What would it take to observe a Sabbath?

I have been reading Jacob Neusner's A Rabbi Talks with Jesus for my Daughters of Abraham book club. In one of his chapters Neusner exams the Jesus teaching about the Sabbath in light of his disciples gathering of grain on the Sabbath. Neusner reminds us that God created the universe and our earth in six days and on the seventh God rested.

As Neusner writes, we are like God when we too rest on the seventh day, on the Sabbath. To be like God we are to give over creating for enjoying and rejoicing, for resting and for prayer.

I have been thinking all day about what it would take for me to truly give over busyness and creating and working for only rest and being with creation. Would my Sabbath begin on Saturday evening and extend to sunset on Sunday? What about the joy I take in creating meals for my family on those evenings. These are  the two days a week when I have time to create something out of the ordinary, to try a new recipe, to look for something that takes longer than 30 minutes to get together. What about the projects I take on with my husband around the house and yard? I work from 8:00 to 4:30 or 5:00 most days. When would the house work and gardening and laundry get done? I would need to rethink what I do and make choices about what I don't do. A long walk outside feels in keeping with the Sabbath, but working out in the gym doesn't feel like it would fit. What about a bike ride on the Chester Valley Trail. Certainly, when I am biking on the trail I am enjoying the outdoors and being with my neighbors who have come outside. Of course Meeting for Worship makes sense, but what about reflecting and writing those reflections down? Driving out to pick up a gallon of milk might seem a stretch, but what about stopping in the library or Chester County Book Company to find another book to read and enjoy? What if it were another book by Jacob Neusner or one of the early Quakers? Does driving out to visit my mother-in-law or calling my mother on the phone constitute work, creation, or enjoying creation?

Then I began to wonder what it would take for my students to observe the Sabbath as something approaching a day of rest. We would have to adjust out expectations of them such that Saturday could be a day of recreation. This recreation would have to include  time for  errands, games, exercise and laundry .. and not homework! Their schoolwork and homework would have to fit into the work week--Monday through Friday only. And yet, by Friday afternoon every student (and adult) I know is ready for a break. I fear we haven't set their lives up to enjoy a true Sabbath. They do go to Meeting for Worship from 10:30 to 11:30. But after brunch we expect them to finish running any errands they might require or begin their homework. Sometimes we have Sunday evening lectures or performances. For these to happen, homework gets pushed into the afternoon. Is it possible for them to do no work, no sports practice, no performances from Saturday evening through sunset on Sunday or to set aside the whole day from sunrise to bed time on Sunday? I know we give our students time to pause; we have recess every morning (in high school no less). We require students to have a lunch period in their schedule. On Friday afternoons we pause for either an assembly or time to meet in advisee groups. All of these are times to catch our breath, to slow down, to consider and reflect, to catch up with a friend, to ask a question. And yet, what would we have to do for our students so that they might all observe the Sabbath, not fret about the paper due or test coming up on Monday, and not read their email?

Obviously, I don't have any answers for myself or my students and yet the questions won't let me go. What would it take, what choices would we make? Would we, would I choose a Sabbath? How would I achieve this enmeshed as I am in a busy community?

“Observe the Sabbath day by keeping it holy, as the Lord your God has commanded you. 13 Six days you shall labor and do all your work, 14 but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your ox, your donkey or any of your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns, so that your male and female servants may rest, as you do. 15 Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and that the Lord your God brought you out of there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the Lord your God has commanded you to observe the Sabbath day."

Deuteronomy 5:12-15

Freezing Green Beans and Reading Charles Wright

A week ago I finished reading Seamus Heaney's District and Circle (again), breaking my own rule that my first poet of the summer is someone I haven't read before. I found new poems to hold onto and visit again..."The Tollund Man in Springtime", "Planting the Alder", and "A Stove Lid for W. H. Auden" to name only those most present in my mind. The new poet for this summer is Charles Wright, named Poet Laureate in 2014. After a little research, I chose Negative Blue: Selected Later Poems. I think I chose it because it included his poems from his collection titled Chickamauga.  Many years ago I spent the summer reading Shelby Foote's Chickamuaga and Other Civil War Stories.  I have only read the first eleven of Wright's poems; I know I need to give him and his poems more time. But even the poems set in spring and summer such as "After Reading Tu Fu, I Go Outside to the Dwarf Orchard" have an autumnal feel. I feel detached, held at a distance by this poet contemplating what it all means in the second half of his life. . . what it all means through the lens of LaoTzu and the poets influenced by him. (When I think of Lao Tzu, I tend to remember the sense of humor and for Chinese poets I gravitate to Li Po).  I remember having the same reaction to Don Delillo's White Noise, and anything by John Updike. The sense of detachment and emptiness as emptiness (rather than emptiness as receptivity) in these first poems is out of synch with where I am, when I am.

