Considering the Sabbath
by Rev. Colin Bossen, January 4, 2009
I got lost the other day. Mid-morning, amid the white whistle of the snow, I drove to the far East side of Cleveland to visit a member of the congregation. I had never been to her house before. I had reasonable directions but, as often happens, I took a wrong turn. Our friend lives off Wildwood Lane. The street immediately proceeding Wildwood Lane is Wildwood Drive. I thought I was on the right street but I turned off Lakeshore Boulevard a block too early.
I quickly realized my mistake. The road I was on took me not to a neighborhood but to a park. It was then that I saw it, Lake Erie in all its fullness. The wind was wicked. The waves smashed up against the walls of the breakwater--great sprays of turgid white and grey tumbled over dock and rubble--and I paused. I got out of my car. I leaned into the wind. It held me upright as I struggled against it. I was locked into pure being. It was just me, the waves and the wind. I don't know how long I stood there. Eventually, I got back into my car and drove to my appointment.
In that moment I had encountered eternal time. "Eternity," writes Forrest Church, "isn't an endless length of time; eternity is depth in time." Eternal or sacred time is the experience of being absolutely present. When we experience sacred time we simply are. We are not concerned with paying the utility bills, finding our next meal or worrying about what we should wear on our date. We are, instead, wholly tuned to the present.
Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel considered the pursuit of such eternal moments the very end of spiritual life. He writes, "The higher goal of spiritual living is not to amass a wealth of information, but to face sacred moments." It can be a challenge to recognize and revel in sacred moments when they come. If we are observant and intentional we will notice that our lives contain many of them. Our span is marked on either end by the sacred experiences of birth and death. Hedged in between these two finite points we find events punctated by eternity: meeting a friend or lover for the first or last time, celebrating a marriage or standing on the shore of Lake Erie.
The practice of keeping the Sabbath is an effort to set aside one day out of every week in which we are oriented towards sacred time. In his book "The Sabbath" Heschel asserts that there is a tension between "the profanity of clattering commerce" and "the seed of eternity planted in the soul." Eternal time and the spatial world of things and labor often stand in conflict with each other. The depth of eternal time does not usually allow for fixing ourselves upon some particular goal, be it immediate or distant. Instead it demands that we pay attention to the present.
This is in contrast the world of things we usually inhabit. That world requires us to place our attention not on the present but upon some objective just a little further off. We go to school, in part, so that upon graduation we might get a job and support ourselves. We work our jobs so that we have money with which to buy food. Even the act of going to the grocery store is tilted towards the future event of eating dinner. Rarely do we engage in some activity for the sake of the action itself.
In traditional Jewish practice the Sabbath is the seventh day of the week. It provides a day of rest, respite, reflection and worship. It is sacred time that demarcates the mundane world of world from the experience of the holy. Heschel writes, "It is a day in which we abandon our plebeian pursuits and reclaim our authentic state, in which we may partake of a blessedness in which we are what we are, regardless of whether we are learned or not, of whether our career is a success or a failure; it is a day of independence [from] social conditions." The Sabbath is a time to be free from the pursuit of the future and focus on the present.
The Sabbath makes an early appearance in the Hebrew Bible. In Genesis it is recounted that God created the world in six days. Genesis 2:2-3 reads: "And on the seventh day God finished the work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it..."
The Sabbath originates in God's rest after the creation. God rests after labor and so should we all. Observation of the Sabbath includes within it various prohibitions and sanctions meant to be clarify that the time is sacred. Work and even kindling a fire are prohibited. The day is to be spent with family and friends, in prayer, in study and in fellowship.
In contemporary society the practice of Sabbath is a useful one. Too many people work too much and forget to take time for their families and themselves. Having one day a week in which you must pause, rest, reflect and be with those closest to you can be rejuvenating. It can make encounters with sacred time more frequent and help us ensure that we do not lose ourselves in the world of the mundane.
God gave Moses, and through him the people of Israel, a set of regulations for keeping the Sabbath. God wanted people to know that God was serious about the Sabbath. So God said: "Six days shall work be done, but on the seventh day you shall have a holy sabbath of solemn rest to the Lord; whoever does any work on it shall be put to death."
The sentence of death for not observing the Sabbath is undoubtedly harsh. I cannot imagine it being followed today. It speaks to past forms of religious extremism. However, there is a small truth embedded in the injunction. If we fail to grasp sacred time when we have the chance--be it on a Sabbath or at another time--we risk losing ourselves and our connection to the fullness of the universe.
It can be easy to lose ourselves under the weight of the world. The practice of keeping a Sabbath is a reminder not to lose ourselves in the daily battles for survival. There are so many things to distract us from being present in the moment. Our jobs, our families, the media and the marvels of technology all pull us in many different directions. Observing the Sabbath guarantees that there is always some time marked off to focus on being rather than doing.
