OUR MISSION Inspired by the love of Jesus, we are building the kingdom of heaven, where differing people live in community, serving God and each other.
SO THE CREATION OF THE HEAVENS AND THE EARTH AND EVERYTHING IN THEM WAS COMPLETED. ON THE SEVENTH DAY, GOD HAD FINISHED THE WORK OF CREATION SO GOD RESTED FROM ALL THIS WORK. AND GOD BLESSED THE SEVENTH DAY AND DECLARED IT HOLY BECAUSE IT WAS THE DAY WHEN GOD RESTED FROM THAT THE WORK OF CREATION.
~ GENESIS 2:1 THE CUMMER MUSEUM | Jacksonville
DEAR PEOPLE OF GOD,
I love to wander through museums. Drinking in the art, gazing at each piece, moving with deliberation and ease, following my heart — it nourishes me in ways I cannot articulate.
There is something that we take for granted in museums, something that lies at the heart of the experience. Paintings are almost always hung with a great space between them. Without the white walls, the empty space, the distance between pieces of art, we could not take them in. If all the paintings were pressed up against each other, the art would become noise, chaos, too much to observe.
The seventh day of rest was baked into the very creation of the world by God. God knew that we cannot experience life without the space in between. If our physical bodies don’t sleep, we go insane. But our minds need another kind of rest, as well. Sleep is not enough; we also just need space. The busier we are, the more the world seems full of noise and cacophony. We must learn to spend time away from busyness because empty space is an essential part of all creativity, of all innovation. Without what the Scripture calls sabbath time, we are not made in the image of God.
But sabbath time — rest time — does not mean doing only what feels good. True rest involves unplugging from technology, letting the mind lie fallow – weaning ourselves off our devices enough to know that we can survive without them. This can be painful, for our relationship with technology has become addictive. We may find ourselves feeling lost, alone, confused, bored, restless. These feelings are a natural withdrawal response, since our minds are so overstimulated.
Technology doesn’t rest. As technology advances, humans are filled with the false notion that rest is optional, even lazy. Rest is not simply an option; it is not some kind of fringe benefit. Rest is part of the essence of life, and without rest, we would not survive. You can unplug, and you won’t die, I promise.
As living, breathing children of God, we need sabbath time so that the Holy Spirit may lead us to see the beauty of this world and to make this world more beautiful. May you be inspired by this issue of the Quarterly and its exploration of rest, which leads to renewal and to delight.
In Christ’s Love,
REST (NOUN): freedom from activity or labor; peace of mind or spirit; a place for resting or lodging; a rhythmic silence in music
REST (VERB): to cease from action or motion, refrain from labor or exertion; to be free from anxiety or disturbance
THE JAPANESE KANJI SYMBOL FOR MA
is a combination of two characters, door and sun; a door that is open for the light to come in, enabling growth and sparking creativity.
Space is substance. Cézanne painted and modelled space. Giacometti sculpted by “taking the fat off space”.
Mallarmé conceived poems with absences as well as words. Ralph Richardson asserted that acting lay in pauses… Isaac Stern described music as “that little bit between each note – silences which give the form”… The Japanese have a word (ma) for this interval which gives shape to the whole. In the West we have neither word nor term. A serious omission. ~ Alan Fletcher
REST IN THE RIVER
by Thich Nhat Hanh
My dear friends, suppose someone is holding a pebble and throws it in the air and the pebble begins to fall down into a river. After the pebble touches the surface of the water, it allows itself to sink slowly into the river.
It will reach the bed of the river without any effort. Once the pebble is at the bottom of the river, it continues to rest. It allows the water to pass by.
I think the pebble reaches the bed of the river by the shortest path because it allows itself to fall without making any effort. During our sitting meditation we can allow ourselves to rest like a pebble. We can allow ourselves to sink naturally without effort to the position of sitting, the position of resting.
Resting is a very important practice; we have to learn the art of resting. Resting is the first part of Buddhist meditation. You should allow your body and your mind to rest. Our mind as well as our body needs to rest.
