Shabbat

I'm reading a glorious book entitled The Sabbath by Abraham Joshua Heschel.

I share just some bits and pieces that hopefully will encourage you in Sabbath if you're already familiar or wet your appetite, making you hungry to feel what it's like to live in a time outside of the confines of space that only Sabbath...Shabbat can give. I have never known "time" to be so deep and thick and full as when it is outside of the other 6 days of the week and outside of what I've always known time to be...predetermined space between "things."

I am still learning Sabbath. And I am still having to consciously make choices about protecting Sabbath. Things still tug at me to cheapen or minimize it. There are still things about what it should look like about which I'm conflicted, but regardless, I'm learning to breathe in the time and space of Sabbath and I find myself longing and anticipating this "other" time.


The Architecture of Time
This picks up in the middle of a conversation about time and space.
"Time to us is sarcasm, a slick treacherous monster with a jaw like a furnace incinerating every moment of our lives. Shrinking, therefore, from facing time, we escape for shelter to things of space. The intentions we are unable to carry out we deposit in space; possessions become the symbols of our repressions, jubilees of frustrations. But things of space are not fireproof; they only add fuel to the flames. Is the joy of possessions an antidote to the terror of time which grows to be a dread of inevitable death?" He continues that "we are more harassed than supported by the Frankensteins of spatial things," and that "the higher goal of spiritual living is not to amass a wealth of information, but to face sacred moments...thus the essence of Sabbath is completely detached from the world of space."

A Place in Time
"Six days a week we wrestle with the world, wringing profit from the earth; on the Sabbath we especially care for the seeds of eternity planted in the soul. The world has our hands, but our soul belongs to Someone Else. Six days a week we seek to dominate the world, on the seventh day we try to dominate the self."

Careful...
"One cannot modify a precious filigree with a spear or operate on a brain with a plowshare. It must always be remembered that the Sabbath is not an occasion for diversion or frivolity...but an opportunity to mend our tattered lives; to collect rather than to dissipate time."

"Sanctify the Sabbath by choice meals, by beautiful garments; delight your soul with pleasure and I will reward you for this very pleasure."

"Time is like a wasteland. It has grandeur but no beauty. Its strange and frightful power is always feared but rarely cheered. Then we arrive at the seventh day, and the Sabbath is endowed with a felicity which enraptures the soul, which glides into our thoughts with a healing sympathy. It is a day on which hours do not oust one another...The difference between Sabbath and all other days is not to be noticed in the physical structure of things, in their spatial dimension. Things do not change on that day. There is only a difference in the dimension of time, in the relation of the universe to God. The Sabbath preceded creation and the Sabbath completed creation; it is all of the spirit that the world can bear."

That to say... Sabbath may take some wresting but, it is worth all the fighting of old hat and old habits that lie to us about why there are 7 days. Maybe it's just time to give in to it's grandeur because something in your soul desperately needs rest that perfecting all the other disciplines has not yet accomplished.

Sabbath quite literally is the "time" our souls were made to live in on 7th days.