Doing nothing part iii: sabbath edition
Why do we prefer busyness over rest?
To find earlier posts in my Do Nothing series, here are parts 1 and 2.
It’s ironic: as I’ve been writing these last few posts about doing nothing, I’ve been quite busy. I’m taking a month-long intensive on investing from a Franciscan perspective, learning carpentry at the Rebuilding Center, and playing music at Community Jams, while still playing soccer three times a week and reconnecting with my Portland friends after three months away. It’s all stuff I want to do. I don’t even have a job! And still I need to cut back.
And that’s what I noticed in modern life: everyone feels busy. And feeling busier all the time. Not only do we work long hours, we fill life with stuff that we want to do. I’ve talked to people my age and older: life is definitely busier now than when we were young.
Again, it’s not only working harder or for longer hours. We are subject to a constant barrage of attentional demand from capitalism and technology demands during in our leisure time. Professor Cal Newport talks about how technology was supposed to free up our time, but instead, has invaded all of it: texts, emails, and digital advertising keep us involved in the productive capitalist system for our entire waking lives.
Do you feel too busy? Because there is a cost to it. And it is what we secretly want most in life: presence.
“For a lack of attention a thousand forms of loveliness elude us everyday” - English mystic Evelyn Underhill
The climax of living
As a kid, I grew up Seventh Day Adventist, a Christian denomination that worships on the Jewish Sabbath, aka from Friday sundown to Saturday sundown. On this day of rest, I wasn’t allowed to:
Watch TV
Play video games
Go to parties
Listen to secular music
Do any work
Do any shopping or buying
The only things I was allowed to do was sleep, go to church, eat, and spend time with other church friends (but not doing the above things). I hated this “day of rest;” from an adolescent point of view, I wasn’t “allowed to do anything.”
I see now that the Sabbath was a day off from capitalism: no working, no spending, no devices. Just time.
A few years ago, I read The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man, by the great American rabbi and mystic Abraham Joshua Heschel. In it, he emphasizes that in modern times, we think about it all wrong: the Sabbath is not a day of rest to recharge to go back to work. No, instead, the Sabbath is the very pinnacle of life:
[L]abor is the means toward an end, and the Sabbath as a day of rest, as a day of abstaining from toil, is not for the purpose of recovering one’s lost strength and becoming fit for the forthcoming labor. The Sabbath is a day for the sake of life. Man is not a beast of burden, and the Sabbath is not for the purpose of enhancing the efficiency of his work.
The Sabbath is not for the sake of the weekdays; the weekdays are for the sake of Sabbath. It is not an interlude but the climax of living.
Heschel reminds us that the purpose of our lives isn’t the work-spend cycle:
… the profanity of clattering commerce, being yoked to toil… the screech of dissonant days… the nervousness and fury of acquisitiveness and the betrayal in embezzling [one’s] own life. [T]he world has already been created and will survive without the help of man.
Modern consumerism wants us to think the goal of all our commerce, labor, and profit is to perpetuate the system. Work to buy more things, get bigger houses, and go on more vacations. The reason why we lack presence is we’re too busy keeping the consumerist wheel spinning by running faster and faster.
These days, if we’re privileged, we think the goal of our lives is to work with “purpose.”
But Heschel believes the real point of life to face sacred moments. Only by restricting ourselves from these things can we get to “the likeness of God found in time, which is eternity in disguise.” One day a week, we have to let go of everything else, and experience God-in-the-Ever-Present-Now:
God is not in things of space, but in moments of time.”
“There are no two hours alike. Every hour is unique and the only one given at the moment, exclusive and endlessly precious.”
The five best things
How else express glory in the presence of eternity, if not by the silence of abstaining from noisy acts? — Abraham Heschel
Contrary to my adolescent thinking, “keeping the Sabbath holy” does not denying and mortifying oneself. On the contrary: Sabbath is supposed to be a time of delight, a sensual time of embodied pleasures.
The journey from work to rest, from action to Sabbath, is first felt in the body. During Sabbath time we sing with our mouths, we pray with our hands, we light candles, we smell the spices, we eat warm bread, we touch one another as we give and receive our blessings. It is a delight for the senses. — Wayne Muller
A rabbi-in-training told me once that in traditional Judaism, you were allowed to do five things on the Sabbath:
Nap
Eat the most delicious foods
Enjoy spending time with your family and friends
Make love to your spouse1
Worship God with music, dance, and singing
Mystical traditions around the world see these sacred moments as an invitation to make love with the divine. The texts command us to meet the Sabbath like a groom greeting his bride.2 At that moment of sunset, after ritual bathing, we put on our best finery and light the candles to excitedly reunite with our lover.
