I write, speak, invest, network, and question to stimulate fruitful conversation. Let's talk about human flourishing! It begins with freedom. Holy leisure is the key to human being, freedom and generativity. Please join me in the adventure of realizing Christ!
SAR 11: A Sabbath Sense of Time
- My email is cluttered with spam. My basement has a huge unused fabric collection. My garage is cluttered with cast-off furniture and materials for ‘someday’ projects. Many, many people have calendars so full of activities there is no time for family, or deep friendship. The internet is (for all its blessings) a junkyard cluttered with layers of trash-and-treasure. Stores seem cluttered, to me, with tons of stuff I don’t need, and dozens of options for every buying decision, no matter how banal. The public environment is cluttered with noises. Every shop has a different radio playing, restaurants have several TVs going on different channels, making conversation impossible. Sabbath is a relief, in its own way, from all the different kinds of clutter that sort of nag at me and drag me down.
- Self-possession enables me to receive and know another person more fully. The patience implied in self-possession prevents my reacting against him and helps me wait upon him – wait with him upon the Lord – for help responding to his needs.
- Wasting time as a gift to God reminds us Who gave us that gift in the first place. It frustrates our desire to be little gods, in control of past, present, and future. It reminds us we are ordered to being, and not just to productivity. Complete tangent: A cradle Catholic tells me handsome priests are often known among teen girls in Catholic schools as “Father What-a-Waste”! I suppose their beauty is ‘wasted’ in the same way our time is ‘wasted’ on Sabbath.
- There are two paradoxical senses of time: We use time as a resource and we are moved through time, as if it were a place within which we exist. It is both ours (chronos) and we are its (kairos). It often strikes me that we need to think much more about context and less about content…in education, in the spiritual life, in evangelization. More about that as I complete some works in progress.
- If we move out of balance toward progress in our use of time (using time to get things done) we ourselves begin to feel ‘used to get things done’. We fail to care for our own being – to provide for and value rest. If we move out of balance toward complacency (floating in the stream) we begin to feel we have no free agency, and actually to lose capacity to act, to have an effect on the world as we pass through it. Sabbath brings us back from every kind of imbalance – giving the one a day of inaction, and the other a day for charitable and community-building action. Even if our ‘only’ Sabbath practice is going to Mass, which provides every possible Sabbath grace in the Eucharist, we must both act (Get up, go to Church, listen, receive, kneel, respond, sing!) and refrain from action (submission to the form of Mass, which we did not design; praying in thanksgiving after receiving the Lord; not going to work or to the ball game during that time; not eating for the hour prior, etc…) An herbalist would call Sabbath a ‘tonic’, because it restores to equilibrium from even opposite types of dis-ease.
- More and more, as we experience the Eucharistic Sabbath, we carry the ‘kairos’ we receive into the daily life of ‘chronos’. Moments in time open up into moments in eternity when we can turn within toward the Lord. Sabbaths well-spent help us develop greater ‘carrying capacity’ – more spaciousness within which to enter Christ’s presence. Ordinary time should give us a hunger for the Sabbath rest, and prepare the way (through ordinary physical tasks like cleaning the house on Saturday, getting the shopping finished before Sunday, organizing our day-to-day work so that it doesn’t impose) for the Sabbath practices we’ve chosen.
- Travel can be very restful to some people, if it helps them step out of the daily demands of life. It can relax and bring new perspective, give families some close up and personal time together, and distance us – literally – from things that threaten to overwhelm. Sabbath practice also helps us be better travelers, if we learn to relax, trust God, wonder at the beauty we encounter, and be more fully present to the people we encounter. To bring home souvenirs, you need suitcase space, but to bring home experiences, you need interior spaciousness…and Sabbath helps you develop that space. Side note: I once dumped a bunch of clothes out of a suitcase to make room for three gorgeous pottery serving bowls from Cuenca, Spain. Best impulsive move I ever made! We still have those bowls, and I love using them – bright, mosaic patterns. They brighten up my living room when not in use, and who cares what clothing I lost to get these gems home?!?!?
- Doing nothing can be a creative act! Some things need space, or silence – patient waiting, trusting self-restraint, hopeful expectancy – in order to occur, to be realized, or to become. Just as artists and composers plan for ‘negative space’, or ‘silent pauses’ creatively within their works of art, our non-doing can often be the most important act of creativity in lives that are our works of art. Non-doing is also a holding back from imposing myself on others (dominating a conversation, judging them hastily, trying to fix them instead of listening attentively) which gives them ‘space’ in which to become. We think of ‘recreation’ as ‘having fun’, but isn’t this a form of helping re-create a person? I know I have many, many times been re-created, refreshed, restored by the listening ministry of good friends.
- Patience, Sabbath, waiting, contentment, and hope are all closely related by virtue of the fact that they are all forms of emptiness-expecting-to-be-filled. The freedom and power of the capacity to hold open this emptiness without any demand, or attachment to the expected good (and even in spite of any appearance that seems to indicate it will not come) is cultivated by the practice of holy leisure, of Sabbath.
- Who could see God’s glory and live? So, He sends it through us – small doses of the overwhelming reality – person-sized portions just right for the people we meet. What they see through us (we’re like a veil over His glory) should intrigue them and draw them to investigate the Source. (This actually relates also to modesty in dress – the allure of the mystery of a woman who is not brazenly exposed!)
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