The Rest of God

by Mark Buchanan

  The root of the Hebrew word for “sanctify” means “to betroth.” It is to pledge marriage. It is to choose to commit yourself, all of yourself, to this man or this woman, and then to honor that commitment in season and out. Sanctifying time works the same way. You pledge to commit yourself, all of yourself, to this time, and then you honor that commitment whether it’s convenient or not.

  The story of the first man and woman helps us understand this. When God sees and laments Adam’s aloneness and decides to make a woman for him, he doesn’t move directly from decision to action. He hesitates. He orchestrates an interruption. He assigns Adam a task—a huge, intricate, unwieldy task, a task that, although it’s narrated in a single line, may have taken days, weeks, or months to fulfill. God has Adam name all earth’s creatures: giraffes, squids, wombats, marmots, centipedes, woodpeckers, steelheads, the three-toed sloth, the Sasquatch. Just as God spoke all creation into being, now he has Adam speak identity into all creation. He has him give voice to the whole pageant of earth.

  Before intimacy, taxonomy.

  It seems an odd, even cruel, thing for God to make Adam do. It would be one thing if there were no helpmate on the way, and all God wanted was to provide him a creative diversion, to distract him from his haunting aloneness. But God already knows what he’s going to do. He’s going to bring the man a beautiful woman, utterly naked, bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. Why not cut to the chase and do it now?

  The naming, I think, is a testing.

  And like all good tests, it’s designed to sharpen something in the man, to seal a resolve: that there is no other creature in all creation with whom he can forge a companionship rich enough to banish his aloneness. What about that golden retriever? He’s always glad to see you, no matter how late you come home or how boorish and neglectful you’ve been. He seems oblivious to your glaring inadequacies. Or what about the horse? He’s loyal and trusting, and he surrenders his power to your will, though your strength is paltry next to his. Or what about that cat?

  Well, maybe that’s stretching things.

  But it’s not the dog, and not the horse, and certainly not the cat who can solve the man’s plight.

  Only the woman will do.

  He must see her as the only one in all creation who can end the tyranny of his aloneness. Only she is close as his rib bone, close as his own breathing. For her alone should he leave mother and father.1 With her alone can he be naked without shame.

  That is the art of sanctifying. That is what it means to betroth another.

  Just so with Sabbath time. Sabbath is time sanctified, time betrothed, time we perceive and receive and approach differently from all other time. Sabbath time is unlike every and any other time on the clock and the calendar. We are more intimate with it. We are more thankful for it. We are more protective of it and generous with it. We become more ourselves in the presence of Sabbath: more vulnerable, less afraid. More ready to confess, to be silent, to be small, to be valiant.

  There is no day in all creation that can banish our aloneness, even while meeting us in it, like this day.

  But first we change our minds.

  One of the largest obstacles to true Sabbath-keeping is leisure. It is what cultural historian Witold Rybczynski calls “waiting for the weekend,” where we see work as only an extended interlude between our real lives. Leisure is what Sabbath becomes when we no longer know how to sanctify time. Leisure is Sabbath bereft of the sacred. It is a vacation—literally, a vacating, an evacuation. As Rybczynski sees it, leisure has become despotic in our age, enslaving us and exhausting us, demanding from us more than it gives.2

  We all know how unsatisfying mere leisure can be. We’ve all known what it’s like to return to the classroom or the workplace after a time spent in revelry or retreat, in high jinks or hibernation: typically, we go back weary and depressed, like jailbirds caught. The time away from work wasn’t time sanctified so much as time stolen, time when we escaped for a short-lived escapade.

  The difference between this and Sabbath couldn’t be sharper. Sanctifying some time adds richness to all time, just as an hour with the one you love brings light and levity to the hours that follow. To spend time with the object of your desire is to emerge, not sullen and peevish, but elated and refreshed. You come away filled, not depleted.

  The Greeks understood. Embedded in their language, expressed in two distinct words for “time,” is an intuition about the possibility of sanctified time. Time, they knew, has two faces, two natures. It exists in two separate realms, really, as two disparate dimensions, and we orient ourselves primarily to one or the other. One is sacred time, the other profane.

