pray ALL ways series closes with sabbath spirituality...

Today marks the close of our summer pray ALL ways series: for the past three months I’ve used the insights and wisdom of Fr. Ed Hays as a guide into embodied prayer. We’ve considered tears as well as laughter, fasting and feasting, suffering and celebrating along with ways that our nose, eyes, ears, and tongue can connect us to the sacred Mystery in our ordinary days. Fr. Ed writes that incarnational spirituality recognizes and honors the “difference between PRAYER and prayers. Prayer is a way of life in which we are always facing the Mystery, while prayers can take many forms within that way of living.” This week, as Fr. Ed asks us to consider how taking a nap might be sacramental, I’ve experienced a sense of cosmic irony or paradox as the conclusion of our series arrives in a week saturated with sorrow and sacrifice.

Perhaps like you, I’ve been overwhelmed: as COVID continues to confound, torment, scar, and kill us all the world over; as our brothers and sisters in Haiti once more are pummeled by earthquakes, pelted by hurricanes, and locked in a morass of political confusion and assassination; as wildfires rage, floods rise up, a suicide bomber parked his truck blocks from the Capitol in Washington, DC, and the battered people of Afghanistan once again found themselves subjected to life under the bootheel of the Taliban. Over the course of 11 days, their 300,000-person army vanished, their political class collapsed, and the United States wisely but tragically withdrew military support for a failed state after twenty years of combat, inept nation-building, and counterinsurgency.

For the better part of this week it felt like devoting any time today to the

seemingly inconsequential task of taking a nap was not only callous and cruel, but trivial and foolish when so much shit is hitting the fan. I wrestled with this disconnect over and over, taking-in only an hour of world news each night, reading the NY Times every morning, and sitting contemplatively with multiple layers of anguish and lament. I kept seeing that meme, if you’re NOT angry – or anguished – you’re not paying attention, flashing in my brain.

So, as I often say to those consulting with me for spiritual solace: when you don’t know what to do or say next be still and stay silent. It is NOT the time to hurry up and do SOME thing, but rather the time to intentionally do NOTHING. Practitioners of contemplative spirituality say we must first take a long, loving look at reality. Especially when chaos swirls around us, sitting with the questions of our anxiety, judgement, terror, and angst is critical rather than reacting. and all too often over-reacting, to our perceived powerlessness and dismay. Both Malala Yousafzai and NY Times columnist, Nicholas Kristof, wrote that now is neither the time for drawing conclusions about what went wrong in Afghanistan nor a time to offer critiques. Rather, as Malala wrote in a NY Times OP/Ed piece: “We will have time to debate what went wrong in the war in Afghanistan (later), but in this critical moment we must listen to the voices of Afghan women and girls. They are asking for protection, for education, for the freedom and the future they were promised. We cannot continue to fail them. We have no time to spare.” Kristof added that it is hard to:

… disagree with the Biden administration for pulling out troops. Resources are limited, and if we couldn't defeat the Taliban with 100,000 US troops in Afghanistan (and 300,000 Afghani sol-diers) I don't think we could have done so with 3,000. Many Pashtuns I talked to over the years didn't like either the Taliban or the Afghan government, but they at least thought the Taliban were honest, albeit uneducated brutes.

Listening carefully to the cries of our sisters and brothers while taking a long, loving look at reality I came upon a link for Women for Afghan Women which I’ve posted on this page. These pros are on the ground, time-tested, vetted, and most able to bring a measure of relief to those in the greatest need in this dark hour. Sitting in the challenging silence with my questions brought to mind this poem by Mary Oliver she calls, Mindful: it bubbled-up to the surface at just the right time. She writes:

Every day - I see or hear……..something

that more or less kills me ….with delight,

That leaves me - like a needle - in the haystack of light

It was what I was born for – to look, to listen, to lose myself inside this soft world –

To instruct myself - over and over – in joy – and acclamation.

Nor am I talking about the exceptional,

the fearful, the dreadful, the very extravagant –

but of the ordinary, the common, the very drab, the daily presentations.

Oh, good scholar, I say to myself,

…………how can you help but grow wise with such teachings as these –

…………the untrimmable light of the world, the ocean’s shine,

……..the prayers that are made out of grass?

