A Wholehearted Sabbath

Quest Monthly Magazine

It was August 21^st of last year when something out of the ordinary happened. Schools closed. People took off from work early, or even the whole day if they could. Some had parties, and gathered to play and eat and enjoy each other. Even those who had stayed at their desks or shops or factories or in their cars stepped outside at the same time, and for about two minutes looked up and focused their attention on something else—something beautiful; something much, much bigger than themselves.

And you didn’t have to pay for it. Sure, you could pay for parking near a good spot, and I’m sure there were some t-shirts you could buy. But the total solar eclipse itself could not be commodified. (We have not yet figured out how to control the path of the sun and the moon for maximum profit.)

For that moment, I felt as if we had entered a different dimension. The light dimmed and the cicadas struck up their chorus in the middle of the day. We could see some stars that are normally hidden from us at 2:30 in the afternoon. Some people cheered. Others, like my children, became very, very quiet. The heavens that many of us don’t pay much attention to suddenly became the focus of our excitement and awe and amazement.

And it didn’t seem to matter your religious preference or your political orientation or your age or your race or your social status. We were all there together. I was so thankful to witness it—both what happened up above, and what happened down here. Why did it take something on this scale of magnitude—a total solar eclipse!—for this kind of stopping, just to be in awe.

I loved it so much, I wanted it for everyone. I thought about those locked away in prisons or stuck in jobs they could not leave, and some who could not or would not step outside and look towards the heavens for a moment of freedom.

The experience also made me think about other times and other cultures that respect a kind of rhythm of rest, a rhythm of gratitude and awe. A rhythm that many of us in this country have mostly left behind. A rhythm of Sabbath.

The great 20^th century Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote in his 1951 book, The Sabbath: “There is a realm of time where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to control but to share, not to subdue but to be in accord.” He’s talking about the biblical 4^th Commandment, to observe the Sabbath. It’s a time to imitate God, to stop your work and appreciate gifts of creation.

In 2005 his daughter, Susannah Heschel, also a great scholar and theologian, wrote a new introduction to his book, in which she reflects on what observing the Sabbath was like growing up in their home:

When my father raised his Kiddush cup on Friday evenings, closed his eyes, and chanted the prayer sanctifying the wine, I always felt a rush of emotion. As he chanted with an old, sacred family melody, he blessed the wine and the Sabbath with his prayer, and I also felt he was blessing my life and that of everyone at the table. I treasured those moments….

My mother and I kindled the lights for the Sabbath, and all of a sudden I felt transformed, emotionally and even physically. After lighting the candles in the dining room, we would walk into the living room…facing west, and we would marvel at the sunset that soon arrived.

There, again, is a turning to the heavens and the gift of creation that we receive, no matter what; turning the ordinary—wine, candles, sunset—into the extra-ordinary during a special realm of time.

When and how do you enter a realm of time where the goal is simply to be, to give, to share; where your attention is tuned not to CNN or NPR or Facebook or Twitter or your to-do list or your fill-in-the-blank activity? But tuned instead to something much bigger and much smaller at the same time. Tuned to something like the sunset, something like a cricket sounding in the middle of all the noise.

American scholar and theologian Walter Brueggemann writes:

It is unfortunate that in U.S. society, largely out of a misunderstood Puritan heritage, Sabbath has gotten enmeshed in legalism and moralism and blue laws and life-denying practices that contradict the freedom-bestowing intention of Sabbath… Sabbath is a bodily act of…resistance to pervading values and assumptions behind those values.

If the intention of Sabbath is about freedom, I suggest some ideas of what Sabbath is not about: deprivation and strict laws, such as not being able to buy wine on Sundays, or a kind of piousness that probably wouldn’t fly with our Unitarian Universalist sensibilities. The Sabbath is not about simply escaping and ignoring the world, nor is it even primarily about resting, though that can be part of Sabbath observance.

