More valuable words from Wayne Muller:

When I gather with friends and colleagues for Sabbath retreats, those courageous few who manage to carve out a day or a weekend for quiet reflection often arrive thoroughly exhausted. By the afternoon, some inevitably fall asleep right in the middle of our meditations. When they awaken they quickly apologize for their spiritual transgressions; they feel ashamed and embarrassed. I reassure them it is good when they sleep. It is a sign of trust, that they feel safe enough finally to let go and surrender to their weariness.

And what a great weariness it is. Most of us do not realize how tired we really are until we go away on vacation or retreat, and cannot even keep our eyes open.

When we think of Jesus, we usually think of him teaching, healing, or being accosted by the hordes of sick or possessed who sought his touch. But Jesus would just as often send people away, or disappear without warning, dismissing those in need with neither excuse nor explanation, and retreat to a place of rest.

One translation of the biblical phrase “to pray” is “to come to rest.” When Jesus prayed he was at rest, nourished by the healing spirit that saturates those still, quiet places. In the Jesus tradition, prayer can be a practice of simply being in the presence of God, allowing the mind to rest in the heart. This can help us begin to understand one aspect of Sabbath time: a period of repose, when the mind settles gently in the heart.

Who is it that can make muddy water clear? asks the Tao Te Ching. But if allowed to remain still, it will gradually become clear of itself. The invitation to rest is rooted in an undeniable spiritual gravity that allows all things at rest to settle, to find their place. There comes a moment in our striving when more effort actually becomes counterproductive, when our frantic busyness only muddies the waters of our wisdom and understanding. When we become still and allow our life to rest, we feel a renewal of energy and gradual clarity of perception.

The practice of Shabbat, or Sabbath, is designed specifically to restore us, a gift of time in which we allow the cares and concerns of the marketplace to fall away. We set aside time to delight in being alive, to savor the gifts of creation, and to give thanks for the blessings we may have missed in our necessary preoccupation with our work. Ancient texts suggest we light candles, sing songs, pray, tell stories, worship, eat, nap, and make love. It is a day of delight, a sanctuary in time. Within this sanctuary, we make ourselves available to the insights and blessings that arise only in stillness and time (Muller, 23-26).

To these words I am only able to say “Amen” (So let it be) or in the words of the Lakota and Dakota peoples, a phrase used in all their prayers that aptly illustrates the Native American sense of the centrality of creation: mitakuye oyasin – used to end every prayer, and often it is in itself a whole prayer (For all the above me and below me and around me things) . . . it is the understanding of inter-relatedness, of balance and mutual respect of the different species in the world, that characterizes what we might call Indian peoples’ greatest gift to Amer-Europeans and to the Amer-European understanding of creation in this time of world ecological crisis (Kidwell, 50-51).

Muller, Wayne. Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal, and Delight in Our Busy Lives. New York: Bantam Books, 1999.

Kidwell, Clara Sue, Homer Noley, and George E. “Tink” Tinker. A Native American Theology. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001.

Today I turn to words that are familiar to me – words that speak deeply to me – from Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal, and Delight in Our Busy Lives by Wayne Muller (New York: Bantam Books, 1999).

I had always assumed that people I loved gave energy to me, and people I disliked took it away from me. Now I see that every act, no matter how pleasant or nourishing, requires effort, consumes oxygen. Every gesture, every thought or touch, uses some life.

This is a useful discovery for how our days go. We meet dozens of people, have so many conversations. We do not feel how much energy we spend on each activity, because we imagine we will always have more energy at our disposal. This one little conversation, this one extra phone call, this one quick meeting, what can it cost? But it does cost, it drains yet another drop of our life. Then, at the end of days, weeks, months, years, we collapse, we burn out, and cannot see where it happened. It happened in a thousand unconscious events, tasks, and responsibilities that seemed easy and harmless on the surface but that each, one after the other, used a small portion of our precious life.

And so we are given a commandment: Remember the Sabbath. Rest is an essential enzyme of life, as necessary as air. Without rest, we cannot sustain the energy needed to have life. We refuse to rest at our peril – and yet in a world were overwork is seen as a professional virtue, many of us feel we can legitimately be stopped only by physical illness or collapse.

If we do not allow for a rhythm of rest in our overly busy lives, illness becomes our Sabbath – our pneumonia, our cancer, our heart attack, our accidents create Sabbath for us. In my relationships with people suffering with cancer, AIDS, and other life-threatening illness, I am always struck by the mixture of sadness and relief they experience when illness interrupts their overly busy lives. While each shares their particular fears and sorrows, almost every one confesses some secret gratefulness. “Finally,” they say, “at last. I can rest.”

Through a good friend and doctor who literally threw me into his pickup truck and raced me to the hospital, through the wise and swift administration of good medicine, through numberless prayers and great kindnesses, I was granted the blessing of being healed of my infection. Now, I take more walks. I play with my children, I work mostly with the poor, and have stopped seeing patients. I write when I am able, and I pray more. I try to be kind. And without fail, at the close of the day, I stop, say a prayer, and give thanks. The greatest lesson I have learned is about surrender. There are larger forces, strong and wise, at work here. I am willing to be stopped. I owe my life to the simple act of rest (18-20).

