Wednesday, August 28, 2024
Memorial of Saint Augustine, Bishop and Doctor of the Church (St. Monica’s son)
 (click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Shabbat – Our day of truce
There are days, and yesterday was such a one in Austin, when simply breathing in deep fills me up inside just like a king. The universe is nearby, – in fact all around – and air’s not just to breathe, but to bask in. Down go the windows, and the sky flies by.
In toil and drudgery night and day we worked.
In the tire repair shop I watched another customer sink into a chair, press four fingers into his forehead and close his eyes. Soon he got a phone call from one of his customers, called someone to help them, and settled in again. Time to rest from his drudgery.
We did not want to burden any of you.
Living and working and sleeping and toiling and drudging leaves less time for rest than we need, and eliminates Sabbath, if it has not been eliminated already. Erich Fromm calls our contemporary Sunday life “a day of fun, consumption and running away from oneself.” But the Sabbath, the Shabbat, is
… one of the great innovations in human evolution … a day of rest in the sense of the re-establishment of complete harmony between human beings and between them and nature. Nothing must be destroyed and nothing built.
In fact the Shabbat “is a day of truce in the human battle with the world.”
On Shabbat one lives as if one has nothing, pursuing no aim except being, that is, expressing one’s essential powers: praying, studying, eating, drinking, singing, making love, a day of joy because on that day one is fully oneself.
How do I make a “truce with my battle with the world?” By noticing the sky and breathing in the air? By noticing the beauty around me and reading poetry and poetic descriptions of it?
Wildness finds itself where it will, and will gladly take over what beings have wrought.
Under the bridge just north of our mailbox, pigeons roosted, cooing like spirits, and if we jumped on the bridge or dropped stones in the water below, they fanned out against the sky, blossoming into wings. Pheasants scurred through the long ditch grass. Frog sang and surprised us, leaping away from our feet, turning instantly in the water into smooth gold-green torpedoes. Snakes slithered in the grass. – p 111, The Witness of Combines by Kent Meyers
Erich Fromm asks a simple question, innocent enough – incredible to imagine its results:
One might ask if it is not time to reestablish the Shabbat as a universal day of harmony and peace, as the human day that anticipates the human future.
This human future is what Jesus called the Kingdom of heaven. Here and now.
You shall eat the fruit of your handiwork. Behold, thus is the man blessed who fears the Lord. Keep the word of Christ and the love of God is perfected in you.
(2 Thessalonians 3, Psalm 128, 1 John 2, Matthew 23)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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