I even shop sometimes. I try to avoid the getting-the-milk-forthe-kids’-breakfast kind of shopping (though I’m not perfectly consistent here and would like to excuse myself by declaring, loud and proud, that I’m no legalist: the truth is, I’m just inconsistent). But if Cheryl and I and our children are driving home on a summer evening from a river where we’ve spent the afternoon swimming and then falling asleep warming ourselves on the sunbaked rocks, and we pass a roadside fruit stand and I say, “Oh, look at those plums!” or if we are returning on a wintry twilight from a snowy hill where we’ve just spent an hour or two swooping and tumbling earthward in inner tubes and magic carpets, and we drive by a country quilt shop and Cheryl says, “Oh, look at those pillowcases!”—well, in either case, neither of us turns all stern and scowly and starts haranguing the other about a lack of piety.
We stop, we shop, we buy.
And that touches on Sabbath’s second golden rule, or the other half of the first golden rule: to embrace that which gives life. The first golden rule, or the first half of it, is to cease from that which is necessary. But to be synecdochic in our approach, we need this other part. We need to know, not just what to avoid, but what to pursue.
What defines the shape and nature of that pursuit? Simple: life, and life abundant. When Jesus broke man-made Sabbath regulations, he always went in this direction: he healed, he fed, he claimed the right to rescue creatures fallen into wells or to lead to wells creatures falling down with thirst. Jesus pursued those things that give life. Whatever had been stolen by sickness, by the devil, by sheer accident and mishap—these things he sought to take back and give back. He honored our created limits and restored our created greatness. He did this always and told us to do likewise, but he especially favored the Sabbath for such activity. What better day than Sabbath to trounce Beelzebub, to trump death, to reverse sickness, to repair injury, to pamper ourselves?
Students of the Sabbath have long noted that the command implicitly forbids creating. God created for six days, but on the seventh he rested. So too us: we can create like mad all the other six days of the week—forge widgets, write sermons, send memos, cook muffins, groom poodles, nail house frames, mix concrete, solve riddles. But the seventh day is when we step back and simply enjoy creation. We stop trying to make anything and instead let the things we’ve made bless and serve us.
Stop creating is the sum of it. This is clear enough, but I find it puzzling, and more than a little susceptible to all the finicky rulemaking I, at least, am prone to get into. Is chopping wood creating? What if I write a letter to my aunt—is this different from all the other writing I do, and if so, how? Can I or can I not bake macaroons with my daughters?
But even to ask such things is to lack synecdochic imagination. What is also implicit in the Sabbath command is our need for restoration. God ceased from creating, not because he needed rest or restoration, but because we do and God wanted to set the precedent, to lead by example.
We need to be re-created after all our creating. Creating taps us out. It doesn’t have this effect on God, of course. But we’re not God. Creating, as invigorating as it can be at times, can also be boring, blistering, depleting. Our resources are limited. Our creativity is easily spent. Creating wears us threadbare. Sabbath is not for more creating. It is for re-creating.
Again, what category does wood chopping, antique shopping, grass cutting, cookie baking, or letter writing fit with you? Is it something you create, or something that re-creates you? Choose the re-creative thing on Sabbath.
Cease from what is necessary. Embrace that which gives life. Those two things, taken together, make up Sabbath’s golden rule. They are, to begin with, deep-rooted in Scripture. But they are also simple and versatile, two qualities not to be underrated. Jesus, after all, and after him Peter and Paul, and after them the early church, worked out of an understanding of Sabbath that had these qualities of simplicity and versatility. The Pharisees (and some later church traditions) developed an approach to Sabbath that was cluttered, labyrinthine, rigid. “For it is: / Do and do, do and do, / rule on rule, rule on rule; / a little here, a little there” (Isa. 28:10).
The rest of God got lost amid a maze of man-made rules. To recover Sabbath, returning to more rules is hardly an option.
But a golden rule is different. Jesus’s so-called golden rule—do unto others what you would have them do unto you—is striking for its simplicity and its versatility. You can memorize it after one or two hearings and apply it lifelong, in virtually every and any situation.
