Sabbath
Drinking form the Living Spring, remembering that we are not God
Temptation comes.
In 2024, it often comes to me via email. An organization or ministry we love has invited me to give a talk or a retreat. Or, a new contact sends a sincere, Spirit-filled inquiry about coming to Metanoia on retreat. Sometimes it’s news of an upcoming conference or workshop, or even simply a huge sale on some needed farm tool. None of these things are bad, of course. I consider each of them good, and each bears a potential gift in its own way. In this season, I’ve come to recognize these as temptations by the response I feel in my body and psyche to a new opportunity. When I feel either a quality of grasping (I don’t want to pass this up! We might not get another chance!) or of urgent elation (This is amazing - we need to change our commitments to make this happen!), I know it’s time to take a deep breath, call upon God, and let go of my own agenda. Then I either delete the email or send a reply - ‘Thank you for the invitation/inquiry. We’re on sabbatical in 2024 and would love to connect in 2025….’
When I send a message like this, I often feel a little ‘death’ inside my psyche. I don’t like saying no to good things, and sometimes I feel a fear of missing out or being left behind in some exciting new project. Yet, I’ve come to believe that saying ‘no’ is one of the most spiritually potent actions I can take this year. It’s an essential aspect of being on sabbatical.
How religious organizations (and communities) die
When we began Metanoia in 2017, Lisa and I committed to taking a sabbatical - that is, a year of sabbath - every seven years1. We did this as part of a visioning process where we discussed our observations that many organizations, religious as well as secular, tend to veer off course and lose track of their original founding vision. Christian organizations may incorporate around a mission that is (originally) divinely guided, yet over time the leaders and membership slowly lose the ability to listen to the Holy Spirit. The organization, imperceptibly at first, shifts its emphasis towards the accomplishment of its own goals. These appear (and usually are, at the outset) to be in service to God, but over time the emphasis can slide to being in service of the organization itself. We begin seeking to serve Christ, but a decade into the project enormous energy is going into keeping the institution alive for its own sake. Because of the goodness of the original mission, it can be exceedingly difficult for the leadership of an organization to recognize this shift.
Our Metanoia board member Simon has founded several non-profits, and he believes that as soon as a non-profit is incorporated, an additional ‘ego’ enters the room. The non-profit becomes a sort of ‘entity2’ that has its own will and agenda. Like a living creature, the non-profit doesn’t want to die, and without the diligence of its board and staff, it will tend to grow over time and begin to drive and direct the energies of all involved. While no individual person controls the direction of the nonprofit, over time the institution itself begins to influence the thought of the people involved in order to ensure its own survival.
I’ve seen this happen in many organizations and ministries that were founded with high ideals. While it’s hard to pinpoint exactly how or when an organization loses its spiritual center, it’s more straightforward to recognize the symptoms that this has happened. The members seem increasingly calculating, fearful, or burnt-out, as if they are running on self-will. There’s a lack of vital energy in the speech or writing that comes from the organization. If it was founded by a charismatic leader who has died, the organization might focus on consolidating and defending the leaders old teachings. Everything has a bit of a hollow quality. While the Spirit brings life in every moment, the organization may no longer be able to hear the Holy Spirit at work in present reality. It may collapse into either worshiping an idealized past (the conservative temptation) or worshiping an idealized future (the liberal temptation).
Bottling the waters of life
“Let anyone who thirsts come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as scripture says: ‘Rivers of living water will flow from within him.’” John 7:37-38
I liken this degradation to drinking bottled spring water. There’s nothing so refreshing as finding a wild spring, and drinking directly from its clear waters. When I’ve been fortunate to drink directly from mountain springs, I feel an astounding energy and vitality fill me as the water flows down my throat. It’s possible to fill a water bottle (or many huge jugs) from a spring. I can walk away from the spring and carry that water along, enabling me to hike many miles away and still be sustained by water from the same spring. Yet, over time, the water becomes less fresh, and it looses some of its vitality. Even when it is still potable, it has ceased to become living water. It may sustain life, but it does not grant radiance. If I’ve got a hard goal in mind - say, hiking to a set viewpoint or camp many miles away, I might walk by another living spring, sipping on my bottled water as I go. Eventually, any bottled water will go stale. Left along in a container long enough, once pure spring water will start to grow algae and become toxic to drink.
This is akin to how religious organizations lose their life. When members end up serving the organization first, and God (usually unconsciously) becomes secondary, we have lost access to the Eternal Spring of divine life. We slip into serving an idea of God, or an idea that came from God, rather than remaining in dynamic relationship with the Living God. At first, it’s a slight loss of spiritual energy and truth - like sipping from bottled water that’s a few days old. As time goes on, the water becomes ever more stale, and our energies and efforts become ever more distant from the God who motivated our beginnings.
The answer, of course, is to keep returning to the Spring.
Sabbath: Returning to the Wellspring
Unless the Lord build the house,
they labor in vain who build.
Unless the Lord guard the city,
in vain does the guard keep watch.
It is vain for you to rise early
and put off your rest at night,
To eat bread earned by hard toil—
all this God gives to his beloved in sleep. -Psalm 127: 1-2
As I understand it, the Jewish practice of sabbath is less about ‘rest’ and more about refraining from work as a way of remembering that God is the Creator of all. While we spend the other six days shaping the word around us, on the Sabbath we do no work as a reminder that God is the ultimate Creator, and all other efforts flow from God and depend upon God for their success3.
