Sabbath News

As summer has warmed the upstate, I've been pondering what "sabbath-keeping" means and requires. Poet Doug Hitt notes that life's daily patterns allow for---even demand---sabbath. "The tune of twilight," he says, "is Sabbath." Nightfall is God's way of drawing the blinds to our work day, telling us to pause, to collect the myriad signs of God's grace, to draw them in, deeply in.

Adagio
by Doug Hitt

why hills are draped
in blankets of cicada-song,
book-toting two year olds climb willing laps
and sheep graze
a winding choreography
to the barn

why whippoorwill begins her seamless chant
and winds renounce the ceaseless
push and pull, become
as cool fingers
beneath a collar

why evening porches,
Deluth to Galveston, bend
rhythmically to the hymnody of rocking chairs
and slowly swaying calves

because the tune of twilight
is Sabbath

In the days when God made the day and the night, there were no power companies and electric lights and red-eye flights from coast to coast. Now, there are whole cities that never sleep. It's easy to get turned around. Most of us city dwellers are out of tune with the patterns of nature, the seasons of planting and harvest, the cycles of the moon, the up and down of the tides, work and rest. It’s easy for sabbath time to be scheduled out. It's easy to work, to fret, to be busy all of the time.

But if sabbath time is cut out of our schedule, is it possible that we will sleep without rest, teach without knowledge, give when there is nothing to give, love with empty hearts?

Perhaps twilight will become for us the symbolic reminder that we need to pause for a moment of sabbath-rest centered on God. For, certainly, we must make sabbath time. And, once made, we must keep it. Regularly. Every week. Every day. As rhythmically as the outgoing tide, as its coming back in again, as dependably as the shawl of night being laid around the shoulders of the earth at twilight. A drinking in. A filling up. God's gracious blessing falling not on deaf ears and busy hands, but open hearts, hearts eager for the resonance of God's song.

How do you keep Sabbath? How do you find time to slow down and re-focus. How is your Sabbath God-centered? I'm interested in how you honor the fourth commandment (honoring the Sabbath). Give me a call or an email.

PEACE,
Matt