So I submit this as Sabbath’s golden rule: Cease from what is necessary. Embrace that which gives life.
And then do whatever you want.
SABBATH LITURGY:
Practicing the Presence of God
Brother Lawrence as a man, I think, would have left little impression on most of us. Not at first, at least. Maybe not at all. I imagine him meek and small, unobtrusive. I think he had a voice thin as paper, a voice shaped for quiet, bruised by noise. You would have had to hold very still, as with a perching bird, to draw him near. You would have had to bend very close, as with a shy child, to hear him. I think Brother Lawrence was a man other men usually miss, typically dismiss.
Which is too bad. His quietness was thoughtfulness. And in his quietness, Brother Lawrence discovered one of life’s deep secrets, and he was happy to tell others about it for the asking: God is everywhere. God hovers in the air just behind you. God slips in, furtive and alert, among your comings and your goings. God listens, and watches, and—yes—speaks. Only, you need to slow down enough to notice. But so often we, like Martha, become distracted by many things and miss Jesus sitting right there in our kitchen.
The devil distracts. God interrupts. And for some reason, we fall prey to the one and grow oblivious to the other. Brother Lawrence found the most simple device for reversing this. In his small, wise book, The Practice of the Presence of God, he speaks about a companionship with Jesus that is without boundary—not in time, or place, or circumstance. Anywhere, everywhere, in anything, you can be with God. God wishes it and invites it and is present and available right now for it.
The only thing missing is us. The one thing lacking is attentiveness. So Brother Lawrence commends a discipline—simple as saying hello—of becoming present with God in season and out, in church and away, in crisis and routine, in ecstasy and heartache, in thrill and tedium. In all these things, as Paul says, we are more than conquerors—not because of some swaggering valor in us, but because we have a God to whom we can cry, “Abba” (see Rom. 8:15). We have a God who is there.
How aware have you been, right now, that Jesus is with you? Why don’t you greet him, out loud or, if that’s awkward for you, in your heart? Even if you are sitting somewhere public—a café, a subway, a city square, a quiet library, a noisy marketplace—do this. I am always amazed at the thrill of homecoming it awakens in me. It is like spotting a trusted friend among a throng of strangers.
In a later chapter and liturgy, we’ll explore listening to God. That’s not the practice here. This is simply noticing him in order to be with him. It is discovering that what he promised holds true: “Never will I leave you; / never will I forsake you” (Heb. 13:5).
Brother Lawrence washed dishes in a monastery. He was a busboy. He carried out menial duties: tidying and scouring the mess of others, removing the slop and stain of their appetites. But when you sit with him awhile (for that is the effect his book creates), you sense, even amid the clank of plates, the steam of dishpan, the rinds and grease of another’s devouring, that he was a king enthroned, a bridegroom on his wedding night, a father holding his newborn. He was the most joyful man in the house.
All because he just kept saying hello.
NINE
PLAY:
Stopping Just to Waste Time
Nathan is twenty-one years old and almost invincible. He seems to think so, at any rate, and I’m inclined to believe him. He is certainly magnificent, if magnific
ence is measured by gorilla strength and monkey agility, by wild audacity and, maybe, by a touch of harebrained madness.
Nathan jumps off anything. Today, it’s a one-hundred-foot cliff, his body straight as a thunderbolt hurled down by Zeus. He sails over a sixty-foot waterfall and lands in a pool churned angry and white by cannonades of water crashing into it. He plunges deep, stays down too long, then pops back up in a boil of frothing water, laughing with joy and a hint of lunacy. You have to laugh too.
A ruined day for Nathan is one that doesn’t start by firing his rifle from his house porch, for no better reason than to hear its loud crack in the morning air and smell the sharp scent of gunpowder, and doesn’t contain some close brush with the grave. He spends his summers rappelling out of helicopters into burning forests, with no more than an ax, a chain saw, a few other tools. The only water he has is for drinking. His job is to hew down trees outside the fire’s perimeter—to cut off its fuel supply—and then to get out before the fire gets him. This isn’t work for him. This is play. This is something he’d probably pay to do if he wasn’t paid handsomely for doing it. In the winter, he fishes for salmon or king crab off the rocky, stormy coastline of British Columbia, and in deep winter he goes north, Arctic north, to test his wits against its ruthless cold and harrowing loneliness and terrifying emptiness.