Perhaps, I shouldn't have started my day in my garden watching bumble bees gather pollen from the liatris. Perhaps I should have skipped counting how many new blooms were on the Magnolia tree. Perhaps I should have started the day with the New York Times and the fighting in the Middle East, the downed plane in the Ukraine, the man killed by the Staten Island police.

Perhaps, I shouldn't have spent my day in the kitchen. Maybe, I could have been more ready for Wright. On the one hand, of what use is it for me to clean, blanch and freeze green beans I bought at the West Chester Grower's Market yesterday? I can for much less money (and time) buy frozen beans at the Acme. Thoughts like these might have opened the way for Wright's lines from "Easter 1989."

On the other hand, I could have spent my day reading something from the piles of books I have throughout the house; I could have spent the time exercising or writing college letters of recommendation for my students. I could have started my reflection on being Interim Principal. If I had a third hand. . . I would say to the other two hands . . .I spent my morning at my kitchen sink, snapping beans and watching "my" humming bird sip nectar from the bee balm Sarah planted in her seventh grade butterfly garden. In between beans, I rolled out the flaky pie crust I had started the day before (and yes a store bought crust is faster and sort of good). Then the crust sat in the fridge for an hour to rest --for better flakiness. The peaches macerated in their own juices which were then boiled down to a third cup of syrup. Peach and blueberry pie and green beans, one for tonight, one for this winter. 

While I worked I thought about how much pleasure I take from looking out my window at the life right there, how much creativity I bring to creating meals for my family, and how much I will enjoy going down to my freezer next winter to get a bag of my frozen beans for one of our favorite winter soups. At that moment I will remember the hummingbird, the sound of the lawn mower, the rooster down the hill and the mockingbird at the top of the Crimson Maple. 

This day, which included cleaning two bathrooms as well as the cooking and baking, brings to mind how much I delight in the witch's stories in Terry Pratchett's disc world series. Unlike the wizards, who mainly eat and argue, the witches do what needs doing, they pay attention, they are woven into life --individual lives and the web of life. Perhaps that's why I savored every page of Michael Ondaatje's Divisidero and had such trouble even finishing Snow Falling on Cedars. (However,  a very good friend tells me to give David Guterson another try).  I want what I read to connect me to life, not hold me at arm's distance, not wallow about death or immortality or numbness or regret or anomie. With bumblebees drunk on nectar who has time to do anything but be alive?

Fourier was right!!

As you may recall from earlier posts here, I enjoy the time I have in the summer to read widely and haphazardly. By way of disclaimer I do recommend all the books below. I no-longer bother to finish books that I haven't managed to engage with by 50-70 pages in no matter how well-recommended by my friends.

This summer my picks included South of Superior by Ellen Airgood. I picked up Airgood's book at one of my favorite independent bookseller's Mclean and Eakin in Petoskey, Michigan where I vacation with my family. Wherever I travel I try and read based on where I am located. Airgood's book set in the Upper Peninsula didn't disappoint me for thoughtful summer reading well tied to its/my location. And interestingly, it fit in well with one of the unexpected themes from the books I read-- finding solutions/building our lives by looking outside our hidden assumptions. The other fiction books included  Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Plan, Louise Erdich's Round House, and Patrick Rothfuss' What the Wise Man Fears. Kingsolver is a master of setting, especially in her books set in Appalachia. The main character Dellarobia, like the butterflies she loves is transformed and by the end of the novel well on her way to her own metamorphosis -- all because she was saw wonder in her own backyard. By the way I especially loved the scene in which the northern eco-warrior shows up with the top ten things to save the planet and she makes short work of his list as impossible for her family or anyone in their economic place. This summer I returned to poets I already loved taking Mary Oliver's Why I Wake Early and Seamus Heaney with me on vacation. For my soul I worked through the Book of Romans and the corresponding chapter in The Women's Bible Commentary. I also read Henri Nouwen's Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life.  For my non-fiction choices I started with Mary Cowhey's Black Ants and Buddhists and have begun but yet to finish Doris Kerns Goodwin's biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson ( this president was featured very colorfully in the movie The Butler) moved to Cathy Johnson's Now You See It: How Technology and Brain Science will Transform Schools and Business for the 21st century and finished with Roz and Ben Zander's the Art of Possibility. While I read Now You See it my son sat on the couch across from me reading The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brain by Nicholas Carr. We had a great time comparing notes and eye catching titles aside we found many things in common.

