A Summer Sabbath

This summer, I am again invoking an ancient practice that I have only done so intentionally once before: Sabbath. It is a practice still vaguely familiar to many people of faith, and related to a perhaps more familiar practice in our culture (at least in academia), the sabbatical. However, both the professor’s sabbatical and most people’s typical weekly day of Sabbath lack many of the qualities, or at least the intentionality, of Sabbath’s origins.

The word Sabbath comes from the Hebrew (“Shabbat”), meaning rest or cessation. The weekly practice of Sabbath is tied to Genesis 2:2 where this verb is found describing God’s rest on the seventh day of creation. God’s rest was not a lazy one, however, but an active cessation in which God sanctified creation. Thus, our Sabbath is indeed a cessation from work, a rest from daily activities, but it is also a time for the active engagement in spiritual matters. A time for blessing, cleansing, perfecting, making holy all that is overlooked in our otherwise hurried lives.

For Jews, this meant/means (depending on the brand of Jew), a set of rules that allowed demanded, one cease work and celebrate life, God and family. Examples of these rules include: no plowing of the earth, no cooking/baking, no washing, no use of lamps or artificial light, no use of technology, not travel or use of automobiles. It also meant saying prayers, breaking bread, time with family, playing games, napping, even celebrating “marital relations” (one of the few healthy religious practices that recognizes and celebrates sexuality). 

While the professor’s Sabbatical is an example of resting from the daily exhaustion of teaching and in theory having more time with family, it has lost a very pure understanding of rest, particularly the rest from one’s normal work. It is expected that our scholars produce during their time of rest; produce new studies, a set of lectures, and always more books. Some have even begun to trade their sabbatical from teaching for a time abroad in a professor’s exchange between universities.

Our Sabbath days as people of faith have also been eclipsed by our need to be busy and “perfected” (sanctified) in the eyes of anything but God. We may rest from our salaried position or hourly pay, but we rush home from services of workshop and prayer to mow the lawn, clean the house, finish an application for the next big phase of life, finish a book only so it’s done for book club next Tuesday, and generally “get things done.” How often do we set aside an entire day to tend to our souls, our relationships, and the creation that surrounds us?

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It wasn’t until I became completely overwhelmed with life that I began to understand the importance of this practice. Summer of 2007 I was lined up to do my Clinical Pastoral Education after my second year of seminary. It was promised to be a grueling emotional summer that would also change my life – one that I couldn’t be a successful pastor without (according to most Presbyteries).

But I was tired. Not just your average end of the year – finals week – eventually crash and get sick tired, but I was bone tired. Heart-tired. Mind-tired. And I couldn’t even attempt to come up with energy to dig deep and do the emotional and spiritual work that CPE requires.

So I stepped off the yellow-brick road to ministry, and got a summer job slicing meat at a sandwich shop in town. I rested from theology (the study of it anyway), from writing formally, even from reading. I gardened, exercised my body, cultivated new relationships in the community through a new job, and prayed.

I have again come to a wall. A wall where I face exhaustion, but also an emptiness spiritually, emotionally, vocationally, and even intellectually. It is time, again, for active cessation. Time for tending to God, to Daniel, to family, and to self.