Sabbath Suckage
Some fragmented thoughts on holy rest, Sabbath grace, zinnias, roast chicken, felicity, and "Dear Theodosia"
The 135th Day after Coronatide*
Grand Rapids, Michigan
Dear reader,
First, a confession: I’m writing you a day late this week, which just about captures the slipperiness of these times. So much to do. So much to sift. Too few hours. Too little energy. How do these weeks simultaneously whiz past yet drag on?
A second confession: I don’t know how to rest, and I’m wondering whether you might be able to help.
For some of you, 2020 might have been filled with the lighting of countless aromatherapeutic candles and the reading of so many books, lockdown-enabled afternoon naps and endless loaves of quarantine sourdough. If so, yay for you! Mine has been marked by endless Zoom calls, too many hours in a messy study strewn with papers, and doom-scrolling social media when I should be surrendering to sleep. Oh, and my sourdough starter is dead. Again. Because honestly, I’ve been too busy—read: too scattered and too undisciplined—to care well for myself, let alone yeast creatures.
I’m embarrassed by my failure to rest, because I should know better. During seminary, I took an entire class on Sabbath, and part of our coursework involved creating a discipline of holy rest. My professor, Nate Stucky, is a Mennonite, hopeful yet pragmatic, his heart fixed on things above even as his eyes perceive the reality below. He knew an entire day of Sabbath each week was beyond us—way, way beyond us—the hapless, overscheduled products of a relentless system. So he asked us to ask ourselves: What might be possible? What might be attainable? What could we give up and put down for at least a six-hour stretch of waking hours, once a week, for the sake of holy rest? I chose my electronic devices.
The other day, I exhumed and re-read my Sabbath journal from that semester. Takeaways: 1. Ugh, I’m angsty. Have I always been like this? I have definitely always been like this. 2. I suck at Sabbath. 3. My Sabbath suckage represents a profound disconnection between my intellectual knowledge of Sabbath and my heart understanding of it.
The first week of class, I explained why I chose my laptop and my cellphone for Sabbath banishment: “They represent nearly the entirety of my work life, whether for school or for journalism. In my mind, they symbolize my separation from rest—and perhaps more than symbolize it; they are physical obstacles to it.” Later, I realized that while these devices were indeed physical obstacles to rest, it was unintentionally revealing to say that my laptop and cellphone symbolized my separation from rest. They really were just symbols. I could put the devices down, but that wasn’t enough. My posture had to change too—and it still has to.
Rest is a practice and a discipline. Tristan and I were talking the other night, and he said that he suspects it’s been harder than normal to rest because we have often found rest by changing place and space—travel, long hikes, immersion in others’ stories, visits with friends, welcoming people into our home and to our table. We have been most successful at resting when we are drawn away from ourselves. And in being drawn away from our selves, in creating room for the recognition of others, something rests and something is restored.
We can’t do these things now as easily we used to. There’s no small amount of grief in that. For this strange time, we need new disciplines, new habits, to help us find the rest we need. But I confess I don’t know how to do it.
A key recognition: Not all rest is Sabbath, though all true Sabbath is rest. What I wanted after Evolving Faith was rest, and one could fairly argue that this would be rest as reward. But what I need as I move forward into the remainder of this autumn is Sabbath. Where rest is earned, Sabbath is grace. Where rest need only be horizontal, Sabbath is vertical and horizontal.
Pretty much every kid who went to Sunday school knows the story behind the Sabbath. It begins on the mythic Day 1, with the separation of the light from the darkness; then the waters above from the waters below; the emergence of the land and all that grows on it; then the installation of the cosmic lighting systems—sun, moon, and stars; the introduction of the sea creatures and the birds; then the making of land animals as well as humanity. And on the seventh day, so the story goes, God finished the work and God rested from all the work that God had done.
My Sabbath professor Nate Stucky’s lovely book, Wrestling with Rest, draws on the theologian Karl Barth’s reading of the creation story to make this key observation: “God gives Sabbath to humankind not as a reward for a week of work, but as a gift.” At this point in the narrative, humanity has not done a thing. “The first full day for humankind—the seventh day of creation—is a day of Sabbath rest, apart from any human effort or achievement,” he writes. “We cannot earn this rest.... We may choose to refuse this grace, but in refusing we render ourselves not-free, captive to lesser gods. In refusing this grace, we refuse the limits that mark our freedom. We refuse our truest identity.”
Our truest identity will never be found in how much we do or what we accomplish, our plans to keep ourselves safe or the fortresses we construct to stay comfortable. We’ll never go fast enough to outrun our demons. There aren’t enough hours in a day or days in a week or weeks in a year for me to secure the guidance and support I crave. I’ll never work hard enough to earn my belonging. That goes for my relationship with God, and it goes for my relationship with other humans.