We Unitarian Universalists are not, in any sense, strict keepers of the Sabbath. We lack religious laws. We do not demand that our members set aside a sabbath day. Yet, we do have Sabbath celebrations. We gather every Sunday morning for rest and respite from the world. Our Sunday services and the fellowship that proceeds and follows them is a time for reflection and rejuvenation. If we take ourselves seriously and joyfully we can provide each other with a sense of sacred time.
We can also remind ourselves to pay attention to sacred time when we encounter it. Instead of believing that it is primarily found on one day we are free to pursue it on any. This is both a blessing and a challenge. We are free to know that when we stand face to the wind we are in the presence of the glory of creation. Yet we also risk never making space for the sacred, forgetting to turn off the television and drown out the static of our lives to catch the revelation that a sunset can bring.
Whether we practice it or not the idea of the Sabbath helps us to remember the importance and the possibility of sacred time. And our own tradition encourages us to cultivate an openness to the experience of the eternal in any encounter. Early Unitarians and Universalists found the divine within nature and within the minds and hearts of their fellows.
The poem "Recuerdo" by Edna St. Vincent Millay suggests the many places and ways we might encounter the sacred. It begins:
We were very tired, we were very merry --
We had gone back and forth all night upon the ferry.
It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable --
But we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table,
We lay on the hill-top underneath the moon;
And the whistles kept blowing, and the dawn came soon.
This poem captures the essence of eternal time. While we are experiencing eternal time life feels thicker. It demands our full attention. We cannot wander off into the half dullness of day dreams. Instead are caught by the moon, the whistles and a ferry that smells like a stable. The poet's experience forms a memory so vivid that each time I read the poem I can almost put myself in Millay's place. Some core of her experience has outlasted her. It most likely will outlast all of us and stand as a reminder of that moment of sacred time until her poetry is forgotten.
Eternal time stands outside of regular time. Eternal time is not limited by minute or hour or by day or night. Millay's poem suggests that it is not even limited to our lifetimes.
Martin Buber tells a story about the depth of eternal time in his "Tales of the Hasidim." It seems that there once was a certain Rabbi Mordecai who sat up all night with his disciples in study and prayer. They were deeply engaged in their activities. They did not notice the passing of the night. When the dawn came, Rabbi Mordecai said to his students: "We have not transgressed the bounds of day. Rather has day transgressed our bounds and we need not cede to it." The experience they were having together was more real than the turning of the Earth towards the sun. Sacred time trumped even the onward march of the heavens.
I have had experiences like that--the conservation was so intense, the company so fine and my awareness so sharp that ordinary time was temporarily suspended. I imagine you have had them too. Such moments stick with me. I can return and turn to them again and again. I suspect that they form the better portion of my life.
As we approach our ends often all we are left with is sacred time. The world of the present fades as death comes. I remember my last visit with my grandfather. He was near death in his nursing home. My brother and I sat with him for an hour or so in the lessening light of his room. He was almost completely unaware of his surroundings. We tried to engage him and he told us stories about his farm.
My grandfather had been a cattleman. He loved his herd dogs. One year, during a lull in a big Iowa storm a good portion of his cattle got stuck trying to cross a creek. The water began to swell. It became clear that unless the cattle could cross the creek they would be washed away. My grandfather could not get across the creek. Somehow his dog was able to make it. The dog nipped and goaded and prodded the cattle over the water to the safety of the barn.
As he told the story my grandfather became more and more distant. It was as if he was not present with us. He was astride his horse in the late nineteen forties. His heart filled with pride as his dog brought the cattle home.
I probably heard that story a dozen times. It left an imprint upon my grandfather's mind and it has outlasted him. This is one of true gifts of sacred moments, their depth gives them a length that allows us to share them, if only verbally, with others. Occasionally eternal time has such power that the moment in which share a story of it becomes hallowed itself.
Holidays like New Years can sometimes be filled with sacred moments. Most of us do little work between Christmas and New Years. We spend time with family and friends. We relax and are present with ourselves and each other. We take time to simply be. Indeed the New Years holiday presents us with a sort secular Sabbath. I suspect that one reason why many people make New Years resolutions is that the holiday actually offers them a few days to reflect upon their lives. This reflection often leads to developing a list of things we would like to improve about ourselves. We plan to lose weight, go to the gym, stop eating red meat or call our parents or children more often. As most of you probably know from long experience such resolutions quickly fade into the woodwork.
It is difficult for us to change our ingrained patterns. Perhaps one of the most challenging patterns to change is our openness to sacred time. It requires that instead of focusing on who we might become or what we might acquire we attune ourselves to what is and who are.
Yet even with that knowledge I invite you this New Year to consider the Sabbath. What would your life look if you were more intentional about pursuing sacred time? Is there a place in your routine for the experience of the eternal? What is it like to occasionally just be?
As you reflect upon these questions let me offer a final quote from Heschel: "The meaning of the Sabbath is to celebrate time rather than space. Six days a week we live under the tyranny of things of space; on the Sabbath we try to become attuned to holiness in time. It is a day on which we are called upon to share in what is eternal in time, to turn from the results of creation to the mystery of creation; from the world of creation to the creation of the world."
Amen.