That’s just it: we were both glad to be alive. A day like that puts that in you. And more: it makes you feel alive, alive in every joint and marrow, alive inside and out. In everything—the food you eat, the people you meet, the trees around you, the conversations you have—in everything, a day like that sharpens your senses. It makes you thankful and amazed. It makes the taste and smell and color and texture of everything intensely vibrant. It heightens the meaning of every last little thing.
And it’s not just because you brushed death and escaped. It’s that you tasted life and came back for more. It’s that you did something for no reason other than the sheer pleasure of doing it.
I wrestled with whether to go at all. It wasn’t just my fear of death that gave me pause. It was also, and mainly, my fear of a deadline: I had to get this book written and had carefully allotted the time I had to do it, assigning myself daily and weekly word quotas.
How ironic. This book is about rest. It’s about breaking our captivity to chronos, about learning to live free of taskmasters. It’s about changing our minds, thinking in new ways about rest and play. It’s about God becoming bigger and us becoming smaller. It’s about rediscovering simplicity and earthiness and wonder.
And I almost missed it. I almost allowed my obligation to write about rest steal my experience of it. I almost allowed my compulsion to merely talk about rest and play take from me these things themselves.
Enough about swimming gorges. As they say in those truck commercials, don’t try this at home.
But do you play enough? Do you risk enough and bask in God’s creation enough and do some things for no reason other than that you’ll be dead soon enough anyhow, so why not live a little now?
If there’s one god of the age that Christians especially pay homage to, it’s the god of utility. As a tribe, we’re deeply, devoutly utilitarian. Everything we do we seek to justify on the grounds of its usefulness. I took part once in a discussion with pastors about whether or not we should watch movies. One group argued that movies were the idiom and medium of our culture, and that failing to keep abreast of the most influential ones was akin to a missionary’s refusing to learn the local dialect and customs, robbing us of the very tools we needed to reach our neighbors. That sounded right. The other group, though, argued that movies were the culture’s primary embodiments and carriers of its godlessness, and exposure to them was akin to a missionary’s participating in the local voodoo or witch doctor rituals, robbing us of the very authority we needed to reach our neighbors. That sounded right too.
But afterward, I realized that both groups were arguing their opposite views from what amounted to a single position: utilitarianism. Each group wanted to justify their view on the grounds of its usefulness. Either watching movies made us more shrewd, or it made us less holy. It increased our effectiveness or hampered it. It enhanced our influence or diminished it.
It made us more useful or less so.
What’s missing is a theology of play. There are many things—eating ice cream, diving off cliffs, sleeping in Saturday mornings, learning birdcalls, watching movies—that can’t be shoehorned into a utilitarian scheme, try as you might. We do some things just for the simple sake of doing them. There’s no particular usefulness connected with them. They don’t need to be done: nobody insists, and the world’s left unchanged by our doing them or not. They add nothing to the gross national product. They enhance our intellect not one bit. They don’t make us worse or better neighbors. They don’t improve our figures, hone our skills, or increase our red blood cell counts—or if they do, it’s sheer accident, not the thing we set out to accomplish. Accomplishment is the least of their concerns.
But they just might make us feel more alive, more ourselves, and that’s use enough. Indeed, many other uses might follow after this. But I want to make something very clear: though play benefits us, the minute we do it for its benefit is the minute it ceases to be play. Play is subversive, really. It subverts business as usual. It subverts necessity. It subverts utility. It subverts all the chronos-driven, taskmaster-supervised, legalism-steeped activities that mark out most of our lives—that make us oh-so-useful, but bland and sullen in our usefulness.
Sabbath is for play. I’ve talked to people who grew up in strict Sabbatarian homes who were forbidden to play on the Sabbath. They couldn’t toss or kick or whack a ball, ride a bike, run. They certainly couldn’t play rummy or Monopoly. All diversion was out of bounds. Some tell me of sitting in starchy clothes, in a house preternaturally quiet, so quiet you could hear the clock ticking, the floor joists creaking, the fly tapping the windowpane. They gazed out that window, at sunlight soaking spring leaves radiantly, or wind tossing fall leaves kaleidoscopically, or thick flakes of snow swirling down on dark, stripped branches, and they ached to be out there and resented that they couldn’t.
