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Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

Sabbath

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Labor and rest

Have you taken a day of rest and restoration this week? —Evangelical Friends Church Southwest

Sometimes it can be helpful to read one of my cultural traditions from another perspective. I’ve read most about the Sabbath recently from Jewish writers and evangelical Protestant theologians.

But today my devotional brought me this query from Quakers in the southwest region of the United States:

Have you taken a day of rest and restoration this week?” —Evangelical Friends Church Southwest

Why, yes, I said to myself. Yes, I have. And tomorrow I have the hard-won privilege of being able to take another.

On International Worker’s Day six days ago, many around the world commemorated the rights, regulations, and conventions that labor movements have fought for over the last few centuries.

The standard eight-hour work-day—which divides the 24-hour day into equal segments for work, sleep, and free time—is one such regulation. The two-day weekend is another. I’ve valued it most when my jobs have required I work through either Saturday or Sunday.

(Yes, labor at churches is still labor! Ask your nearby minister.)

But evangelical Quakers aren’t asking about regular rest in solidarity with international labor. Nor are they following the Seventh-day Adventist concern for the observance of the Ten Commandments or “moral law” on a specific weekday.

Rather, the Friends’ interest is in living in acknowledgment of God throughout life:

First generation Friends on the other hand did not feel that God was calling them to observe a particular sabbath day – much to the consternation of mainline Protestants. Small wonder after their meeting for worship these Friends would open their businesses and serve their fellow humans with honesty and caring. These Friends were, in other words serving the Lord even though, government officials often arrested the true Christians for ‘breaking the Sabbath.'” —Arthur Berk

“We do not need to long for a particular day,” Berk explains. “He is present always.”

That principle of pervading presence is the community’s historical status quo, but some Friends are experimenting with the rite of disrupting their typical schedules and choosing not to work as normal anyway.

Some, like the Jewish and allied community of the Reboot initiative, choose to unplug from the internet and mobile technologies and recenter with family and friends.

Even when it’s philosophically inconvenient, humans love habit and structure. And sometimes that tendency can help us recover attention, presence, and grounding that our wider culture’s habits make it hard for us to live into every day.

Having access to these benefits shouldn’t be a matter of privilege, and part of seeking a more just world has to mean changing our social cultures so that it no longer is.

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The right to rest

True courage dwelleth closer to gentleness than to denunciation... let there be constant self-restraint. —Ohio Yearly Meeting (Conservative Friends/Quakers)
I’ve always found this advice from Ohio’s Conservative Friends challenging.

These don’t seem to be the best times in the world for “gentleness” or “self-restraint.” And the quietist impulse to pull back in times of social turbulence—well, in the spirit of Frederick Douglass, I’m a little suspicious of that. “Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow,” Douglass once said, quoting Lord Byron.

But whenever this quote surfaces in my meditation time, and it frequently does thanks to the Quaker Advices and Queries app, I turn it over again just in case there’s something in it for me.

A few years ago, Walter Brueggemann wrote about Sabbath as an ancient ritual of resistance to oppression and endless production, and social commentators have taken that characterization to heart.

This year, I’m finding Sabbath a welcome reprieve not from endless production but from this year’s endless political turmoil. As I check out of the workweek, I also get to check out of the news cycle. I miss stories. I’m late on analyses. I don’t see that Really Smart or Really Funny thing for days. And that’s precisely what I need to forestall overwhelm.

Unlike the Conservative Friends, I wouldn’t say there’s more courage in gentleness than in denunciation. I’d simply say there’s courage in gentleness too.

I can rest long enough to step outside the social cloud of hyper-vigilance, but I don’t have to take so long that I lose the ability to see how The Powers’ work impacts vulnerable people and what action’s in my power to take.

We have the right to rest. We don’t have to drive ourselves as Pharaoh once drove the Israelites. And there are no prizes for dying on the treadmill.

As the new week begins, please join me in remembering that and planning accordingly.

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Writing from The Justice Conference

In popular culture, doing business is synonymous with taking action. Flip open a magazine about business or entrepreneurship and you’ll see articles and imagery about design scrums, mergers, stocks and sales, commercial transportation options, the best ways to expand, and ideal places to travel on your down time.

Vacations, too, are framed in terms of activity: hunting for a region’s best restaurants, heading to the waterfront or mountains for an adventure away from the office, and exploring galleries, exhibitions, and touring festivals. Advertising promises we can absorb the best of a town “in 18 hours!” and perhaps we can, but by the time anyone could possibly account for all of the recommended destinations and detours, they’d have worked enough to merit another vacation.

The challenge for our time isn’t filling the hours of the day. We’ve mastered that. Our deep challenge is releasing the vise grip of clock-time and calendars, knowing when and how to pause, and how to take the liberty to rest, refrain, and recover even when the culture around us is ambivalent about it.

I grew up in the Seventh-day Adventist community, a comparatively small 150-year-old Christian denomination that teaches the observance of a weekly Sabbath from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday. Sabbath is still one of my favorite spiritual practices: beyond its many theological and sociological rationales, Sabbath is a material and embodied reminder that everything that lives participates in an in-breath as well as an out-breath, reception as well as expression, rest as well as activity. Hustlers, business-builders, and worldchangers need that reminder.

The body constitutes a site of divine revelation.” —M. Shawn Copeland

As much as “the social body constrains the way the physical body is perceived” (Mary Douglas), it’s the physical body that limits not only what we can perceive on our own but also frames, through shared mental structures such as metaphor and analogy, how we organize and interpret the data that comes to us through our senses and all that we experience through our bodies (Beatrice Bruteau, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, and Richard Beck).

Even more: we live in a world where law and convention each regulate our bodies, our enfleshed us. In this world, social systems frame some bodies as ripe for hyper-analysis and suspicion when alive and fit for dissection and critique after death.

Andreas Vesalius, father of modern dissection, was neither the first nor the last to imagine that one could extract more wisdom from a tortured, dead, or carved-up body than from living bodies, pulsing and mobile, unpredictable, and capable of talking and pushing back.

As someone just four generations removed from people whose Christian slavers refused them the liberty to rest when their bodies demanded it, the capacity to cease work is sacred to me. And as someone driven to make, to investigate, to develop, to teach, to heal, and to help in a world with no off-switch, the disciplines of rest and listening are a critical counterbalance for me.

This weekend, Sabbath meets me away from home and work near what used to be the Cabrini-Green projects of North Chicago. Now “redeveloped,” that is, gentrified, this block hosts an expanding mostly White, middle-class mega-church and out-of-town tourists like me. We’re in town this weekend for the 2016 Justice Conference (#Justice16) and I’m most excited about hearing from Mark Charles (@wirelesshogan).

Mark Charles on stage at The Justice Conference, Chicago, IL.
Mark Charles speaks at The Justice Conference (Chicago, IL), June 3, 2016

Charles is a Navajo writer and consultant who teaches about the Doctrine of Discovery, the complicity of religion in the Western Hemisphere’s genocides, and the United States’ desperate need to tell the truth about the violations that scar its social body. These violations are ongoing, not merely historical. We sustain this pace of frenetic activity despite that ongoing injury, and that’s about as wise as running a marathon on a broken hip.

Charles calls us to pause, to stop and take stock. To stop acting long enough to allow truth to bubble up through layers of dehumanization and injustice. To stop acting long enough for all us to move from oppression and confession to lament and deep change.

What does justice look like when everything you have is stolen, when the entire system is corrupt?” —Mark Charles

I’ll share more tomorrow.