So what does the French philosopher Francois Marie Charles Fourier have to do with my summer reading? Whenever I have taught World History I tend to keep my students thinking and working at a 10,000-20,000 foot level focused on human interactions with the natural world and with other human populations. However, we do a couple of dives into more detailed looks at human ideas. One of them explores the trajectory from Jean Jacques Rousseau to Karl Marx. Fourier is one of the steps along the way. For those of you who aren't familiar Fourier is best remembered for his ideas on how to create harmonious, cooperative societies and for his thinking on feminism and human love. For him the greatest harm to the human psyche was separating our passion from our productive work. In his utopias people would choose what work they wanted to do that the society needed or wanted accomplished. One of his ideas that my students always enjoyed was the idea that because little boys like getting dirty they would be natural rag and trash pickers. Fourier recognized that for this society to work you needed a sufficiently diverse population to insure that all of the jobs got done. For him that number was 1620 individuals. As I read Cathy Davidson's discussion of the genius of Wikipedia and its truly democratic nature, I was struck by Wikipedia and other wikis and moocs as proof that Fourier was correct. Wikipedia thrives on the way it connects individual passions for any topic imaginable, to other people's love of editing, with those who want to improve the functionality or take on any number of the other hundreds of tasks needing doing and getting done through the Community Portal. All of this happens because people choose to engage. Twenty first century technology created the scale necessary for Fourier's ideas on harmony, collaboration and mutuality to thrive.

Focused Skiing

I have just returned from a wonderfully exhausting and renewing three days of skiing with my family.  For me, the beauty of down hill skiing is that it requires a high degree of focus. To not focus is to risk getting hurt. The past few days, every time my mind has wandered to something at work, I have found it very easy to push that thought aside and refocus on my body hurtling down the mountain on two skis. I am only an average intermediate skier with a healthy interest in NOT falling.

While sipping hot chocolate slope side I was reminded of Thomas Kelly's call for leading an integrated internal life as the best means for simplifying our lives.  Somehow or another skiing feels for me a bit of a metaphor for this. Skiing is a dynamic activity that demands coordinating a whole host of activities beginning with deciding what to wear and then over the course of the day constantly checking equipment. There is a constant feed back loop from my feet to my legs and torso to my brain.  Are my hips and shoulders pointing down the mountain. Is my right foot cramping (and why never the left foot?)? How are the Charley horses in my thighs? In the physical world there are the slope conditions. Is there ice on the trail ahead,  moguls (I hate moguls), sharp turns, or precipices to avoid (cliffs make me queasy)? On top of this there are the other people on the mountain. Where is my family? Who is moving around me? Is it a child? A teenage boy or other young male who may or may not have had a second beer on the chair lift? How is the visibility--there are few things as blinding when your are heading down a slope as skiing through a line of blasting snow making machines! Are my toes cold? I find I go from comfortable to cold in a heartbeat and once my toes hurt, my skiing becomes less effective --hot chocolate is always the solution so where is the nearest lodge?

Meanwhile, another part of my brain is reveling in the pleasure of being outdoors, enjoying the quiet and the natural world. The mid-westerner in me delights in the cold, the frosty trees, and icy creeks as I go whooshing past.  My spirit is focused and finds it natural to rest in gratitude in the present with my Creator. Though I have described all of these as separate and distinct thoughts, in truth, on the slopes this is all one singular state of being as integrated and natural as breathing. Now as I reflect on my skiing and because I am an educator, I am left considering how to lead my students to this place of simplifying their complex, dynamic external lives through focusing and integrating their internal life?