How can the simple (though not necessarily easy) practice of sabbath help heal the world? Sabbath is more than taking time off. It’s a basic life orientation toward busyness and fullness. Sabbath is the habit of resisting the hurry and worry, the acquiring and protecting that drives the economics and politics of the modern world. Walter Brueggemann has said that “In our own contemporary context of the rat race of anxiety, the celebration of Sabbath is an act of both resistance and alternative. It is resistance because it is a visible insistence that our lives are not defined by the production and consumption of commodity goods.” Sabbath is ceremonial, that is, it is a way we, as our ancestors did, seek to live more harmoniously with the rhythms of nature from which our lives come and to which they will return. Our key texts are Exodus 20.1-3, 8-11 and a reading from Thomas Berry’s book, The Great Work. Berry writes, “The historical and cultural accomplishments of the indigenous peoples of this continent are only now beginning to be appreciated and accepted into a general narrative of the human venture. The peoples who lived here first, with their unique experience of this continent, have much to teach us concerning intimate presence to this continent, how we should dwell here in some mutually enhancing relation to the land. . . . Some sense of this relation with the land can be gathered from the First Peoples’ ceremonial lives, for it is in the celebrations of a people that they participate most intimately in the comprehensive liturgy of the universe.” Find the sermon audio here.

When despair for the world grows in you, what do you do? When hurry and worry close in around you, what do you do? When you find yourself feeling thin, kind of stretched, like too little butter spread over too much toast, what do you do?

“When despair for the world grows in me,” writes farmer, novelist, and environmental activist, Wendell Berry:

[when] I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.

I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light.

For a time I, rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

When despair for the world grows in you, what do you do? When hurry and worry close in around you, what do you do? When you feel like too little butter spread over too much toast what do you do?

In his lyrical and memorable way, the poet, Wendell Berry, describes a practice that helps him come back to his senses when so much around him seems senseless. Berry describes a practice that helps him come back into the stability of his body when hurry and worry malform the mind and slides it into an insanity he knows he must avoid. Berry describes a practice that helps him come back into balance, when his life spins and tilts out of balance.

Yesterday, I stuffed too much into the washing machine. I was in a hurry. Part way through the wash cycle I heard a whomp, whomp, whomp; then no sound at all; then the alarm on the machine telling me that the load was out of balance. I reached in, moved things around, and started it again. A few minutes later: whomp, whomp, whomp. Same problem. Moving things around in an already stuffed washer was senseless. I had to slow down, remove some things, then start it again.

Most of us get pulled out of balance from time to time. We go, “whomp, whomp, whomp.” The alarm goes off, and if we’re savvy, we listen, we stop what we’re doing and rebalance our lives again. Too often, we don’t.

Today’s the second in a three part series exploring the three great spiritual practices. Last week we explored the importance of self-care as a spiritual practice. Self-care isn’t a luxury; it’s a necessity. It’s about tending our wellbeing; if we tend our wellbeing, chances are we’ll help tend the wellbeing of others and of the world. If we don’t practice self-care, our wellbeing suffers, we injure the parts of us no one sees—our inner lives. And when we wound what’s inside us or don’t tend the wounds within us, we can suffer “mental hellness” rather than mental wellness. We suffer. Everything suffers.

This week, we explore the nature and practice of sabbath, which is more than practicing a day of rest; it’s about an orientation or posture toward the gift of our lives; it’s about cultivating spiritual presence, balance, and aliveness; it’s about being people who are not so easily driven helter-skelter by the compulsions that disorder and imbalance our lives and screw up our world. Practicing sabbath is what Wendell Berry describes so artfully and memorably when he tells us what he does “when despair for the world grows” inside him.

“Remember the sabbath and keep it holy,” says Exodus, the book of the Bible from which one of today’s readings was taken. “For six days you shall labor and do all our work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God.”

