But something else caught my eye: Dr. Seuss’s Mr. Brown Can MOO! Can You?, a primer for very young children, children who are a long way off from reading on their own, who are just beginning to explore the world of sounds. My girls outgrew this book years back.
I picked it and hid it behind my back—our routine when I choose the book, so they have to guess which one I’ve got. They went through the usual suspects. No, no, no, no. I started laughing, couldn’t stop. I pulled the book out from behind my back, and they laughed too.
“Sit up straight, children. We’re going to read.” So, with Sarah on my left and Nicola on my right, we began: “Oh, the wonderful things Mr. Brown can do! He can go like a cow. He can go MOO MOO. Mr. Brown can do it. How about you?”3 And then, laughing hard enough to cry, we all let out bullhorn rumbles of long, cacophonous moos.
On it went: squeaking like shoes, buzzing like bees, sizzling like sausage, whispering like the flap of butterfly wings. We laughed the whole way through.
They went to bed happy, and I got on with my work, happy myself, and productive. I finished in plenty of time.
The next morning I was downstairs reading my Bible when the girls awoke. I heard their footfalls on the floor above me. I heard them go into the kitchen and their mother greet them, ask what they wanted for breakfast.
And then I heard something that filled me with wonder. It filled me with joy. My two girls, Sarah, Nicola, sat at the table and mooed like Mr. Brown, then fell into a fit of giggles.
And to think I almost went my own way and missed that.
SABBATH LITURGY:
Finding Your Joy
If I live to decrepit old age, tottering in body and wandering in the head, I still think I won’t have deciphered an everyday mystery: how it is we seldom choose what’s best. How, given an entire orchard, we’ll choose the one fruit forbidden. How, invited into intimacy, we’ll settle for suspicion, and encouraged to speak truth in love, we’ll instead resort to gossip. How, told not to be anxious about anything but to pray about everything, we’ll be anxious anyhow, and more or less prayerless.
Some of the most gifted people I’ve met are also some of the most broken. Their giftedness has not led them to a place of serenity and thankfulness. It’s not led them to what’s best. In some cases, it’s led to barrenness: fretting, blaming, self-pity, envy, accusation. I know. I fight this in myself daily. My giftedness—modest as it is—has fed my insecurity more times than it has helped me vanquish it. I rarely rejoice in the times I think I have spoken or written well. It produces in me something more akin to panic: Can I do it again? Did I really do it then? If I’m doing well, why don’t more people say so? What’s wrong with them? What’s wrong with me?
In quietness and rest is your salvation, God says. But we want to flee and amass horses, chariots, accolades, pats on the back—just about anything to bolster our sense of security and worthiness. But none of those things can. All they do is send us scurrying in the opposite direction. They just widen the hole we want them to fill. Like gluttony, insecurity’s appetite increases with every bite.
What a surprising cure God provides: to choose our own joy. God invites that, but with a caution: don’t mistake your joy for your druthers. This is not about getting your own way. This is not about indulging your own appetites or satisfying your own sense of justice. This is not about getting what you think is owed you.
This is about finding what is best.
In Luke’s story of Mary and Martha, Martha is all in a flap over what she sees as Mary’s laziness. Mary sits attentive at Jesus’s feet, while Martha wrestles the crockery, thickens the sauce, bastes the lamb chops, sets the table. Mary is oblivious, dreamy and serene, even though Martha is sending up smoke signals thick and menacing. She places the tableware with an emphatic clunk. She raps the ladle on the pot’s edge hard as a blacksmith nailing horseshoes. She sighs with a hiss like fire brazing water.
Still Mary doesn’t notice.
So the lid finally boils over. Martha vents her frustration on both Jesus and Mary: “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!” (Luke 10:40).
Jesus gently chides Martha, gently commends Mary. But it’s his praise of Mary that should give us pause: “Mary has chosen what is better” (v. 42).
Mary’s choice is only better.
What would be best?
My guess: Martha’s industry joined to Mary’s attentiveness. Martha’s briskness and energy and diligence stemming from Mary’s quietness and restfulness and vigilance. The best is to have Martha’s hands and Mary’s heart.