To pass the time, he does any number of death-defying things: free climbs, tree climbs, leaps from bridges. His life is a round of cougar chasing, bear baiting, glacier walking.
Most people hope they die in their sleep. They want to go serene, oblivious, slipping into eternity without so much as a toss of the limbs. But dying like that would rob Nathan. If he doesn’t die spectacularly, flinging hurdy-gurdy into a hurricane, tumbling headlong from a mountain bluff, getting sucked out to sea in a gnashing riptide, he’ll be one spoilsport in heaven. I said that to him once. He looked at me with his impish grin. “Yeah,” he said. “A grizzly bear. That would be my pick, torn to shreds tangling with a grizzly bear.”
I pity the grizzly.
Anyhow, Nathan wanted me to go swimming with him. Swimming with Nathan is not like swimming with almost anyone else. This will not be a nice little dip in some warm, lazy river. It will not be a splash-and-wade in some park-side lake, with a sandy beach and a dock twenty feet out and a rope held up by oblong floats marking the boundary. There will be no lifeguard sitting nearby, itching to rescue someone.
Nathan swims in rapids. Nathan swims in torrents. Nathan cavorts beneath cataracts. Nathan plunges into icy white water that sluices through narrow gorges and whirls in deep rock bowls. You have to scale down cliffs, clinging to tree roots and grass tufts, even to reach the places Nathan swims. Or, if you’re him, you can just jump off the cliff.
No, nothing mild for Nathan. Nothing safe for him. Nothing sane for this boy. Nathan walks out on trees lodged between gorge walls, triple-somersaults into the blue-black water, and lets the plunging current carry him away. Nathan swims in water so muscular and swift, in currents that braid and unravel like large snakes mating, that the water can grip you and spin you round and round until you have no strength except to sink. He swims in eddies that can pin you subsurface on the underside of a ledge and leave you there like a barnacle.
Nathan wanted me to go swimming with him.
I’m middle-aged. My day job involves a lot of sitting. I don’t care for heights. I panic in swift water, do all the things you’re not supposed to: thrash, fight, swim against the pull of the current. And this was late September, after nearly a month of heavy rains that had brought the river up several feet, dropped its temperature several degrees, and made the river’s pools and channels, only a few weeks before safe as a Jacuzzi, now deathly treacherous.
Nathan wanted me to go swimming with him.
The night before our trip, I call Nathan, a bit anxious. “Um, listen: I’m going to live through this, right?”
Long pause. “You know,” Nathan says, “I was thinking about that. I was thinking how much the church would hate me if I killed you.” Nathan likes to joke, but he’s not joking now. He adds nothing to reassure me. It doesn’t seem to occur to him that my wife and children might be a tad upset too. He says, “Good night, see you in the morning.”
I don’t sleep well.
We arrive at the river, and the first things I see, everywhere, are large, bold yellow signs, official signs, all with the same message:
DANGER!
This area is marked by Extreme Danger.
Beware Steep Cliffs
and
Treacherous Waters.
Stay inside the fence.
Unfortunately, this is just a recommendation. Just a suggestion. It’s not a command. It has no teeth: violators will not be imprisoned and fined and beaten and shamed. There’s no law saying you can’t go on the other side of the fence. Only common sense would say that.
Nathan isn’t strong on common sense.
I think we are going to start slow, find some gentle, shallow pool and get our feet wet. This is not so. We start by jumping off a thirty-foot bridge into a narrow channel whose current, if you don’t catch the edge of rock it rifles past, tosses you off a waterfall. From there we lunge across the current to catch the bank on the other side, then pick our way over a ridge of boulders above a waterfall to leap off a twenty-foot cliff into a frothing spill basin and swim back to the far side.
And just after this I nearly drown.
