Disciples, Apostles, and Saints!
God created Sabbath for the Hebrew people as an invitation to something essential to life, to the practice of living. That, at the end of a long week of work and responsibility, of obedience to social forces and familial relationships, we take time to stop. Yes, to rest the body and mind. But not to prepare for next week’s slog, as if rest itself is only there to prepare for more work like some optimized perpetual work machine.
Sabbath restores us to alignment. It produces justice in the face of injustice and unites all people of every station into the same quiet stillness.
One of the popular mistakes in Christian witness to this command is that we would seek to maintain the disorder through the Sabbath time. Wives still cook and clean for the whole household and minimum wage workers make the food we order for brunch. Prisoners remain encarcerated and the hungry are arrested for stealing food from trees.
Sabbath isn’t just rest. It’s about restoring wholeness. Wholeness that isn’t personal or obligated, like reading a weekly self-help book. This is a communal defiance of disorder, of distortion, of inequality and inequity, to restore justice, peace, health, and wholeness to everyone. It is, at it’s heart, the story of freedom.
I had time away for a few weeks, with vacation in Michigan and the final residency of my MFA in Creative Writing. And it wasn’t entirely restful, either. It was full of anticipation and writing and rehearsal and feasting and crying. This, too, is rebalancing. And this, too, is communal.
With love,
Drew+