What a sublime, simple affirmation, yes? Every day something seeks to kill me with delight even as I sit with those damnable, excruciating, tormenting albeit sacred questions. And when it is time – whenever it is time – from within the stillness you will know how to “look, listen, and lose yourself inside this SOFT world like a needle of light within a haystack.” The tragedy does not abate, it is still all too real, and yet at the same time there is beauty and light and even love. Mary Oliver helped me rethink Fr. Ed’s suggestion to consider taking a nap a sacramental prayer; speaking from experience, nap-taking has immediate verve and integrity. But like every sacrament, there’s more going on than first meets the eye. The longer I waited, listened, and looked, the clearer it became that Fr. Ed was ALSO speaking about sabbath spirituality. At its core, his message is about nourishing a rest so deep that from within the storms of our lives three things can come to pass:

· One, we might become as much at peace as Jesus was when he fell asleep and napped in that boat crossing the Sea of Galilee;

· Two, we might know from the inside out how to regularly cultivate this inward peace by practicing solitude and renewal;

· And three, that our peace might become available to be shared with others who are often as troubled, hurting, afraid, or anxious as we are sometimes, too.

Now, I grant you, this take is a bit slant, but I stumbled upon another Mary Oliver poem this week, too that helps to trust its validity. She proclaims:

I have refused to live locked in the orderly house of reasons and proofs.

The world I live in and believe in is wider than that.

And anyway, what’s wrong with Maybe? 

You wouldn’t believe what once or twice I have seen.

I’ll just tell you this: only if there are angels in your head will you ever, possibly, see one.

Too often I’ve read some of our Bible stories as extraordinary tales about that really do not have much to do with reality. When the truth is that these stories are poetic words of encouragement – metaphoric summaries of what contemplation and embodied prayer might mean for us – rather than abstract mythologies. Once upon a time, an old Presbyterian minister told me that early in his ministry he was startled to hear the way his leadership team talked about Mother Teresa. “They admired her” he said. “She’s so wonderful and compassionate, so unlike most of us.” Over and over, they raved, oohed and ahhed, which is when it hit him: his team of well-seasoned believers knew all ABOUT Mother Teresa, but they had NO idea about how to become like her. They acted like her patience and love was magic or else like she fell from the heavens fully formed as a strong but tender disciple of Jesus when the truth was, she practiced making sabbath rest her core! They knew all about her but not how to become like her.

In one of Fr. Henri Nouwen’s journals he writes much the same thing: while

visiting holy Mother Teresa of blessed memory he asked her what the key to her life was. To which she said, “Get some rest, sit alone with God in silence for an hour every day, and help those who are closest to you.” He left India despondent for even the great Henri Nouwen wanted some magic rather than nitty gritty of spiritual practice. I saw this put another way last week in a Face Book meme where a music fan asks his idol: How do you play so well. Practice she answers. It MUST be an innate gift that fan says only to be told: it’s PRACTICE. Oh, I have never understood why some people have such talent; it’s magical and a mystery. No, it’s practice.

What I’m trying to say is that naming nap-taking as a sacrament – a visible, outward, and embodied sign of a profound inward, and spiritual truth - is shorthand for sabbath spirituality. Practicing DEEP physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual rest is what gives us the ability to wait in trust, the strength to act with love at the right time, and wisdom to know the difference. Fr. Ed writes: “Our word sleep lends itself to a natural care-less spirituality. Our English word sleep comes from the German word “schlaff” which means “loose.” To sleep, then, or to nap is to hang loose, to be un-tight and know how to let things go.” Sleeping or napping is, therefore, a beautiful expression of prayer since it is resting in God. It is letting go of our control of life. It is a parable or prayer as well as an embodied prayer. If we look only at the front side of sleep we might miss a hidden insight… The front door of sleep is bodily rest… but the back door is an external sacrament built upon letting go of trying to manage every aspect of our lives.

