Getting Our Bearings
Sabbath Reorients Clergy to God and the World
If someone approaches me at church on Sunday morning and asks if I’m “Dr. Mahlberg,” I’m likely to respond, “Not today.” Thanks to the Sabbath Renewal Project at Princeton Theological Seminary, I know that Sabbath means resting from my professional identity in order to explore all the rest of who God created me to be – who I am and am becoming.
When I first agreed to serve as a group facilitator for the project, I understood Sabbath primarily as good preventive mental health. As a psychologist, I did not appreciate its importance beyond self care. But as our Sabbath Renewal Group learned in two years together, Sabbath also shapes how we live and work. As one of our group members put it, Sabbath is “a day in the Kingdom,” a day lived by radically different values and mindsets than we have in our work, even when that work is for the church.
Basically, Sabbath reorients us, helping us to get our bearings both to the world and to God. In many ways, it’s a process much like the one certain types of whales use as they navigate across vast oceans. As these whales swim, they periodically stop, raise their heads out of the water as far as possible and then slowly turn 360 degrees before diving back into the water. Then, they may change course. Though these creatures live in the water, they apparently orient themselves to landmarks above the water. One model of the Christian life is to be in the world but not of the world. Like the whales, we take our bearings from a different environment than the one we usually inhabit.
Yet, somehow it doesn’t seem that pastors would need to stop and reorient themselves. Unlike most people, they don’t work just for an employer or themselves or their families; they work for the Lord. They don’t work in secular society; they work in the church. Unfortunately, however, the church absorbs and even emulates aspects of the dominant culture. A sabbatical break, however, takes pastors far enough away from their usual work that they can return with new eyes to see and new ears to hear. Weekly Sabbath counters the habituation that keeps pastors from seeing how the dominant culture intrudes into God’s work. Regular Sabbath accentuates the contrast between the Kingdom and church culture.
So what are we to do on the Sabbath? The options are endless. The Sabbath commandment is brilliant because it doesn’t tell us what to do, but what not to do. It maximizes our freedom—which is really what Sabbath is about. We are not to take Sabbath rest only for ourselves, for example, but to grant it also for those who work for us, including slaves. On the Sabbath, we free others from obligations toward us. In the Deuteronomy version of the commandment, the Jews are reminded that God liberated them from slavery in Egypt and therefore they are to keep the Sabbath day. Though we were created to be free, even today we still drift into living in ways that enslave us. These are the only clues the text gives us about what to do on Sabbath:
- Remember that God rested; it is a special day to the Lord;
- Keep it holy; and
- Rest from our work.
These brief instructions leave much room for how we can spend Sabbath. To me, work is anything that I or others would not normally consider optional. It includes not only those tasks that I am paid to perform, but also chores and tasks on the “to-do” list, even if they are enjoyable. Responsibilities such as parenting, of course, are not optional. They are commitments. They are work. Sabbath, however, is time for us to expand beyond work and areas of responsibility to express who else God created us to be. We are created to be so complex and multifaceted that no job is diverse enough to use all of who we are, including parish ministry.
Surprisingly, pastors often have more difficulty recognizing the need to reorient than do many lay people, who know at some level that they may often compromise their Christian values in their work. As an Enron executive said, “I’ve had a lucrative career, but it has cost me my soul.” All of us conspire to remain unaware of the ways we work and live in violation of the Kingdom. We keep our heads in the water, trying to reduce the dissonance between the Kingdom and how we live. We overwork. We numb out with TV or computer games. We spend and consume, and we dull our awareness with alcohol or drugs. By reorienting us to God and soul, Sabbath unsettles our comfortable lives.
Resting—more precisely, resting from our work—is but the doorway to deeper levels of Sabbath. Every part of our being that is involved in our work needs to rest in order to reorient. In work, our muscles, our minds, our emotions, our spirits, become constricted. When under stress, we perceive less and are less flexible and creative. We lose awareness of the Kingdom and its values and become less able to follow them.
On the Sabbath, therefore, we must rest on many levels, not just physically but also mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. For pastors, who are “always on,” always looking for insights or life lessons to use in sermons or Bible studies, such all-encompassing rest can be difficult to achieve. Consequently, pastors need at least some personal time with God that is protected from professional use, no matter how brilliant the insights. They must know on the front end that such time will not be used professionally. Precedent exists for relating to God differently during Sabbath. The Jewish tradition, for example, distinguishes between Sabbath prayer and non-Sabbath prayer. Sabbath prayers do not ask God for anything but are instead for thanksgiving. Similarly, some clergy find it helpful to distinguish between relating to God in their role as a pastor and as a person and to always protect the latter from being used professionally. Likewise, Sabbath can be a time for pastors to refrain from speaking for God.
