As we enter summer, most of us hope to find a more spacious life in which we can take time for recreation or release from patterns of overwork and over scheduling that have become habitual in our lives. Yet unless we create this reality, that hope will have passed us by when September arrives. Might we create time for Sabbath somewhere in our week during these summer months?
The practice of Sabbath is an ancient spiritual discipline that has particular relevance in our world of ceaseless work and activity. Emailing, texting, tweeting, and Facebooking carry with them the possibility of losing ourselves in a world of being “connected” seven days a week, 24 hours a day. No breaks. No silence. No rest. Sabbath would be an spiritual offering of a time to “unplug,” to step off the treadmill of work-and-achieve and to move into the circle of glad gratitude for the gifts of God in which we may explore life itself in all its wonder, beauty, and unexpected possibilities of joy or even astonishment.
Abraham Heschel wrote, “the solution of humankind’s most vexing problem will not be found in renouncing technical civilization, but in attaining some degree of independence from it.” Perhaps this year’s Independence Day celebrations could include pondering the possibility of independence from those technological advances to which we have become enslaved.
You may have heard of the experiment in which a group of friends gathered in a restaurant for dinner and put all their cell phones at the end of their table. This idea came as these friends found that the social connections of those gathered were constantly being interrupted or ignored in favor of texts, tweets, emails, and instant messages buzzing, ringing, quacking, gonging, clicking, barking, and otherwise vying for the attention of those at the table. The purpose of gathering in person with one another socially had become completely usurped by technology’s siren call taking attention and focus away from being present to one another. In this trial, the first person to reach for the phone would be paying the bill for the group. They all laughed at such a “silly” undertaking as they began, but before long the addictive nature of the cell phones reigned, and several found that paying the price of the bill was less expensive to them than the cost of being without their devices. That evening, many woke to the awareness of the soul’s need for Sabbath rest and the gift of presence to one another.
This summer, if we find ourselves filling leisure time with tasks, we can be sure that we have begun to imagine that our worth consists only in what we accomplish. To regularly cease from labor and enjoy rest as a holy gift is to grow in the trust that our worth in God’s sight lies in our very being—affirmed in God’s vow to us in our baptism: “You are my beloved creation, in whom I delight.”
Sabbath reminds us of our place in the world, human beings in need of rest and recreation. Sabbath reminds us we are not simply machines of production, units of consumption, or our insatiable desires, which we attempt to fill with countless goods and services. All of these are mythic identities, which are some of the temptations our culture proposes, manipulates, and enforces.
In Sabbath, we begin to realize that we are not the ones who cause the vegetables in the garden to grow or the wildflowers in the meadows to bloom. We begin again to understand that our greatest fulfillment does not come through the acquisition of material things. Even the planet needs rest from human plucking and burning, drilling and fracking, buying and selling. Resisting the tyranny of too much work, celebrating life with God and others in gratitude for all that is will help us remember who we really are, what is truly important, and how our values are being lived out day by day. Perhaps instead of asking each other, “What have you been doing this summer?” we can ask, “How have you been practicing Sabbath these long summer days? How are you taking time to rest and recreate this summer? How have you learned to “let go and let God” this summer?”
It could change everything, one quiet moment at a time. Shalom.