The problem is that not many of us know how to allow our body and mind to rest. We are always struggling; struggling has become a kind of habit. We cannot resist being active, struggling all the time. We struggle even during our sleep.
It is very important to realize that we have the habit energy of struggling. We have to be able to recognize a habit when it manifests itself because if we know how to recognize our habit, it will lose its energy and will not be able to push us anymore.
We have to practice in order to be able to transform this habit in us. The habit of struggle has become a powerful source of energy that is shaping our behavior, our actions, and our reactions.
When an animal in the jungle is wounded, it knows how to find a quiet place, lie down and do nothing. The animal knows that is the only way to get healed—to lay down and just rest, not thinking of anything, including hunting and eating. Not eating is a very wonderful way of allowing your body to rest. We are so concerned about how to get nutrition that we are afraid of resting, of allowing our body to rest and to fast. The animal knows that it does not need to eat. What it needs is to rest, to do nothing, and that is why its health is restored.
In our consciousness, there are wounds also, lots of pains. Our consciousness also needs to rest in order to restore itself. Our consciousness is just like our body. Our body knows how to heal itself if we allow it the chance to do so. When we get a cut on our finger, we don’t have to do anything except to clean it and to allow it the time to heal, because our body knows how to heal itself. The same thing is true with our consciousness; our consciousness knows how to heal itself if we know how to allow it to do so. But we don’t allow it. We always try to do something. We worry so much about healing, which is why we do not get the healing we need. Only if we know how to allow them to rest can our body and our soul heal themselves.
But there is in us what we call the energy of restlessness. We cannot be at peace with ourselves. We cannot be peaceful. We cannot sit; we cannot lie down. There is some energy in us to do this, to do that, to think of this, to think of that, and that kind of restlessness makes us unhappy. That is why it is so important for us to learn first of all to allow our body to rest. We have to learn how to deal with all our energy of restlessness. That is why we have to learn these techniques of allowing our body and our consciousness to rest.
THE CREEK IN SHIRLEY CANYON
by Robert Hass
A long, slow dusk on the day before solstice— I did it, I did it, I did it: song of the pond frogs. Shrill piping of the cliff swallows, fluting of a vireo, Raspy song of the Bewick’s wren. Such commotion
In the trees! These evenings of long light
Must be high festival to them. It’s the time
When the light seems tender in the needles
Of the pine, the shimmer of the aspen leaves
Seems kindly on the cliff face, gleams
On the patches and gullies of snow summer Hasn’t touched yet. And the creek is flush With life, streams of snow melt cascading down
The glacial spills of granite in a turbulence
The ouzel, picking off insects in the spray, Seems thrilled by, water on water funneling, Foam on foam, existence pouring out
Its one meaning, which is flow. Up here, In the last light, the vireo’s warble declares, Repeats, falls silent. The swallows, soaring, Dipping. They must be feeding their young The insects they are gleaning from the pond.
And the frogs: I did it, I did it, I did it
Fall silent one by one as dark comes on.
ANOTHER WORLD IS NOT ONLY POSSIBLE, SHE IS ON HER WAY. ON A QUIET DAY, I CAN HEAR HER BREATHING.
~ Arundhati Roy
MY MOTHER NAMED ME BELOVED | Kalila Ain
REFLECTION
from Episcopal Relief and Development
We are now a society that counts our steps and fusses that praying four times daily is too hard. We walk laps around the kitchen at 10 p.m. to make sure we hit our goal for the day while our prayer books and Bibles stay unopened on our nightstands. We hoard “me time” and lose hours to social media. We overschedule ourselves.
In these often hard, strange, dark, confusing and divisive times, the temptation to stay busy and distracted is powerful. But it’s not what we were made for. We were made, like Abraham, to sit in the heat of the day and wait for the Lord. We were made to sit still at the feet of Love and worship together. When the world seems to be coming apart at the seams, it is time to stop all our Doing, counter-intuitive as it is, and begin to practice Being.
