Once, when my wife, Gail, and I were hiking the high meadows of the Swiss Alps, we saw two farmers cutting the high-standing mountain grasses with scythes, a hand-mowing tool that has been around since ancient times. Their broad-sweeping movements seemed like the synchronous movements of dancers.
Drawing closer, we noticed that both paused periodically and produced from their pockets something resembling a flat stone. Then in the same graceful manner, they now drew the stones back and forth across the scythes’ blades. The purpose? To restore sharpness.
The sharpening done, each returned to the cutting.
Gail and I observed them repeat this process—cut and sharpen, cut and sharpen—several times: ten minutes (give or take) of cutting followed by five minutes of sharpening.
A dumb question: why waste five minutes sharpening the blades? We’re talking here about 20 minutes of unproductive time each hour. Why not keep cutting, get the job finished, and head home at an earlier hour?
Answer: because with every swing of the scythe, the blade becomes duller. And with the increasing dullness, the work becomes harder and less productive. Result: you actually head home much later.
Lesson learned: cutting and sharpening are both part of a farmer’s work.
Lesson applied: In my earliest pastoral years, I didn’t appreciate this cutting/sharpening principle. I’m embarrassed to admit that I usually gave attention to the sharpening (or the spiritual) dimension of my life only when I needed something beyond my natural reach or when I found myself knee-deep in trouble.
The cumulative results of a life lived like this became alarming. It led to dullness of the soul.
While talking a lot about God, I had very little practice in listening to him.
My work fell prey to mission-creep. I tended to become bogged down in matters of secondary importance, neglecting truly important things.
I often complained of fatigue: not only physical fatigue, but spiritual and emotional emptiness.
Sometimes I became flooded with temptations to envy, impatience, ambition, discontent, wandering thoughts.
I was too sensitive, easily rattled by criticism, disagreement, and the slights of people who seemed not to be on my side.
I often did not feel I was doing my best. I seemed to give God and the people a B- effort.
My prayers were shallow, not reflective of a man who was supposed to “walk with God.”
While most people complimented me as a good preacher and pastor, the fact was that I was not influencing many people toward a deeper commitment to Jesus Christ.
As time passed and I hit one too many “walls,” I began an earnest search for what was missing at the center of my life. If I could not identify it, I feared that I was not going to last. It was then I discovered a most important biblical law: Sabbath—holy time when the soul is sharpened.
Somehow the Sabbath idea had not come alive to me before. Sabbath was perceived as a wild Sunday of spell-binding preaching, growing crowds, and successful programming. I never imagined a Sabbath experience of majestic worship, joyful quiet (instead of noise), interior “conversation” and a reordering of the pieces of my life. No wonder I felt so messy. I knew none of these.
All this is the result of a wide-spread reluctance to take God seriously when he says there are times when work in the world must stop (really, really stop!) and be replaced by work in the soul.
Imagine what a Sabbath pause might look like. There would be 24 hours of relative quiet in which to escape the unrelenting busy-ness in order to listen to God; 24 hours of intimacy with those one loves the most; 24 hours to appraise the recent days and count one’s blessings and resolve one’s regrets; 24 hours to look forward and re-order one’s priorities and sense of direction; 24 hours to reaffirm true belief and obedience to God the Creator; 24 hours to rest, laugh, study, and play.
Simply imagining it causes me to breathe deeply and ask: What keeps me from this?
I was in my early thirties when this Sabbath-sharpening idea began to make sense. And it started not with Protestant or Catholic sources but by acquainting myself with Jewish thinkers.
Author and playwright Herman Wouk, an observant Jew, describes in his book This Is My God his life of faith and makes it clear that the Sabbath was at the core of his way of life.
Strength, Refreshment, and Cheer
“I can now tell (the reader),” Wouk wrote, “that (the Sabbath) day is the fulcrum of a practicing Jew’s existence and generally a source of strength, refreshment, and cheer.” That line certainly caught my attention.
“The great difference between the Puritan Sabbath and the even more restrictive Jewish Shabbat is an impalpable but overwhelming one of spirit. Our Sabbath opens with blessings over light and wine. Light and wine are the keys to the day. Our observance has its solemnities, but the main effect is release, peace, gaiety, and lifted spirits.” (italics mine)
Reread Wouk’s last four descriptors. When was the last time you ended a Protestant Sabbath (Sunday) and described yourself in such a fashion?
Wouk went on to describe a typical Sabbath in his Jewish family. Each week he arrived home—a New York City apartment—by sundown on Friday night.
“Leaving the gloomy theater (where Wouk worked), the littered coffee cups, the jumbled scarred-up scripts, the haggard actors, the shouting stagehands, the bedeviled director, the knuckle-gnawing producer, the clattering typewriter, and the dense tobacco smoke and the backstage dust, I have come home. It has been a startling change, very much like a brief return from the wars.”
