“Dear God: ‘Help!’ I Need to Rest but I Don’t Know How!”

Years ago I attended something called CREDO. A wonderful five day event put on for clergy by the Board of Pensions of our Presbyterian Church USA denomination. The mission of CREDO is to provide opportunities for clergy to examine significant areas of their lives and to discern prayerfully the future direction of their vocation as they respond to God’s call in a lifelong process of practice and transformation. For five days we heard from financial advisors, nutritional counselors, and spiritual guides because the Board of Pensions that I am very thankful for - retirement and health care - was concerned about the trends that we were seeing in their pastors. To put it crassly: too many had high blood pressure and were overweight; too many were financially not ready for retirement on a pastor’s salary. Too many were burned out. The conference schedule was well designed to give us a “Sabbath” time for rest and reflection.

While there, the layperson who was the financial coach gave a wonderful little meditation on Leviticus 19:8 about farming. In all the years since, what I recalled Leviticus being about was: “don’t plant your crops to the edge of your field.” I replayed in my head what I heard that he was providing advice about the importance of boundaries. You have to leave space in your calendar. For rest. For God to show up. Working up to the edge - be it field and crop, calendar, work, will leave you exhausted. (Painting: The Gleaners by Jean-François Millet, 1857)I saw this passage from Leviticus coming into the rotation of what we call the lectionary cycle. So I thought:  I want to pass on that bit of wisdom I had heard to my folks about not planting to the edge. I went back to look at the passage and saw that the passage didn’t say anything about not planting to the edge. Rather the focus was upon harvesting. Leave the harvest at the edge of your field for the poor and the hungry to glean. 

But I think whether we are not to plant to the edge or harvest to the edge, what is underneath it is the same: we have a need to fill space and time. Why? Could it be our fear of scarcity? A fear of not enough  space and time. A fear that what we bring to life is not enough?

The Jewish philosopher Abraham Heschel wrote a book called The Sabbath. IThis book, written a long time ago, has been important to me and also to Ezra Klein who featured Heschel’s writings in his podcast. Ezra Klein writes: “Heschel’s argument is that the modern world is obsessed with questions of space. We spend our days trying to master the spaces in which we live — planting in them, building in them, acquiring from them, traversing them. And what we spend to do that is the time that we have to live.” Heschel writes, “Most of us seem to labor for the sake of things in space. As a result, we suffer from a deeply rooted dread of time and stand aghast when compelled to look into its face… “Man is not a beast of burden and the Sabbath is not for the purpose of enhancing the efficiency of his work.”  Rest here is not the negation of activity as we tend to define rest. But repose. A word that means tranquility. Heschel has this line — “Six days a week we seek to dominate the world. On the seventh day, we try to dominate the self.” Ezra Klein, a parent of young children opines how much harder that is to do with kids, with the phone always being on as is our social media. It is an interesting question to ask what we would be if we lived at a different speed. Who would I be if I knew more than how to work and not work? Who would I be if I knew actually how to rest?  Could it lead to greater meaning in our lives?

There are two creation stories. In one, on the 7th day God rests. About this Creation Story, Judith Shulevitz says during the interview in response: “God doesn’t just rest. God makes rest, which seems like a contradiction in terms. God is making something. God is making rest. So the rabbis say, well, how can that be? And how can God be making something that isn’t? And the answer is God was creating this system of meaning, which is based on stopping and looking back over what God had created to say, is that good? And it turns out it was good.” That is the invitation of intention and practice here that I am offering to you to consider. When was the last time you stopped and looked back over with gratitude what happens in your life? Sabbath builds this intentionality into the flutter of your life.

I went back and looked at what I wrote during Credo about time and the need for rest. Now 5 years later, I am still dealing with it and in a confessional tone I want to say, at this point in my life I am wanting to retire the faithful lieutenant who got me where I am. I call him “Johnny Hustle.” We are busy working out a separation agreement, but I know I need something different. I’ve been struggling so much with this idea, is a sense I have of myself that I actually don’t know how to rest. Hence the title. And I share this because I think many of you do, too. Teenagers. Parents. People of all ages. We don’t know how to rest. Rest. Not to be confused with escape. Or vacation. Or to unplug. Or to recharge as though we are an I Phone and if we can just plug in we can recharge and get back to efficiency at work and in parenting. I don’t think the speed at which I live, at which I move through time, at which I see the people around me living and moving through time is a speed that any of us really want. I don’t think the habits that I’ve cultivated here are really good ones. That is what Ezra Klein assesses about his own need and that of others and so he invited an interview with Judith Shulevitz who wrote this beautiful book, “The Sabbath World,” Judith Shulevitz looks very squarely at the question of what the Sabbath has tried to create and how that has worked throughout time, throughout cultures, throughout different religions. I highly recommend listening to this podcast. You can listen to it wherever you get your music. What struck me is how fundamentally countercultural the practice now is, how radical something so ancient now feels to us, and, in a way, how urgent it feels. And yet, while we know the need, we don't know what to do. Especially, if “holiness” means setting apart that leaves us with a hole and it makes us anxious because we don’t know how to fill it. Think of it as a big hole…and this hole feels extremely uncomfortable for a while and there is the tendency to fill the hole with activity and to consume social media. It can feel extremely uncomfortable for a really long time. 