Along with physical and mental rest, pastors need also to rest emotionally from work, letting go of the responsibilities and burdens they normally carry in their hearts. It is essential that pastors take significant rest breaks from the caring that is part of their job and the trauma and suffering they often work with. If they don’t, then they risk succumbing to compassion fatigue. Unable to care, such pastors become cynical, resentful and bitter toward those they are called to serve.
It might seem odd that pastors would stop caring on the Sabbath. After all, Jesus did heal on the Sabbath. But clergy in the Sabbath Renewal Project found that, as caregivers, they had to rest from professional cares if they were to rest from work. Giving such cares over to God for the duration of the Sabbath frees us to have energy and time to care about other things and other people, personally rather than professionally. It allows us to experience emotional states such as delight that are not so available when in work mode. The book of Isaiah says to “call my Sabbath a delight.” Free from stress, we are more able to experience delight, love, joy, playfulness and other feelings that are not as accessible when we are constricted.
For pastors, spiritually resting from work means putting aside their primary call and any issues they might have with God. As John Calvin said about Sabbath, “We rest from our work so God can do God’s work in us.” In Sabbath, we receive, and in so doing, we are refreshed. We are given time and energy to discover and engage in other activities we are called to do, other roles that are important to God working in our lives. Parent, friend, lover, writer, inventor, gardener, artist, naturalist, photographer, woodworker – God created us to be so complex and multifaceted that no earthly role can contain us. Sabbath is a time for the rest of who God calls us to be, the rest of who we are. When we don’t have enough time away from our work, we can lose track of the many other calls we have. Many pastors, for example, tell me they feel called to social justice or some other activity or ministry that their congregation may not be interested in. When pastors decide to follow that call anyway, even on their own time, they become more fully alive.
When we are in Sabbath mode, we more easily relate to everyone, including God, in an “I-Thou” rather than an “I-It” manner. In our work, it is easy for people to be seen as objects or functions and not as children of God and citizens of the Kingdom of God. Indeed, one of the greatest occupational hazards of pastoral ministry is that even God can become objectified.
Worship, for example, is often more difficult for clergy when they are leading it because they must constantly be in “work mode” and cannot lose themselves in the experience. Even when pastors worship in the pew with others, many still find it hard to let go of their “professional” mindset, much like a professional musician who’s part of a concert audience. While the non-musician listens receptively with the emotional/experiential part of the brain and is moved by the music, the professional musician listens with the analytical part of the brain, and may even be “playing” or “conducting” the music either mentally or with micro movements of the muscles.
For pastors sitting in the pew, the challenge is to switch off the work mindset and switch on the experiential. With all the pressure that comes with speaking for God and about God and representing God responsibly, pastors can lose the experiential aspect of their own relationship with God. They may, for example, relate to the Bible analytically and professionally, but not experience it as something to feed the soul. In the novel, A New Kind of Christian, by pastor Brian McLaren, the character Neo says that, “Talking about God for pay always threatens to work against really loving God . . . The people who talk the most about God are the ones most in danger of taking him for granted, of letting God become just a comfortable word in their lexicon, a piece of furniture, rather than a reality, a friend, a constant surprise.” Fortunately, Sabbath rest can give pastors the chance to let the soul be with God in ineffable mystery, not trying to reduce it to words or use it in any way.
Some pastors, however, may not want to spend Sabbath time with God. Like members of a family business, many clergy may want to go their separate ways on their day off. Many tell me they prefer to have a non-spiritual rather than a spiritual focus when they meditate. At its most extreme, some clergy say they want to spend time off in secular and possibly even unholy pursuits so as to get as far away from work as possible. “Carnalling out,” it’s called—pursuing carnal interests as a break from the holy life.
Indeed, clergy can get tired of “being good,” and can grow to resent the expectation that they are to be more spiritual than others. For some, switching from religious work to Sabbath can feel unfulfilling, a busman’s holiday with more of the same. The same is true not only for spiritual workers but also others in the helping professions. We tire of being good. We want to engage in “conduct unbecoming” our professions. But even so, much fulfillment, carnal and otherwise, lies within Sabbath. Some Jewish sects, for example, strongly recommend that married couples make love on the Sabbath. When we consider that the Sabbath way of doing things is to savor them, unhurried and not goal directed, Sabbath love making can be the best of all. So too with Sabbath eating and Sabbath conversation. On the Sabbath we fast from some things in order to feast on others. Rather than being distracted or only half attentive as we habitually multitask, Sabbath can be a time of wholly indulgence, with the whole of us involved.