Notice the description of the theater and its echo of the larger world in which he (and we) live. And then notice the ordered world found in his home.
His wife and his boys awaited his arrival. Soon after the family sat down to a splendid dinner “at a table graced with flowers and the Sabbath symbols.” Then—and I love this—Wouk touches each of his sons and blesses them. All of this is followed by eating, singing, conversation, and prepared questions. “For me,” Wouk says, “(Sabbath) is a retreat into restorative magic.”
Restorative magic: what a term.
Saturday, Wouk adds, is passed in much the same manner. There is a synagogue gathering and the embrace of the worshipping community. There is play in the park. There is togetherness. “On the Sabbath, he says, “(our boys know) that we are always there. They know too that I am not working, and that my wife is at her ease. It is their day.”
“It is my day too,” Wouk writes. “The telephone (think Blackberry here) is silent. I can think, read, study, walk, or do nothing. It is an oasis of quiet.”
When Wouk returns to the theater on Saturday night after Sabbath has ended, someone says to him, “I don’t envy you your religion, but I envy you your Sabbath.”
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks in his book Faith in the Future, writes not dissimilarly about his Sabbath: “Imagine the experience of coming home on Friday afternoon. The week has flown by in a rush of activity. You are exhausted. And there, in all its simplicity and splendor is the Sabbath table: candles radiating the light that symbolizes shalom bayit, peace at home; wine, representing blessing and joy; and two loaves of bread, recalling the double portion of manna that fell for the Israelites in the wilderness so that they would not have to gather food on the seventh day.”
Then, get this.
“Seeing that table you know that until tomorrow evening you will step into another world, one where there are no pressures to work or compete or distractions or interruptions, just time to be together with family and friends.”
Come to think of it, no one that I remember ever envied my Sabbath. Maybe it was because I had no consistent or well-ordered personal sharpening experience for anyone to envy.
An elder in one of my congregations once said to me at the end of a long, very busy Sunday morning: “I’m sure glad that God only insisted on one Sabbath each week. If he’d required two, I’d have a nervous breakdown.”
By contrast, Senator Joseph Lieberman, an observant Jew, writes in his book The Gift of Rest, “For me, Sabbath observance is a gift because it is one of the deepest, purest pleasures in my life. It is a day of peace, rest, and sensual pleasure.”
Explaining that last word, Lieberman writes: “When I said the Sabbath is sensual, I meant that it engages the senses—sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch—with beautiful settings, soaring melodies, wonderful food and wine, and lots of love. It is a time to reconnect with family and friends … with God, the Creator of everything we have time to ‘sense’ on the Sabbath. Sabbath observance is a gift that has anchored, shaped, and inspired my life.”
Is there anything about the way most of us Protestants and Catholics “do church” these days that can be likened to what Wouk, Sacks, and Lieberman have said?
In my younger days of inner disorganization, the nagging question became: if God intends there to be experiences of release, peace, gaiety, a lifted spirit—then how can I experience them?
I wish I could answer this question by telling you that I regularly take full 24-hour Sabbaths. That would be untruthful. But I have learned to insert genuine Sabbath “sharpenings” into my life even if they have usually been briefer than 24 hours.
The Personal Side of Sabbath
There are two sides to Sabbath: the personal side and the communal or public side where one engages with friends and congregation. Here I can only reflect on the first of the two.
In our home over the past many years, the starting point for each day has been a Sabbath-silence. We have learned the value of time in a private place. No noise, no interruptions, no distractions. In the past when there were children in our home, we simply arranged to find this time in morning’s earliest hours before they awakened. This, of course, meant going to bed earlier). And it actually worked for us.
Over the years I have come to guard those quiet moments as among my most precious treasures. Each morning the time is spent differently. But the goal is always the same. Again to quote Herman Wouk: “to find release, peace, gaiety and a lifted spirit.” The larger purpose? To prepare to walk through the coming day obedient to Jesus, useful to people, embedded (not insulated) fully in the larger world.
Thomas a Kempis said of reflective moments: “Be faithful to your secret place, and it will become your closest friend and bring you much comfort. In silence and stillness a devout person grows spiritually and learns the hidden things of the Bible. Tears shed there bring cleansing. God draws near to the one who withdraws for a while. It is better for you to look after yourself this way in private than to perform wonders in public while neglecting your soul.”
In these private Sabbaths, I have found a number of activities that are essential to my own day-to-day sharpening. They are my spiritual version of the sharpening of the farmer’s scythe.
• Vigorous repentance. I must start here because repentance is life-saving and heaven-opening.