Waiting. Silence. Solitude. Stillness. These are not the same as relaxing or being lazy, as Martha suggested to Mary all those years ago. Being still isn’t just a physical act. It is an internal act as well. Stillness and Silence are about being present. Present to God and to each other. They cultivate the humility to say, “This isn’t all about me or what I can do or say; this is about what God is doing among us.”
The spiritual practices of Stillness and Silence can help us become aware that this life is not ours alone; we are part of a greater whole. When we practice Being over Doing, we open ourselves up to what is beyond us—beyond our abilities to fix, mend, solve or do on our own—making space for the wisdom of the Holy Spirit and the gifts of our wider community to lead us toward lasting change.
FOR REFLECTION
Part of being in community with others is sharing time and space, often going at a slower pace than we would like. How do you cultivate a posture of humility that allows others to lead?
THE WILD GEESE
by Wendell Berry
Horseback on Sunday morning, harvest over, we taste persimmon and wild grape, sharp sweet of summer’s end. In time’s maze over fall fields, we name names that went west from here, names that rest on graves. We open a persimmon seed to find the tree that stands in promise, Geese appear high over us, pass, and the sky closes. Abandon, as in love or sleep, holds them to their way, clear in the ancient faith: what we need is here. And we pray, not for new earth or heaven, but to be quiet in heart, and in eye, clear. What we need is here.
WHY GOD WANTS YOU TO REST
by Barbara Brown Taylor
The first time I really tried [to keep the Sabbath] was the Sunday after my last Sunday as a parish minister. After more than twenty years of being in church most Sunday mornings, I found myself suddenly faced with a whole day at home alone. I could not go to the church I had just resigned from. I did not want to go to church anywhere else. I thought about going to the grocery store, but I live in a small town where someone was bound to report that I had been seen buying cold cuts on my first Sunday morning away from church. So I stayed home instead, where I confronted grave questions about my professional identity, my human worth, and my status before God.
But that only lasted about an hour. After that, I went out on the front porch and said morning prayer with the birds. Then I read until lunchtime. Then I made an egg sandwich. Then I took a nap. By the time the sun went down, I realized that I had just observed my first true Sabbath in more than twenty years. In the years since then, I have made a practice of saying no for one whole day a week: to work, to commerce, to the Internet, to the car, to the voice in my head that is forever whispering, “More.” One day each week, More God is the only thing on my list. While reading up on a practice is no substitute for practicing it, I have also read enough to remember that the Sabbath has always been Saturday, not Sunday. By the lunar reckoning of the Bible, it starts on Friday evening and it ends on Saturday evening.
Look the word up in the book of Exodus and you discover that Jews were observing Sabbath before Moses brought the stone tablets of God’s holy law down from Mount Sinai. The first holy thing in all creation, Abraham Heschel says, was not a people or a place but a day. God made everything in creation and called it good, but when God rested on the seventh day, God called it holy. That makes the seventh day a “palace in time,” Heschel says, into which human beings are invited every single week of our lives.
Why are we so reluctant to go?
In the eyes of the world, there is no payoff for sitting on the porch. A field full of weeds will not earn anyone’s respect. If you want to succeed in this life (whatever your “field” of endeavor), you must spray, you must plow, you must fertilize, you must plant. You must never turn your back. Each year’s harvest must be bigger than the last. That is what the earth and her people are for, right? Wrong god.
IN THE EYES OF THE TRUE GOD, THE PORCH IS IMPERATIVE—NOT EVERY NOW AND THEN BUT ON A REGULAR BASIS.
When the fields are at rest—when shy deer step from the woods to graze the purple clover grown up between last year’s tomato plants, and Carolina chickadees hang upside down to pry seeds from the sunflowers that have taken over the vineyard— when the people who belong to this land walk through it with straw hats in their hands instead of hoes to discover that wild blackberries water their mouths as surely as the imported grapes they worked so hard to protect from last year’s frost—this is not called “letting things go”; this is called “practicing Sabbath.” You have to wonder what makes human beings so resistant to it.
