ON THE NECESSITY OF SABBATH
James Ishmael Ford
27 August 2006

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The most challenging thing about Sabbath is that it is useless. Nothing will get done, not a single item will get checked off any list. Our work is necessary. But Sabbath time offers the priceless gift of balance. We are valued not for what we have done, but simply because we are. During Sabbath time, we reconnect with what is truly valuable: the beauty of the world, the love of God, the miracle of being itself. Sabbath is waiting quietly for us, a heaven of calm, a nest of gentleness, a sweet apple on the tree of peace. Let us reach up toward it, and taste it for ourselves.
Amanda Aikman

Yesterday I had the enormous honor of officiating at Georgina Labovitch’s memorial service. Our own Paul Labo’s mom had died Tuesday. Wednesday evening I was able to visit with Paul and Bela as well as Paul’s brother Andrew. The kids were being cared for by Bela’s parents who are visiting from India. We sat in their living room and talked a little about Georgina and grief, but mostly laid out plans for the service. The next day I was able to interview them in order to prepare the eulogy for Saturday’s service. There’s something incredibly powerful in that hour or two I get to interview the family about a loved one’s life. Often I feel like Moses might have when he approached the burning bush - fear, awe, so many emotions confronting the real as something much bigger than me.

I’ve had this experience numerous times since I’ve become a minister. Particularly in these situations so close to death, there’s always something, perhaps small, perhaps big that takes my breath away and reminds me how precious we each of us are. In Georgina’s case, it was something big that spoke to who she was, and how curious and crazy the world is. I asked the family if it was okay to recount part of her story for today’s sermon. Thankfully they said yes. This is how I recorded it for the eulogy.

“On the evening of the 23rd of October, 1956 students from the Technical University gathered to demonstrate for freedom from the Soviet occupation. Soon over a hundred thousand people joined the demonstration. It was the first instance of Eastern European flags flying with the communist symbols cut out. But it was too early, despite promises from the West and even an encouraging speech from President Eisenhower, no one responded when the tanks rolled in.

“Georgina was twenty-five (had already endured the Holocaust) and she decided she’d had enough of it. She determined to escape. Several of her friends and her boyfriend agreed to go, as well. But when shove came to push she found she was on her own. She joined with some people who hired a Red Cross truck to drive them to the Austrian border. Some distance from the frontier they were unceremoniously dropped off. The group scattered each making their own way. Georgina walked through the forest trying to make it to the border. That’s when the young Soviet soldier caught her. He was part of the contingent of guards assigned to prevent just this sort of thing. He looked at her, holding his rifle, and asked, ‘Are you trying to escape?’ She hesitated. Then she replied simply, ‘Yes.’ Their eyes locked for a desperate few moments and he said, ‘Good luck,’ turned, and walked away.

“When she finally made it to the border she found another group of escapees. They decided to run en masse, feeling the soldiers couldn’t shoot them all. Several were shot, but Georgina just kept running. At last, not sure what had happened, or even where she was Georgina was confronted by another soldier, also carrying a rifle. Terrified she asked, ‘Where are we?’ He replied, ‘Austria.’

“Later Georgina would say ‘I escaped with a bologna sandwich and a toothbrush in my pockets.’” In that “yes” and that mad dash across the border I found the summation of who this woman was: gutsy, determined, wildly fierce in the face of uncertainty. She became a great mother. She became an even more wonderful grandmother. Like I said, getting to do this sort of work feels like I get to tread on holy ground. Not feel like, it is what I get to do.

Of course that’s only a dramatic example of what work can be about. This is, after all, my job. This is the job you all let me do. And I can’t say how grateful I am for this amazing work. Work is good. Or, more properly work can be good. It’s not just about putting food on the table, as so very important as that is. Work should, if we’re just a little lucky, also be about our lives and the life of this world from which we receive our being.

But, there’s something else in work. As my colleague Hilary Landau Krivochenia once observed, “Our stillness is part of our work as silence is part of music.” We often miss this point. Particularly in our culture which is driven to distraction by business, often every waking moment filled.

My old friend, and another UU minister, Amanda Aikman tells a story. “Betty… had some sort of compulsion that made it impossible for her to leave the house in the morning without first dusting or vacuuming every single item in it. This included Reuben. He was a slim, black little fellow whose elegance of gait and demeanor did not betray his humble origins: As a kitten, he had been rescued from a dumpster by Jay, who brought him home in his pocket. Ruben knew he had been rescued from a dumpster. He knew about the world outside Betty and Jay’s house – a harsh reality where there were bad smells, hunger, other cats, and noises even louder than the whine of a vacuum cleaner.

“And so every morning, with a martyred expression on his furry face not unlike that of Saint Sebastian in Guido Reni’s famous painting, Reuben would lie on his back and submit to being vacuumed. Betty used the Hoover’s upholstery crevice tool, determined to get every last scrap of fur and dander. Jay would sometimes come by and say (over the noise of the vacuum), ‘Now, Betty, why do you have to vacuum that poor cat?’ Betty didn’t know. She just kept vacuuming. She had to do it before she could feel free to leave the house.”