If rest becomes just another thing we have to master, just another thing we have to do, how will we ever find Sabbath? “To make rest from work the basis for Sabbath observance is to make the self the basis,” Stucky writes. “Our Sabbath observance loses its power and merely becomes another manifestation of endless human effort if it finds its basis in anything other than the radical grace and life of God.” Holy rest acknowledges God and God’s good gifts; Sabbath practices attentiveness to God’s grace and embodies gratitude.
And even as I type these words to you, I know them. But do I believe them? Do I live them out? Not consistently, but I’m trying.
On Tuesday morning, I closed my laptop and we walked to a nearby park. Grand Rapids has so many lovely urban green spaces, and this one has several outdoor tennis courts. We brought our pickleball set, and Tristan and I hit the ball back and forth for about half an hour while Fozzie stared at us, confused about what we were doing. (He does not know how to fetch.)
Yesterday, I spent five minutes staring out my study window at the maple tree that guards our house. As the weather has cooled, the colors in its leaves have warmed, rich and deep greens morphing into every shade of yellow, orange, and red. It’s so beautiful when a thing does exactly what it was created to do.
Tonight, I’ll make meatballs, which will bathe in the arrabbiata sauce that I canned early last month. We’ll probably watch an episode of the Great British Baking Show and maybe one of Schitt’s Creek, and then we’ll turn in early so that I can get up tomorrow with at least half a brain, which I’ll need to write my Sunday sermon.
This is what constitutes rest right now, and somewhere in there, I might have glimpsed Sabbath as well. If you’ve found either or both, I’d love to hear more about how, if you’re willing to share.
What I’m Growing: Things in the garden are winding down. I have some fall chard and bok choy going. The parsley, chive, sage, and scallions are still thriving. I’ll probably do a fuller accounting soon of this season—what’s worked and what hasn’t—but the stars were unquestionably the zinnias. Just a supermarket packet of seeds. Who knew? Every blossom has been a blessed surprise in shape and color.
What I’m Cooking: Roast chicken is a reliable dinner for us in the fall and winter. I tuck some butter under the skin of the breast, stick half an onion and half a lemon and some herbs in the cavity, sprinkle some salt and pepper over it, and pop it in the oven for an hour at 450. This time, I took the four carrots left in the garden as well as a handful of potatoes I harvested, chopped them up, and, half an hour in, tossed them into the bottom of the roasting pan to soak up all the chicken fat and caramelize in the juices. It’s just the two of us, so one bird gives us at least a few meals—a nice dinner, then chicken-salad sandwiches, and this time, a bonus meal of pasta with chopped up chicken, pepper, leeks, and spinach in a cream sauce. And Fozzie gets some scraps.
What I’m Reading: I’m leading a book-study group at church over the next six weeks. We’re reading Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies, by Marilyn McEntyre. We’re only a couple of chapters in, but already I delight in how she holds words as if they were real gold rather than pyrite. She laments the loss of words—and the range of emotional understanding that comes with those words. “Felicity,” for instance, is Austenite and nowadays uncommon. But her exploration of that emotion resonated with me, because I’m not a particularly happy person. I could invest in felicity, though. She defines “felicity” as “considered happiness, pursued with a clear eye toward economic stability, compatible temperament, and self-control,” contrasting it with our modern-day, superficial happiness, which is “the kind of happiness marketed in movies that focus on falling in love against all odds, throwing caution to the winds. Following the passions, and losing oneself in a rush of sensation.” Whew! “The person who understands felicity understands that happiness changes as it ripens,” she continues, “and that the unripe fruit is often bitter.” Amen.
What I’m Listening to: Those of you who have been reading these letters for a while know that I find some random things on YouTube. My favorite song from Hamilton is “Dear Theodosia.” I like the original just fine. I like Regina Spektor’s version too. But this week, I found a new cover from two Welsh singers, Steffan Hughes and Steffan Harri, that’s just lovely. The words of this song are so achingly painful to consider. I so want them to be true: “You will come of age with our young nation/ We’ll bleed and fight for you, we’ll make it right for you/ If we lay a strong enough foundation/ We’ll pass it on to you, we’ll give the world to you...” Can I look my nephews or my goddaughters in the eye and say that I’m making the world safe and sound for them? Are we making it right for them?
That’s all I’ve got for you this week.
Oh, a tiny bit of housekeeping from last week: My inbox should be declared a federal disaster zone, but yes, I really do read all your emails. And yes, I will eventually write back. I’m sorry if I haven’t managed to so far. But please don’t follow up with an angry or shaming screed if I haven’t responded on your timetable; it can just take a while—sometimes a long while—to get to everything.
I’m so glad we can stumble through all this together, and I’ll try to write again soon.
Best wishes,
Jeff
*I’m still counting my days from June 1, when my governor, Gretchen Whitmer, lifted Michigan’s stay-at-home order. COVID-19 cases are as high as they were in April. Yikes! Yes, some of this reflects significant improvements in testing, and mortality rates are lower, in part because it’s hitting healthier people and treatment is more sophisticated now. But this remains a horrible, deadly disease. So please, please, please stay safe, help keep your neighbors safe, and wear your masks.