If you really thought about it, what would you rather be doing than napping, eating the most delicious foods, spending time with family and friends, making love, and singing and dancing? I say nothing. According to Heschel, Sabbath is the climax of living. Why is it so hard to refrain from the stupid stuff: working, buying, performing, sitting in front of devices, in order to do the best stuff? As Americans, we equate choice with freedom, but they are not the same. In fact, the more our choices multiply, the more we feel dissatisfied, and overwhelmed. Sabbath is intentional simplicity.
In spite of our triumphs, we have fallen victims to the work of our hands; it is as if the forces we had conquered have conquered us. — Abraham Heschel
A Love Affair with Eternity
Black minister Renita Weems talked about how the Sunday Sabbath used to be the best day of the week:
Once upon a time Sunday was a special day, a holy day, a day different from the other six days of the week…. This was a time when [Black] people like those I grew up with still believed that it was enough to spend six days a week trying to eke out a living, … fretting over the future, despairing over whether life would ever get better for [us]. Six days of worrying were enough. The Sabbath was the Lord’s Day, a momentary cease-fire in our ongoing struggle to survive and an opportunity to surrender ourselves to the rest only God offered. Come Sunday, we set aside our worries about the mundane and renewed our love affair with eternity….
Remembering the Sabbath where I grew up involved delighting oneself for a full twenty-four hours, ultimately in good company, with fine clothes and choice meals. The Sabbath allowed us to mend our tattered lives and restore dignity to our souls. We rested by removing ourselves from the mundane sphere of secular toil and giving ourselves over fully to the divine dimension, where in God’s presence one found “rest” (paradoxically) not in stillness and in repose but in more labor—a different kind of labor, however. We sang, waved, cried, shouted, and when we felt led to do so, danced as a way of restoring dignity to our bodies as well. We used our bodies to help celebrate God’s gift of the Sabbath. For the Sabbath meant more than withdrawal from labor and activity. It meant to consciously enter into a realm of tranquility and praise.
After a week of the body toiling away in inane work and the spirit being assaulted with insult and loss, Sunday was set aside to recultivate the soul’s appreciation for beauty, truth, love, and eternity.
Weems acknowledges that we’re losing the Sabbath to superficial modern culture, and in doing so, we’re losing something precious: time.
I miss the Sabbath of my childhood. I miss believing in the holiness of time. I miss believing there was a day when time stood still. There’s virtually little in this culture, and hardly anything in my adult comings and goings, to serve as a timely reminder of how precious time really is, to remind me of sacred moments.
Today our devices never get a break, and we never get a break from them. We’re constantly in a state of arousal by text or artificial light on computers, or flashing images on TVs or phones.
The biggest problem with keeping the Sabbath is we lack the social system that supports it.3 My friend Matthew is 70 now and he remembers Sundays in upstate New York in the 1950s:
“There were no TVs on, no cooking. Sunday was a big shutdown — people used to simply drop by. Your community was your neighborhood. You just existed in communion with God and others.”
Today we don’t have that. Some people self-impose personal or family rules, like the recently popular “digital Sabbath.” But as Oliver Burkeman observed in Four Thousand Weeks:
“[These rules] lack the social reinforcement that comes when everyone else is following the rule too, so they’re inevitably harder to abide by—.. because they’re reliant on willpower.
Culture matters. Heschel’s, Weems’s, and Matthew’s Sabbath rested on the foundation the fact everyone else was doing it too. We’ve collectively lost this culture of celebration and rest.
Example: financial freedom is an opportunity for Sabbath activity on a regular basis. Yet most FIRE people stay pretty busy doing things. Even FIRE people, people now with the gift of time and who don’t need to work, lack the community around them to create Sabbath habits.
Would you want a day where you were only allowed to nap, eat delicious foods, spend time with family and friends, make love and play music, sing, and dance, if you were the only one doing it?
Or would refraining from working, buying, and any sort of digital activity everyone else is doing feel like deprivation?