Here’s today’s Sabbath Liturgy: sit with Jesus until you hear from him what he would have you do—sit some more, visit the aging, teach Sunday school, or clean your desk. Or, maybe, cook the lunch. And then put your hand to the task, Martha-like, and do it with all your heart, Mary-like.
That’s best.
In that, you’ll find your joy.
EIGHT
THE GOLDEN RULE:
Stopping to Find a Center
I learned a valuable life lesson when I was, oh, seven. My mother stepped out to go somewhere—the store for milk, or a friend’s house for coffee, or maybe for a walk to clear her head. I don’t remember. She asked my nine-year-old brother and me to look after things. (This was the era when parents did such things, and rather often—left young children home alone or loosed them to wander city blocks, neighborhood parks, adjacent woods unattended— and did it without fear of stalking child abductors waiting to waylay them or snooping neighbors, ready to call in the social workers.) Mother told us, specifically, unambiguously, not to touch the chocolate cake she had just made. She couldn’t have been more clear about that.
I heard her.
I also heard what she didn’t say: she never said we couldn’t help ourselves to the chocolate cake’s chocolate icing. She clearly never said that. Cake, after all—even a child knows this—is a substance made from flour, sugar, eggs, a few other powdery things, all mixed and baked. Cake, strictly speaking, is not icing. Icing is what you put on cake once it cools. Cake is cake with or without it.
And that icing was a revelation—a frosting of fudgy goop, lustrous and thick, teased by mother’s deft spatula work into a labyrinth of crevices and ridges.
So, clearly hearing what Mother said and what she didn’t say, I helped myself to the icing. I began by scooping with one finger the daubs of icing spattered around the foil base the cake sat on. This was, when you think about it, a favor I was doing my mother. I was cleaning up after her. But the taste of that confection in my mouth whet my appetite. I proceeded to scoop, with two fingers, the rim of frosting that drooped down the cake’s sides and bulged thick at its base. My fingers left there a double-grooved gouge. I was just getting started. I next skimmed off, with the spatula, what I would have reasonably argued was excess frosting on the top, and then along the sides. Then, to cover my deed, I tried with the same spatula to tease the icing back into that whipped texture at which my mother was such a skilled hand. But I didn’t have the knack. Besides, the frosting by this time was crusting slightly, losing its pliancy. When I’d finished, the icing was pitted and chopped, as if a dog had mauled it.
I got found out, of course. I don’t remember what consequences I was made to suffer. I do remember, though, my mother scolding me to the effect: “Don’t touch the cake means don’t touch the cake— any of it, all of it, the whole thing.”
I gravitate toward minimalism when it comes to obedience. My default is, What’s the least I’m required to do and the most I can get away with? Show me a command, and I’ll show you wondrous interpretive tricks to sidestep its sharper edges and dance around its outer bounds. I will perform astonishing contortionist and escapist techniques worthy of the Ringling Brothers—squirming through tiny loopholes, bending around unmovable objects, wriggling out of padlocked straitjackets, slipping snakelike from ironclad cargo trunks. I will show you how to thread a camel thro
ugh a needle’s eye or swallow one whole and strain out a gnat.
The problem, though, is that minimalist obedience is really no obedience at all. It is a bony, gristly thing, lacking suppleness and muscle, bereft of beauty. A patron saint of minimalism is Jonah, quarreling and sulking outside Nineveh, doing what he’s told but refusing to like it. It’s the older brother of the prodigal, accusing and complaining outside the father’s house, never disobedient but bitter in obeying. These are people who, in a strict ledger book of obedience, have met all basic requirements.
But their hearts are stones.
I was a flagrant Sabbath-breaker. I didn’t pay the least bit of heed to the rest of God for almost twenty years of Christian faith. I wish I could say that what finally caught my attention was a conviction of the Spirit brought on by a careful exegesis of biblical texts, a deep meditation on rabbinical writings, a still, small voice wooing me in deeper. But that would be lying. The conviction, the study, the meditation, the voice—they came, but they came late, as a consequence of my interest in rest and Sabbath. What actually finally caught my attention was that I wasn’t doing well. Plain and simple, I was worn out. I knew that if I didn’t recover the art of rest—if I failed to find the rest of God—I would watch all my works and all my days turn to blight. I became, as I shared earlier, a Sabbath-keeper the hard way.
