Loni is the office administrator at the church where I’m a pastor. Recently, she enrolled in a community college poetry class. Her motive was to enhance her already considerable skills as a songwriter, to bone up on a few tricks of diction, a ruse or two with rhyme. She went to the first class weary, wary, cranky. She resented that she’d booked herself one more night out. She had a growing skepticism that the class would be of any practical use.
Before the first night finished, she was hooked.
Two reasons: the teacher, a gifted poet himself, had an infectious love, not just for words and poems, but for life itself. He relished mystery and simplicity, the quirks of the human heart, creation’s whims and flukes and feats. He was childlike with wonder, exclaiming over ordinary things that, for most of us, have become familiar to the point of invisibility.
The second reason Loni was hooked was that the class, at bedrock, was about one thing: going and doing likewise. It was about paying attention. Live with curiosity and wonder and hunger. Notice cracks in the sidewalk, the way the earth’s aliveness subverts our man-made things. Notice beetles, the iridescent glaze on their hard, dark backs, their strange mix of clumsiness and agility. Notice the rubbery mottledness of a dog’s nose, the fiery ribbon of a car’s taillights, the way clouds one day mound thick like boulders, the next scatter thin like feathers, the next drape heavy as wet wool.
Loni rediscovered the world. She came into work the mornings after her class almost shivering with joy, eyes wide enough to swallow the sky. All things were becoming new. Here is “The Brief Fall,” one of her poems that came out of her experience:
An off the cuff nudge shapes a
brief flight through the air.
The thumbtack’s life now rolls in makeshift figure eight circles
as books are set on the seat to the left.
A fingernail sized spike, vital to the life of a bulletin board,
converts into a hazard
a few feet below.
Stone faced,
it lays in the comfort of the cushion in the pale green waiting room;
waiting on its prey:
adult or child,
even a toddler.
It has no conscience, no remorse.6
It is the simplest thing, to pay attention. But it is easily neglected. I suggest you make this a key Sabbath Liturgy, a wide bridge you build to cross from your life now—which, if it bears any resemblance to what mine can be, is marked by frantic busyness and chronic distraction—to a life of restfulness and wonder.
Have you ever written a poem? Poetry is the first art form, the primal, almost instinctual way humans try to reflect and make sense of the world’s bigness and wildness and danger and beauty. Failing that, our next reflex is just to box up the world, to categorize and file it. One writer was asked when he first became a poet, and he answered something like this: “I think we are all born with a natural desire to discover and create. We’re all born poets. The real question is, when did you stop being one?”
Why not return to it right now? Why not write a poem?
Stop. Look. Look close.
Notice the sun falling slantwise through the window, the dust’s slow dance in it. Or touch the threadbare edges of your chair’s upholstery, and remember that day it arrived new, smelling synthetic, clashing a bit with the paint on the walls. Ah, now look at the intricate folds of your child’s ear, the way light bleeds through the thin, taut flesh of it. Gaze outside and see the wind spin larch leaves like fish lures. Watch the darkness sift down the hillside and gather in the fir boughs.
See it all. Like Adam, name it.
Resolve to live this way more often.
FOUR
IN GOD’S TIME:
Stopping to See God’s Bigness
One day the windows in our house started to rattle, all at once. Dishes clinked and pinged in the cupboards. Ornaments fell off the mantel. The floor turned semigelatinous.
Then it stopped.
It was an earthquake. Tectonic plates nearby nudged each other in passing, bumped shoulders. The resulting shudder wasn’t brusque enough to do structural damage—it didn’t splinter joists, sheer pipes, or shatter glass. It just pulled a few pranks.
We picked up the fallen ornaments, inspected them for chips and cracks. We opened the cupboards—cautiously—and set bowls and cups and glasses back on their bases. We straightened pictures that had slipped askew. We checked the water pipes where they join the house. We would have checked the gas line, too, except we don’t have one.
No big deal.
