Quiet, unstructured time is not generally appreciated by children.
The long summer afternoons of my 1960s childhood were challenging to fill. To have hours without plans sent me scattering to find something to do. My father would be at work. My mother, often working from home, might have taken us to the town beach in the morning. My brothers and I would have played in and around the water, eaten our cream cheese and jelly sandwiches for lunch, then gone home to wash off the sand. And then the long afternoon would lay ahead of us. Unstructured.
At the height of a dull hot summer day, still and stifling, I might stare at my small bookshelf for some distraction, splay out on the floor with my coloring book, or head out the front door, grab my bike and ride down the few familiar roads looking for some neighbor girl playing listlessly on their swing set. A possible game of hide and seek, perhaps. Fetch with a dog, hopscotch or jacks in the shade if we were too hot. Absent a friendly distraction, I might sit alone on the front steps, willing for something interesting to happen. It rarely did.
It may be those few summer days with childhood boredom that remain with us; most of us grow up in this culture allergic to unstructured time. We share a founding myth of American life, that our nation was built by people who never stopped striving, never stopped clearing land, or moving west, or establishing small towns, or imagining great inventions of transport or manufacturing or institution. Never mind these stories told half-truths, that they ignore the indigenous, the enslaved and poor. Or those who failed. Or were harmed in the efforts.
The myth keeps getting repeated by families, teachers, and other story tellers. With generational repetition, and technological change, we have made a 24/7 culture, becoming slaves to the economic machine of our own design. We have exhausted ourselves, created huge income disparity, and, in doing so, poisoned the only planet we have.
You and I can’t turn the culture around. But as adults, we can choose not to be completely enslaved to the myth and the internal pressures. We can choose to live a life that seeks a rhythm of work and rest, of effort and recovery. We can choose to observe Sabbath.
During my childhood in Connecticut, a form of enforced Sabbath was actually state law since colonial days. Nicknamed “Blue Laws,” these laws still limited what could be bought and sold on Sunday. While churches were busy, and most gas stations were open, you couldn’t find large retail stores open at all. Good luck if you needed a pharmacy prescription, new pair of shoes, or a gallon of milk. You best have gotten it Saturday.
This isn’t the kind of Sabbath we need. The command for Sabbath, the fourth of the 10 Commandments we read about in the Book of Exodus in the Old Testament, is given by God in the story as an incredible gift. The small tribe of Israel, just led out of slavery in Egypt by Moses, knows nothing of rest and renewal. They had been slaves of the Egyptians for generations and were worked like property. To be commanded to rest after six days of effort was remarkable. It was a way to renew the body, spirit, family relationships and even their animals and the land they would one day occupy. It was a healing and restorative life God wanted them to live.
Could renewing a sense of weekly Sabbath in your own life be just the restorative, healing, counter-cultural move this Commandment envisions? What would having a regular time of rest, quiet, and contemplation do for you, for your relationships, for your body and mind? I promise you, it’s not easy. Ironically, this was made abundantly clear when, as a pastor, Sunday was an exhausting day of worship, education, and community care. My Sabbath? I tried to have a different day to be away, relaxed and unavailable. You can guess, in our culture, how often that was really possible.
I can’t imagine a more critical time than now (with the thrum of pandemic and environmental pressures, political dysfunction, and international war) for us to find a weekly period to rest, quiet ourselves and slow our bodies and minds. It might be Sunday worship in community, a regular afternoon away from your office, whole days you don’t think about work at all. Imagine what life could feel like if you didn’t feel imprisoned to production every day of your work week. We might feel a bit of personal freedom, the freedom God longs for the whole creation to know.
The Rev. Lynne Silva-Breen, M.Div., M.A., LMFT, served for over 20 years as a Lutheran parish pastor. She’s currently a family therapist/pastoral counselor and can be contacted at inspiringchange.us. She is one of several area pastors who write for “Spiritual Reflections.”
