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Jürgan Mottman writes, “The true meaning of Sabbath is ecological. Related to it is also an esthetic aspect: Only someone who comes to rest and has nothing planned is able to perceive the beauty of things. He or she sees the flowers and the sunset, a painting or a vase or a beloved person with uninten-tional/ unexpected pleasure.”2
Karl Barth writes about the Trinity and beauty. He says, “God’s triune being ‘is radiant, and what it radiates is joy. It attracts and therefore it conquers. It is, therefore, beautiful.’ In other words, the triunity of God, its difference in unity, its relationality and harmony, its being and economy, its loving interweaving of persons (perichoresis) as if in a cosmic dance, radiate beauty.”3 The
Sabbath is a day when we enter a dance with God and others and experience a beauty that takes our breath away.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Beauty is a given that reflects a form created by God. Which sentence strikes you as more true? The first sentence reflects an assumption that our take on beauty is highly individualistic and subjective. This is the most common view of beauty—it is subjectively constructed by each individual.
Beauty is not under our control and mastery—we cannot easily define it and own it. But when we encounter it, we are its servant.
According to Karl Barth and Hans Urs von Balthasar, “God’s beauty is God’s power to attract, to give pleasure, to create desire, to awaken joy and wonder.”6
What most awakens desire, joy, and wonder for a Christian? Nothing in creation opens the heart to the presence of beauty like the incarnation.
We can approach beauty only through awe. Awe enables us to be both humbled and bold. Artists I have spoken to tell me that when an idea comes for a painting, a play, or a song, there is a sense of receiving something that is not theirs, yet is entrusted to them and demands engagement.
God intends the beauty in nature to arouse us and to capture our hearts to desire him. This requires opening our senses to beauty.
Diane Ackerman writes, “The senses don’t just make sense of life in bold or subtle acts of clarity, they tear reality apart into vibrant morsels and reassemble them into a meaningful pattern . . . the senses feed shards of information to the brain like microscopic pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. When enough ‘pieces’ assemble, the brain says Cow. I see a cow.”8
But what do I love when I love my God? Not material beauty or beauty of a temporal order; not the brilliance of earthly light, so welcome to our eyes; not the sweet melody of harmony and song; not the fragrance of flowers, perfumes, and spices; not manna or honey; not limbs such as the body delights to embrace. It is not these that I love when I love my God. And yet, when I love him, it is true that I love a light of a certain kind, a voice, a perfume, a food, an embrace; but they are of the kind that I love in my inner self, when my soul is bathed in light that is not bound by space; when it
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We crave reality—both pain and pleasure—so much that many young people cut themselves, saying, “I just wanted to feel something.”
Sabbath is not a break from work; it is a redefinition of how we work, why we work, and how we create freedom through our work.
The core of all play is linking what is known (past) to what is yet to be created (future) with the freedom to risk, to fail, and to recreate.
freedom scares us. We demand freedom, yet we fear the risk required to recreate in a manner that has such openness, vulnerability, and potential for failure.
Diane Ackerman playfully writes about the origins of our word play. She says, “In Indo-European, ple-gan (the word for play) meant to risk, chance, expose oneself to hazard. A pledge was integral to the act of play, as was danger (cognate words are peril and plight). Play’s original purpose was to make a pledge to someone or something by risking one’s life.”4 If one can’t lose, then it is not play.
Play redistributes power and gives the opportunity for convention to be reconfigured by the unexpected and the inconceivable.
Yet as much as we love the underdog, we don’t want to be one. We’d rather be the fat, privileged, and powerful; yet we justify our struggle by seeing ourselves as equally disenfranchised. It is a no-win situation, so we project our ambivalence to a team or a contest rather than facing the contradiction in our own situation.
The weight of life, sometimes, makes it easier to escape personal risk and to enter vicariously the risks of others.
Play is not diversion, if it is truly risky.
I want the tidy and true; I crave the wild and unknown.