Despair for the world will grow in you. Hurry and worry will close in around you. You will, from time to time, find yourself feeling thin, stretched, like too little butter spread over too much toast. You will go whomp, whomp, whomp like a washing machine out of balance.

What do you do then?

“Go and lie down where the wood drake rests”—or something like that; “come into the peace of wild things who do not tax themselves as you do;” “come into the presence of still water;” “rest for a time in the grace of the world”—or something like that.

“Remember the sabbath and keep it holy;” give yourself the gift of the attention and intention needed to cease from your working and doing and worrying; and if you will not give yourself the gift, or if parts of you rebel against the idea, maybe you’ll have to tell yourself that practicing a sabbath rest is not one of the Ten Suggestions; it is one of the Ten Commandments. It’s about living artfully, gracefully, wholeheartedly.

We modern people often chafe at commands. Few of us like being told what to do. We revel in our freedom. But freedom without limits isn’t necessarily good for us.

On my washer there are some instructions, among them, the words, “Do not overload the washer.” Kind of like a command I ought not to ignore. Those words could have told me how to avoid imbalance.

“Practice the sabbath. . . . For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day.”

This last sentence is important: “For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day.”

The wisdom the Bible itself wants to pass on to us is this: woven into the very nature of Nature is a rhythm, a pattern, a ceremony (if we’ll see it that way), that we cannot ignore without injury to ourselves and to Nature itself.

God, the Sacred Presence that is above and beneath, within and around all things is not exempt from this rhythm. God, the Divine Energy that holds all things together, abides by natural patterns. God, the Source and Goal of all things, acts and rests, rests and acts. And so, we too are urged with the most forceful language our ancestors could muster, to do what God does—regularly practice sabbath; intentionally practice a holy leisure; devotedly practice a sacred restfulness, to engage in the most mundane, yet holy, ceremony.

“When despair for the world grows in” you, “go and lie down where the wood drake rests;” wrap yourself up in a hammock; shut your eyes and do nothing for awhile.

When hurry and worry close in around you, “come into the peace of wild things,” enjoy a long and leisurely meal, visit a friend and talk about nothing in particular.

When you find yourself feeling thin, stretched, like too little butter spread over too much toast—remember that before there were electric lights that gave us perpetual day; before there was the internet that gave us access to everything; before there were cell phones that made us accessible everywhere, all the time, before a person could wake up in Davis and fall asleep in Dubai, our ancestors knew that work without rest and life without limits isn’t good for us; instead, the world has rhythms, patterns, and engages in the natural, ordinary ceremonies that foster balance and wellbeing.

But we too often ignore them. We ignore them at our peril.

In his book, The Great Work: Our Way Into the Future, another Berry, this time Dr. Thomas Berry—Christian theologian, philosopher, and architect of the modern environmental movement—reaches back into ancient wisdom to help us recover the rhythm of Nature so that we can find our way into a flourishing future.

Here’s my paraphrase of his chief argument:

Our Great Work is to recover the role of the human in the midst of Nature rather than the rule of the human over Nature.

Not only does our humanity depend on this recovery, but so does the planet itself—for the impact of human beings, in the relative brevity of our existence on this planet, has transformed the planet. We are, to quote Berry, “neither an addendum nor an intrusion into the universe. We are quintessentially integral with the universe,” (p. 32).

To do this Great Work, Berry argues that we have a lot to learn from our ancestors, and especially the indigenous peoples who inhabited the land for tens of thousands of years before the Modern era.

Maybe that sounds antiquated and idealistic, but I don’t know a futurist who doesn’t think that the past has something important to teach us, even if the only purpose of the past is to help us avoid the mistakes of history.

One thing we can recover from the past, says Thomas Berry, is the role of ceremony. Ceremony, and the sense of celebration that arises from the intentional acts we call “ceremony,” can help us recover the role of the human in the midst of Nature rather than the rule of the human over Nature.

Native peoples knew something about the kinds of ceremonies that can helpfully celebrate our role in the midst of Nature. They knew, says Berry, that the cosmos itself has the feel of celebration. And ceremony helped them enter into that ongoing cosmic celebration.

