Carved Out

I find it difficult to imagine anything quite so countercultural as the sabbath. In the Hebrew Scriptures, God commands the people of Israel to hallow the seventh day of the week, and neither to do nor to allow any labor during that period from sundown to sundown. Sabbath observance is to be the mark of His people, even more so than circumcision. By setting this time apart, they set themselves apart.

Sabbath observance, mind you, deals not with laziness or with simple entertainments. The sabbath is a time for learning and for prayer. It’s when we remind ourselves that we are not merely beasts of burden, but human beings, possessing an innate dignity far more precious than whatever we can accomplish or produce. Sabbath is a time to be, rather than to do.

Leisure, in our society, has become something of a lost art. We live not as responsible citizens of a republic, but as consumers; with a worth based not on the Image of God but on our purchases, preferences, and politics. How much money do we make, and what can we buy with it? Production and consumption are the exclusive concerns of postmodern life in the West.

“If you want to confuse an American,” my old Confessions professor liked to say, “ask him what freedom is for.” We no longer know what to do with leisure, with truly free time. For years I used to muse that most people confuse leisure with entertainment, yet now even the entertainment industry has been superseded by the distraction industry, with scrolling, clicks, and likes.

True leisure is never distraction. It isn’t laziness or entertainment. True leisure involves time set apart to contemplate, to imagine, to ponder. It lets us gaze in awe at nature. It leads us to sit at the feet of great masters, even if only in books. Leisure begets philosophy, art, music, poetry, prayer, law, scientific inquiry, all the grand achievements of the human psyche and civilization.

For much of history, leisure remained a luxury available only to the wealthy, to those who needn’t labor because they made others do it for them. Aristocratic Romans, for instance, vilified actual careers, viewing any sort of job as a selling of one’s body, and thus a form of prostitution. Subsistence farmers, slaves, soldiers, merchants, and common laborers had little such time to set aside.

The sabbath changed all that, for the Israelites at least. The sabbath applied to everyone and indeed to everything: rich and poor, male and female, slave and free, adult and child, even to beasts of burden and to the very land itself. Fields were to lie fallow every seventh year, a sabbath rest for Creation. Thus can sabbath observance be seen as the world’s first labor law.

By it, the wealthiest merchant had to cease periodically from his profiteering, and the lowest pauper got to live one day a week as a free and sovereign human being. To gather with one’s family, to sit and gaze at stars, to share a meal and a story with nowhere else to go, and to stand in reverence before the holiness of God: such are the riches of the sabbath.

And there in the silence, there within this sanctuary carved in time, one ponders life and death, truth and beauty, sin and salvation, all the things we would ignore by distracting ourselves from the real. Imagine setting aside the cellphone from Friday dusk through Saturday, not watching TV, not busying oneself with chores, not pretending that productivity makes your life worthwhile. Just you, and silence, and wonder, and the starry-decked heavens above.

Christians are not commanded to keep sabbath, not in the way that our Israelite siblings and forebears have been. Yet it’s still a good idea, isn’t it? Most Romance languages preserve the convention of calling Saturday the sabbath, and Sunday the Day of the Lord. Setting apart a particular day, refraining from particular activities, may vary between communities, families, and individuals. But taking the time to be human—to value your life in itself—remains vital.

The Buddha would set aside three hours each day, and three months out of every year, to retreat into solitary meditation. Jesus often attempted something similar, climbing mountains, crossing lakes, setting off into the desert. Alas for Him, we always found Him. Thanks be to God, He never could turn away anyone who was seeking out or striving for salvation.

When He told us that the sabbath was made for man and not man for the sabbath, He was reminding us that sabbath observance, in whatever form, is a blessing, a time for healing and for helping out our neighbor in their need. He warned us against legalism, turning the sabbath into a burden. But He clearly endorsed the practice, the blessing, of taking time to be and to breathe in the presence of God.

Much more could be said on meditative and contemplative prayer. For now I simply offer the vision of Jesus Christ: of a humanity valued for what we are rather than what we can do; of life as something sacred, something holy in itself; and a true and worthy rest that’s not distractive but divine. For God and our own soul shall ever await us in the silence. Observe the sabbath. Keep it holy. And work to provide opportunity for others to keep the same.

In Jesus. Amen.

By: Reverend Sir Knight Ryan Stout