But it makes you slightly edgy, living here, above what seismologists tell you are many ragged seams loosely stitched, many raw scars badly sutured, many fractured bones hastily set and splinted. They say we’re due, overdue, for a real shakedown, a great hullabaloo of seismic vengeance that would swallow coastlines and resculpt mountain ranges and make the ocean stack up on itself catastrophically. We can’t do anything about that, except move, and we don’t want to.
But we can get ready. We keep in our shed many gallons of water, held in rinsed-out milk cartons and purified with a few drops of iodine. They wait for that day when the shift beneath the earth’s crust is violent enough to sever water pipes, perhaps disruptive enough to infuse poison gases into our nearby rivers and streams. As well, the schools routinely drill our children on earthquake survival skills: stand back from windows and mirrors, anything that might fall like blades, get out from beneath heavy objects that might twist loose and plummet, crawl under a sturdy table that’s unlikely to buckle. Wait it out.
Expect aftershocks.
Watch your step afterward.
Be careful opening doors and cupboards.
Above all, don’t panic. Panic will wipe out everything else you know.
It’s an odd way to look at it, but Sabbath is preparedness training of sorts. It gets us ready for a time, a time we can anticipate but can’t predict, when the world as we know it will fall to pieces. It trains us in practical wisdom, clear judgment, skillful response. It slows us down enough to notice what truly matters.
The most moving stories of the Jewish people keeping Sabbath are the ones when they kept it in the midst of crisis and terror. They kept Sabbath under siege. They kept it in famine. They kept it in drought. They kept it in Warsaw’s ghettos and Hitler’s death camps and Stalin’s gulags. They kept Sabbath when the world was falling to pieces.
Their keeping it in their days of peace and abundance and freedom prepared them for keeping it in times of war and scarcity and captivity. Their keeping it nurtured something deep and hidden in them that came to light only on the day of testing.
As the rabbis are fond of saying, more than Israel ever kept the Sabbath, the Sabbath kept Israel. I would alter this slightly: to the extent that they kept Sabbath, Sabbath kept them. Sabbath living orients us toward that which, apart from rest, we will always miss.
The root idea of Sabbath is simple as rain falling, basic as breathing. It’s that all living things—and many nonliving things too— thrive only by an ample measure of stillness. A bird flying, never nesting, is soon plummeting. Grass trampled, day after day, scalps down to the hard bone of earth. Fruit constantly inspected bruises, blights. This is true of other things as well: a saw used without relenting—its teeth never filed, its blade never cooled—grows dull and brittle; a motor never shut off gums with residue or fatigues from thinness of oil—it sputters, it stalls, it seizes. Even companionship languishes without seasons of apartness.
God stitched into the nature of things an inviolable need to be left alone now and then. The primary way people receive this aloneness and stillness is, of course, through sleep. We can defy slumber only so long—propping ourselves upright with caffeine, manufacturing artificial alertness with drugs—but past a certain point, we collapse. We must submit to sleep’s benign tyranny, enter its inescapable vulnerability and solitariness (in sleep we’re easily besieged or abandoned, and we are by ourselves even when enwrapp
ed by another’s arms). Unless we do, we die.
Not long ago I tried to outrun my limits. I was preparing to go away and so crammed my last few working days precariously full, like a bus in Delhi. I was up hours before dawn, answering e-mails, finishing reports, speed-reading correspondence, tossing back responses. Then off to a breakfast meeting, and from there into a day of troubleshooting, firefighting, strategy planning, troop rallying, complaint management. A working lunch. More appointments, deadlines, negotiations, each segment as intricately fitted to others as the parts of a circuit board. A quick dinner with the family. Back to a meeting that deadlocked in niggling details. Home about midnight. Only to get up the next day, after lying awake half the night thinking about all the things I had failed in or forgotten to do, and repeat a slight variation of the same thing. In the midst of that, I sat down in my study to read something or write something—ask me what, even at gunpoint or with the promise of vast wealth set before me, and I couldn’t tell you. And I collapsed. I fell into a sleep so deep that, had God plucked a rib from my side, fashioned a woman from it, and brought her to me naked, I wouldn’t have so much as twitched. The office administrator came by to ask me something, saw me, watched to make sure I was breathing, and went and fetched my assistant, and the two stood in the doorway, laughing.