This is odd, that we ever emptied Sabbath of play. I grew up in a home with no religious influence, so I have no inkling about how those who ran these Sabbatarian homes thought. But my guess is that they were beholden to the grimmest form of utilitarianism. My guess is that they figured since we spend six days in unbroken usefulness, we should spend one in unbroken restfulness. My guess is that rest was the only alternative they could imagine to work.
But what about play? What about spending some of the day in sheer, unapologetic uselessness—not just ceasing from our utilitarian existence, but turning it right on its head? What about spending time producing nothing but adrenaline, laughter, memories?
In C. S. Lewis’s classic The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the two girls Susan and Lucy witness the terror and sorrow of Aslan’s death at the hands of the White Witch and her henchmen. And then they witness his resurrection. The first thing Aslan does? He plays:
“Oh, children,” said the Lion, “I feel my strength coming back to me. Oh, children, catch me if you can!” He stood for a second, his eyes very bright, his limbs quivering, lashing himself with his tail. Then he made a leap high over their heads and landed on the other side of the Table. Laughing, though she didn’t know why, Lucy scrambled over it to reach him. Aslan leaped again. A mad chase began. Round and round the hilltop he led them, now hopelessly out of their reach, now letting them almost catch his tail, now diving between them, now tossing them in the air with his huge and beautifully velveted paws and catching them again, and now stopping unexpectedly so that all three of them rolled over together in a happy laughing heap of fur and arms and legs. It was such a romp as no one has ever had except in Narnia; and whether it was more like playing with a thunderstorm or playing with a kitten Lucy could never make up her mind. And the funny thing was that when all three finally lay together panting in the sun the girls no longer felt in the least tired or hungry or thirsty.1
Whether it was more like playing with a thunderstorm or playing with a kitten Lucy could never make up her mind.
Both play and Sabbath participate in something outside the bounds of strict utility and chronology. They dance in a woods unwatched by Chronos, outside his repressive rule. Play is the forest of Nottingham, where the sheriff fears to tread. A game is not played on strictly chronological time scales: it’s played according to its own logic—innings, rounds, sets, quarters, periods. You play until you’re finished. Swimming with Nathan is the same: you go until you’re tired, or you drown.
But play is also subversive. It hints at a world beyond us. It carries a rumor of eternity, news from a kingdom where Chronos and utility are no more welcome than death and Hades and the ancient serpent. When we play, we nudge the border of forever.
And this also is what happens when we keep Sabbath. Sabbath, Abraham Joshua Heschel says, is a foretaste and a heralding of eternity. Its joy is precisely this: it rehearses heaven.2 This, too, is what the writer of Hebrews says—in a passage we’ll look at closely in a later chapter: the rest we experience in Sabbath is only preliminary. It is an anticipation, as shadow is of reality, of a rest that never ends.
Play and
Sabbath are joined at the hip, and sometimes we rest best when we play hardest. Whether it’s more like playing with a thunderstorm or playing with a kitten, you can never make up your mind.
And if you’re ever on Vancouver Island and feel like swimming, I know just the place.
SABBATH LITURGY:
Game Plan
Adulthood is mostly about getting things done. Past a certain age, our existence is consumed by obligation. Deadlines loom. Assignments are due. Responsibilities are mountainous. Chores are piling up. There’s a list, always, of things to do. Accomplishing these things yesterday has virtually no bearing on our performance of them again today. Or tomorrow. Let up for more than, say, forty-eight hours, seventy-two at the outside, and the world begins to teeter.
