Sabbath Simplicity Part II

Credit:  Jeremy Tarling

As we train our gaze to a horizon beyond the consumer habits of our society, the Sabbath becomes a day of refashioning. The recalibration that occurs spills into the rest of the week as we shift away from a consumer-driven way of living toward a relational way of living. Indeed, as I’ve come to recognize the holiness of this one day and as I’ve gazed through this weekly window into the eternal by simply stopping and resting, I’ve begun to realize that God has left windows open throughout the week through which a Sabbath draft flows. Moments are found to realign, to practice that art of saying no, to resist the temptations of competition and consumerism.

As an offering in these Sabbath musings I present a poem written while reflecting on a metaphor common in Jewish lore, where the Sabbath is compared to a queen. Thus, just as one would roll out the red carpet for a royalty, so one honors this day as the Queen of days.

The Sabbath Queen

The days are drones and swirl
about my head, darting,
drumming in my ears.
Beneath them I squat,
swollen with the sting of their concerns
of commerce and competition.

I heave myself
from place to place,
but find nowhere to rest;
all is bustle and business,
when what I need is binding up
of wounds and worries.

But then I come to her—
regal in her unconcern
for the frenzied course I’ve taken.
She is midwife to my frustration,
birthing the stillborn cares,
which she sets aside, swaddled in a solitary
place I do not know.

In their stead she offers
nothing but a place to sit and rest.
And in that rest I am refashioned—
unswollen; the poison of the days transfused
with a nectar sweet and satisfying,
so that when I rise to bid her well,
I am well.

Sabbath Simplicity

credit:  Brooke McAllister

My family keeps the Sabbath. Not religiously—as in, we don’t always do religious things. But we are pretty religious about “keeping” it. Usually we go to church. Usually we eat simply—eggs and toast is normal fare for Sunday dinners. Usually we say “no” to invitations and engagements unless they involve family. If it’s winter we might go cross-country skiing; if it’s rainy we might read a book aloud as a family; if it’s sunny we might take a walk at the beach. Our only hard and fast rule is no shopping. The point is, we say “no” to certain things. We step out of our normal rhythms of work and commerce and step into a new way of being.

Essentially, the Sabbath is about time. It’s about trusting in a rhythm of time that depends not on clocks attuned to commerce, but on a larger clock attuned to the rhythms of nature and of God. Sabbath is rooted first in the Jewish notion of day, which in their calculation begins at sundown. Thus, we go to sleep as the day is just getting rolling. We wake when the day’s half over. In a society where productivity is the measure of worth, it would seem counter intuitive to begin one’s day by lying down and shutting one’s eyes. The beginning of day is for writing lists, making plans, springing from the starting blocks, not for putting on one’s pyjamas. But in the Jewish creation narrative, the day begins not with the rising of the sun, but with its setting—there was evening, there was morning, the first day. The day begins with rest and is followed by work, a work already begun by God, and into which humans join.

The Sabbath is also rooted in the Jewish understanding that this particular day is a different sort of day, not only in its parameters, but in its essence. The Jewish creation narrative, Abraham Heschel says, declares that the first thing in all of creation that is declared holy is the Sabbath—not a people or a place, but a day. Everything else in creation is declared good, but this day, the seventh day, is declared holy. The Sabbath, then, becomes a “palace in time,” into which we are invited. The invitation, writes Heschel, is to come away from the “tyranny of things of space” to “share what is eternal in time, to turn from the results of creation to the mystery of creation.”