But a funny tendency emerges in those of us who desire Sabbath-keeping: first, we tend to overdo it, piling rule upon rule. And then, weary with that, we push toward minimalism, discovering loopholes, inventing exemptions, rigging shortcuts. We turn first to legalism and then to excuse making. We spin elaborate definitions, then absolve ourselves on minor technicalities. So we say we won’t shop. Not at all. And then one Sunday afternoon we see that if the kids are to have breakfast Monday morning, we need milk. We explain to ourselves that this falls under the category of a bull falling into a well on the Sabbath. Of course you pull it out. Well, likewise, if the kids don’t eat breakfast or eat their cereal dry and without the recommended daily requirements of calcium and vitamin D, then they will have insufficient strength that day—not to mention bad attitudes—and will struggle to concentrate, and then they’ll fall behind in their schoolwork, and then they’ll fail third grade, and then their self-esteem will plummet, and then they’ll turn to a life of crime and waste and dissipation to fill the void—and all this because I was too hidebound to go out and buy a jug of milk. And so I go and buy the milk, and while I’m at it, I figure I may as well do the grocery shopping I planned to do on Monday, since it’s a waste of precious petroleum reserves to make two trips in a week to the grocery store when I could easily combine them into a single trip. And—this clinches it—shopping now will free up more time to rest later on.
And on and on the switchback logic goes.
It tires me just thinking about it. Sabbath-keeping was always meant to be robust, not this picking of bones.
There is a word you may not know or, if you do, likely never use: synecdoche. Synecdoche (pronounced si-neck-dah-key with the emphasis on the neck sound) is a technical literary term. It means when a single part of some large, complex system stands for the whole: when “the crown” stands for the entire tradition and history of royalty, or “the flag” for all the complex layers of patriotism, or “the cloth” for the practice and personnel of ordained ministry, or “Nam” for the whole experience, the blood and madness, of the Vietnam War. When a word or image functions in this way, it’s synecdochic.
I tell you that to tell you this: the Ten Commandments are synecdochic. Each command means more than itself. Each is a tiny part that stands for a vast whole. So when we are commanded, for instance, not to steal, the command stretches beyond bare-bones decree. It means more than simply to restrain your hand from brigandage or thievery. It implies a whole way of life: the practice of contentment, the disciplining of appetites, the deepening of trustworthiness, the enlargement of generosity. The refusal to steal, no more, no less, is a rickety and stingy obedience. It’s hardly life to the full. It’s obedience to the letter of the law, but not its spirit. A mere abstainer can still be a thief at heart: hoarding, envying, coveting, a skinflint to the last breath. Scrooge-like.
But hear the command synecdochically, and it becomes an invitation to bountiful living—to receive but never take, to give and expect nothing in return, to celebrate the muchness of creation and relationship. It is an invitation to be as Scrooge after his three night visits, spendthrift and giddy, aprowl for opportunities to lavish gifts on friends, strangers, paupers, passersby. It is to be as Zacchaeus after Jesus came to his home, where an outburst of generosity instantly supplants a lifetime of greed. This is the essence, this life of abundance, of the command “Thou shalt not steal.”1
The commandments call us, not to bare minimalism, not to rigid observance or to tedious ledger toting, but to an exuberant overcompensation— to Zacchaeus-like extravagance. Each command is a doorway into a vast world that is ancient and new all at once.
This is true about the Sabbath command. Interestingly, it is only one of two of the Ten Commandments phrased in a positive manner. Except for this command and the one to honor our parents, all the rest are cast in the “Thou shalt not” form. They are written prohibitively. They take the shape of warnings and shunnings. But the Sabbath command is written in strong imperatives: remember, observe, keep, stop. It does get around to prohibition—thou shalt do no work—but this is couched first in the insistence that we do something, something good and hearty and life-giving.
