Chapter 1: Episode 8

The Map of Sabbath

This Sabbath map is a powerful guide for sustaining our life and others’, especially in the face of family responsibilities, work pressures, and financial anxieties.  Even more, this Sabbath map guides us to experience this day with a sense of our ultimate worth.  In Sabbath we experience our divine dignity, and then share that dignity with others.   And this Sabbath-way of experiencing life flows into our other days.

But what about all the other stuff in these Sabbath laws and stories?  Granted, these stories contain  ancient features that aren’t a part of our lives – laws about cooking fires, goats and sheep, looms for making cloth. 

We’re going to have to do some reinterpretation of these laws. 

But that reinterpretation actually doesn’t take us away from religion or diminish its power.  Rather, reinterpretation puts us in a long line of devout thinkers who have continually rethought how to keep Sabbath in the face of new circumstances.  (No cooking on the Sabbath?  Okay, but does microwave reheating count as cooking? No carrying a burden on the Sabbath. Okay, but can’t a wheelchair be pushed to synagogue?) 

Religious communities have always had circles of devout thinkers and debaters who reinterpret the claims of faith.  Jesus, indeed, was part of that long line of thinkers when he rejected oppressive Sabbath laws, saying, “The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath” (Mark 2:27).

Your Rational Decision about Life’s Rhythm

This may make you uneasy, and cause you to say, “Hey, can’t I have my rest, and holidays and Christmas carols without all this “God stuff”?

Yes, you can. . .

But look at the deeper power of the religious map. 

The Sabbath guides us to affirm the dignity of others – even the lowliest and laboring of animals.  We are called to rest and celebrate as a high command from Heaven that no one should violate, especially against others. 

And recognizing these religious rhythms gives your life more dignity.  This religious map says, “We are not just isolated human beings trying to survive, to get through each day in a blur of joyless toil.   No!  Our worth is based on a higher power no human can take away.  And we are called to pace our lives according to the very rhythms of this higher power.  We rest and celebrate with God, because “the Lord rested on the seventh day.”

What’s Next?

We’ve started with something obviously “real,” an aspect of life biological:  the human need for rest.  But we’ve gone way past the biological and onto the spiritual.  We’ve begun to examine the differences between understanding rest without religion, and understanding it from a religious perspective of shared dignity and sacred rhythm. 

And I’ve begun to encourage you to think more deeply about religion – not as discredited, pseudo-science or a series of false facts, but as a deeply symbolic map.  Maps may not look like what they depict but dismiss them at your peril.  You can lose your way in the wilderness.

The next trail also addresses something real and universal – our awestruck wonder before the sheer miracle of life.  While one need not be religious to experience that awe, I’ll frame this next topic with a spiritual word – that word is, “reverence.”

(Continued February 4, Chapter 2: Episode 9)