Sabbath

Image credit: Photo by Vanessa Pike-Russell on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons

Spiritual inspiration can come from the oddest bits of serendipity.  I was at a talk a few months ago by a Zen Buddhist who talked about making each moment sacred, about how we could light incense before doing the dishes and make the washing of each dish a meditation and a part of our practice.  That's a nice goal.  I like that image.  Instead, every day I engage in the totally unspiritual practice of washing dishes while playing yesterday's episode of the Colbert Report on my laptop: sometimes watching, sometimes listening, sometimes popping over to my e-mail.  And it turns out, that led me, well, maybe to the same place anyway.

A few months ago, Colbert's guest was AJ Jacobs, author of The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible.  The premise of the book sounded like a take on the humorous e-mail that circulates periodically mocking Biblical literalists for calling homosexuality an abomination while ignoring passages that condone things like slavery and animal sacrifice.  It sounded interesting, but because my hands were wet and covered with dish soap, I didn't jump right over to Amazon to buy it.  And then, I'll admit, I forgot about it.  Until a few weeks later, when my husband and I were out on a date night and decided to use our last few minutes of babysitter coverage to browse in a bookstore, where I noticed the book and decided to buy it after page one made me laugh out loud.

I loved it. It was much more than a take on a joke e-mail. It was spiritual and funny, reverent and irreverent.  It reminded me in many ways of my own spiritual journey.  (And what's not to love there?)  It even (unknowingly) contained some commentary on what recovering sex addicts face in our culture (but more on that tomorrow).  The bit that inspired me was the author's relationship to the Sabbath.  At first, leaving work aside for a day and resting is an anxiety producing chore for Jacobs, who can't make it through the first evening without checking his e-mail.  But it gradually becomes his favorite day, the one around which the rest of the week revolves.

I thought about my own tendency toward constant work: how hard I push myself, how difficult it is for me to make time for rest and how overwhelmed with guilt and fear I become whenever I am not being "productive."  I thought about how freeing it had been when my computer was in for repairs recently, and I couldn't do some of my work.  And I thought the idea of a Sabbath, a day of rest devoted to spirituality, might be good for me.

I don't formally belong to any organized religion, so I can choose any day for my Sabbath and honor it in any way that works for me.  So I've been thinking about what it would look like to spend one day a week dedicated to my spiritual life and wondering how I can make it happen.  I don't have it all figured out yet, and I don't need to, but what I do know is that I've decided I'd like to make it part of my spiritual journey to find out.  And I suspect that will mean that, at least one day a week, I will turn off the Colbert Report and light some incense when I do the dishes.

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This post originally published at The Second Road.