Sabbath is a Raqi’a in Time
The Three Ps on Sabbath: a Poem, a Pondering, and a Practice
A Poem:
Clearing
by Martha Postlethwait
Do not try to save
the whole world
or do anything grandiose.
Instead, create
a clearing
in the dense forest
of your life
and wait there
patiently,
until the song
that is your life
falls into your own cupped hands
and you recognize and greet it.
Only then will you know
how to give yourself to this world
so worthy of rescue.
Light breaking into a small clearing in a dense forest on the Island of Hawai’i
A Pondering: The Raqi’a
On the second day of creation in Genesis 1, God spoke into the chaotic waters and created a raqi’a. Traditionally translated as “firmament” or “dome,” the raqi’a is essentially a boundary holding the waters at bay. With the raqi’a God created a protected area—a clearing—in the center of the chaos, which created the conditions within which life could flourish.
The Sabbath is a raqi’a in time. It is a boundary we establish in the midst of the chaos and noise of our lives—the distractions, obligations, worries, uncertainties, and stresses of our lives—that enables us to do as the psalmist bids: “be still and know that I am God.”
Life cannot flourish in the midst of chaos, distraction, overwhelm, or exhaustion. The dense forest chokes out the light and so chokes out the life. Life needs space, sunlight, rest, and support. More often than not, as the poem’s opening lines caution, our attempts to “save the whole world” cause us to transgress our limits and strive beyond our capacity, which further chokes out the light and life we need to thrive. This leaves us diminished, distracted, and demoralized.
The Sabbath, like the poem, reminds us that our job is not to save the whole world! Rather, it is to make room in our lives for joy, delight, gratitude, wonder, and connection—the very essence of life—to grow and flourish. Our work is, as Martha Postlethwaite so beautifully put it, to wait patiently in that clearing “until the song / that is your life / falls into your own cupped hands / and your recognize and greet it.”
Doing this may feel selfish. It may feel inappropriate or irresponsible to stop trying to save the world one day every week when so much of the world feels broken, lost, and in desperate need of rescue. But if we seek to serve the world from within the dense forest of our lives, bereft of light and beset with worries, we serve from a place of diminishment. It’s also important to remember that the raqi’a did not abolish the waters, just as creating a clearing is not clear-cutting the whole forest. To practice Sabbath is simply to create a boundary beyond which the water and the trees—the work, stress, and anxiety of life—shall not cross, for 24 delightful hours.
I love how Postlethwaite’s poem ends, reminding us that waiting in the clearing is not, ultimately, for our benefit alone. What we receive in Sabbath-keeping is a gift we offer the world: the gift of our life’s song. The world is rescued not only by our effort, our striving, and our exertion. It is rescued also by our joy, our life, and our light. To live that way is beautiful. And, as Dostoyevsky famously said, “beauty will save the world.” Sabbath helps us make room to reconnect to the parts of us that make us want to sing our life’s beautiful song for all to hear.
A Practice: Create a Clearing
The first step in creating a Sabbath clearing is getting clear about what constitutes work for you, and choosing to set it aside for 24-hours. “Work” includes all of the things you do regularly at your job (if you have one), such as checking email, finishing a report, setting up or preparing for a meeting, following up on messages, checking the Slack app, or getting things done on your To Do list.
But “work” doesn’t only apply to those who have jobs, of course. It also includes doing the dishes and laundry, tidying up a room, cleaning, running errands, weeding the garden, preparing meals, shuttling kids around, and managing the complex details of family life.
“Work” also refers to the kinds of things that generate stress and anxiety or fuel distractibility, including mindlessly scrolling social media, watching the news, worrying about finances, and habits like over-scheduling, rushing around, and saying yes when you want to say no (and vice versa).
All of these things create the dense forest of our lives. And the Sabbath invitation is to cease from it.
Begin by having every member of your family, or each person you plan to practice Sabbath with (I highly recommend doing it with others if you can) write down in a journal all of the things that feel like “work,” according to the above definitions. Take your time with this.
Then, have each person share what they discovered. This can be helpful on many levels. You will learn much about each other in the process, but hearing how other people define their work will help clarify your own understanding of work, and may remind you of things you overlooked. It will be helpful for parents to respect what their children write on this list, and refrain from requiring them to do those things on Sabbath.
Then, select as many things from the list to cease from doing on your next Sabbath as you feel you can. Then select one more. Share them with each other and strategize together how you will set yourself up for success. Perhaps you will turn your phones and computers off and put them in a “Sabbath basket” for the duration of Sabbath. If you have a home office, consider shutting the door and putting up a sign that says “closed for Sabbath.”
Whatever you do (or don’t do), be sure to have fun with it. Take this seriously, but not too seriously. Pay attention to how it feels to set aside work in this way, and process it together afterwards. If you “fail” and do some work, don’t beat yourself up, you’ll have another opportunity to experiment again next week!
Finally, if 24-hours feels like a bridge too far for you or your family at this point, that’s okay. Something is better than nothing. Try it for an afternoon or a morning, and build yourself up to a full day. Start where you are, and go from there.
