I admit it. I am not the best at sabbath. Real sabbath. Put everything down and relax with myself kind of sabbath. I mean ever since I was a kid I have been on the go- no matter what - on the go, always. Parent's leaving me stacks of stickers and coloring pages alongside a touch night light beside my bed as a child- hoping these would suffice my midnight wakings and help me to help them sleep a bit longer as a young child. I have never liked stillness. Resting.
The idea of this kind of real deep sabbath sort of scares me.
At least it always has - until I began working at a church full time and then this need for real, alone, quite sabbath has become an almost, sometimes unfortunately, necessary part of my life (if I want to keep my sanity).
I have just finished re-reading Barbara Brown Taylor's (I am sort of obsessed with all things BBT, I admit it, but it is good stuff!) Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith. This book does not advocate for all persons to jump on a bandwagon and say they are ready to leave the institutional church for other ways of living out their calling but inside invites readers to explore their calling and to rest within it. To realize that self-care is important in all callings and part of that self-care is sabbath. (Insert sarcasm: Great.)
This past week was exceptionally long and at the end of it I found myself about two more emails away from pulling my hair out and running back home to my four year old cousin and his heart that I know will always hold room for "May May."
On Saturday after my typical clean the house morning, afternoon volunteering with BINGO at a retirement living center (part of my calling- not BINGO per say but the old folks- I will have to write about this later, it is all too real and raw to process now) and enjoying a mushy feast at the same center with a lovely couple I came home to my dogs and my exhaustion sank in like a bag of bricks over my shoulder.
I decided that perhaps I would practice sabbath in a way I had not before.
I typically break and realize all the good in my life by picking up the splintering woody paintbrushes from their drying rack in my bright kitchen and going to town on my latest water color (paint of choice now a days) creation.
But this evening as I got my paints out I began to list the things I need to work on with my paint: I had a friend's birthday coming up, I needed to mail a letter and wanted to send a watercolor post card along with it. My sabbath was becoming my work and I decided to put the paints (As much as I love them) away and attempt something else.
I picked up my phone and soon put it back down, on silent and decided I would go to take a long bubble bath. I was nervous about leaving my phone at first- what if there was an emergency, what if there was a problem, what if I did not reply to a message quick enough and it upset someone. Leaving the screens behind made me uncomfortable. I did not want to miss out and I did not want anyone to be upset with me for missing anything.
I put my phone down and then back up and down and back up. Soon I decided to leave it in the other room- I cannot take a call in the bath anyway I thought. I can leave it hear- I have a good excuse.
A bubble bath- That is relaxing I thought .That is what I needed (and I hoped deep within myself that it would be relaxing fast enough that I would not have to sit alone in the silence for too long).
I gathered some candles and took them in the bathroom and ran water as warm as I could stand with bubbles pilling high to the edge of the tub.
I sat there, I soaked, I pruned.
Water became cold and I warmed it up a bit. I breathed a deep sigh and shook out, as well I could, all the lists of things I needed to do in my head. As my bath came to an end I stood up and stretched toward the sky, breathing out breaths of thanksgiving and in breaths of joy. I stretched in a practice learned in a wonderful class during seminary as I got dressed into my baggy pajamas.
The process felt like it had taken forever and I felt more refreshed and yet like the to do lists would spill from my ears if I did not let them escape onto paper. I made my way toward my phone and computer and picked up a small page of paper. Beginning to write my list and my phone blinked- a message. Ignoring the message I noticed that it was 7:02PM.
I had jumped in the bathtub at 6:30PM. I had relaxed for all of 32 minutes, sort of, and was already ready to get back to it- so I thought.
32 MINUTE SABBATH: CHECK.
The rest of the evening I tried not to bully myself over this and told myself- it will take time to be good at this (All the while having some envy in my heart for my dear Jewish brothers and sisters who practice a real sabbath each week and my beloved second-family of Muslim believers who take time throughout the day, each day, to just be and are thankful for it). The rest of my night was full of ice cream and relaxing in the midst of to do lists and just reading over Sunday school lessons ( I convinced myself that since I was just reading to know what was happening and I would not be teaching per-say that it was ok to do this).
My sabbath was 32 minutes.
And it was good.
I am working more intentionally to become better at sabbath, at rest, at stopping and saying WOW THIS IS GOOD. Just as our creator stopped and rested on the 7th day, not out of sheer exhaustion, but to breathe in deep breathes of thankfulness, to look around and center one-self and to say WOW THIS IS GOOD.
I am working on this.
Perhaps I should aim to increase my real sabbath time by ten minutes a week. Perhaps I should rest a bit more each day. I am not sure- all I know is that it is good to stop and to breathe in deep breaths and to say thank you, this is good. I hope that I can keep on keeping on in this practice. Life can become overwhelming and work can burn one out so quickly.
But I did not miss anything too important and life went on. The silence did not envelop me but instead invited me to breath and to hear myself breathe, to be thankful for these breaths, to soak and to notice the curves of my hands and the warmth of the water embracing my entire being, and to be thankful.
May we all take time to rest, to be thankful and to know that world will still go on around us. I am not sure how I will continue working on my rest but know that it is important enough to do. For in my rest I may find something I have longed to hear. I may feel myself breathe breaths I have never felt so distinctly before. And if not- it will still be good and the silence will not be as hard to stand as I had once imagined.
I leave you with a little jewel from BBT's Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith (alongside a huge invitation to read this beautiful work):
“Committing myself to the task of becoming fully human is saving my life now...to become fully human is something extra, a conscious choice that not everyone makes. Based on my limited wisdom and experience, there is more than one way to do this. If I were a Buddhist, I might do it by taking the bodhisattva vow, and if I were a Jew, I might do it by following Torah. Because I am a Christian, I do it by imitating Christ, although i will be the first to admit that I want to stop about a day short of following him all the way.
In Luke's gospel, there comes a point when he turns around and says to the large crowd of those trailing after him, "Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple" (14:26). Make of that what you will, but I think it was his way of telling them to go home. He did not need people to go to Jerusalem to die with him. He needed people to go back where they came from and live the kinds of lives that he had risked his own life to show them: lives of resisting the powers of death, of standing up for the little and the least, of turning cheeks and washing feet, of praying for enemies and loving the unlovable.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith
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