Poet David Whyte tells a story about a time when he wasn’t yet published, though he wrote poems. It was a time of his life where he was working very hard for a non-profit organization, trying desperately to save the world. But he was exhausted, and he knew it. He just didn’t know what to do about it. He had a friend who was a Benedictine Monk, whom he asked for advice. What should he do to not feel so exhausted all the time?

And his friend, Brother David Steindl-Rast, suggested that the cure for exhaustion is not necessarily rest; it is wholeheartedness. Find what you can be wholehearted about, said Br. David, and you won’t be so exhausted. You’ll feel more free.

A practice of wholeheartedness as Sabbath can help us find the resilience to move through a busy week, through hard times at home, hard news week in and week out. A liberating practice of wholeheartedness can move us toward what matters most in our lives, helping us resist pressures of our capitalist culture that say human value comes from our production and consumption—how much we can sell, earn, or buy.

The good news is that this kind of practice can look many different ways. But it is, truly, a practice. Because we just have to keep at it: trying, maybe not doing so well, and trying again. How do we build in moments of Sabbath rest and wholehearted listening throughout our days and weeks? I encourage us to think about a practice of Sabbath that does not necessarily mean taking a whole day, though those of you more practiced can show us how to do that.

Here’s a simple practice that I do with my younger daughters most mornings. We kind of stumbled organically into it, but it works for us. Weekdays when I drive them to their preschool, as we cross the Tennessee River we simply say “Good morning, River!” And sometimes we note: Is the river foggy, is it calm, is it shiny, can we see any boats or birds?

Now, there are plenty of mornings that I forget. I am sometimes wrapped up in my head thinking about the day ahead, or caught up listening to the radio. But usually my daughters remind me. They call from the back seat, Good morning, River! A couple of times we forgot, and they made me drive back so they could offer the greeting. And now we have taken to adding, Good morning, fishes in the river! Good morning, sky and clouds! Good morning, birds! And sometimes we sing, “I’ve Got Peace like a River.”

That’s it. A few moments on the morning drive. But it turns my heart towards what I love and what loves me back—my daughters and the land. And it resists the relentlessness of urgency. We stop and we look. We treat the earth as a friend whom we greet fondly. I carry the spaciousness and freedom of that moment into my day.

Here’s another practice that is a kind of mindfulness activity you can do anytime, anywhere, to create a moment of Sabbath in time. Choose a color—say, the color yellow. Then spend some time out walking or driving, and put your attention on looking for the color yellow. You’ll be surprised how much yellow you see when you start looking for it. It’s like listening for the cricket in the middle of the big city. Practice enough and it becomes easier to find what we look for, even in the midst of noise.

Here’s another. Choose a time each week—maybe just an hour, maybe a whole day—and put away the thing that usually takes your time, attention, energy. You might even physically put it away in a box for a while. Put your phone or your iPad out of sight. Put your to-do list of things into an
envelope and seal it up. Cover up your TV with a cloth. Write down whatever is making you anxious and resolve to put it aside for a time, knowing it’s mostly out of your control anyway. And see what happens.

If you are someone who goes, goes, goes—try taking a nap in the middle of the day, if you can. See what kind of wholehearted time opens up for you, what comes up in you when you stop and let yourself rest.

Play can be a kind of Sabbath, too. In his book Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal and Delight in Our Daily Lives, Wayne Muller describes play as “engaging in purposeless enjoyment of one another.” Just do it with intention—delight in your friend or your partner or your kids or your neighbor. Focus on that for a while.

And here’s one more that can be a family practice. At the end of the day, try lighting a chalice candle and simply asking: What was good today? What was hard? What do I need to let go of? What do I hope for tomorrow? Create a few minutes of time out of time, tuning life to bigger questions.

I often include in my prayer and meditation the phrase, “…until all people have access to the gifts of this life.” A Sabbath practice helps us recognize those gifts, gifts which can’t be bought or sold, gifts that every person has a right to enjoy, wholeheartedly. As we find the gifts, may we share them.