Sabbath, then, is an opportunity to return to the wellspring of Divine Life. It is sanctified time, and to enter into it is to remember that God is the source of all life, and of each of our days. On a day of Sabbath, we turn to worship, praise, and reflection on God’s goodness. We refrain from work, to remember that only the work that flows from closeness to God will be spiritually fruitful. My ego is regularly tempted to ignore the limits of a Sabbath’s rest to stay productive. There’s always something that needs tending - either tending to the spiritual needs of others or to the physical needs of the homestead. By saying ‘no’ on a Sabbath, I force my ego to acknowledge that I can’t possibly save everyone, or everything, or even create perfect order in my own life. I can only do my best, and then let go and return to God in humility and trust.
In addition to reminding us of God’s providence and sovereignty, I’ve found that keeping Sabbath also helps change my perception of time. The weekly rhythm becomes a sort of ‘going forth’ from Sabbath (and from Sunday Eucharist, the spiritual heart of our Sabbath observance as Catholics) into a time of labor and productivity. As the end of the week nears, I find my heart orienting towards the return to the next Sabbath (and Sunday Eucharist). It reminds me of the cycles of night and day, and of breathing in and breathing out. There is rest and return, then going forth and creative labor, followed again by rest and return. Again and again, the cycle continues. It’s ultimately not about getting somewhere else in some future time. Abundant life comes from living more deeply into each cycle of rest/return and labor, with ever greater trust and reverence.
Shemitah - The Year of Sabbath
For six years sow your fields, and for six years prune your vineyards and gather their crops. But in the seventh year the land is to have a year of sabbath rest, a sabbath to the Lord. Do not sow your fields or prune your vineyards. Do not reap what grows of itself or harvest the grapes of your untended vines. The land is to have a year of rest. Whatever the land yields during the sabbath year will be food for you—for yourself, your male and female servants, and the hired worker and temporary resident who live among you, as well as for your livestock and the wild animals in your land. Whatever the land produces may be eaten. -Leviticus 25: 3-7
However imperfectly, I’ve been keeping weekly Sabbath my whole life. What is new this year is that our family is seeking to practice the Biblical Shemittah, or ‘year of release’. We don’t have any close precedent for this, so it’s a working experiment. As we’ve prayed and reflected on how to keep a seven-year Sabbath or ‘sabbatical’, we’ve come to realize that we can’t act as if it’s Sunday for an entire year. We still need to work. However, we’re hoping and praying that we can learn this year to work in a spirit of rest, radical trust in God, and deeper prayer and surrender.
To keep the ‘Year of Release’, we’re letting go of our usual commitments in both our Metanoia ministry, and in our homesteading. Practically, this means:
We are not accepting guests for our typical ‘sharing in community life’ retreats/homestead stays. However, we are welcoming guests to come and camp in a ‘silence and solitude’ retreat, where the guests are self-sustaining other than sharing in our liturgy of the hours.
We are not accepting a cohort of long-term guests/interns/apprentices this year, something we did in 2023 and hope to do regularly in future years.
We are not facilitating any retreats in 2024, either at Metanoia or off-site.
I am not accepting new people for spiritual direction, though I am honoring my commitment to those I’ve already been working with in spiritual direction.
Both Lisa and I will have additional solo retreat days for more intensive prayer, and we will have monthly days to retreat and pray together about God’s will for this ministry.
We are not slaughtering any animals on the homestead this year. Last year, we raised enough meat to cover two years-worth of consumption.
We are only planting nitrogen fixing plants and cover crops in our gardens. We grew enough in 2023 to provide much of our needs in 2024.
We are increasing our wild food harvesting (which is permitted in the Old Testament Shemitah!) to fill the gap of our food needs created by not planting a garden.
We are eschewing new building projects/infrastructure development on the land, though allowing ourselves to plug away at unfinished projects from the previous year.
We are each doing a focused spiritual study project, with more time for prayerful inquiry than in a typical year.
We’re engaged in a seven-year prayerful review of Metanoia, and a prayerful visioning of the next seven-year cycle.
Taken as a whole, it’s a year to rest, reflect, listen, and return to a stance of more deliberately honoring God as Creator. It’s something we’re doing for ourselves, but also for the land we’re blessed to steward. It’s our attempt to break the spell of organizational ‘mission creep’ and the tendency for any human effort to lose track of its need for divine grace. At times when I’m caught in my egoic/false self, it feels like we’re doing something very foolish, and perhaps fatal, by ‘letting our foot off the gas’ just when our life and ministry seemed to be picking up strong momentum. Yet when we pray and return to a state of trust, this is exactly the time when we need to let go and rely ever more fully on God’s grace. When all is said and done, if this project in lay contemplative Christian community is not sustained and guided by God, I don’t want it to continue. If it is sustained and guided by God, we have nothing to fear and much to gain by embracing a ‘year of release’ where we return our efforts and our lives to the mercy of our Creator.
The world is on fire right now, and in response to each new crisis (of violence, of political chaos, of the rise of authoritarianism, of diseases both chronic and acute, of environmental destruction, of injustice, etc), there are always calls for more effort, and more reform. While in many circumstances it may be noble to respond to a crisis with doing our part to help, in the bigger picture I wonder if responding with more human will and effort is actually part of the problem. One of the guiding principles of the modern world4 is that we’re able to perfect the world by human effort. An older world view, the Biblical and classical Christian world view, ensures us that this is simply not true. There’s no simple ‘solution’, but the root of the problem is a forgetting of our true relationship with God as Creator and source. The practice of Sabbath, both weekly and every seven years, is one simple step of return to the source of all Life, all enduring peace, and true rest.
If you do the math we’re actually a year behind in this first cycle - seven years (not six) on to one year off.
I believe this is a helpful metaphor, not a metaphysical reality as if an angel or demon where being created….
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel beautifully articulates this Jewish understanding in The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man (1951)
And the post-modern world, and the post-post-modern world or whatever it is you call our current era.
Thank you for sharing these most inspiring insights. Think I’ll be coming back to this post often.