I was oblivious. I was far, far away—in the darkness of Sheol, in the brightness of seventh heaven, who knows? My body had been pushed and bullied, cajoled and coerced long enough, it staged a general strike, an all-out boycott. I had lost the power to resist.
I slept.
The tricky thing about Sabbath, though, is it’s a form of rest unlike sleep. Sleep is so needed that, defied too long, our bodies inevitably, even violently, force the issue. Sleep eventually waylays all fugitives. It catches you and has its way with you.
Sabbath won’t do that. Resisted, it backs off. Spurned, it flees. It’s easy to skirt or defy Sabbath, to manufacture cheap substitutes in its place—and to do all that, initially, without noticeable damage, and sometimes, briefly, with admirable results. It’s easy, in other words, to spend most of your life breaking Sabbath and never figure out that this is part of the reason your work’s unsatisfying, your friendships patchy, your leisure threadbare, your vacations exhausting.
We simply haven’t taken time. We’ve not been still long enough, often enough, to know ourselves, our friends, our family. Our God. Indeed, the worst hallucination busyness conjures is the conviction that I am God. All depends on me. How will the right things happen at the right time if I’m not pushing and pulling and watching and worrying?
Sabbath-keeping requires two orientations. One is Godward. The other is timeward. To keep Sabbath well—as both a day and an attitude—we have to think clearly about God and freshly about time. We likely, at some level, need to change our minds about both. Unless we trust God’s sovereignty, we won’t dare risk Sabbath. And unless we receive time as abundance and gift, not as ration and burden, we’ll never develop a capacity to savor Sabbath.
So let’s talk about both, first the Godward orientation, and then the timeward one.
First, God.
Jewish Sabbath begins in the evening. It begins, in other words, with sleep. Sleep, I already said, is a necessity. But it is also a relinquishment. It is self-abandonment: of control, of power, of consciousness, of identity. We direct nothing in our sleep. We master nothing. We lose ourselves and are carried like children or prisoners into a netherworld alternately grotesque and idyllic, carnivalesque and elysian. In sleep we become infants again: utterly vulnerable, completely defenseless, totally dependent. Out of control. I knew a man, a hard-fisted, burly man who could snap your bones like sticks with his bare hands, whose house was burglarized while he slept a mere arm’s length from the prowler. He knew nothing of it until morning. His girth and brawn may as well have been a baby’s downy softness for all the good it did him.
So sleep, besides being a necessity, is also an act of faith. “O LORD, how many are my foes! / How many rise up against me!” David begins Psalm 3. But then he declares: “I lie down and sleep; / I wake again, because the LORD sustains me” (vv. 1, 5, emphasis mine). Or the next psalm: “I will lie down and sleep in peace, / for you alone, O LORD, / make me dwell in safety” (Ps. 4:8, emphasis mine). Every time we sleep we place ourselves again in this position of vulnerability, of defenselessness, of dependency. We enter again this infantlike unguardedness. And we do this well only under one of two conditions: utter exhaustion, where we can’t help ourselves, or complete confidence, where we stop trying to help ourselves. Then we sleep because we know from whence our help comes. We sleep because we know in whom we have believed and are confident that he is able to keep that which we have entrusted to him. We give ourselves, regardless of our unfinished business, into God’s care. We sleep simply because we believe God will look after us.
It’s the same with Sabbath rest. Real Sabbath, the kind that empties and fills us, depends on the second condition, on complete confidence and trust. And confidence and trust like that are rooted in a deep conviction that God is good and God is sovereign.
There’s no rest for those who don’t believe that. If God works all things together for good for those who love him and are called to his purposes, you can relax. If he doesn’t, start worrying. If God can take any mess, any mishap, any wastage, any wreckage, any anything, and choreograph beauty and meaning from it, then you can take a day off. If he can’t, get busy. Either God’s always at work, watching the city, building the house, or you need to try harder.