Native peoples, says Thomas Berry, seem, through their ceremonies, rituals, and practices, to show a particularly keen awareness of this, while many of us Modern people seem oblivious. Driven as we are, we seem to have lost our connection to the Earth, stars, and planets. We have lost the art of living ceremonially.

When was the last time you stopped to focus your intention consciously on something in the way Wendell Berry does in the poem? “I come into the presence of still waters and feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light”

When was that last time you did something like that?

When was the last time you had a little ceremony at dawn or dusk, at the solstice or equinox and marked the transitions of the seasons or even the day?

It’s little wonder that despair for the world gets into us. It’s little wonder that hurry and worry close in around us. It’s little wonder that, from time to time, we find ourselves feeling thin, kind of stretched, like too little butter spread over too much toast. It’s little wonder we can sometimes feel like a washing machine with too much stuff crammed into it till it goes “whomp, whomp, whomp.”

Some religious people have made sabbath practice an article of faith—something religiously serious people do, a way to honor God, a way to separate the sheep from the goats, those who are with God from those who are not.

Jesus didn’t practice the sabbath that way. For him, sabbath was an orientation or posture toward the gift of life, cultivating spiritual presence, balance, and aliveness, being people who are not driven helter-skelter by the compulsions that disorder and imbalance our lives and screw up our world. For Jesus, sabbath was about the art of living ceremonially.

Many Jews bring a sense of ceremony to the way they practice the sabbath day. That sense of ceremony for a single day teaches them (and us) how to carry that sense of ceremony to the other days—to the whole of life.

The same can be said for the native peoples of every land. First Peoples’ lives were always ceremonial—the Xiongnu of China, the Dinka of Africa, the Celts of Europe, the Aztec of Central America, the Sioux of the Great Planes, and the Patwin who once lived along the banks of what we now call Putah Creek. They all, before the Modern era, practiced the art of living ceremonially.

Sabbath, then, is an invitation to recover a sense of simple and ordinary ceremony that honors the patterns of the natural world and can bring us to our senses again, restore our sanity, and help us recover the rhythm of Nature so we can thrive—body, mind, and soul.

Sabbath, pausing to stop and do nothing, whether for a day or for an hour, is a way we can practice the art of living ceremonially, living as participants in the rhythms of Nature, the patterns of God, the ways of wellbeing. Sabbath is an orientation to life, a posture of reverence toward the universe, a participation in the sacred liturgy of the universe, the eternal song and dance and prayer of what is bigger than we are—galaxies and stars and nebulae, oceans and landmasses and climates, elephants and dolphins and snowy egrets.

Moonlight fades upon the western hills.

Sun, still hidden by tall peaks,

Blazes bright against the crest,

Rimming east with light.

These are the simple ceremonial words I’ve used often this last month as I begin my day—a poem I wrote, which was inspired by an email one of you sent me describing what you too love about the dawn. It’s an artful way of doing what sabbath is supposed to get us to do: pay attention, set intention, practice a little ceremony that honors the wonder of living.

It continues:

Dancing hummingbirds,

Enthusiastic squirrels,

Roosters reporting news to drowsy hens,

And birds—all these gorgeous birds—

Darting here and there

As if they’re late for breakfast.

I smile, full of it all.

This is, without a doubt,

my favorite time of day.

Ceremony without pomp and circumstance. Not formal. Not self-conscious. Utterly ordinary, simple, but fully alive to the wonder of living. It’s what I need to keep from going “whomp, whomp, whomp.” It’s one of the ways I practice staying connected to all that is beyond me and of which I am only a part.

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life or what my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake rests…

What do you do?

What can you do?

How might you live with a little more attention and intention?

How can you practice the art of living ceremonially, bringing more attention and intention to the utterly ordinary parts of you life, and by doing so, come back into your senses, recover your sanity, and heal your body, mind, and soul?