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May 27 - June 26, 2021
For many of us the great danger is not that we will renounce our faith. It is that we will become so distracted and rushed and preoccupied that we will settle for a mediocre
version of it. We will just skim our lives instead of actually living them.14
Because attention leads to awareness. All the contemplatives agree. The mystics point out that what’s missing is awareness. Meaning, in the chronic problem of human beings’ felt experience of distance from God, God isn’t usually the culprit. God is omnipresent—there is no place God is not. And no time he isn’t present either. Our awareness of God is the problem, and it’s acute.
We sit around sucked into our phones or TV or to-do lists, oblivious to the God who is around us, with us, in us, even more desirous than we are for relationship.
A yoke was a common idiom in the first century for a rabbi’s way of reading the Torah. But it was also more: it was his set of teachings on how to be human.
But Jesus realizes that the most restful gift he can give the tired is a new way to carry life, a fresh way to bear responsibilities…. Realism sees that life is a succession of burdens; we cannot get away from them; thus instead of offering escape, Jesus offers equipment. Jesus means that obedience to his Sermon on the Mount [his yoke] will develop in us a balance and a “way” of carrying life that will give more rest than the way we have been living.
Jesus doesn’t offer us an escape. He offers us something far better: “equipment.” He offers his apprentices a whole new way to bear the weight of our humanity: with ease.
What a trellis is to a vine, a rule of life is to abiding. It’s a structure—in this case a schedule and a set of practices—to set up abiding as the central pursuit of your life. It’s a way to organize all of your life around the practice of the presence of God,
Following Jesus has to make it onto your schedule and into your practices or it will simply never happen. Apprenticeship to Jesus will remain an idea, not a reality in your life. But here’s the rub: most of us are too busy to follow Jesus.
To requote the Catholic father and social critic Ronald Rolheiser, “We…are distracting ourselves into spiritual oblivion.”
Meaning, the quiet place wasn’t a onetime thing. It was an ongoing part of his life rhythm.
In Luke, Jesus went to his quiet place no less than nine times.
Quiet is a kind of balm for emotional healing. And more: an unlocked, open door to spiritual life. As Saint John Climacus, the sixth-century Syrian monk who spent most of his life praying on Mount Sinai, so beautifully said, “The friend of silence draws near to God.”
Solitude is how you open yourself up to God; isolation is painting a target on your back for the tempter. Solitude is when you set aside time to feed and water and nourish your soul. To let it grow into health and maturity. Isolation is what you crave when you neglect the former.
In the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable, we learn that ultimately in this world there is no finished symphony.
You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.
But Sabbath is more than just a day; it’s a way of being in the world. It’s a spirit of restfulness that comes from abiding, from living in the Father’s loving presence all week long.
But Sabbath is the primary discipline, or practice, by which we cultivate the spirit of restfulness in our lives as a whole. The Sabbath is to a spirit of restfulness what a soccer practice is to a match or band practice is to a show. It’s how we practice, how we prepare our minds and bodies for the moments that matter most.
God rested. And in doing so, he built a rhythm into the DNA of creation. A tempo, a syncopated beat. God worked for six, rested for one.
“If you go against the grain of the universe, you get splinters.”
The Sabbath is an invitation to enter delight.
It means that the Sabbath—just like an animal or a human being—has the life-giving capacity to procreate. To fill the world up with more life.
Due to our immaturity, dysfunction, and addiction, God has to command his people to do something deeply life giving—rest.
When I Sabbath, I run each activity through this twin grid: Is this rest and worship?
But I mean worship in the wide, holistic sense of the word. Expand your list of the spiritual disciplines to include eating a burrito on the patio or drinking a bottle of wine with your friends over a long, lazy dinner or walking on the beach with your lover or best friend—anything to index your heart toward grateful recognition of God’s reality and goodness.
In Exodus the Sabbath command is grounded in the creation story. In the rhythm that God built into the world. A rhythm we tap into for emotional health and spiritual life. That’s the reason to Sabbath. But in Deuteronomy the command is grounded in the exodus story. In Israel’s freedom from slavery to Pharaoh and his empire. That’s a whole other reason to Sabbath.
So much of our unhappiness comes from comparing our lives, our friendships, our loves, our commitments, our duties, our bodies and our sexuality to some idealized and non-Christian vision of things which falsely assures us that there is a heaven on earth. When that happens, and it does, our tensions begin to drive us mad, in this case to a cancerous restlessness.35 Oh man, that phrase, “cancerous restlessness.” He continued: True restfulness, though, is a form of awareness, a way of being in life. It is living ordinary life with a sense of ease, gratitude, appreciation, peace and prayer. We
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Fast-forward to today: our “consumer” economy is now built around people spending money they don’t have on things they don’t need. And we’ve all heard how our apartments and homes are twice the size they were in the ’50s, while our families are half the size.11
The intentional promotion of the things we most value and the removal of everything that distracts us from them.
“Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.”
As Dallas Willard so astutely pointed out, the cost of discipleship is high, but the cost of non-discipleship is even higher.60 Yes, it will cost you to follow Jesus and live his way of simplicity. But it will cost you far more not to.
spiritual discipline of “slowing.”4 Ortberg defined it as “cultivating patience by deliberately choosing to place ourselves in positions where we simply have to wait.”
But here’s the deeper motivation: it’s wise to regularly deny ourselves from getting what we want,
New age aceticsm? But why?
A recent study from Finland’s University of Tampere found that happiness levels peak on day eight of vacation and then hit a plateau.19 The researchers recommended we take off one week every quarter (for those with the luxury of four weeks paid vacation time).
The end isn’t silence and solitude; it’s to come back to God and our true selves.
It isn’t Sabbath; it’s a restful, grateful life of ease, appreciation, wonder, and worship. It isn’t simplicity: it’s freedom and focus on what matters most. It isn’t even slowing; it’s to be present, to God, to people, to the moment.
Slow down. Breathe. Come back to the moment. Receive the good as gift. Accept the hard as a pathway to peace. Abide.
