Let God be God...

The spiritual practice of honoring the Sabbath is a precious (in the best sense of the word) and all too often neglected part of our lives.  For the past 15 years, with verying degrees of success, Dianne and I have been trying to gently embrace a Sabbath keeping rhythm to our shared life. It mostly consists of waking LATE, sitting together in the morning with the NY Times and tea or coffee and visiting.  Later in the day we will likely share an easy walk and a fun meal, too. 

Ours is an incarnational commitment to the Sabbath rather than a ritualized one - although I find myself going to my prayer book at least once on this day.  And this is probably true for a great deal of my prayer life - walking/waking meditation on gratitude, discerning the sacred in the events of the day,  listening for the still-speaking God in the music of the hour - rather than marking the hours with liturgy. Both have value and both have been a part of my journey in faith, too.  It seems, however, that in this second part of living, I am more energized and open to improvisation in all things - including my opening my heart to God - than used to be true.

Joan Chittister, once well-acquainted with a more ordered life in prayer and service, has written:

I do not have unlimited freedom.  Obedience to God's will sets limits...(That is why) the first rung of the ladder to union with God and harmony in life is to let God be God. We make so many things in life god - this job, that person, this thing, that title - that eventually we forget who God really is. We forget what really lasts in life.  We forget that there are responsibilities that come with creaturehood: to gend the garden and to care for it, to take care of the creatures and to be helpmates to one another. We even forget the presence of God and so act as if God were not present:  we belittle one another and make fun of the poor and reject the alien.  We make ourselves god and forget the will of God in others for us.

Keeping Sabbath - and honoring it, too - is a body prayer.  From the inside out and the outside in, it awakens me to the presence of God so that I might act faithfully in the present realities of my life.  One of my mentor's in the contemplative life is Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel who once wrote:

Creating holiness in time requires a different sensibility than building a cathedral in space: “We must conquer space in order to sanctify time... There is a realm of time where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to control but to share, not to subdue but to be in accord. Life goes wrong when the control of space, the acquisition of things of space, becomes our sole concern. (Heschel)

He also has observed that, "Spiritual life begins to decay when we fail to sense the grandeur of what is eternal in time."  For me, honoring the Sabbath involves rest on a variety of levels, for rest and refreshment is an act of trust as well as renewal.  And I know that when I am not at rest I am not able to sense what is eternal in time.  It is also trust in that my rest documents that I am not necessary to God's work.  For 24 hours, the One who is Holy can get along without any of my efforts - without ANY of our efforts - because God is God. Practicing this truth - honoring it - enriches my life as well as my faith.

Another thing that has become a part of Sabbath keeping for me is a quiet reflection on the week that has passed:  what happened last week that knocked me off my center, where were the blessings, the fears, the joys and the sacred surprises?  Fredrick Buechner speaks of this type of prayer as observance:

A religious observance can be a wedding, a christening, a Memorial Day service, a bar mitzvah or anything that you might be apt to think of. There are lots of things going on at them. There are lots of things you can learn from them if you're in a receptive state of mind. The world "observance" itself suggests what is perhaps the most important thing about them.

A man and a woman are getting married. A child is being given a name. A war is being remembered and many deaths.  A boy is coming of age.  It is life that is going on. It is always going on and it is always precious. It is God that is going on. It is you who are there that is going on. As Henry James advised writers, be one on whom nothing is lost.  OBSERVE!! There are few things as important, as religious, as that. (Buechner)

This week I observed a colleague in crisis and a faith community searching for ways to experience redemption. I was present with people with talent and finesse playing music from their hearts.  I shared a meal with loved ones in my family, walked the main street of our town during a festival and greeted new friends and neighbors, spoke about spiritual formation and community building with people who want to help strengthen our Sunday School ministry, visited with friends and talked about where God might be breaking into our lives.  A few times I was rattled by the cruelty people I love can dish out in their pain and fear; it awakened me to the fragility of love and friendship.  But I also encountered a LOT of love and integrity in people as they seek ways to be faithful to God.

As this Sabbath day unfolds, I find myself going back to the poetry of Scott Cairns.

Scattered, petulant, argumentative,
the diverse members generally find
little, nothing of their own, to offer

one another.  Like us all, the saved
need saving mostly from themselves, and so
they make progress, if at all, by dying

to what they can, acquiescing to this
new pressure, new wind, new breath that would fill
them with something better than their own

good intentions.  Or schemes of community.
Or their few articulate innovations
in dogma. What the Ghost expects of them

is a purer than customary will
to speak together, a mere willingness
to hear expressed in the fragmentary

figures of one another's speech the mute
and palpable identity they share,
scoured clear of impediment and glare,

the uncanny evidence that here
in the stillest air between them the One
we call the Ghost insinuates his care

for the unexpected word now fondling
the tongue, now falling here, incredible
confession - that they would be believers,

who startle to suspect among the scraps
of Babel's gritty artifacts one stone,
irreducible fossil, capable

of bearing love's unprovoked inscription
in the locus of its term.
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