Which is EXACTLY how Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel talks about sabbath spirituality. If we can learn to practice resting for one full day, trusting that God’s loving kindness and care can manage things without us, maybe we can come to trust God beyond a mere 24 hours? Heschel believed that the greatest challenge facing contemporary people was a loss of a sense of the sacred:

Our world has been reduced to the utilitarian bottom line where success and usefulness are the only criterion that matter. “In our attempts to master our physical surroundings through technological advancement, we have become desensitized to the grandeur and beauty of life, both in the natural world and in the faces of other people. In our rush to industrialize we have become so focused on gaining economic and political power that we have forgotten our ultimate purpose: to serve as co-creators with the Divine in the establishment of a just and compassionate world.”

Another reason I’ve chosen to trust my slant take on napping as prelude to sabbath spirituality has to do with synchronicity. If you’ve been with me on this journey for a while, you know that I tend to look for the holy connections that show up in unplanned ways within the ordinary details of my humanity. Christine Valters Paintner calls this following the wee threads of synchronicity that flow through the maze of our days like those early Celtic monks on pilgrimage.

· For the past month I’ve been reading two books about the Indigenous and First Nations people of the US and Canada. One is a searing history by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz in the vein of Howard Zinn’s A Peoples History of the United States; who, it turns out, challenged her to write a First Nations’ history of the United States after she told him how much HE left out of his life’s work. It’s tough reading for an old, bourgeoise white guy – but so clarifying.

· The other is the collected testimonies by Shirley Hager and Mawopiane from a thirty-year conversation between Indigenous and Non-Indigenous allies living and meeting along the Northeastern shore of Canada and the US entitled The Gathering. It’s striking that almost word for word the Indigenous elders in both texts describe the agonizing challenges confront-ing us today much like Rabbi Heschel and those grounded in sabbath spirituality: we’re out of alignment – disconnected and desensitized to the grandeur and beauty of life – as the Creator intended.

For over 400 years, they tell us, white settler-colonizers have incrementally lost touch with God’s first wisdom as incarnated in nature. That’s why we poison the water, set Mother Earth on fire, abuse our children, hate more than we love, and believe everyone different from us is out to get us. We’re alienated from the holy – exhausted and afraid – and it is killing us all. Alma from the Wabanaki Nation put it like this:

It seems as if it is the Aboriginal peoples’ job to take care of this land we call Turtle Island. It’s been our job to help non-Natives see the error of their ways and to help them reconnect with Creation… They have come to the horrific realization that they are destroying the land that they took and have not respected it. Now the lives of their own children and grandchildren, the survival of their own people. Is wrapped up in whether or not they get it. My people have been saying for a hundred years that if you destroy the land, poison the water, you are going to die! (In the beginning) everything was in perfect harmony and balance and provide everything we needed to live a good life. Life thrived. When the sacred colors of humankind were place at the four corners of the Earth, each was given a path to walk on and each was given a Sacred Bundle with instructions to life. Somewhere along the way, someone felt they could ignore the Sacred Words – they told the world that we come here to Earth to suffer, then we die an go to a better place. Our Elders teach that this is not true: the reasons we have suffered here is because those things that the Creator gave us to live a good and happy life were taken away… restoration is the start of reconciliation.

This is sabbath spirituality – original blessing not original sin – restoration of the holy in the human by balance and trust. Small wonder that Scripture tells us Jesus took a nap, right? He’s literally incarnating the soul of Sabbath rest in that tiny boat. And he keeps telling and showing his beloved how to do likewise. Fr. Ed puts it well: “Jesus did not have to work overtime since he was fully aware of who really was working in and with and through him. Jesus knew that he did not have to save or heal the world all by himself.” He trusted – and rested regularly – as prayerful proof of a life grounded in God’s love.

· When our children were small, they would often say something like: We like you a LOT more, dad, when you’re on vacation. I know that I liked me a lot more when I was on vacation, too; and while I knew my babies were speaking truth to my heart, for decades I didn’t pay attention. No, I believed that I had to earn my keep in creation and Christianity. I had to prove my fidelity to God and stay busy doing good things so that others would know I loved Jesus. I didn’t really believe in my own heart that I was God’s beloved – and found out the hard way that you can’t give what you ain’t got and you can’t lead others where you’ve never gone.

· Sabbath spirituality, of which sleep and napping are but two embodied signs, is ALL about experiencing from the inside out the Serenity Prayer: O God grant me the serenity to accept the things I can-not change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. It is learning to trust God beyond the bottom line so that we have love to share from well-rested hearts and minds.