Anyone who practices Sabbath for even an afternoon usually suffers a little spell of Sabbath sickness. Try it and you too may be amazed by how quickly your welcome rest begins to feel like something closer to a bad cold. Okay, that was nice. Okay, you are ready to get back to work now. Yes, you know you said you wanted this, but now you have had just the right amount of rest—maybe even a touch too much— so that you are beginning to feel sluggish. What if your energy level drops and never comes back up again? What if you get used to this and want never to go back to work? Plus, how will you ever catch up after taking a whole day off? Just thinking about it makes you tired.
Is weeding the garden really work if you enjoy it? Is looking through a Garnet Hill catalog really shopping? This, I think, is how the rabbis were finally forced to spell out all the kinds of work that are forbidden on the Sabbath—because people kept trying to find ways to get to yes instead of no. If I am a doctor and someone calls for help, am I allowed to help? If my dog gets sick, can I take her to the vet? Is striking a match really making a fire?
Yes, it is. If you decide to live on the fire God has made inside of you instead, then it will not be long before some other things flare up as well. Most of us move fast
enough during the week to outrun them, but if you slow down for a day, then all kinds of alarming things can happen. You can start crying without having the slightest idea why. You can start remembering what you loved about people who died before you were ten, along with things you did when you were eighteen that still send involuntary shivers up your back. You can make a list of the times you almost died in your life, along with the reasons you are most glad to be alive. Released from bondage to the clock, you eat when you are hungry instead of when you have to. Nine times out of ten you discover that you are far less hungry than you thought you were, or at least less for groceries than for the bread no one can buy. As you slow down, your heart does too. The girdle of your diaphragm loosens, causing great sighs too deep for words to pour from your body. In their wake, you discover more room around your heart, a greater capacity for fresh air. Sabbath sickness turns out to be a lot like other sicknesses, which until now have been the only way you could grant yourself more than one day off from work. If you flee from the pain and failure, then you run into them everywhere you go. If you can find some way to open to them instead, then they may bring their hands from behind their backs and lay flowers on your bed.
THE ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW
Most people I know want to talk about why it is impossible for them to practice Sabbath, which is an interesting spiritual exercise in itself. If you want to try it, then make two lists on one piece of paper. On one side of the paper, list all of the things you know give you life that you never take time to do. Then, on the other side, make a list of all the reasons why you think it is impossible for you to do those things. That is all there is to it. Just make the two lists, and keep the piece of paper where you can see it. Also promise not to shush your heart when it howls for the list it wants.
If a whole day of life-giving freedom is too much for you to imagine, then start however you can. Decide that you will get up an hour before everyone else in the house and dedicate that time to doing nothing but being in the divine presence. Decide that you will turn off the television an hour before you go to bed and spend that time outside looking at the sky. You could resolve not to add anything more to your calendar without subtracting something from it.
YOU COULD PRACTICE PRAISING YOURSELF FOR SAYING NO AS LAVISHLY AS YOU DO WHEN YOU SAY YES.
If you do any of these things, you will likely discover that they are very difficult to sustain all by yourself. It is hard to be a lone revolutionary, yet that is what you become when you start saying no. You rise up against your history, your ego, your culture and its ravenous economy. You may also have to rise up against your church or synagogue, if you belong to one, since such institutions can demand as much of you as any pharaoh. My advice is to find yourself a partner revolutionary. Find a whole community of revolutionaries if you can. They will help you hang on to your vision, the one that helps you remember who you were created to be. They may even supply you with some missing details, along with the support to realize them. In the meantime, I think it is good to have a Sabbath vision even if it seems impossible to you right now. Here is mine, which you are free to borrow while you are envisioning your own.
