On rest

My year started with a book that came to me with providential timing.

Last year was a tough year. Really tough. I ended it thoroughly depleted; staggering into the Christmas break emotionally, spiritually and physically wrung out. More than ever, I needed a rest… a sabbath, if you will.

Enter: Sabbath, by Nicola Slee. Slee’s thoughtful and vulnerable book is based on a poem by Wendell Berry, which begins describing his journey into sabbath rest:

I go among trees and sit still.
All my stirring becomes quiet
around me like circles on water.
Wendell Berry, Sabbaths

Real rest requires an element of intentionality – a deliberate pause in order to find the stillness. As my exhausted brain worked through the mess of the year, it began to quiet as I allowed it to process, rejuvenate, recharge.

Reflecting on the book, and on my own relationship with rest, it occurred to me that sabbath actually has an element of work; it involves the work of resting.

To rest actively requires us to consider what has made us tired, and to sort through the chaff in our minds.

But fortunately, this quiet work of the sabbath comes with a reward.

After days of labor,
mute in my consternations,
I hear my song at last,
and I sing it. As we sing,
the day turns, the trees move.
Wendell Berry, Sabbaths

Doing the hard work of rest is valuable. It is also, at times, painful. As I took stock and reflected, I could see truths and realities in a way that I could not in the noise and busy-ness of life.

As I approached the end of my break, I wrote in my journal:

This year – more than ever – I have limped over the finish line, frailer and sicker than I have ever been.
Slee says that this is normal – sometimes to enter sabbath is to have it all crash down on you as your body catches up. But this year has been particularly torrid and I think this has had an effect. The last few days have been tough. I begin work again tomorrow and my body knows it. I don’t want to do it.
I need more time.
Even just little more time.
Leaving sabbath is difficult, and not just because we connect with ourselves and with God in it.
Leaving sabbath is hard because we return to a world we do not control, and which has marched on in our absence. Even if I was in control of my world (which I am not), returning is hard as it has grown out of my control in my absence.
While I have been in sabbath, I have been discovering (or rather remembering) some of my passions that bring me joy.
And that, I suppose, is good. Anxiety may be the price of leaving my sabbath woods, but a renewed sense of self and (hopefully) better tools to find rest again are what I take from it.

There are certain parallels between leaving sabbath and leaving the strangeness of this season, whenever that may be.

2020 has forced many of us into a form of sabbath; a mandatory degree of rest and reflection that we have not had before. In many senses, the year has been traumatic… But it has also been an opportunity to reset and renew our inner worlds.

Leaving this form of sabbath will come with its own challenges.

Leaving any sabbath is hard. But eventually the sabbath must end.

The key is to take its lessons and its energies to meet the new day.

Sunday is on the way

Each year I am struck by what a sense of isolation and helplessness the disciples must have felt on the first Good Friday and Holy Saturday.

All they had known for years came crashing down around them. Their messiah and deliverer died an ignominious death on a Roman cross.

The disciples had in their hearts a vision of political revolution; the establishment of an earthly kingdom. But what they had before their eyes was a crucified leader.

It is easy for us now, on Good Friday and Holy Saturday, to know that we are about to celebrate the resurrection. We know that we can celebrate His death on Friday because his resurrection on Sunday is on the way.

But in that moment, the disciples knew nothing of what was to come.

They hadn’t read to the end of the book – of the victory to come. And even if they had, it was a different victory than the one they had anticipated, and they could not have comprehended, with their religious-political mindset.

But Jesus did know the end of the story. He knew of the victory to come. He knew Sunday was on the way.

Despite our strange isolation this year, we cannot really fully understand what the disciplines went through on that first Easter. But we can empathise with the isolation and a sense of helplessness.

More importantly – we can remind ourselves that Jesus knows the end of the story. Isolation is not the end. Victory – in some form or another – is on the way.

Sunday is on the way.

On fear, sadness and COVID-19

In many ways, one of the saddest things about COVID-19 is the fear. The fear of each other, the fear of the future and the fear of being without.

I cried a little at Amman airport this morning when I saw two young children wearing face masks. Their parents carried on stoicly, but you don’t cover your children’s faces without being struck by some sort of fear (justified or not). It reminds me of the morning after the Finsbury Park mosque attacks. I was walking to the station and saw little boys and girls accompanied by their tired-looking parents. The children normally walked to school without adult supervision.

The parents were afraid. Literal survival was at stake.

There is something primal about the protection of a parent over a child. And in the case of COVID-19, it’s a risk that they cannot see nor fully comprehend. This event could still be anything and they don’t know how to protect their kin.

I also share in the fear. Today, I was nearly quarantined by flight restrictions. I would have been stuck outside of my home countries, without friends of family. In the hours when that seemed a real possibility, I was afraid. Even as I write this, waiting for the plane to take off, I am anxious.

But what of fear? Fear often comes from a sensible survival instinct, but there is also an element of sadness to it.

There is a sadness to it because a state of fear is your body telling you that something is not normal, is not safe.

Young children with their faces covered is not normal. It is not safe.

And in this case, the non-normal, non-safe state is such an unknown. If a lion is coming towards you, you know what you’re afraid of. In this very strange March 2020, we don’t really know what to be afraid of. Closed borders? Flu symptoms? Running out of bog roll? Each other?

Being afraid without fully knowing what to be afraid of is unusual.

Either way, this state is not normal. And it is not safe.

Yet we have Hope. “I lift up my eyes to the hills– where does my help come from?”

On the passage of time

There is a certain helplessness that comes with the passage of time.

“Time flies”, they said… but it never really rang true to me.

The older I get, the faster time seems to go. There’s a growing sense of running out of time.

When you are a child, the hours and days are endless. As a teenager, you can waste hours lying on your bed, doing nothing, and it costing you nothing.

Time no longer works like that for me.

Every day is full and somehow seems to have fewer minutes than the last.

It’s not a matter of not being in control. It’s that the march of time is speeding up.

And with it, my life.

It is perennially harder to find time for reflection, for prayer, for planning and for growth.

And when you blink, a month has gone.

It’s like being a passenger in a speeding tube of time.

There’s still so much to do, but so little time.

I wonder whether Jesus felt like this, approaching the end of his time on Earth. He had done so much… but did he have the feeling of running out of time as well?

Lent day 12, 2020. Amman, Jordan

On Ash Wednesday

From the love of my own comfort

From the fear of having nothing

From a life of worldly passions

Deliver me, O God

– Audrey Assad

Today is Ash Wednesday; the beginning of Lent.

Lent was (and is) not really something practiced in our church tradition. Pentecostalism was marked, amongst other things, by a desire to do away with many things that appeared liturgical or overly religious, and simply ‘follow the promptings of the (Holy) Spirit’.

So the Christian calendar (at least, apart from Christmas and Easter) was not something observed in our rhythm of worship. For its many wonderful qualities, I do think our tradition misses out on something by not observing some of these very old rhythms.

In my own situation, this Ash Wednesday, I am in a foreign country and away from friends and family. Perhaps as a result, I am acutely aware, maybe more than normal, of the significance of the season.

After all, by its nature, the season demands a certain amount of introspection and solitude.

Am I ready? I think of Him, I think of my faith and reflect on my shortcomings. I am grateful for His sacrifice.

Without Lent, without this season today, would I have this same sense of self-examination?

Likely not.

As the Teacher says in Ecclesiastes, “There is a time for everything under the sun”. And the reality is that this includes times of reflection and times of sorrow, along with times of celebration and times of joy.

Without the balance, we cannot appreciate the extremes.

So, today, I am grateful for Lent.