Message for Worship at West Richmond Friends Meeting, 1st of Ninth Month, 2024
Speaker: Welling Hall
Reading from Black Liturgies, Cole Arthur Riley
Loving God,
We confess that we are so accustomed to pushing through an exhausted state that we come to expect the same from those nearest to us. We mirror the demands made of us and dissociate from the reality that these demands have harmed us, have left us anxious and unwell. Reorient our souls toward more than self-care. We want more for one another than the same expectations that haunt us, the same brutal experience of living within the systems of this world. Free us from resentment and envy as we bear witness to the prophets in our lives who practice rest and boundaries well. Let them be our guides into deeper freedom. Help us to never get used to being used. We were made for more. And together we possess the mysterious power of regeneration wrapped up in our bones. May it be so.
Reading from Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu
Chapter 16 (short excerpt)
Empty yourself of everything.
Let the mind rest at peace.
The ten thousand things rise and fall while the Self watches their return.
They grow and flourish and then return to the source.
Returning to the source is stillness, which is the way of nature.
Good morning, Friends! It is truly a truly joy to be with you here this morning on this side of the projector :-) on the other side of the projector.
This Labor Day weekend I want to talk with you about Sabbath and rest, those holy and spiritual practices that are more deeply embedded in some faith traditions than others. Together in this room, I’m fairly confident that we have collectively experienced the kind of culture that Cole Arthur Riley names in this morning’s reading when she talks about pushing through exhausted states that leave us anxious and unwell.
And we are also here, I imagine, because of the conviction that there is more to life than constant busy-ness. Don’t the world’s great mystics and spiritual traditions have something to say about that? This morning I want to briefly mention three: Judaism, Taoism, and Quakerism.
The Hebrew word for rest is menuha, although it is better translated as joyous repose, tranquility, or delight. The key idea is that Creation was not fully finished until God rested. God did not finish Creation and then rest. Rest is part of the fabric of Creation. Made in God’s image, human beings are also called to balance labor with repose that delights in the world. I hear the poet singing:
Glory be to God for dappled things!
Rabbi Abraham Heschel describes the Sabbath as a Cathedral in Time - a sacred, inviolable day carved out for enjoying the fruits of labor – and doing so, religiously, every week in order to honor both God and God’s creation.
The creating and liberating God, who has freed human beings from bondage, invites us to Sabbath. God intends that all of life be meaningful to all human beings. The injunction of the commandment is not only to rest ourselves, not only to allow our entire community to rest, but to facilitate communal rest. Together. It would be cheating to ask or demand that someone else work on our behalf during the Sabbath. And, by extrapolation, striving to acquire machines that can do every conceivable labor for us, even jobs that we would not do without those machines, would also seem to violate the meaning of Sabbath.
One final thought about the Jewish conception of Sabbath is that genuine repose and delight are not possible if human beings experience the bulk of life as meaningless drudgery. Again, in Heschel’s understanding, every day of the week is made to serve the glory of the Sabbath and, if we are so exhausted by the workaday world that we are unable to enjoy and take delight in Creation — or so exhaust others that they are unable to delight in Creation — something is seriously wrong in the systems of the world and must be addressed as an urgent matter for Spiritual repair. This too is a theme of Cole Arthur Riley’s confession. And the reason that I am preaching this sermon on Labor Day.
A tool of Spiritual repair that I regularly lean on is my practice of qigong, an ancient Chinese form of moving mindfulness that is the mother of Tai Chi and is deeply entwined with Taoist philosophy. In both qigong and Taoism, rest is not seen as mere inactivity, but as a crucial aspect of harmonizing body, mind and spirit, restoring vitality, and realizing a more natural, we might even say ergonomic, way of being.
There are many ways in which this worldview embraces or cultivates rest. In both qigong and Taoism, stillness and quietude are essential for allowing the body and mind to deeply relax, rejuvenate, and heal. Taoism, with other Eastern spiritualities, teaches us that when we still our disordered desires, the authentic, true self awakens in love and compassion as its natural movement.
By letting go of excessive thinking, striving, and attachment, one settles into a restful state of openness and flow. We will practice that in a bit with the Meditation on breathing before we center down into Waiting Worship.
Taoism emphasizes the principle of wu wei, or the art of effortless action, which is a state of being in harmony with the natural flow of things without striving or forcing. The priority is patience and mindful observation rather than productivity. This restful approach allows one to conserve energy and act with greater ease and effectiveness.