This post is based on an article that I was requested to write a few years ago . . .

I believe that it is time to restore the three “R”s back into the arts.

For so many of us – especially musicians – we have tried to make our music by only using our Ability and our Training – many of us have burned ourselves out in the process letting the creative process become a distant memory of things we used to be able to accomplish with ease.

So what are the three “R”s that need to be restored in ArrrT?

The first is REST – Yesterday I was doing a meditation for a worship service utilizing the passage from Deuteronomy about God’s command to keep Sabbath. It seems like our world continues to move at a faster and faster pace. It reminds me of a time when one of my friends wrote a book about time management. He said that he studied all of the books on the subject and realized that basically they all had one thing in common – how to do more and more in less time and feel guilty about what does not get completed – so – he decided to write a book that suggested a way to do less in more time and not feel guilty about what did not get completed. It was a wonderful book – The Gospel for the Clockaholic by Thomas Are – also the author of Faithsong. We need rest!

The second “R” is RETREAT. Often a simple change of scenery is very beneficial. For people who are constantly on the road working their retreat may be at home. A change of pace, a change of routine, a change.

The final “R” is RENEWAL. Everyone needs to have their batteries recharged from time to time. Different people do this in different ways. I need time alone or time with a very limited number of loved and trusted people – people that I know love me enough to know when I need space and time either alone or with just a few people.

I thought I might be able to say all I needed to say about this in one post but that is not the case. I imagine that each of the following three posts will be devoted to one of these three “R” words. I am reminded again of words by Robert Shaw (what a surprise!): In a time and a society whose values are geared to the biggest, the fastest and mostest, whose gaze is fixed desperately upon the future – as far at least as the next election or life after death or prosperity, whichever should happed to come first – the Arts offer an historical perspective. For their concern is with originality – meaning, that which has origins. (The Robert Shaw Reader. Robert Blocker, editor. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004, p. 364).

In the meantime, remember, REST, RETREAT, and RENEWAL are not luxuries to be included only when time permits – they are all three necessities for daily living – you cannot properly spell the word ARRRT without all three of them!

In this concluding post in this series we give consideration to Robert Shaw’s thoughts on where does Religion meet the Arts?

I suspect that in the long run – if there is a long run – the arts will be seen to be the lode-star of [human] humanity – even more than religious or political structures – for some of the reasons I listed earlier, and for three more which lean upon me now.

In the first place, it is clear that a commitment to the creative process starts the human animal on an endless, thorny and lonesome road of self-discovery, away from the comforts, blurred objectives and compromises of institutions. “Forty days and forty nights” is a Biblical metaphor for what is really a lifetime of wilderness and solitude.

In the second place, the Arts are concerned not with the consumption, sale or other exploitation of earth’s material wonders – not even with their recycling – but with their reincarnation. They propose not a mounting monopoly of a medium of exchange, but the sweet, quiet exchange of truth and beauty themselves.

And in the third place, in a time and a society whose values are geared to the biggest, the fastest and mostest, whose gaze is fixed desperately upon the future – as far at least as the next election or life after death or prosperity, whichever should happen to come first – the Arts offer an historical perspective. For their concern is with originality – mean, that which has origins.

For, finally, the simple truth is that every [human] is an artist – whether [they want] it or not.

The only question is whether [they are] enough of an artist to fulfill [their] humanity – and to fill full [their] short mortality.

The understandings of the spirit are not easily come by. It takes a creative mind to respond to a creator’s mind. It takes a holy spirit to receive the Holy Spirit – and “just as I am” is not nearly good enough.

There’s no freeway to Truth. There’s no easy on, easy-off approach to Beauty (Blocker, 361-364).

The Robert Shaw Reader. Robert Blocker, editor. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004.

In this post we consider the answers to the following questions posed by Robert Shaw: What are the meanings of art? What is it trying to tell us of [humanity]? What is [humanity] trying to tell us of [humanity itself]? . . . What may be the function or influence of art in a world gone schizophrenic, paranoid, masochistic? What does art show itself to be? Why is it important? How can it help us? (Blocker, 357-359)

Shaw’s answers:

First: Art on this scale is the most pervasive, persistent, powerful affirmation of the life-force in the [human]-thing. Than sex it is stronger and longer – by centuries and oceans. It is a true transubstantiation . . . it is finally the Flesh become Word.

Second, facing the bewildering profusions of matter and sensation, the Arts testify to [the human] ability to isolate and identify, then to relate and to order . . . art is the achievement of order.

[Third], Science has been able to provide knowledge of matter, but not of essence . . . the Arts exist to convey that which cannot otherwise be conveyed.

The Fourth mark of Art’s meaning I find in the simple fact that it is unremittingly an attempt to communicate, to establish contact, to find kinship across even centuries and oceans . . . the arts may indeed be not the luxury of the few but the last best hope of humanity – to inhabit with joy this planet (Blocker, 359-360).*

* – The Robert Shaw Reader. Robert Blocker, editor. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004.

The next post will consider how Mr. Shaw answers his question, And where does Religion meet the Arts? (Blocker, 361)

Until then . . .