Either God is good and in control, or it all depends on you.
Sietze Buning’s poem “Obedience” is a quiet meditation on the surprising fruit such trust in God can bear in time.
Were my parents right or wrong
not to mow the ripe oats that Sunday morning
with the rainstorm threatening?
I reminded them that the Sabbath was made
for man
and of the ox fallen into the pit.
Without an oats crop, I argued,
the cattle would need to survive on town-
bought oats
and then it wouldn’t pay to keep them.
Isn’t selling cattle at a loss like an ox in a pit?
My parents did not argue.
We went to church.
We sang the usual psalms louder than usual—
we, and the others whose harvests were at stake:
“Jerusalem, where blessing waits
Our feet are standing in thy gates.
God, be merciful to me;
On thy grace I rest my plea.”
Dominie made no concession on sermon length:
“Five Good Reasons for Infant Baptism,”
though we heard little of it,
for more floods came and winds blew and beat
upon the House than we had figured on, even,
more lightning and thunder
and hail the size of pullet eggs.
Falling branches snapped the electric wires.
We sang the closing psalm without the organ
and in the dark:
“Ye seed from Abraham descended,
God’s covenant love is never ended.”
Afterward we rode by our oats field, flattened.
“We still mow it,” Dad said.
“Ten bushels to the acre, maybe, what would have been fifty
if I had mowed right after milking
and if the whole family had shocked.
We could have had it weatherproof before the storm.”
Later at dinner Dad said,
“God was testing us. I’m glad we went.”
“Those psalms never gave me such a lift as this morning,”
Mother said, “I wouldn’t have missed it.”
And even I thought but did not say,
how guilty we would feel now if we had saved the harvest.
The one time Dad asked me why I live in a
black neighborhood,
I reminded him of that Sunday morning.
Immediately he understood.1
King David’s a good model for depth of trust. That man trusted in God’s goodness and sovereignty. The evidence is laced throughout his “diary,” the psalms he wrote. Psalm 62 is a good example. It begins with a declaration: “My soul finds rest in God alone; / my salvation comes from him. / He alone is my rock and my salvation; / he is my fortress, I will never be shaken” (vv. 1–2).
David is training himself—and whoever else will listen—in God’s sovereignty. This is for him no mere intellectual exercise, but a way of survival. It is the shape of his life in the holy wild. The context of the psalm is distress: David is beset by enemies bent on his ruin, adversaries who cloak malice with flattery, who “with their mouths . . . bless, / but in their hearts . . . curse” (v. 4). The only way to truly rest in a world like that—a world of deceit and enmity—is to “find rest in God alone.” David had no way to dredge up rest from his circumstances. It had to be sought elsewhere. It had to come from God. David had to know God as his rock, his salvation, his unshakable fortress: that God alone is sovereign and works all things together for good for those who love him and are called to his purposes.
But notice something, because it helps us to train ourselves likewise. David starts with declaration—a confident assertion that his soul finds rest in God alone. But he shifts tone slightly yet significantly at verse 5. He virtually repeats verbatim what he says at the opening, but watch for the change: “Find rest, O my soul, in God alone; / my hope comes from him. / He alone is my rock and my salvation; / he is my fortress, I will not be shaken” (vv. 5–6).
David moves from declaration to imperative. He moves from saying how it is to saying how it ought to be, from celebration to exhortation, from a diary of experience to a manual of instruction. This even takes on a liturgical shape, where David in the middle of the psalm steps back from personal reflection and testimony and speaks to the congregation: “Trust in him at all times, O people; / pour out your hearts to him, / for God is our refuge” (v. 8).
I like the honesty and practicality of this. I waver between these two things—my experience of God’s sovereignty and my need to take hold of it afresh. One minute I’m declaring that I do rest in him, the next exhorting myself that I can. And the exhortation moves the inside to the outside, from myself to the congregation, from testimony to liturgy—trust in him at all times, O people.
The Rest of God Page 7