But how are we to promote and protect Sabbath time? One of the best ways, our clergy group discovered, was to call it by name. Call it “Sabbath.” When pastors think of their day off as “Sabbath,” they are less likely to spend it on errands and tasks. To ensure that those essential tasks will be performed, some, myself included, find it helpful to observe Sabbath from one evening to the next, thus allowing time to complete necessary tasks before returning to work. Designating a particular day as “Sabbath” helps one prepare for it. But ultimately, the discipline of Sabbath is to stop our work whether we are ready or not. We stop whether we believe we have the time or not. As Barbara Brown Taylor said, we rest “as if” our work is done, even when it isn’t.
Calling a day of rest “Sabbath” also helps others respect it. Somehow, “my day off” seems unimportant to others and to us and is easily violated by both. But when someone asks, “Can we meet Monday night?” and the pastor says, “That’s my Sabbath,” it sounds less negotiable. It reinforces for others and ourselves that this time is to be protected and kept holy. Whenever we have the urge to contaminate it with work, the term “Sabbath” can help us resist. In church bulletins and newsletters, some pastors now use the phrase “Pastor’s Sabbath” rather than “day off,” which helps alert parishioners to the sanctity of that time.
Even with that formal designation, however, Sabbath is bigger than a day. Indeed, as we found in the Sabbath Renewal Project, we need at least some Sabbath every day. Obviously, we all need rest breaks from work throughout the day, every day, but once we start formally observing Sabbath, we realize that all rest from work has the potential to be “Mini-Sabbaths.” Sleep, for example, can be meaningful time with God when we set aside thoughts of work before going to bed. As children, I and many others said our prayers kneeling beside the bed, in effect giving our cares and worries to God before getting into bed. Resting from our work and responsibilities, we can enjoy time with God in deep rest and in the creativity of dreaming.
Numerous opportunities exist to find Sabbath moments.Indeed, every place and every time reveals an aspect of the Divine and is ripe with opportunity for “Mini-Sabbaths.” Common experiences such as being stopped in traffic, standing in line at the store, or sitting in a waiting room all have the potential to be Sabbath moments. We can use them to fuss or think about our problems or to do something “useful” such as making a cell phone call, or we can see them as a small slice of Sabbath, a moment that opens us to all that is around us that waits to be enjoyed. When I am making a phone call and am placed on hold, I no longer feel compelled to do something “productive,” but instead take it as the gift of a Sabbath moment. I clear my mind, close my eyes, and turn my attention to God.I turn and look out my office window and enjoy the trees and sky. Such unexpected moments of Sabbath bring delight to an otherwise ordinary day.
The distinction between “delight” and “ordinary,” between Sabbath and regular time, illustrates that crossing into Sabbath is not a seamless transition. It’s not a change that one barely notices. To turn away from work and toward God requires a boundary or border, a marker that tells us we are leaving behind the things we have been carrying. In our group, we marked this boundary by taking time to pause, close our eyes, identify what we are carrying in our hearts and minds, name them, and then set them aside, giving them up to God. Only when we have consciously and deliberately dropped the concerns of work and other responsibilities can we really enter Sabbath time. Likewise, it also helps to create a ritual that marks the end of Sabbath and helps reorient us toward work, with eyes more able to see and ears more able to hear.
Statio, a Benedictine practice, can be a model for all Sabbath time, whether brief moments, an entire day, a vacation or even a sabbatical. Statio is a way of making transitions from one focus to another, in three stages. First, we look back to what we have just experienced. What was that? What just happened? How did it go? We debrief it. We affirm it, as God did at the end of the days of creation. Then, in the second part, Sabbath time, we are fully in the present, simply being with God in the moment, looking neither back or forward. In this stage, it can help to focus on the breath, an external object, or a simple phrase like “Be still and know that I am God. Be still. Be.” We can be fully in the present because we have tended to the past, and we know that in the next stage we will deal with the future. In the third step, one turns toward whatever is coming up next, to be ready to engage it fully. Statio is flexible, taking as little or as much time as necessary. Always, Sabbath is the middle step, whether a Mini-Sabbath or a full 24 hours, a Sabbath vacation or sabbatical. By attending to both the past and future, this process allows us to be fully engaged in Sabbath with God.
Although Sabbath is clearly good self care, that alone is not reason enough for God to have made it a commandment. More than good self care, Sabbath is a time of rest, recovery and healing, just as Jesus healed on the Sabbath. God commanded us to observe the Sabbath because He needs us to stop and lift our heads out of the water, to reorient to the values of the Kingdom and to God’s voice so that we can do God’s work in the world. May Sabbath grow and spread from those who participated in the Project.
Arden Mahlberg is a psychologist in private practice and director of The Integral Psychology Center in Madison, Wisc., and served two years as a small group facilitator for the Sabbath Renewal Project, an SPE project at Princeton Theological Seminary.
© 2007 – Arden Mahlberg, PhD. All rights reserved.