There is meant to be more risk and danger on the Sabbath than any other day. It is the risk of playing with God communally amid his creation, aroused by sensuality, and open to the terrifying presence of the Trinity.
Heresy is so dangerous not because it is ridiculously false, but because it is deceptively almost true.
C. S. Lewis captured this well when he wrote, “There comes a moment when the children who have been playing at burglars hush suddenly: was that a real footstep in the hall? There comes a moment when people who have been dabbling in religion . . . suddenly draw back. Supposing we really found Him? We never meant to come to that! Worse still, supposing He had found us?”5
Belden Lane offers a terrifying and thrilling proposition: perhaps God is truly playful. When we experience God’s absence, perhaps God is “like a mother playfully hiding from her child or a lover playing hard to get, God hides from those God loves, occasionally playing rough for love’s sake. The purpose of God’s apparent absence, of God’s hiding, is to deepen in the lover a longing for the one loved, to enhance the joy experienced when fear dissolves and the separated are rejoined.”6
we don’t like play, especially when it has to do with faith. Instead, we want the tried-and-true, the established and fundamentally solid. It is just too much freedom and risk to play with God.
Playing is failing—at least failing so many times that we succeed only by the gift of grit and desire that is the real point of all play.
To endure and to grow in desire is why God our mother hides and waits for our fear to rise.
God knows our frailty and our courage and never confuses one for the other and knows how to comfort and call forth when we would prefer God to simply answer us as we desire.
More than any other purpose, God plays for the victory of union. We seek and hope to be reunited.
The deepest delight is to participate with another in a delight that we have had a small hand in bringing to pass.
To create opportunity for another to know joy is regenerating both for the giver and for the one who receives, and the combined joy is a gift we return to the Creator for offering us such bounty in his creation.
Regeneration requires giving away for new growth to spring forth.
Abraham Heschel warns us that the Sabbath is “not a day to shoot fireworks or to turn somersaults, but an opportunity to mend our tattered lives; to collect rather than to dissipate time.”8
Creativity risks being foolish—to do the tried-and-true is to repeat convention with no possibility of shame.
It is a simple principle: we get of God what we desire. The more we desire, the wilder the journey becomes.
How do we go to the party when we have known such loss?
If you are living in any manner that is a threat to the kingdom of darkness, then you are under assault. Nothing wears our hearts down faster or deeper than division in our closest and dearest relationships.
Divisions always lead to disinformation that serves to sustain our just right to see ourselves as the victim, the righteous one.
Accusation is the tool of evil that deepens every division.
The bitter tar of accusations will, over time, be the residue that steals, kills, and destroys beauty. The lungs were not meant to suffer such an infusion of darkness.
Division in relationships is inevitable in a divided world, as divided people who are at odds with our own deepest desires.
One cannot create without pretending. Pretending is risking the status quo—turning from the past to create a new future, dreaming what has not yet been for the sake of an unseen glory. It is allowing the “not yet” to be more real than the “is.”
Curiosity is a gift of the Spirit. It loves to be taken as a guest into the chambers of wonder to be humbled and lifted up only to ask, Is there more?
Ambition leads to the demand for the shortest path between points to gain the most in the least amount of time; wonder calls the heart to explore the unexpected, nonlinear paths that often create a new unity that could not be expected when one first began.
Madeleine Bunting names our problem with human sustainability. She says, “Human sustainability lies in the question ‘Who found time to care for whom?’”4
Care can seldom, if ever, be purchased, because it requires a commitment of honor. To care means to tend to something with diligence and delight.
There are two categories of destitution that are real for the middle class: 1) the emptiness of an uncertain future and 2) the emptiness of the unrealized present.
Envy is the craving to possess what another owns in order to fill our desperate emptiness.
market-driven economies depend on this desire for their impetus to sell the next best thing. When one looks deeper into the dark hole of envy, it is far crueler than merely the desire to better oneself.