At least one day in every seven, pull off the road and park the car in the garage. Close the door to the toolshed and turn off the computer. Stay home not because you are sick but because you are well. Talk someone you love into being well with you. Take a nap, a walk, an hour for lunch. Test the premise that you are worth more than what you can produce—that even if you spent one whole day being
good for nothing you would still be precious in God’s sight—and when you get anxious because you are convinced that this is not so, remember that your own conviction is not required. This is a commandment. Your worth has already been established, even when you are not working. The purpose of the commandment is to woo you to the same truth.
Except for the point, the still point, there would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
~ T.S. Eliot
TAKE A DAY OFF
by Malcolm Doney and Martin Wroe
Next time someone asks you, “What has religion ever done for us?” try these on them:
There are more. Hinduism has more than a thousand. What are they? Holy days, from which we get our more common ‘holiday.’ And to which we might add less sacred versions, including Duvet Day and the Throwing of the Sickie Day.
Everyone needs a day off, According to Genesis, the first book in the Bible, even God needed a lie down after slogging away all week in creating the cosmos. ‘And he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made.’ Out of this grew traditions in the Abrahamic faiths – Judaism, Islam, Christianity – about setting aside a weekly ‘sabbath,’ a day of rest.
And while religious holy days may be nationally focused on founders’ birthdays and lunar and seasonal cycles, at grassroots level, they’re basically an excuse for some well-earned R&R. The busier our days become, the more essential it is to set aside rest days. ‘We humans have lost the wisdom of genuinely resting and relaxing,’ says Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. ‘We worry too much. We don’t allow our bodies to heal, and we don’t allow our minds and hearts to heal.’
Often the ancient traditions of good religion are reminders of how to live a good life. Like nature, rest is vital for regeneration. ‘Take rest,’ said the Roman poet Ovid. ‘A field that has rested gives a more beautiful crop.’
‘Each person deserves a day away in which no problems are confronted, no solutions searched for. Each of us needs to withdraw from the cares which will not withdraw from us,’ wrote Maya Angelou.
Why not take the rest of the day off?
AN AFTERNOON WALK IN THE RAIN
by Will Pittman
I’m insignificant. on the other hand, I’m insignificant!
no one, for example, minded me stealing all afternoon. pastures, meadows, farms and glades yards and gardens and patios jangly bells of oafing cows bird chirps, dirt, smell of earth a reflection of the world through the glossy dark eye of a horse (that one made me cry a little).
I came away with a first-rate haul: sounds, smells, sensations, impressions, thoughts, ideas, understanding, glee, rapture a body tired and wet, happy thief and trespasser!
perchance the farmer in his home looking out through the rain and mists saw this skulking apparition, this tramper in his fields
but those gates are for keeping cattle in not amblers out.
seeing and receiving seeing and receiving all afternoon mine, mine all of it and none of it.
A BLESSING FOR ONE WHO IS EXHAUSTED
by John O’Donahue
When the rhythm of the heart becomes hectic, Time takes on the strain until it breaks; Then all the unattended stress falls in On the mind like an endless, increasing weight,
The light in the mind becomes dim. Things you could take in your stride before Now become laboursome events of will.
Weariness invades your spirit. Gravity begins falling inside you, Dragging down every bone.
The tide you never valued has gone out. And you are marooned on unsure ground. Something within you has closed down; And you cannot push yourself back to life.
You have been forced to enter empty time. The desire that drove you has relinquished. There is nothing else to do now but rest And patiently learn to receive the self You have forsaken for the race of days.
At first your thinking will darken And sadness take over like listless weather. The flow of unwept tears will frighten you. You have travelled too fast over false ground; Now your soul has come to take you back.
Take refuge in your senses, open up To all the small miracles you rushed through.
Become inclined to watch the way of rain When it falls slow and free.
Imitate the habit of twilight, Taking time to open the well of colour That fostered the brightness of day.
Draw alongside the silence of stone Until its calmness can claim you. Be excessively gentle with yourself.
Stay clear of those vexed in spirit. Learn to linger around someone of ease Who feels they have all the time in the world.
Gradually, you will return to yourself, Having learned a new respect for your heart And the joy that dwells far within slow time.