So one of the first things to die in adults is playfulness. We are, as a tribe, a grim bunch generally: stern and mirthless, bent beneath huge, invisible weights. Most grown-ups—and an increasing number of youth and children—feel that life is all work and no play. Play feels irresponsible. How can you justify it when there are so many things still to do on your to-do list? How can you feel guiltless in it when the chores you neglected last week are now added to the chores you’ve yet to attend to this week?
And you want to go golfing?
Of all the things Jesus meant when he exhorted his disciples to be childlike, few dare to suggest he wanted them to play more. But maybe he did. Maybe all the other virtues of childhood—trust, humility, simplicity, innocence, wonder—are not separate from a life of playfulness, but the fruit of it: that apart from cartwheels and kite flying, leapfrog and hide-and-seek, snakes-and-ladders and digging for buried treasure, all those other things wither.
Certainly, this: the death of play spells the conquest of Chronos. When we really believe that we have no time to waste—no time simply to enjoy without excuse or guilt, without having to show anything for it—then the cult of utility is utterly ascendant. It has vanquished all rivals.
Do you want to hand the god of utility that much territory? Isn’t there still, stirring somewhere inside you, a streak of defiance? Isn’t there at least the faint pulse of subversion?
When last did you take a day just to play? Or even an hour? Half an hour? When did you last initiate a game with your children and not much care about what time the clock said? Some grown-ups have neglected play so long, they’ve lost all instinct, all reflex, all capacity for it. Maybe you’re one of them. Start slow. Try a card game, or saddle yourself up on a park swing and see how high you can go. Read a book different from this one: a twisty-turny thriller, or a fluffy romance. Or a comic book. Watch a Monty Python movie, or an old Peter Sellers one.
Dance.
In the movie Patch Adams, Robin Williams is a medical student who has every bit as much acumen and skill as any of his classmates. But he also has something they don’t: a riotous sense of humor and a childlike love of play. Patch treats his patients—some with terrible, crushing illnesses, some victims of accidents that have left them shattered in mind and body—with the medicine, not just of pharmaceuticals, but of laughter. He comes to their bedsides dressed as a clown, or with Groucho glasses, and goes through his routine with slapstick antics reminiscent of Laurel and Hardy. His classmates, one in particular, disdain him for this.
But never mind that. There is healing in that laughter, not least of all for the one who brings it.
TEN
RESTORE:
Stopping to Become Whole
After fifteen years of pastoral ministry, I rested.
I took a sabbatical. In fact, I’m on it now, as I write. By the time you read this, though, the sabbatical will be long gone, a fossil of memory faint as ancient fish bones pressed into hardened mud. But for now, I have several months to step back, breathe, stretch, ponder. I can spend an entire day reading if I choose. I can browse a used bookstore at my leisure or shave cedar stumps into thin sticks of kindling even though I have boxes of it already. I can spend uninterrupted hours handpicking words, hand-sculpting sentences. I can nap midday if the mood hits me or go for a walk or sort old paint cans.
There’s a country lane not far from me, lined with oak and chestnut trees, and this time of year I can collect handfuls of chestnuts as lustrous as jewels, bagfuls of acorns capped with perfect little crosshatched tams, and heap them in glass bowls just to be looked at. When a car passes by this stretch of road, this wind-fallen treasure snaps and pops beneath its tires like strings of firecrackers set off all at once.
Or I can drive to a place where the tide has scooped out the earth from the roots of huge bent maple and fir and arbutus trees and crawl through them as if they’re mazes in a medieval gauntlet. I can drive to another place where the pounding of the waves has smoothed the stones flat and round like old Roman coins, perfect for skipping if the surf weren’t always in such tumult.
I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time. For years, in fact. It’s not that I don’t enjoy what I do—I love it most days, except Mondays, and sometimes Wednesdays, and every Thursday afternoon when the sermon still feels rough-cut and patchwork. But all the rest of the time I love it. Actually, that’s the problem: I love it overmuch. I spend an average amount of time doing my work, fifty or so hours a week. No more, maybe a tad less, than most people at their jobs. But then I spend many more hours thinking about my work, talking about it, stewing over it, jotting memos to myself concerning it. I’ll lie down in bed and remember some odd Greek word I want to look up or think up some new slant on a conversation I should therefore resume, and I’ll spring out of bed and shuffle downstairs to scrawl something in a journal or rummage a scrap note from a haystack of paper.