  The first word is chronos—familiar to us because it’s the root of many of our own words: chronology, chronicle, chronic. It is the time of clock and calendar, time as a gauntlet, time as a forced march. The word derives from one of the gods in the Greek pantheon. Chronos was a nasty minor deity, a glutton and a cannibal who gorged himself on his own children. He was always consuming, never consummated. Goya depicted him in his work Chronos Devouring His Children. In the painting, Chronos is gaunt and ravenous, wild-eyed with hunger. He crams a naked, bloody-stumped figure into his gaping mouth. Peter Paul Rubens depicted Chronos even more alarmingly: a father viciously biting into his son’s chest and tearing the flesh away, the boy arching backward in shock and pain.

  Chronos is the presiding deity of the driven.

  The second Greek word is kairos. This is time as gift, as opportunity, as season. It is time pregnant with purpose. In kairos time you ask, not “What time is it?” but “What is this time for ?” Kairos is the servant of holy purpose. “There is a time for everything,” Ecclesiastes says, “and a season for every activity under heaven.”

  A time to be born and a time to die,

  a time to plant and a time to uproot, . . .

  a time to embrace and a time to refrain,

  a time to search and a time to give up,

  a time to keep and a time to throw away, . . .

  a time to be silent and a time to speak,

  a time to love and a time to hate,

  a time for war and a time for peace. (3:1–2, 5–8)

  This year, this day, this hour, this moment—each is ripe for something: Play. Work. Sleep. Love. Worship. Listening. Each moment enfolds transcendence, lays hold of a significance beyond itself. Ecclesiastes sums it up this way: “I have seen the burden God has laid on men. He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end” (3:10–11).

  Chronos betrays us, always. It devours the beauty it creates. But sometimes chronos betrays itself: it stirs in us a longing for Something Else—Something that the beauty of things in time evokes but cannot satisfy. Either we end up as the man in Ecclesiastes did: driven, driven, driven, racing hard against chronos, desperate to seize beauty but always grasping smoke, ashes, thorns. Seeking purpose and finding none, only emptiness.

  Or we learn to follow the scent of eternity in our hearts. We begin to orient toward kairos. We start to sanctify some of our time. And an odd thing can happen then. Purpose, even unsought, can take shape out of the smallest, simplest things: “I know that there is nothing better for men than to be happy and do good while they live. That everyone may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all his toil—this is the gift of God” (Eccl. 3:12–13).

  This is a gift of God: to experience the sacred amidst the commonplace— to taste heaven in our daily bread, a new heaven and new earth in a mouthful of wine, joy in the ache of our muscles or the sweat of our brows.

  There’s an exercise that some pilots go through late in their flight training. The student pilot gets the plane airborne, at cruising altitude. Then the instructor places a loose-fitting, thick-woven sack over the student’s head, so the student can see nothing. The instructor takes the controls and starts stunt-piloting: He loops the loop. He pushes the plane, Turkish-h
eadache-style, skyward, then flips belly-up and swoops earthward. He rollicks and spirals, careens and nosedives, tailspins and wing-tilts. He gets the student utterly discombobulated. Then he puts the plane in a suicide dive, plucks the bag off the student’s head, and hands him the controls. His job: to get the plane back under control.

  The exercise is called Recovering from an Unusual Attitude.3

  To keep Sabbath, most of us first have to recover from an unusual attitude. We find ourselves disoriented, in vertigo. We’re dizzy with all our busyness and on a collision course.

  Maybe it’s time to change your mind: to stop feeding Chronos his own children and start sanctifying time.

  SABBATH LITURGY:

  Taking Thoughts Captive

  I sometimes imagine Solomon submitting the Proverbs to a modern publisher and getting this response:

  Dear Sol:

  Thanks for the opportunity to glance over your recent submission. We loved your dad’s book and continue to be humbled and amazed by how many people it’s blessed.

  About your book: there’s some great stuff here—some real gems of insight (my four-year-old loved the one about a dog’s vomit, though I’m not sure something like that would make the final cut). I also appreciate your ability to cover a wide range of topics with brevity. You explore everything from domestic squabbles to international politics to corporate strategy, and so succinctly (though, I admit, here and there a tad cryptically).

