Ch.8: Discover The Rhythms of the Daily Office and Sabbath
Stopping to Breathe the Air of Eternity
Parker Palmer in his book A Hidden Wholeness related a story about farmers in the Midwest who prepared for blizzards by tying a rope from the back door of their house out to the barn as a guide to ensure they could return safely home when visibility was nil in the blowing snow.
Our lives have a tendency to become an ongoing blizzard, full of demands from work and family. We are over-scheduled, hurried, frantic, preoccupied, fatigued and starved for time. We admire people who are able to accomplish so much in so little time.
Add to this the storms and trials of life that blow in unexpectedly and catch us off guard.
No wonder we get disoriented and confused.
We need a rope to lead us home. A place that is centered and rooted.
This rope can be found in 2 ancient disciplines going back thousands of years: the Daily Office and Sabbath.
These 2 disciplines are like anchors for living in the hurricane of demands of our lives.
At the heart of these 2 disciplines is stopping to surrender to God in trust.
The essence of being in God's image is our ability, like God, to stop. We imitate God by stopping our work and resting. If we can stop for one day a week, or for mini-Sabbaths each day (the Daily Office), we touch something deep within us as image bearers of God. Our human brain, our bodies, our spirits, and our emotions become wired by God for rhythm of work and rest in Him.
The Daily Office
It is not so much a turning to God to get something but to be with God.
Setting aside times just to be with Him. David set times of prayer 7 times a day. (Psalm 119:164). Daniel prayed 3 times a day (Daniel 6:10). St. Benedict structured prayer times around 8 Daily Offices.
The great power in setting apart small units of time for morning, midday, and evening prayer infuses into the rest of my day's activities a deep sense of the sacred, of God.
The Daily Office, practiced consistently, actually eliminates any division of the sacred and the secular in our lives.
The Central Elements of the Daily Office:
1. Stopping
Be unhurried to let what we read or pray sink deeply into our spirits.
Give up control and trust God to run His world without me.
2. Centering
"Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for Him."(Psalm 37:7)
Let go of tensions. Follow James Finley's guidelines:
-be attentive and open
-Sit still
-Sit straight
-Breathe slowly, deeply and naturally
-Close your eyes or lower them to the ground.
If your mind wanders:..as you breathe in, ask God to fill you with the Holy Spirit. As you breathe out, exhale all that is sinful, false, and not of Him.
3. Silence
Dallas Willard has called silence and solitude the 2 most radical disciplines of the Christian life. Solitude is the practice of being absent from people and things to attend to God. Silence is the practice of quieting every inner and outer voice to attend to God. Henri Nouwen said that "without solitude it is almost impossible to live a spiritual life."
Our culture fills our lives with noise so that we become uncomfortable with silence.
But when God speaks in a whisper, we need to be silent to hear Him.
4. Scripture
The Psalms are the foundation of almost any Daily Office book. Use the Lord's Prayer.
Meditate on Scripture.
Let God be your Guide.
Remember the purpose of the Daily Office is to remember God and commune with Him throughout the day.
2nd Ancient Treasure: Sabbath-Keeping
The word Sabbath comes from the Hebrew word that means "to cease, to stop working."
It provides for us an additional rhythm for an entire reorientation of our lives around the living God. Setting aside a day to rest and delight in God is not an optional extra, it is a command from God.
The 4th commandment is the longest:
“Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. 9 Six days you shall labor and do all your work, 10 but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns. 11 For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.
(Exodus 20:8)
God worked. God rested. We are to work. We are to rest.
As one theologian stated, "To fail to see the value of simply being with God and doing nothing is to miss the heart of Christianity.
Observing the Sabbath, we affirm: "God is the center and source of our lives. He is the beginning, the middle, and the end of our existence." We trust God to provide and care for us.
The 4 Principles of Biblical Sabbath:
Develop a biblical framework for Sabbath that fits your particular life situation, temperament, calling and personality.
1. Stop:
Most of us can't stop until we are finished with whatever it is we think we need to do. Always one more goal to be reached before stopping.
We stop on Sabbaths because God is on the throne, assuring us the world will not fall apart if we cease our activities. It reminds us to "be still, and know that [He is] God (Psalm 46:10).
The core spiritual issue revolves around trust.
We can trust Him enough to stop.
2. Rest
Once you stop, you need to rest from all that you're addicted to like work, technology...
How do you rest?
By doing whatever delights and replenishes you: napping; walking; reading a good book; watching a good movie; going out for dinner..etc...
When we stop and rest, we respect our humanity and the image of God in us. We are not nonstop human beings. Sadly, it often takes a physical illness such as cancer, a heart attack, the flu, or a severe depression to get us to rest.
3. Delight
We live in a delight-deficient culture. Pleasure and delight have been distorted.
We are to delight in creation. we are to slow down and pay attention: to the tree, its leaves; to our food, the smell, the taste; our children, their eyes, their forms.
We are invited to healthy play. Creation and life are, in a sense, God's gift of a playground to us. Could be sports, dance, games, photos. Something that nurtures our sense of pure fun in God.
4. Contemplate
Pondering the love of God remains the central focus of Sabbaths.
Worship; reading and study of Scripture; silence.
Sabbath is like receiving the gift of a heavy snow day every week.
You have permission to play, nap, read, enjoy life.
God gives you this--every 7th day.
If you practice this, you will soon find your other 6 days becoming infused with those same qualities. God's plan.
The Principle of Longer Sabbaticals
God built into the lives of the Israelites, their national economic and political life Sabbatical years: they were to give the land a "sabbath of rest" one year in every seven. (Leviticus25:1-7)
Ponder your life. Take replenishment leaves--longer Sabbatical times--to refertilize the soil of your spiritual life.
We do violence to ourselves in not gripping this rope in the blizzard of life.
Thomas Merton wrote:
"There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence... activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence...It kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful."
Prayer:
Lord, help me to grab hold of you as my rope in the blizzard today. I need You. The idea of stopping to be with You one, two, or three times a day seems overwhelming, but I know I need You. Show me the way. Teach me to be prayerfully attentive to You. This idea of Sabbath, Lord, will require a lot of change in the way I am living life. Lead me, Lord, in how to take the next step with this. Help me to trust You with all that will remain unfinished, to not try to run Your world for You. Set me free to begin reorienting my life around You and You alone.
In Jesus' Name, Amen.
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