The inmost places suffered most. I was losing perspective. Fissures in my character worked themselves here and there into cracks. Some widened into ruptures. I grew easily irritable, paranoid, bitter, self-righteous, gloomy. I was often argumentative: I preferred rightness to intimacy. I avoided and I withdrew. I had a few people I confided in, but few friends. I didn’t understand friendship. I had a habit of turning people, good people who genuinely cared for me, into extensions of myself: still water for me to gaze at the way Narcissus did, dark caves for me to boom my voice into and bask in the echoes. I didn’t let anyone get too near.
And then I came to my senses. I wish I could say this happened in one blazing, dazzling vision—a voice from heaven, a light that blinded and wounded and healed—but it didn’t. It was more a slow dawning. I didn’t lose my marriage, or family, or ministry, or health. I didn’t wallow in pig muck, scavenging for husks and rinds. But it became clear that if I continued in the way I was heading, I was going to do lasting damage. And it became obvious that the pace and scale of my striving were paying diminishing returns. My drivenness was doing no one any favors. I couldn’t keep it up and had no good excuse to try.
I learned to keep Sabbath in the crucible of breaking it.
God made us from dust. We’re never too far from our origins. The apostle Paul says we’re only clay pots—dust mixed with water, passed through fire. Hard, yes, but brittle too. Knowing this, God gave us the gift of Sabbath—not just as a day, but as an orientation, a way of seeing and knowing. Sabbath-keeping is a form of mending. It’s mortar in the joints. Keep Sabbath, or else break too easily, and oversoon. Keep it, otherwise our dustiness consumes us, becomes us, and we end up able to hold exactly nothing.
In a culture where busyness is a fetish and stillness is laziness, rest is sloth. But without rest, we miss the rest of God: the rest he invites us to enter more fully so that we might know him more deeply. “Be still, and know that I am God.” Some knowing is never pursued, only received. And for that, you need to be still.
Sabbath is both a day and an attitude to nurture such stillness. It is both time on a calendar and a disposition of the heart. It is a day we enter, but just as much a way we see. Sabbath imparts the rest of God—actual physical, mental, spiritual rest, but also the rest of God— the things of God’s nature and presence we miss in our busyness.
You might have grown up legalistic about Sabbath—your principal memory of it is of stiff collars chafing at the neck and a vast, stern silence that settled on the house like a grief. I hope to invite you out of the rigidity and gloom that mark the day for you.
You might have grown up indifferent about Sabbath—Sabbath to you is a musty, creaky thing about which only ancient rabbis and old German Mennonites bother. I hope to awaken in you wonder and expectancy about it. I’m going to make a bold assumption and guess that this description fits you closer than the other: that you tend to see Sabbath, even if you grew up under legalism, as something archaic and arcane. Something from which you’re exempt. Something that, like bloomers and corsets and top hats, went out of style long ago and is not likely to make a comeback soon.
I hope to convince you otherwise: that Sabbath, in the long run, is as essential to your well-being as food and water, and as good as a wood fire on a cold day.
I am going to be bold enough to assume one more thing: that you are just plain tired, and often overwhelmed—such that even Sabbath seems just one more thing to do. I hope to tune your ears to better hear, and gladly accept, Jesus’s invitation: “Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest” (Matt. 11:28 NASB).
One thing I’ve already hinted but need to make explicit: when I use the word Sabbath, I mean two things. I mean a day, the seventh day in particular. For Jewish people, that day is sundown Friday to sundown Saturday. For most Christians, it has traditionally been Sunday, however you reckon it, evening to evening or daybreak to daybreak or midnight to midnight. I want to convince you, in part, that setting apart an entire day, one out of seven, for feasting and resting and worship and play is a gift and not a burden, and neglecting the gift too long will make your soul, like soil never left fallow, hard and dry and spent.
But when I say Sabbath, I also mean an attitude. It is a perspective, an orientation. I mean a Sabbath heart, not just a Sabbath day. A Sabbath heart is restful even in the midst of unrest and upheaval. It is attentive to the presence of God and others even in the welter of much coming and going, rising and falling. It is still and knows God even when mountains fall into the sea.
You will never enter the Sabbath day without a Sabbath heart. In this book, I sometimes use the word Sabbath to refer to both, and sometimes to one or the other. But always my assumption is that both are needed and that each reinforces the other.
“Of course!” the poet Mary Oliver exclaims in one of her earthy, ethereal poems. “The path to heaven / doesn’t lie down in flat miles. / It’s in the imagination / with which you perceive / this world, / and the gestures / with which you honor it.”1
The imagination with which you perceive this world. In many ways, this book is a call to your imagination, an attempt to awaken in you fresh ways of perceiving this world, fresh ways of understanding both your place and God’s presence within it. Any deep change in how we live begins with a deep change in how we think. The biblical word for this is repentance—in Greek, metanoia, a change of mind. Repentance is a ruthless dismantling of old ways of seeing and thinking, and then a diligent and vigilant building of new ones.
