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 2: Taking the Cure
- The Eucharist – the Real Presence of Christ, the Living God – is THE central focus of the true Sabbath. Sabbath-keepers who celebrate the Eucharist symbolically, are recognizing Christ as the center, but just not encountering Him as fully. Catholics who go to Mass, but who have no sense of the Sabbath day as a whole, receive the essential gift of Sabbath, to the extent they have the capacity to receive Christ. This capacity is what we want to increase by true, holy leisure, and by more fully realized Sabbath-keeping.
- The Mass is, in essence, everything that Sabbath has to give, because in it, we receive Christ – the fulfillment of the Sabbath, or Lord Sabbath. The Sabbath practices enhance our capacity to receive Him, and our capacity to carry Him into the world within our own lives. The Mass is perfect Form, but we are not perfectly formed to receive it. Sabbath observance is to Mass what the soul is to Christ. It could occur on another day – especially if that day is centered upon the Eucharist. The best day is Sunday, if possible, as that day brings your observance into unity with the whole Church in a particular way. Really, even people whose work, whose jobs are Sunday-based (like the priest, the organist, the music director) can, ideally, find true Sabbath rest within those duties. But of course, it’s nice if they can incorporate some additional period, or day, of holy leisure into the week, too!
- If we keep Sunday open for leftover work, we’ll end up having work leftover to fill it, every time! It’s better to draw a line in the sand and ‘just say no’ to using Sunday for last-minute catchup work. That way you’ll start thinking of Saturday as the new deadline, and leaving mental space open where Sabbath should be!
- My Sabbath must be ordered to my needs and circumstances, and so will look different from everyone else’s. It can be hard to decide on practices your friends and family aren’t also following, but sometimes you’ve got to choose a different way.
- If we are speeding along all week, it is hard to feel halted interfered with, impeded by Sabbath. It may take a while to get over the restlessness, anxiety, or agitation that cessation of distraction and activity can cause. If you chafe at whatever you’re ‘supposed’ to do on Sabbath, it’s a clue you need to find greater freedom and greater understanding of what Sabbath is all about!
- The temptation is to take the easy route to Sabbath: to do what someone else tells you is ‘Sabbath-keeping’. They may have some great ideas, an authentic practice of Sabbath-keeping, a truly holy life – and still not be able to say what you should do, or not do, on the Sabbath in order to keep it holy. You’ve got to come to grips with what the Scriptures say, what the Catechism says, and then – harder, for most people – what your own heart is telling you is your desire, your imbalance, your distraction, your way of eluding the Lord of the Sabbath.
- On Sundays I, of course, attend Mass. I try to have no laundry or dishes to wash. I make a point of not writing on Sundays, and try especially hard not to ‘light the flame’ of anger. We keep most Sundays as ‘family days’, and don’t entertain (but we make sure to set aside other time for community and friends!!) I observe a no-internet rule and avoid shopping so as to protest quietly against the worker-culture’s over-ruling of the human being’s need for Sabbath rest (even non-Christians need and deserve this rest, by the way!).
- If we don’t actually re-present Sabbath in practice, then it isn’t real-ized. There is a danger that it will become a nice idea that never engages us. The grandiose things you imagine doing, or not doing, to keep the Sabbath holy can become a form of idea-olatry if you don’t act.
- The ‘weekend’ is an idea that comes from the industrialized world. It corresponds to machine down-time, and to the idea that man is a worker, or work is his essential value. Rest is, then, ‘not working at a job’. People then think of the weekend as time off from having to do anything in particular, or anything uncomfortable, or anything that isn’t fun. The ‘weekend’ devolves into amusement (literally, non-thinking) and so dehumanizes persons. The Sabbath day was created by God to restore man periodically to the reality that he is a bearer of God’s own image. Now, it actually conveys into the vessel, man, the very Person of God, if he keeps a Eucharistic Sabbath!
- Leisure is vitally connected to human freedom, because we must be connected to the reality of our own being (to reality, as fully as possible, beginning with presence to, and love for, Self) in order to respond in freedom to everything we encounter. Our freedom grows as we exercise it, and leisure helps develop greater capacity to do just that.
You must be logged in to post a comment.