  But I need to be frank with you, Sol: this is an editorial nightmare. It is all over the place. One minute you’re talking about nattering wives, the next about kings’ hearts, and then suddenly you’re on about table manners, lazy people, poor men, whatever. You repeat yourself in many places, contradict yourself in others. I’m intrigued but confused. I wish you would take one theme per chapter and develop it fully.

  I’m not saying no. But I am asking this: sum up the whole book in one clear sentence—I’m talking thesis statement here, Sol, just as in your college days. If we can nail that, I think we can build the book from there.

  Say hi to the wives and concubines and kids. And congratulations on your recent marriages last month.

  Kindest regards,

  Friendly Publisher

  P.S. I should have mentioned, the title The Proverbs strikes me as a bit pedestrian. I’m thinking something catchier, like Zingers: One-Liners to Delight Your Friends and Humiliate Your Enemies. What do you think?

  Solomon’s response might have gone something like this:

  Dear Friendly Publisher:

  I’ve thought about your critique and request, and though I think you’ve missed the point of my book’s (dis)organization (hint: it mimics life), I at least want to give you the “one clear” sentence that sums up the entire work. I simply lifted this straight out of my book. Here it is:

  The wisdom of the prudent is to give thought to their ways, but the folly of fools is deception. [Proverbs 14:8]

  Hope that helps.

  Shalom,

  Solomon

  P.S. I prefer the original title.

  The wisdom of the wise is to give thought to their ways. They think about where they’re going. But the folly of fools is deception. They keep lying to themselves.

  Wise people ask, Does the path I’m walking lead to a place I want to go? If I keep heading this way, will I like where I arrive?

  Fools don’t ask that. They keep making excuses for themselves, justifying and blaming, all the way to nowhere. They dupe themselves right to the grave. They never change their minds.

  Consider your ways. That’s a wise Sabbath Liturgy. And let me make it even more specific: consider your thoughts and attitudes, the pattern of them, their shape and drift. Are they leading you where you want to go? Plot their trajectory: will they land you in a place you care to live?

  If not, change your mind. “Take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ” (2 Cor. 10:5).

  Take a moment right now. Begin with David’s prayer, “Search me, O God, and see if there be any wicked way in me” (see Ps. 139:23–24). Invite the Spirit to search you and reveal one habitual thought, one attitude of your heart, that is misleading you. It may be shame, a sense that you must keep hiding, keep avoiding the light. It may be pride, or a temptation to judge others, or an insecurity that drives you into envy and rivalry. It may be just the sense of insignificance—that no one sees you, not even God.

  It may be how you see God.

  Whatever it is, ask God to change your mind. End with the rest of David’s prayer: “And lead me in the way everlasting” (Ps. 139:24).

  THREE

  THE REST OF GOD:

  Stopping to Find What’s Missing

  British Columbia is a land of forests and deserts and mountains and rivers. It is hemmed in on one side by the Pacific Ocean, most of the other side by the granite and glaciers of the Rocky Mountains, and held together by a patchwork of lakes, some tiny and icy and blue-green, others huge and dark and warm as a kiss. British Columbia was the wilderness that old gold prospectors, Yukon-bound, plied their way across in search of Aladdin’s cave, surviving by hardiness and foolhardiness. These were men wily and stubborn, living by the skin of their teeth. But some didn’t have to go to the Yukon. Some struck gold right here, in this province, in pockets where swift rivers spilled out of mountains, clawing loose rock and mineral on their way down, strewing their plunder through valleys where the water slowed and bent.

  My wife’s grandmother Alice used to live in a place like that, in a little town called Enderby. And in her middle years, in the late part of the twentieth century, men with lingering gold fever still went there to try to dredge up what they could from river silt. They still bored deep into the hills, propping up the earth with a rickety skeleton of rough-hewn timbers that almost always, at some twist in the tunnel, gave way.

