I’ve been reading The Sabbath, by Abraham Joshua Heschel, a book which I’ve owned for several years and have yet to actually read. He starts out with a sort of polarization of time and space, saying:
Technical civilization is man’s conquest of space. It is a triumph frequently achieved by sacrificing an essential ingredient of existence, namely time. In technical civilization, we expend time to gain space. (p.3)
And what he means by “space” is basically all of the “stuff” of life, the things we do, the things we work to earn, all things that can be categorized by their “thinghood.” Time on the other hand isn’t a thing like all these other things are. He calls it a realm where “the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to control but to share, not to subdue but to be in accord.” (p.3)
In making time subservient to space, or using time merely as a means to an end within space, Heschel argues that we then cause a dread of time, and time becomes the enemy, “a slick treacherous monster with jaw like a furnace incinerating every moment of our lives” (p.5). And in doing this, I think, we lose the essence of what it means to live.
I’ve been pondering for some time now what it means to have abundant life and what that would look like because I feel like most of us, myself included, often settle for far less than the abundant life that Jesus said he came to give us.
And the abundant life is not a life abundant in things. It’s not a better car or a bigger house. It’s a feeling of well-being, of peace, of being able to enjoy life, to stop and smell the roses, to enjoy friends, to be.
But we don’t live like this.
Oh, you might say, that all the things we do are important, lots of them have to do with people, and we have to get all these things done. (I know you think this, I do it all the time).
The thing is though, we don’t. We’ve bought a such a load of crap from our culture where somehow busyness became the highest good, a moral thing where “keepin’ busy” is the only appropriate answer anymore to “how’s it going?” “Oh, keepin busy.”
How have we sold our birthright for such a watery pottage that we think we are only valuable if we’re keeping busy?
Or maybe we’re afraid of ourselves. We’re afraid if we did stop, if we just sat and were, that we would discover something we didn’t like, and if we just stay busy enough, we won’t have to see that.
I think it’s both. Somehow all of us have ended up racing the clock no matter how old we are because we feel there’s all these things that have to get done by a certain time. Never mind if there’s actually a deadline or not. We make them up.
It’s not a bad thing to have goals, but it’s bad to sacrifice really living in pursuit of these goals.
I want to make time my friend, and the secret to that, according to Heschel, lies in the Sabbath. Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.
Yes, but I’m not Jewish. Well, the same God that inspired the New Testament inspired the Old, and handed down the Ten Commandments. It’s all part of a continuum. Clearly, there are parts of the Torah that Jesus fulfilled, but based on his regular get aways to spend time with the Father, I think the Sabbath is one thing that never goes out of style.
See, the point of the Sabbath is that we can rest, and acknowledge that it’s not our labor that’s doing it anyway. We can completely cease from doing, and realize that the world is not going to come to an end.
We can just be.
Be still and know…
Be still and know that he is God.
“For where shall the likeness of God be found? There is no quality that space has in common with the essence of God. There is not enough freedom on the top of the mountain; there is not enough glory in the silence of the sea. Yet the likeness of God can be found in time, which is eternity in disguise” (p. 16).