I swallow water and can’t get my breath. I cough and gasp, grasp at a rock shelf to pull myself out. The water keeps pulling me back in. I must look like a cat in bathwater, scrabbling frantically against the hard sides of the tub, getting nowhere. I’m caught in a medicine bowl: a whirlpool that keeps spinning you so that, unless you’re strong as Nathan, you’re good as dead. I keep going around, still not breathing right. I panic.
“Do you need help?” Nathan calls.
“Yes!”
Next time around the rock wall, just before the current opens out into the wider stream, Nathan reaches out and plucks me up as if I am no more than a newspaper boat bobbing down a street gutter after a heavy downpour.
I sit on the rocks, panting, humiliated. I want to go home. I don’t say this, but it’s in my heart. Nathan, of course, has other ideas.
“Let’s go to the Big Falls,” he says.
Yes. Good. The Big Falls.
The Big Falls are, well, big. Very big. They spill in a veil of glittering, thundering water into a pool so deep it could swallow a ship. The waterfall is maybe sixty feet. Above and just behind it, another forty or so feet higher, is a thin shelf atop a sheer column of rock. I pick my way down the cliff into the gorge one hundred feet below, clawing along a narrow, zigzagging footpath. Meanwhile, Nathan positions himself on the ledge above the falls. From where I stand below, he looks small and far away, a bird of prey perched in its aerie. He stands and waits. He isn’t hesitating from fear. I’m not sure Nathan knows what fear is. He’s getting a line on his landing point. There are rocks under the falls and to the right of them. There’s only about a twelve-foot-wide pocket of clear, unobstructed water, where he can plunge sixty feet beneath the surface and not touch bottom. Nathan’s aiming for the center of that twelve feet.
And hits it.
More than once.
Meanwhile, I do know what fear is, and I am locked in a fierce contest with it. I know I’d never jump from that cliff. I wish only for a small redemption, a modest reclamation of my manhood. I want only enough courage to dive a ten-foot ledge into the pool’s twisting, heaving water and survive it. I want only to get in and get out again alive and to do it with some dignity, without feeling like a spindly limbed old man or a sapling-limbed young boy, someone in need of rescue.
There’s an off-the-cuff remark that Maggie Smith’s character makes in the movie Gosford Park, an Agathie Christie–style whodunit that depicts the infinite gradations of snobbery among the British aristocracy and their servants. Smith plays Constance Trentha
m, a grande dame of snootiness. She is majestically haughty and self-absorbed. She never stifles a caustic opinion or barbed remark about anyone and everyone. After Constance has gone on a jag excessive even for her, someone tells her not to be such a snob, to which she retorts, with surprised indignation, “Why, I haven’t a snobbish bone in my whole body.”
I am thinking about that, listening to the roar of the falls, watching the boiling of the water. I have some good friends, male friends, and we like to think we’ve given up the myth of machismo. We like to think that we don’t need to strut and howl and do dangerous, foolhardy things to feel we’re real men. We like to think we don’t have some primitive throwback need to prove ourselves, to convince ourselves and our friends and our women and our children that we’re steel-nerved and red-blooded. “Why, I haven’t a macho bone in my whole body” is our secret motto.
But standing on this rock ledge above this torrent of river, I know I am soaked to the gills with it. I need to prove this to myself. To Nathan. To my wife and son and two daughters. To the crowd that has gathered atop the cliff, leaning in against the steel-mesh fence, to gawk at Nathan’s antics. To everyone who will later hear me crow about it—or will come to my graveside and grieve the glory of my fallen heroism.
So I dive.
And I live.
And I dive and dive and dive again, and live and live and live.
(I told you you’d have to hear me crow about it.)
We went from there to other pools and eddies and falls. Even Nathan got in trouble once: he lassoed a rope to a rock above a short but furious waterfall and pulled himself under the fall’s veil to frolic like an otter, leap like a spawning salmon. Only, the undertow was too strong, and it swept him down and pinned him underwater against a rock cavity. I waited and waited for him to come up, wondering what I’d do if he didn’t. I knew I didn’t have the strength to rescue him. But should I go down there and die with him? Then suddenly he popped up, went down again, and came up once more, gasping, glad to be alive.
The Rest of God Page 14