This week, Joe and I talk a lot about Sabbath. Well, I talk a lot about Sabbath, to be honest, because it’s been something I’ve been thinking a lot about recently.
Two things have inspired me. First, I heard a great sermon on the subject a couple of weeks ago. And following up on that I read Abraham Heschel’s book, The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man. I am ashamed to say I’d never come across Heschel before. Definitely someone I should check out. Heschel’s book is a reminder that the Sabbath is a joyous escape from what he calls ‘the world of things’. He writes:
Reality to us is thinghood, consisting of substances that occupy space; even God is conceived by most of us as a thing. The result of our thinginess is our blindness to all reality that fails to identify itself as a thing, as a matter of fact.1
In the UK today I wonder if the Sabbath is either joyous or an escape. It seems to me to be just as bound up in thinness as any other day of the week. But Heschel underlines the Jewish understanding of the Sabbath as an encounter with time, rather than things.
The higher goal of spiritual living is not to amass a wealth of information, but to face sacred moments.2
The sermon, preached by a friend of mine, reminded me that, in Christian practice, the Sabbath is the start of the week. This is something that we kind of know theoretically, but in reality we all think that the week starts on Monday. But if we really stop and think about the change the early church inaugurated – moving their holy day from the Saturday to the Sunday – then that is something immensely significant. Most of us see Sunday as the ending of our week, we’ve got through the week, now we need to recharge our depleted batteries so we can get through the next one. But if we see it as the beginning, then our week starts with joy and rest. We start out on the week attending to time rather than things.
There’s much more I need to work through on this, not least the fact that my Sabbaths, like a lot of people’s, tend to be filled with tasks. But for the moment I’m going to start each Sunday with a reminder: the week starts now.