I would like to offer some advice on how this notion of Sabbath rest could help you not only fill the hole we have in our lives but deepen meaning.

First is that we cannot do this alone. Sabbath rest is hard to attain on your own. You can’t  do it until you  become part of a community that values it, does it, that makes rest something pleasurable, that makes it festive.

That leads me to my second tip: I invite you to make it a regular habit. And make it festive. Make it fun. Fill it with things. Fill it with meals. Fill it with long walks. Fill it with what they call a Shabbas shlof, which is a Shabbas nap sometimes with mandated sexual activity, if you are married. That’s the Jewish Shabbat.

Third, when we don’t spend all of our time and energy “planting and harvesting all the way to the edges” which means always rushing to the next thing because you have tried to fill every moment of time, we can be more ethical people. And don’t we as parents want to model an ethical life to our children.  This notion of boundaries of space and time has an ethic and a social morality around it.

Judith Shulevitz tells about a study that was done back in 1973 but still seems to be relevant. Let me read from the transcript of the episode: 

“So in 1973, two social psychologists wanted to answer the question, what makes someone stop when passing by a stranger who is in obvious distress? Let’s just say on the street. They wanted to know which of three attributes would make them stop — innate personality, cultural conditioning or how they were raised, or something more situational.

And they went to Princeton Theological Seminary because they wanted to work with people who were familiar with a parable from the Gospels in which Jesus tells the story — someone is lying on the ground, is in obvious distress. Different kinds of people go by. Finally, the good Samaritan stops and helps the man up, gives him food to eat, water to drink, takes him to shelter. So they took these students and they wanted to reawaken the story of the good Samaritan in their heads. And they asked some of them to write a sermon about it. And they asked some of them to write an essay on their job prospects. And then they sent them over to another building to give a sermon. And they divided the students in third. And they told one third of students to get to the building really fast because they were late. They told one third of the students that they weren’t late but they better not dawdle. And they told one third of the students that they had plenty of time to get to the building. And along the way, as they were going to the building, they passed someone slumped against a wall in very obvious distress. And they wanted to know who would stop. And what they found is the people who would stop were the ones who had plenty of time. Some of the ones who were on time but shouldn’t dawdle did stop, some didn’t. The ones who were in a rush did not stop. And they concluded that it wasn’t a factor of personality. It wasn’t a factor of cultural conditioning. It wasn’t that they knew the good Samaritan story. It was the situation they found themselves in, how fast they felt they had to go. And they came to the conclusion that ethics becomes a luxury — this is a quote — “ethics becomes a luxury as the speed of our daily life increases.” They also found that some of the students hadn’t even seen the guy. They just hadn’t even noticed that he was there. And their conclusion — it’s just a line I really like — “time quickening narrows the cognitive map.” Meaning that your ability to perceive things shuts down because you’re so focused on getting done what you have to get done by the deadline.”

Doesn’t this feel true in our own life? Not stopping to help another. But also in our hurrying, we are less likely to stop and help ourselves. 

my own life. I’m not going to say when I am hurrying, the likelihood that I will stop and help somebody on the street is dramatically lower. When I’m hurrying, the likelihood that I will stop and help myself is dramatically lower. Down to whether or not I’m going to the doctor to get things checked out Down to how I treat my family.

Finally, my advice to you is the importance of preparation. Holy time then is time that we ourselves make holy, time that we sanctify by means of ourselves. We have to commit ourselves to holy time before it will oblige us by turning holy. There is a line from Dr. Seuss’s “The Cat in the Hat,” which is, “It’s fun to have fun but you have to know how.” You can’t get what you need from a Sabbath if you don’t prepare for it (Judith Shulevitz makes this comparison in the podcast.)

Conclusion

Jesus said to his disciples: “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.” He said: “Come unto me, all you that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and you shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light (Matthew 11:28-30).  How we need it.

Sabbath rest. I hope there is something inviting to you about its importance in the midst of our busy and often chaotic lives.