Taoism also sees humans as embedded in the natural world, and encourages aligning oneself with nature's rhythms, which include regular periods of rest, stillness, and renewal. Spending restful time in nature is a common Taoist practice, well aligned with the Sabbath principle of taking delight in Creation.
So, how is it that our Western culture seems so removed from the Spiritual embrace of Sabbath and rest that are intrinsic to the mysticism embraced by both Judaism and Taoism? This remove, I believe, is one of the ways in which Christianity has missed the mark. Quakers, too, have historically followed the precept that the Old Law had been fulfilled by Jesus on the Cross. In other words, the Old Law and the Old God of the Old Testament had been superseded by the New and Improved God of the New Testament. To quote a 17th century theologian “when the Sabbath lost its force it forfeited the name, therefore ought not so to be called: and so having lost both force and name, it has become nothing at all but a meere Idoll.”
Just as Quakers have rejected sacraments like the Eucharist because Christ commanded his disciples to remember him whenever they ate and drank, we Quakers have preached that every day is holy and no day should be set apart from the others. Quakers argued that Christians should at all times, not one day each week, be aware of their union with God. Rest, they argued, would be found in their faith in Jesus, echoing words from the Gospel of Matthew:
Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.
Yet, the early Quaker emphasis on rest at the end of days was not accompanied by an emphasis on liberative rest. Indeed, Benjamin Franklin's notorious remark, recently paraphrased by a prominent politician at a certain convention, that “there will be sleeping enough in the grave” could have been made by an early Friend.
Even so, despite the absence of developed Quaker thought on restorative or liberative rest there is an abundance of Quaker thought that aligns well with both menuha (delight in creation) and wu wei (effortless action). For example, our testimony on simplicity invites Quakers to remove ourselves from crass materialism in order to liberate ourselves and others from anxieties and inequities. The practice of extended silent prayer and holy listening in Quaker worship in order to hear the promptings of the spirit and benefit from continuing revelation aligns with the idea of creating some peace within the noise of the world so that we can truly attend to the Divine. The words of the Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier are often quoted:
And so I find it well to come for deeper rest to this still room,
For here the habit of the soul feels less the outer world’s control;
At the same time, there is much within Christianity and the Religious Society of Friends that continues to militate against the concept of Sabbath rest. Rather than practicing menuha (delight in creation) or wu wei (the art of effortless action), we Quakers are predictably driven to productivity. If we have rejected turning our lives into a giant shopping spree, we are nonetheless tempted to pack every waking minute with urgent activities that must be done now. The goal of a simple life with ample time to enjoy the fruits of creation and to attend to the sacred too often feels elusive. As Cole Arthur Riley reminds us, rest requires community acceptance and support as well as individual intention. A national holiday does not, in fact, make it so.
Still, the world’s faith traditions and our own intuition keeps nudging us to embrace a healthy spirituality that can embrace effortless action, can balance chores and delight, can balance grief for the world with resting in the grace of the Goodness Beyond Being, the Beloved, and the Holy Spirit. I will close this morning with a poem by Wendell Berry that celebrates both menuha and wu wei.
The Peace of Wild Things
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be
I go and lay down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Bibliography
Berry, Wendell. “The Peace of Wild Things.” Scottish Poetry Library (blog). Accessed June 12, 2024. https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/peace-wild-things-0/.
Heschel, Abraham Joshua. The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005.
Poetry Foundation. “Pied Beauty by Gerard Manley Hopkins.” Text/html. Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation, June 11, 2024. Https://www.poetryfoundation.org/. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44399/pied-beauty.
Primus, John. “Sunday the Lord’s Day as a Sabbath: Protestant Perspectives on the Sabbath.” In The Sabbath in Jewish and Christian Traditions, edited by Tamara Eskanazi and et al., Chapter 8. New York: Crossroad, 1991.
Riley, Cole Arthur. Black Liturgies: Prayers, Poems, and Meditations for Staying Human. Convergent, 2024.
Whittier, John Greenleaf. “‘This Still Room’—a Poem by John Greenleaf Whittier.” Ironicschmoozer’s Weblog (blog), August 3, 2010. https://ironicschmoozer.wordpress.com/2010/08/03/this-still-room-by-john-greenleaf-whittier/.
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