College Union

At the suggestion of a dear friend and confidant I was recently encouraged to read Wayne Muller’s book titled Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal and Delight in our Busy Lives. I started it as part of a Fall sabbatical and with a sort of relentless quietness it beckoned to become a devotional companion, calling me away from incessant striving and helping me reclaim places, faces and spaces in which I could find sacred rest. Muller points out that most of the virtues that we cherish in the spiritual life are not gained by working harder but are nourished in the soil of attentiveness and care. It’s when we get too rushed, too busy, too tired - its then that we fail to love. So, during the time I had for sabbatical, I tried to inject a regular practice of Sabbath rest.

Muller writes that Sabbath requires surrender, because to practice Sabbath in the way that it was designed does not depend on our readiness to stop. Like the Muslim call to prayer, Sabbath requires us to stop and acknowledge the Sovereignty of God. Sabbath subverts the tyranny of the urgent, insisting that we put down the cell phone, turn off the computer, close the books, and break the seduction so often created by the demanding sense of our responsibilities. Sabbath, writes Muller, dissolves the artificial urgency of our days because it “liberates us from the need to be finished.”

We stop because there are forces larger than we that take care of the universe. Sabbath remind us that though our work is important it is not ultimate nor indispensable. So apt are we to regard it as such, that God would not only invite, but even command that we take a day for rest a day to “float on the tides of a deeper time.”

Throughout Muller’s book comes the call to “Be still” - to listen to the heart speak its truth; to let silence deepen our awareness of who we are before a loving and omnipotent God who “bids our sorrows cease.”

There are so many college students whose daily lives are full of perplexity and anxiety and whether they would immediately recognize it or not, are looking for sanctuary. Part of the importance of practicing Sabbath ourselves is so that we can continually become Sabbath for others. The space that we create in ourselves becoming a sanctuary of peace for those in our circle.

Muller records an excerpt from the journal of a young Dutch woman named Ette Hillesum who suffered the Nazi concentration camps. Ette wrote about her struggle to keep at bay the daily forebodings surrounding her. Her journal may have prophetic words for us today:

We have to fight them daily, like fleas, those many small worries about the morrow, for they sap our energies…The things that have to be done must be done, and for the rest we must not allow ourselves to become infested with thousands of petty fears and worries, so many motions of no confidence in God. (repeat). Ultimately, we have just one moral duty: to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves, more and more peace, and reflect it to toward others. And the more peace there is in us, the more peace there will also be in our troubled world.  

Categories: Virtues & Choices
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