After recounting this bizarre but compelling story Amanda asks the question. “Does it sometimes feel as if your entire life is like this – an endless round of work and frantic consumption and leisure that feels suspiciously like work? Is true, healing rest something you are vaguely planning to enjoy… one day?” Work needs a stop, no matter how important, no matter how fulfilling, stillness is part of work as silence is part of music.

No matter what our job, I believe we must seek a rhythm that includes a break. As Stephen Covey calls it, we need to stop and sharpen the saw every now and again. I want to be able to be fully present when one among us has died. I don’t want to be stale. Never. And I know consciously attending to a time of silence, of fallowness I find a way to achieve that goal. Kind of ironic, unh? Stop in order to do. But it’s true. Stillness is a necessary part of work, just as silence is essential to music. We must stop and sharpen our saws.

I’m moderately sure people in all cultures have noticed this need. When I first began sitting at a Zen center in the late 1960s, the center followed a rhythm called shikunichi, where the meditation hall was closed on days that had fours or nines in them. Significantly, I feel, within a couple of years the closed days became Saturday or Sunday. I think there are several reasons for this.

The seven-day week has very nearly become universal, replacing other systems that have included five-day, six-day, ten-day, thirteen and twenty-day weeks. We probably have the British Empire to thank for the beginnings of a seven-day week becoming that near universal counting we have today. But I think also within the seven-day week we find one of the great gifts of the West to world culture. And I suspect this is another reason the seven-day week is observed most everywhere.

That is the Sabbath, the day of rest, a formal call to a regular moment of silence in the cycle of our lives. It was given its original formation within the Jewish community who followed the rhythm described in Genesis where God labored to create the world for six days and then on the seventh, rested. This appears to be the first place where a rhythm of work explicitly included stopping. The Christian inheritance played with the idea, describing the next day, the first in the seven-day calendar as the Lord’s Day, a commemoration of Easter, of new birth. In Islam the Sabbath was considered a day of assembly and prayer and was determined to be held on Friday, the “king of days.”

I find each of these visions, within our world culture also cross-inform each other - and all suggest what the nature of Sabbath might be for us as religious liberals. We: who are called to weigh and consider what lessons we might find in ancient spiritual teachings with humility, reason and attention.

I have no doubt we need these lessons, these teachings. Too many of us have become like Amanda’s friend, unable to rest, endlessly busy, even to vacuuming the cat. I see it in myself. I see it going on all the time in this community. Even our children are booked from waking up to falling asleep. The eighth grader with a palm pilot is in danger of not being a joke. And I really believe in all this business we’re in danger of losing something very important.

Wayne Muller who wrote an important study, Sabbath: Restoring the Sacred Rhythm of Rest warns us “Because we do not rest, we lose our way. We miss the compass points that show us where to go. We lose the nourishment that gives us succor.” We need that pause, if we hope to be of use, to ourselves, to each other, to the world itself.

And now you’re sending me off on a sabbatical. Sabbath, sabbatical and Jubilee are all connected in the Jewish spiritual way. (Jubilee will have to wait for another Sunday to be unpacked.) But, even as we are called to mark out one day a week to rest, to contemplate the holy, in the sacred tradition of the west there is a call to take a larger period of time out once in a while, traditionally once in seven years – for much the same purpose. I’m a little embarrassed at being able to do this when so few of us get to. I know when friends ask Jan about whether she’s going with me to Chicago or India, the two destination points of my sabbatical, she occasionally replies, “No. I have a real job.”

Getting a sabbatical is a privilege. Of course, author Tillie Olson sagely observed “The only thing wrong with privilege is that most people don’t have it.” I’m grateful for our ministerial tradition of sabbatical, and I’m grateful you all felt it important enough to write it into my covenant when I came here, and designed it in such a way to force me to take it before the end of my seventh year among you. (If I don’t, it disappears…)

I know I’m tottering a bit dangerously toward vacuuming the cat on my sabbatical. I’m going to be minister-in-residence at Meadville Lombard, our seminary in Chicago, where I’ll teach a class. And then I’ll be wandering around north-eastern India visiting an indigenous Unitarian community in the Khasi Hills before making a pilgrimage to the principal sites marking the life of Gautama Siddhartha, the Buddha. A bit busy, I admit.

But let’s make a deal. Remember the Sabbath in your own lives. Take just a little time regularly, say one day in seven and make it holy by your presence, by showing up, by not being overly driven with tasks that must be done. Explore silence, explore doing nothing. If you can’t really do it one week, try hard to do it the next. Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy. I’m positive it will make the remaining time clearer, better focused and more productive.

And, I’ll try to take the same lessons in my sabbatical. I’ll do a lot of silent meditation. I’ll stop, as many times as I can, and just notice. I’m positive when I return I’ll be a bit clearer, a bit more focused, and hopefully able to continue serving in this wonderful strange work you’ve allowed me to undertake fresh and engaged.

Sabbath and sabbatical. As Amanda says, “During Sabbath time, we reconnect with what is truly valuable: the beauty of the world, the love of God, the miracle of being itself. Sabbath is waiting quietly for us, a heaven of calm, a nest of gentleness, a sweet apple on the tree of peace. Let us reach up toward it, and taste it for ourselves.”

Amen