  One day Grandma was in her backyard, polishing a large stone. It was a boulder that sat athwart her garden, too big to move. It was one of those stones round and smooth, tumbled by eons of wind and ice and water, thickly embedded with glittery chunks of mineral. She was polishing it with sandpaper. Her logic was that, since she couldn’t be rid of the thing, she may as well beautify it, try to remove the scumble of dullness on its surface and hone it to a lustrous sheen. She was going to make it the centerpiece of her garden.

  But she got more than that. As she sanded, she noticed a thin sifting of gold gathering on the stone. She pressed the moist tip of her finger into it and pulled up a caking of gold dust. Her heart raced. She sanded faster, leaning her whole body into it, and more gold appeared. Now she was scrubbing that rock as if it were a bloodstain, with strong, sweeping strokes, bone and sinew bent to the work. Gold accumulated rapidly.

  She caught the virus in one swoop. She understood with perfect instinct what all this time she’d dismissed as sheer nonsense: grown men squandering all else—homes and farms and families and reputations— and flinging themselves headlong into reckless escapades, spending their years burrowing beneath tree roots, grubbing through silt beds.

  But now she had it too: gold fever. She was going to be rich.

  She stopped a moment, to wipe her brow, to rest a spell. And that’s when she noticed that something was wrong with her wedding ring. The topside was normal, but the underside, the part that nestled in the crease where her finger joined her palm, wasn’t. The band there was thin as a cheese slicer wire, thin as a filament.

  She had nearly sanded her wedding ring clean off. All that gold was merely filings. It was the remnants of her heirloom. It was her treasure reduced to dust.

  It was all fool’s gold.

  I laughed the first time my wife told me that story, but only the first time. After that it made me sad. It’s sad for its own sake, an aging woman giddy as a schoolgirl, heady with a sense of windfall, dreaming of a new dress and a real holiday, and the next moment crestfallen, stinging with shame over her coveting and naiveté.

  But it’s also sad because much of
my own life I’ve repeated, again and again, Grandma Alice’s mistake. I’ve squandered treasures in pursuit of dust. I’ve eroded precious, irreplaceable things in my efforts to extract something that’s not actually there. I’ve imagined I’m on the trail of a groundbreaking discovery, only to find I’m at the tail end of a hard loss. Here are a few: all the times I never swam in a cool lake with my children, made a snowman or baked sugar cookies with them, lingered in bed with my wife on a Saturday morning, or helped a friend in need, all because I was in a hurry to—well, that’s just it: I don’t remember what.

  I was just in a hurry.

  I’ve been in a hurry most of my life. Always rushing to get from where I am to where I’m going. Always cocking my arm to check my watch, doing that habitually, mechanically, mindlessly. Always leaning heavy on the gas, in the passing lane, angry that the driver in front of me doesn’t share my sense of urgency, that she’s in no particular hurry and can’t seem to imagine a world where anybody would be. Always fuming over having to wait in bank lines and grocery checkouts and road construction zones.

  Sanding away my wedding band.

  But all that hurry has gotten me no farther ahead. It’s actually set me back. It’s diminished me. My efforts to gain time have only lost it. Whole epochs of my existence have swept by me in a blur, with nary a cheap souvenir to remember them by. There are seasons and seasons of my life swallowed whole, buried in a black hole of forgetting.

  I keep waking up, finding myself older, my children altered dramatically, the paint I just put on the side of the house a season or two ago already blistered and flaking. I can’t remember getting here. My wife turned to me one evening not long ago and spoke a name. At first I was uncomprehending. The name was like a lost word, archaic, a word I used to bandy freely but now whose meaning I could not dredge up or pry open. Then I remembered: the name belonged to a man I once knew well—or thought I did. I had lost touch with him several years past. Until Cheryl mentioned him, I had forgotten him entirely. Now, I recalled him only in hazy silhouette, in rough fragments. His name was a smudge of memory. I could not remember the texture of his voice or the shape of his face, any of the conversations we’d had. I couldn’t remember his middle name, or if he had one. I couldn’t remember what secrets I entrusted to him, or he to me. I couldn’t remember where he was born, who his parents were, where he now lived. These were all things I am quite sure I used to know.