Taking Back Your Time

"Slow down and enjoy life. It’s not only the serenity you miss by going too fast. You also miss the sense of where you are going and why."

--Eddie Cantor, 20th Century Comedian

"Sabbath keeping is not about taking a day off but about being recalled to our knowledge of and gratitude for God’s activity in creating the world, giving liberty to captives, and overcoming the powers of death."

--Dorothy C. Bass, Practicing Our Faith

The initiative invites people, as individuals or with their loved ones, to choose four time periods [in the next month] during which they will engage in slow, simple life-renewing activities--for example, taking a walk in the woods, relaxing with their families, connecting with their spiritual tradition, or just sleeping! As part of the Massachusetts Council of Churches’] history of promoting Sabbath observance and justice in labor and leisure, "Take Four Windows of Time" encourages people to reconnect with God, self, family, community, nature--as a poster suggests, "four times, without stress, obligation, or guilt."

Sound familiar? We hear much about unemployment, but we hear little about overemployment. But here are a few of the facts [from Mass. Council of Churches brochure]:

--Americans work an average of nine full weeks more per year than do European workers.
--From 1973 to 2000, the average US worker added an additional 199 work hours to his or her annual schedule.
--Americans have by far the shortest paid vacations in the industrialized world. Twenty-six percent of American workers don’t take any vacation at all!
--80% of men and 62% of women put in more than 40 hours a week on the job. We work longer hours than medieval peasants did.

Many of us live what Henry David Thoreau, in response to the rapid industrialization and ubanization of his own day, once called "lives of quiet desperation." On the other side of the Atlantic, another 19th century poet, William Wordsworth, noted a similar trend:

The world is too much with us; late and soon
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

I may be one of the few people who think that a return to the old Sunday "blue laws" wouldn’t be such a terrible thing. I feel this way not out of some exaggerated sense of piety or devotion, and certainly not because I object to Sunday liquor sales on principle, but because I sincerely believe that we all could use at least one day a week free of that "getting and spending" of which Wordsworth wrote. I have vague, nostalgic memories of when Sunday was truly a day of rest and relaxation from our ordinary work-a-day concerns, a day for family and friends, made easier by the fact that we had no other real choices.

The idea of the Sabbath has deep roots in our Judeo-Christian tradition. Among the ancient Israelites, the Sabbath was held to be the day on which God rested from his act of creation. The word Sabbath is derived from a verb meaning "to cease, to abstain, to desist from, to terminate, to be at an end." If even God ceased and desisted on the seventh day, the logic goes, so should we.

Also related to the Sabbath was the idea of the "sabbatical year," which in Jewish tradition was a year during which the land of ancient Israel was left fallow, observed every seventh year. Transferred to academia, this practice became the basis for sabbaticals. Having been the recipient of a sabbatical leave from this congregation in 2002, I can testify to its healing and renewing propensities!

This year Sabrina and I find ourselves alone, at least temporarily, for the first time in many years, having become "empty-nesters" with the departure of our youngest son Josh for college at the end of August. This is a bittersweet experience that many of you have had, and that many of you can look forward to. The poet Howard Nemerov has written a poem about a father taking his son to school on the first day of first grade, which in a strange way speaks to this departure of an 18 year old young man:

May the father he finds
Among his teachers have a care of him
More than his father could. How that will look
I do not know, I do not need to know.
Even our tears belong to ritual.
But may great kindness come of it in the end.

The problem for most of us who are afflicted by the Protestant work ethic is that we never feel that we are working hard enough. Generations worth of Puritan guilt have had their residual effect, I suppose. It is hard not to fill our time, as I know all too well from personal experience.

But if we do not take the time for the discovery of what Thomas Merton once called "our true selves, those selves we were meant to be," how can we ever expect to live productive and fulfilling lives, lives of harmony and of wholeness?

Here the Jewish observance of the High Holy Days, the so-called "Days of Awe" or Yom Kippur, is instructive. For at least in part, the observance of Yom Kippur is a time, in scholar Theodor Gaster’s words, "to restore [us] to that state of wholeness and holiness which is a condition of [our] fulfilling [our] function in the world and serving as effective co-workers of God." Judaism does this by each year allowing us to wipe the slate clean and begin again. Gaster writes, that ". . .the regeneration which Yom Kippur is designed to accomplish is effected from within, not from without--by man’s own effort, not by an external power. It is," he says, "the result of his strenuously fanning into flame that divine spark which usually lies smothered beneath the dust of his mortality." As it states in the adaption of the Kol Nidre prayer which I shared with you during the meditation time this morning,

We vowed, not so long ago, to live lives that added, not subtracted,
We promised, not so long ago, to live lives that matched our words.
     Lives not hard and brittle with anger, but soft with letting go.
We made an oath, not so long ago, to live lives that reached for the stars,
     and did not consist of strings of little disappointments,
     or fragments of the shattered dreams we once used as mirrors
     to see how good we looked.

We are free, not to promise to be good,
but simply to get on with loving each other.
We are free, not to vow great transformations,
but to engage life with tenderness and understanding
          and outpourings of kindness.

We can be those better people we hope to be, but only if we take the time to rest our bodies and our minds, to reflect on life’s deeper meanings and mysteries, to reconnect with our families and our communities, to reclaim our time, to recreate balance in our busy days, and to renew our relationship with God or whatever it is that is the ground of our being and that calls us to our best selves.

For those of you who can hardly imagine such a possibility, the Council of Churches suggests that you "commit at least four windows of time--ideally a consistent time each week for four weeks--for simple, restorative activities. Just time to be with self, God, family, community, nature. Time to restore your soul." And here are a few of their suggestions for renewal:
      --no scheduled activities
      --no buying or selling
      --no stress
      --no intrusive technology
      --no obligations
      --no work
      --no guilt

Read a novel, ride a bike, take a walk, take a nap. Be alone, or be truly present to those you love. Only you know what you need to do. Only you can fan into flame "that divine spark that is always and innately within" you. But take back your time.

Who knows, you may discover things about yourself that you never suspected. Who knows, you might even get to like it! Who knows, together we might start a gentle revolution in which we reclaim time for all that makes our world a better place, and our lives within it more divine. That is my wish for all of us, this day and in the days still to come. Amen.

The Rev. Harold E. Babcock