A legalistic disposition, on the one hand, makes the commandment gloomy. It corrals us into a tight corner and forces us to sit, stock-still and long-faced, thinking solemn Sabbath thoughts (remember, observe, keep, stop). A minimalist mind-set, on the other hand, gets us looking for shortcuts, ways the commandment can be shaved here, bent there, sloughed off outright over here.
A synecdochic imagination does something utterly new. It invites us into a place that is larger than all the other days—a place so large, in fact, it contains all the other days and at the same time transcends them. It is a day as different from those other days as an ocean is from a lagoon. Each contains the other but transcends it. In doing so it becomes something altogether different.
Sabbath is that day in which all other days have no claim. Monday morning, Wednesday afternoon, Friday evening—none can make demands on Sabbath. Sabbath exists free of their concerns and their obligations. Sabbath owes them no allegiance. It releases us from paying them tribute. For this one day, we can hold aloof from all the other days.
J. R. R. Tolkien gives one of the most entrancing descriptions of the true nature of Sabbath. In book 1 of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, he describes a time of rest and healing in the house of Elrond in Rivendell. The hobbits, along with Strider, their guide, have made a dangerous, almost fatal journey to this place. They will soon have to make an even more dangerous, almost certainly fatal journey away from this place. But in the meantime, this:
For awhile the hobbits continued to talk and think of the past journey and of the perils that lay ahead; but such was the virtue of the land of Rivendell that soon all fear and anxiety was lifted from their minds. The future, good or ill, was not forgotten, but ceased to have power over the present. Health and hope grew strong in them, and they were content with each day as it came, taking pleasure in every meal, and in every word and song.2
The future, good or ill, was not forgotten, but ceased to have power over the present. That’s Sabbath.
Lauren Winner, in her book Mudhouse Sabbath, remarks on the different wording that Exodus and Deuteronomy use in prescribing the fourth commandment. Exodus calls us to remember the Sabbath, Deuteronomy to observe it. Why this variation? Winner, a convert first to Judaism and then to Christianity, cites a rabbinical insight: the three days that follow Sabbath are to be spent in reflection upon—remembering—the one just past, and the three days leading up to Sabbath are to be spent in preparation for—observing�
�the one approaching.3 In other words, Sabbath makes claims on all the other days, they make none on it.
To approach Sabbath with synecdochic imagination, and to free Sabbath-keeping from the demands of the other days of the week, one thing is indispensable: to cease from that which is necessary. This is Sabbath’s golden rule, the one rule to which all other rules distill. Stop doing what you ought to do. There are six days to do what you ought. Six days to be caught in the web of economic and political and social necessity.
And then one day to take wing.
Sabbath is that one day. It is a reprieve from what you ought to do, even though the list of oughts is infinitely long and never done. Oughts are tyrants, noisy and surly, chronically dissatisfied. Sabbath is the day you trade places with them: they go in the salt mine, and you go out dancing. It’s the one day when the only thing you must do is to not do the things you must. You are given permission— issued a command, to be blunt—to turn your back on all those oughts. You get to willfully ignore the many niggling things your existence genuinely depends on—and is often hobbled beneath—so that you can turn to whatever you’ve put off and pushed away for lack of time, lack of room, lack of breath. You get to shuck the have-tos and lay hold of the get-tos.
So can I or can I not chop wood on Sabbath? Well, is it necessary? Is it something I must do, that I feel under obligation to do? Then no, I won’t. It smells like an ought.
But I often chop wood for the sheer exhilaration of it. It makes me feel alive. It puts me in touch with earth and sky, savoring the saltiness of my sweat, the good ache in muscles seldom used, the folksy music of dry alder cracking under the swing of my maul. The same goes with cutting grass. A rhythm and luxury are there that, for me, are the exact opposite of work. The work I do most every other day—that I must do—involves reading, writing, preaching, teaching, counseling, attending meetings. I sit around a lot, advising actions, plotting courses, preparing speeches. I make numerous phone calls and always have a few dozen e-mails in the bottleneck. I talk and talk and talk, I write and write and write. To cut the grass, most times at least, pours something back into me that all that other work siphons off. It feels like playing hooky. It feels like getting a barely legal tax break. It feels like a night on the town.
The Rest of God Page 13