Change begins with fresh eyes, in other words. It begins with an awakened imagination. You turn away, stubbornly and without apology, from that which formerly entranced you, and you turn toward that which once you avoided. You start to see what God sees, and as God sees it. But that takes more than will. It also takes imagination.
According to the apostle Paul, sin’s fortress is your mind: the ultimate consequence of evil behavior, he says, is that it makes us “enemies in [our] minds” toward God (Col. 1:21). So God in Christ, and Christ through the Holy Spirit, is seeking to change our minds. All who are in Christ, Paul declares, are new creations being transformed “by the renewing of your mind,” being “made new in the attitude of your minds” (Rom. 12:2; Eph. 4:23). We have exclusive access to the “mind of Christ” (1 Cor. 2:16). The apostle Peter, likewise, tells us that God has revealed to us his salvation—a salvation the prophets foretold but never beheld, which angels “long to look into” but for some reason have been denied the privilege (1 Pet. 1:12). The gift has come to us alone.
Peter urges this response: “Therefore, prepare your minds for action” (1 Pet. 1:13).
When salvation comes, change your mind. Reshape and fill fresh the imagination with which you perceive the world.
The movie A Beautiful Mind is about the brilliant mathematician John Nash, who, despite his schizophrenia, won the Nobel prize in 1994 for his original contribution to mathematics. John inhabits a world that doesn’t actually exist: his closest friend, his friend’s lovely niece, the CIA director who employs him in dangerous and clandestine operations—all are figments of his broken mind. When John is first diagnosed with the disease, he is treated with medication. This banishes his delusions but also stifles his personality: he becomes a hollow man, a mechanism. Gradually, through his wife’s immense patience, fortitude, and sacrifice, John learns to live with his disease untreated. Except for one thing: he disciplines himself to no longer heed the people and the voices that his mind invents. Though even in his old age they appear to him as real as himself—flesh-and-blood people, with histories and personalities and needs and expectations, clamoring for his attention and affection and obedience—he refuses to listen. He defies them. He ignores them. He walks past them.
He changes his mind.
It’s not a bad image for repentance: the voices that once held sway over us, that loomed so large and boomed so loud they defined reality, we now defy or ignore. We pay them heed no longer, th
ough they try with all their might to resume their former dominance. We keep walking past them.
We change our minds.
This change of mind is meant to touch every aspect of how we see and think. And, God being my helper, that’s what I’m trying to do in this book: to help us think differently about time and eternity, rest and work, food and play—to change and renew our minds about such things (of course, I can do nothing apart from Christ and the Spirit). Unless he illumines and empowers these words— shapes them into a sword that becomes companion to the sword of his own Word—they remain cold and inert as scrap metal, able to penetrate or separate nothing.
But this must be practical too. We need to change our minds, yes, but we also need to change our ways. And for this we require practices to embody and rehearse our change of mind. The physical is a handmaiden to the spiritual, but a necessary one, without practices— without gestures with which to honor fresh ways of perceiving—any change of mind will be superficial, artificial, short-lived. We might attain a genuinely new thought, but without some way of putting it into practice, the thought gets stuck in abstractions, lost in forgetting.
Good practices are both catalysts and incubators for new thoughts, they initiate them, and they nurture them. But they do even more: they make real our change of mind. It’s like marriage. When I married my wife, Cheryl, I had to change my mind about who I was. I was no longer a bachelor. My habits of thought had, for more than twenty years, taken shape around the fact of my singleness. I had bachelor attitudes about how to spend time and money, about the ideal color to paint a bedroom, about the best car to drive, about other women. It all had to go through a dramatic shift, in some cases a complete about-face, when I took vows (actually, the change began a long time prior to that, and continues lifelong). I had to—have to—change my mind.
But if I changed only my mind and never changed my behavior, I doubt I’d still be married. I have needed, at every turn, practices that embody and rehearse—that make real—my change of mind.
Zacchaeus is a good example of how this works. Zacchaeus was Jericho’s runtish tax collector who went out on a limb for Jesus: he shimmied up the trunk of a sycamore tree, scrambled out on its branches, and perched there baboonlike just to catch a glimpse of Jesus. Jesus liked him, though no one else in town apparently did. Jesus asked him to get down from that tree immediately: “I want to come to your house today.”
“Look, Lord!” Zacchaeus says in response. “Here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount” (Luke 19:8). Zacchaeus meets Jesus and changes his mind, but straight on the heels of that, he changes his ways. He embraces a practice that embodies and rehearses his new way of seeing. Jesus’s comment on the matter is telling: “Today salvation has come to this house” (Luke 19:9). When salvation comes to your house, first you think differently, then you act differently. First you shift the imagination with which you perceive this world, and then you enact gestures with which you honor it.
Throughout this book, as I try to change your mind about Sabbath, I will also suggest some gestures with which to honor it. These suggested practices I have placed at the end of each chapter and under a single heading: “Sabbath Liturgy.”
Liturgy. I chose that word with care.