In a word, I’m obsessed.
This is good some days, but most days it’s not. It produces the complete reversal of what I intend. I intend to do my work with excellence. I intend to solve problems diligently, preach fervently, care compassionately. I intend to be heartfelt and skillful in the things to which I put my hand. But I sometimes end up with none of that. I end up withered. I spark with dry static. When I’m really tired, I get mildly paranoid. I suspect conspiracies afoot. I start to distrust people. I resent interruptions. I stop caring. I become a master of diversions. I get sloppy and cagey and prickly and forgetful. I clench my jaw too much, which gives me headaches, which make me irritable. I winch tight my shoulders, as if I’m poising to batter-ram open a door in the manner of an old-style cop, which makes the muscles along my neck and back rigid and spasmodic.
So a sabbatical started to look like a good idea.
About a year before I took it, I was invited to speak to a group of pastors in a neighboring city. I gave my speech, and the host opened the floor for questions. Someone asked me what he should do on a sabbatical. I told him I hadn’t a clue, that I’d love to find out, and could he please arrange to speak to my board? They laughed, politely. Then this thought came to me: “I don’t think it’s possible to benefit from a sabbatical if you’ve never learned to keep Sabbath. Sabbatical is Sabbath writ large. If we haven’t been faithful in the small things, why do we expect to be entrusted with the greater ones? I see a lot of people head toward a sabbatical like it’s the great white hope, a supercure, the answer to all that ails them, and then come out of it sorely disappointed. They emerge more tired than when they went in.
“Sabbatical is just doing daily, for several months of days, what you’ve already learned to do weekly, for many years of weeks.”
It sounded wise at the moment. Even borderline profound.
It haunts me now. It’s not that I’m off to a bad start. It’s just that now I get to test the soundness of my claim. If this is a good season for me, it will be because I already know the rest of God.
As I left for sabbatical, many people in my church wished me well. They told me they’d miss me, that they’d be praying for me, that they hoped I came back refreshed. And then they usually said, “You deserve this.”
I don’t. I can think of all kinds of
people who deserve it: a single mother who works three jobs to ensure her kids have a decent home and good clothes; a couple who have been clocking twelve-hour days or more six days a week for many years, trying to keep a small business from sliding over the edge; a tradesman who never has time for a holiday when the work is on and never has money for one when it’s not; a millworker whose shifts change like the clouds so that he’s seen the inside and out of every hour of every day and now never quite sleeps and never fully wakes. I can think of all the people who do their jobs faithfully and capably, even though they die at it a little every day. I like what I do, and I have not worked half as hard as half of these people, and few will ever be given the luxury of a sabbatical.
No, I don’t deserve it. It’s pure gift, like being born in peacetime and not war, like being forgiven, or kissed, or told you have beautiful eyes. I never earned a minute of it. I don’t deserve a scrap of it.
But I feel deeply obliged to the people in my church who have allowed me it. Obliged, not to come back smarter, or thinner, or more eloquent, or more studied up, though all that could help. The obligation I feel is not to pay them back. These things don’t work that way, on some barter system where the church trades several months of leave in exchange for shorter, pithier sermons.
The obligation I feel, rather, is to come back restored.
It’s not that I went out maimed, not really. There was another time, a few years ago, that if the door of sabbatical had been opened, I would have hobbled out and spent the time given just trying to piece myself back together, trying to find some dim, quiet room where the light didn’t sting my eyes and no loud noises startled me. But the door wasn’t opened then. I managed anyhow. This time, the time I was handed a sabbatical, I went out sprightly, still swinging, still singing.
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