Again, culture matters.
Busy is the heart killer
“Perhaps I don't understand economics, but economics does not understand me, either.” — Lin Yutang
With the loss of Sabbath culture, we’re constantly doing something. According to the wonderful Henri Nouwen, Jesus’s three great temptations were: to be useful, to be important, and to be powerful. Are these not the temptations that keep us busy today? Are these not the temptations that keep us producing and buying shit as we head to environmental collapse?
Americans take the least paid vacations in the world. In fact, 37 percent of Americans take fewer than seven days of vacation a year. And 20 percent of those who do, often spend their vacation staying in touch with their jobs.4 We’re somehow afraid not to work.
I was talking to someone at the dog park this morning who is taking his family to Japan for weeks in July. Japan is amazing. My favorite place on earth. I love Japan. I could go on. He was telling me they are only going to see the major cities: two weeks is too short for seeing all of Japan. But at the same time, he was worried that two weeks was too long to be in Japan. If he was not working; what will be happening at his job?
The temptation to be stay to be useful, important, and powerful.
The Chinese pictograph for “busy” is composed of two characters: heart and killing.
If you’re going to fly your entire family to Japan, 10,000 miles of carbon round trip, don’t worry about work. Don’t worry about being useful, important, or powerful.
How heart-killing.
On the receiving
The temptation to be stay to be useful, important, and powerful: Christian theologian Walter Brueggemann describes the Sabbath as an invitation to spend one day per week “in the awareness and practice of the claim that we are situated on the receiving end of the gifts of God.” Take one day a week to remember that there is nothing you need to do in order to justify your existence.
The poet Sabrina Benaim wrote: “My heart has developed a kind of amnesia, where it remembers everything but itself.” We are surrounded by love. Grace. We don’t have to do anything to anything; in fact there’s nothing we can do, to either get more, or less, of it. All we have to do is receive. And keeping Sabbath is practice.
Through the passage of time we may become hard of hearing an inner voice that loves us wholly, and we may grow accustomed to moving too fast through the world and our relationships, frequently tuning out rather than in. But … all that is required is slowing down, long enough to hear the whispers of wisdom once again, and then, finding the courage to surrender to the birth of a new becoming, authentic and essential to our lives. — David Auten
Why do we prefer busyness over rest? There is a cost to it. I believe the only solution to our environmental problems is to do nothing. Sit with it and you’ll realize it’s true too.
Amazingly the solution to our inner not-enoughness is also to do nothing.
Don’t work. Don’t spend. Stay off the digital devices.5 Do nothing.
You don’t have to be important, useful, or powerful. You don’t have to earn your right to be here.
Just nap. Make love. Eat. Sing. Dance. Play. Celebrate everything you’ve been given. Receive and rejoice.
Everything is already here for you.
“The world is charged with the grandeur of God.” — Gerard Manley Hopkins
Postscript
Next cohort of Financial Freedom 1 starts June 15. If you want examine your relationship to work, to spending, and take control of your financial life, consider signing up. If you’re a FF1 grad, spread the word!
My old boss Denise Pope is Jewish and she told me that in Orthodox Judaism, you are supposed to make love to you spouse five times [edit: twice haha] on the Sabbath. That begins to sound like work to me.
Usually written by and for straight men.
I think that’s why FIRE people have a hard time “doing nothing;” everyone else is busy so there isn’t community to enjoy life with.
Source: Subversive Sabbath: The Surprising Power of Rest in a Nonstop World by A. J. Swoboda. I believe in the future, people will look back at 21st century America and view the 50 week 40 hour a week job was a human rights violation. It’s totally unnecessary and cripples human dignity.
Ironic, I know!
Powerful post. I am taking a career break due to health reasons. With all the time in my hands, I too constantly find myself finding activities to keep busy! I am exploring way of tea and zen meditation here in Kyoto. Feel free to reach out on Japan related reflections.
Douglas, impeccable timing!
Just listened to a podcast talking about trusting God's story that creation is GOOD, that the first lesson He wants us to know is that we are enough in His eyes (we are His crowning achievement and we are not judged by our productivity).
I am in a small group, and there is another man in the group who is challenging us to really try to look at Sabbath a little differently with our families, and attempting to make some slight tweaks to one day of our week to remember that we are called to rest...that we are enough!