I once thought that repentance simply meant that when you do something bad, you mention it, say that you’re sorry, and move on. But a revisiting of the Bible on this subject has moved me to understand that repentance is, first and foremost, an acknowledgement of that deeper pool of evil that lies resident in every one of us and which is ready to explode at any moment.
What a noisy life I live. How many unfinished thoughts fly away, never to be remembered again.
A deeper repentance means that I must examine my heart for such potential waywardness and renounce the tendency to compare myself with others, to explain away my failures, and to stop whining if someone isn’t merciful to me.
Repentance means that I have to present myself to God and speak the equivalent of Isaiah’s words, “Woe is me; I am a broken man.” This has required a painful humility, a regular readjustment. There remain many moments when a rebellious part of me still tries to avoid owning and assessing my own messiness (active and potential). The Sabbath experience—the sharpening of the blade—means this cannot be avoided.
• Immersion in the Bible. Each day I push myself to read it not as a preacher preparing talks for others, but as one hungry (sometimes desperate) for God’s kind and searching words.
I confess an unbridled love of the Bible’s stories, especially those of Jesus and his disciples.
And there are life-long favorite places such as the oft-read Psalm 23. I often sit quietly and repeat this Psalm over and over again.
With each repetition, I pause and brood over individual words: cool waters … darkened valleys … rods, staffs … banqueting tables … the qualities of goodness and mercy (what powerful words to a sinner like me). I love to imagine the great shepherd, Jesus himself, going before me: urging calmness in those green pastures, assuring me of his presence amid danger, swabbing my wounds with oil, serving me a healthy dinner while my “enemies” look on powerless to do anything.
• Reading the great spiritual masters. I’d never had time for those strange folk when I was young. But now I read them with great appreciation: Augustine, Lawrence, Fenelon, Fox, Thomas a Kempis. They speak to my soul. Quakers, Catholics, Puritans, monks, mystics. Each brings a fresh perspective and builds into me a balance of understandings of this immense God who will not be fully captured by any one tradition or theological perspective.
• Reflection. What a noisy life I have lived. How many unfinished thoughts have flown through my mind never to be remembered again. How many experiences have gone unevaluated in the past? How many times did I fail to take inventory of the day and squeeze events and conversations that might morph into wisdom? How often have I forgotten to express thanks? Reflection is the act of gathering these things and squeezing meaning and message out of them.
• Journaling. Among the most important daily exercises I ever undertook was the day (December 17, 1968) when I began describing myself on the pages of a notebook. Over the years these journals have included records of each day’s experiences where I heard (or missed) God’s voice, what was delightful or regrettable. My journals include prayers, quotes, Bible references, and comments made to me by “angels” in the course of the day. Just as Israel built memorials to God’s great acts and revelations, so my journals have been a memorial to God’s grace in my life.
• Worship. In Sabbath one must kneel before the Lord, assume that prayerful posture and reaffirm once again the words: “Worship the Lord with gladness; come before him with joyful songs. Know that the Lord is God. It is He who made us, and we are His; we are His people, the sheep of His pasture.”
In the act of worship—exalting God’s character, his mighty acts, and reliable promises—we are appropriately upsized or downsized, depending on who we think we are at the moment. More than once I have been painfully reduced to true size by a God who will not tolerate my self-centeredness. Then there have been times when I have been so low and this wonderfully gracious God has lifted me out of “that slimy pit” and filled me with a new song.
• Sabbath imagining. It’s often unappreciated, but the heavenly Father has provided us an imagination (an inner theatrical stage, if you please) where we can visualize scenarios of possible futures for ourselves. The long future (what sort of man might I be in ten years?) and the short one (for what must I prepare today?).
During my Sabbath moments, I quietly dream through the conversations I am scheduled to have. I often think about the tasks that populate my to-do list. As I imagine, I ask questions: How could I be useful in that situation? What might I say if he or she … Can I be a better listener? What word from God might come through me? It is in these imagining moments that God’s Holy Spirit paints possibilities on our minds.
And so it is with my Sabbaths. The inner blade is sharpened, and one re-enters the larger world with greater focus and spiritual energy.
I love the words of Rufus Jones, a biographer of George Fox, founder of the Quaker movement: “In all his planning and arrange-ments he exalted the place of hush and silence, and he taught his followers to prize the times of quiet meditation in their gatherings for worship, so that he left behind him a fellowship of persons who knew how to cultivate the interior deeps within themselves and who had discovered how to make their own approach to God without external helps.”
Along with Gail and me, George Fox would have loved those Swiss farmers.
Gordon MacDonald is editor at large of Leadership Journal and chancellor of Denver Seminary.
Copyright © 2011 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