I was converted within a Low Church tradition, where the building’s walls are stark, the music simple, the prayers clumsy and direct, made up as you pray them. I have only ever belonged to that tradition. And so early on I picked up the tradition’s historic suspicion of High Church, where God is approached through a sometimes elaborate system of symbol and ritual—robes and candles and prayer books and lectionaries—and almost everything is scripted.
That scripting is liturgy.
Yet over time I began to realize that the Low Church is just as bound by liturgy as any church, and maybe more so because we think we’re not. The Low Church enshrines—makes a liturgy of— austerity, spontaneity, informality. And we have our unwritten but nonetheless rigorously observed codes and protocols. We love our traditions, even our rigmarole, every bit as much as the next guy, only ours is earthy, rustic, folksy.
So I changed my mind about liturgy. It certainly can become dull and rote, but so can anything—water polo, rose gardening, kite flying, even lovemaking. Even fly-fishing. Just as often, though, maybe more so, liturgy can enrich these things. At its best, liturgy comprises the gestures by which we honor transcendent reality. It helps us give concrete expression to deepest convictions. It gives us choreography for things unseen and allows us to brush heaven among the shades of earth.
Our most significant relationships and events have a liturgical shape to them. They have rites of passage. Birthdays and homecomings, graduations and good-byes, Thanksgiving and Christmas and Easter, birth and death and marriage: all are marked by words and actions, songs and symbols, customs and traditions that enact them and complete them. And all these things also provide us with a means of entering them. What is a birthday without a cake, at least one candle burning on it, and a huddle of well-wishers, wearing clownish hats, singing in their ragged, hoary voices?
What is a birthday without liturgy?
What liturgy accomplishes is nothing short of astonishing: It breaks open the transcendent within the ordinary and the everyday. It lets us glimpse the deeper reality—the timeless things, the universal ones, the things above—within this particular instance of it.
Liturgy’s an odd word, even awkward, for the early church to have chosen to describe its acts and forms of worship. It was a word they had to pry loose and drag over from a context far removed from the world of hymns and prayers and sermons. Liturgy originally meant a public work—something accomplished by a community for the community. A town bridge, for instance, or a village well, or a city wall: something built by the people and for the people. The oddness and awkwardness of the church’s decision to import this word is even greater when we realize that they had a word for worship close at hand, a word in wide circulation within a religious context: orgy. Orgy now has sordid overtones. But in the days of the early church, it didn’t, or at least the sordidness was still in the background. Orgy described a public event that produced a private, usually ecstatic, experience. It was the word pagan religions used for their worship, regardless of how many people were involved—and the more, the better—the emphasis was always squarely on the emotional experience of the individual.
It was all about me.
Not so liturgy. Liturgy is done by me—I am invited, perhaps required, to play a role—but it’s not about me. It’s about us. It is about the Other. Its purpose is to benefit the entire community—to provide protection or access to all. One of the more common uses of the word in the ancient world was for the making of a bridge. Liturgy is bridge building. It is to construct something that spans separate worlds and provides an efficient means of crossing from one to the other.
So it’s a good word for what I want to describe here: the ways we might, individually and together, create access and protection for one another. The ways we might build and use a bridge for getting from where we are to where we want to be.
Liturgy is not law. This is important. The last thing I want to do here is return us to some parched and crabbed legalism around Sabbath observance. The beauty of calling Sabbath practice a liturgy is that nothing is violated if it’s not followed, or if it’s altered, expanded, abbreviated. No punishment ensues. Liturgy functions in a completely different way. Better to think of it, not just as a bridge, but as a kind of choreography, a choreography for our dance with things unseen, things ancient and things anticipated, things above and things below. Some move through this choreography with light-footed elegance, others with flat-footed clumsiness. You can add your own steps and moves, ignore others, or sit it out entirely. No one will arrest you.
But don’t you want to dance?
Don’t you want to push beyond mere idea and theory into th
e realm of the actual? I don’t know how many books I’ve read or sermons I’ve heard (and too many I’ve preached) that have helped me think better but not live better. Though many abound in insight, they are bereft of practicality. They never go far enough, the writer or speaker, for fear, maybe, of being legalistic, shies away from actually suggesting ways to embody the idea, the theory.
This is where liturgy helps. Liturgy is a repertoire of possible ways—not the only way, or even the best way, but at least some way—to set what we know in motion. It lets us render thinking into doing, to pour our knowledge through our limbs. And it gives this with freedom both to imitate and to improvise. Though it describes a way of doing things, it never prescribes the way. Each person on each occasion is free to mimic what has come before, and free to innovate it. Each occurrence of liturgy is unique, unrepeatable, and yet is also enfolded with all the other occurrences. My dance will be both similar to and different from yours. It will echo yours, but with its own style, and rhythm, and pace.
So think of the Sabbath Liturgy sections in this book as choreographic notes. They are not to be followed slavishly. They are hints and prompts and invitations. They’re meant to try to coax you onto the dance floor, to help you limber up, to get you to move in ways you might at first think awkward or foolhardy.
But who knows? After much practice, you might come to like it, even finding yourself, like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, floating above the hard, cold floor of your workaday life, your feet barely touching.
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The Rest of God Page 2