Two more tiny threads of Celtic pilgrimage and synchronicity showed up last week as I was sitting with sabbath spirituality. After finishing the first half of today’s message, I got an email from Soul Play, a tender-hearted Canadian community dedicated to slowing down, waking up, and loving well. The note started out: Are you ramping up or down? 

If you had asked me this question about a month ago, I would have said, with great hope and optimism, that I was ramping up to the fall season ahead. I was looking forward to permanent post-lockdown connections, worry-free experiences, and easier freedom with the worst behind us. It lasted for about 9 days. Now, while I am still enjoying the summer, and hopeful for the remainder of this year, I find myself now cautiously tending to the reality that "ramping up" might not be as simple and straightforward as I had hoped. It now looks like we will be doing a few things, simultaneously: ramping up, staying the course, and slowing down our expectations for how the future will unfold. It can be a lot to hold. It has the flavor of vertigo but really, its what reality tastes like. It's an acquired taste, to be sure, and it's taking me a while to digest. Add the daily stream of soul-sapping news of ecological collapse, natural disasters, rising cases, and the heart-breaking impact of war and conflict, how can anyone find the solid ground of solace, and wisdom to keep walking well?

· Have you ever experienced vertigo? I haven’t tasted it but have had a few bouts over the years where the inner ear crystals slip out of balance, everything starts spinning before your eyes, and dizziness and nausea soon to follow.

· Reading this description of our moment in time from my Soul Play friends was yet another wee thread of synchronicity that helped me go with my take on sabbath spirituality – especially when Soul Play noted that the time-tested way to regain sure-footing in a time of cultural vertigo is… patience, generosity, gentleness, and adequate rest.

The second nudge came while wondering how the fruit the Holy Spirit as described

in both the First and Second Testaments of our Bible are related to practicing sabbath spirituality. St. Paul as well as the Hebrew prophets of ancient Israel teach that those who are well-rested AND saturated in trust give shape and form to love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Our New Testament give us two different words for embodied good: agathos is “the quality of something that is good in character, beneficial in effect, and useful in action.” Peter Marty, editor of the Christian Century magazine writes that “food shared with those in need is a goodness that is precious to a hungry body.” Acts of love, working for peace, listening, patience, gentle, compassionate corporate acts of mercy are this type of goodness, too. Marty notes that when Primo Levi “wrote about being an Auschwitz survivor:

Primo begins by celebrating the man who smuggled soup and bread to him every day. ‘I am alive today,’ Levi confesses, ‘not so much of Lorenzo’s material aid, as for his having constantly reminded me by his presence, his plain and gentle manner of being good, that there still existed a just world outside of our own.”

This points towards the second New Testament word for good – kalos – which is “the word reserved for something or someone that expresses goodness incarnationally in a winsome or beautiful way.” Jesus uses kalos regularly in his instructions for growing a healthy, sabbath soul. “Let your light so shine before others,” he tells us in St. Matthew’s gospel, “that they may see what is good (in you) and glorify God in heaven.” Same, too, when he speaks of being anointed by Mary Magdalene in St. Mark’s gospel: “Let her alone,” he tells those who grumble about wasting expensive perfumed oil. “She has performed a good service for me by anointing me in a beautiful manner.” Jesus is speaking about the inner peace that is expressed outwardly generating beauty and peace – and dare I say trust?

This week, taking a long, LOVING look at our broken reality while sitting silently with the seemingly incongruence of Fr. Ed’s notion that napping is sacramental prayer, my heart and mind were opened to the importance of sabbath spirituality. Deep rest is essential to peace-making, gentleness and compassion. It is foundational - especially in uncertain times – to cultivating a character that evokes trust and love in others, too because it gives shape and form to the very source of life. No wonder Jesus regularly calls out the harsh teachers of scrupulosity: chill, hang-lose, take a nap won’t you?”

“Those who execute a strong need to point out the failings and errors of others,” says one wise old soul, “more often than not ends up repelling more than attracting.” As this weird, evolving, anxious and awesome time of Covid and chaos unfolds, the good news for those with ears to hear is to be found in sabbath rest and cultivating trust within our all-too ordinary but holy flesh.

see the video here: https://fb.watch/7yp0ArG0u7/