Episode 266 (Transcript): Big Ideas | Sabbath
Episode Transcript
Many thanks to listener Amanda Davis for her work in transcribing this episode!
This episode can be found on any podcast app or can be listened to here on our website as well. All the notes and resources we cited in the episode are found at this link as well:
CW: And so more and more I’m just looking for these, like, quiet disruptors of my work or productivity: scrolling, whatever. And I don’t know how I feel about Sabbath as an entire day. Again, laws don’t stand still, Right? But I do know that I’m actively working on Sabbath moments.
SH: Love that idea. Sabbath moments. Yes! I can get behind that.
CW: Hello, I’m Cynthia Winiward.
SH: And I’m Susan Hinkley.
CW: And this is At Last She Said It. We are women of faith discussing complicated things, and the title of today’s episode is Big Ideas: Sabbath.
SH: Ooh, Cynthia, I’m nervous for this one.
CW: You should be–you made all the notes, so-
SH: I know.
CW: If it’s a flop, you blame yourself.
SH: It’s not that I necessarily worry about being a flop. It’s that I feel… man. I was gonna say I feel like a hypocrite having this conversation, but that’s not even strong enough of a word. I feel... like a fraud. This is a fraudulent episode of At Last She Said It. And I’m gonna say more about why that is in a minute.
So. And I feel about approaching this one like you felt about approaching myth. Like you were a little bit, you had some trepidation…
CW: Oh, good.
SH: ... about that because you didn’t feel like it was in your wheelhouse necessarily, right? You were kind of, yeah it, that’s how I’m, that’s how I am in this conversation.
But also, I am the one who begged to have this conversation, so, it’s all on me. I wanna start right at the beginning by saying that however you feel about Sabbath, however you keep using air quotes, “The Sabbath,” or don’t, whatever your experience with Sabbath is, this episode is not to be prescriptive, not to say one way of doing the Sabbath is better than another. Nothing like that.
We’re interested in the concept of Sabbath, and so even if you saw the title Sabbath and said, “Ew, no, I don’t think so. I’m not listening to that,” I hope you’ll hang with us because there are interesting things, I think, in this, about this big idea. I didn’t know it was a big idea. Who knew- first of all? Let’s just start right there.
CW: Well, can I ask you, Susan, What triggered you wanting to have this episode? ‘Cause it’s been months now since you told me, “Let’s do an episode on Sabbath,” so I don’t remember.
SH: Well, it was actually-
CW: Do you remember what it was?
SH: Yeah, I do. I know exactly what it was. It started with a piece that we were assigned to read for The Living School, and I read it, and suddenly my mind was exploding ‘cause I could see–I could glimpse that this is a big idea, and I never really understood the scope of it, the intent of it, everything that the original law encompassed, all those things. I had no idea about so much that goes along with the idea of Sabbath, and so, my mind was blown. I wanted more.
I read that piece and I said, “Oh, I want that. Wait a minute. I want that. I didn’t know that was a thing. That’s what I want.” And so I decided to start diving on it.
CW: I love that and I feel like so many of our Big Idea episodes this season (by the way, this is our last), so I’m kind of excited to have our last Big Ideas episode on Sabbath. But so many of our Big Idea episodes have come about because it was something like you just described. Like, you were like, “Wait a minute. I want that. Let’s talk about that.” Best kind of conversation to have.
SH: Hopefully I can sell it because honestly, if I opened
the podcast and saw that it was about Sabbath, I would. Everything in me would resist.
CW: Yes, it would.
SH: It would resist. So hopefully, we’ll see. We’ll see how well I do selling the concept. Okay, so why a conversation about Sabbath? Let’s just start right there. First of all, Cynthia, I’m tired.
Oh. I am so, so, so tired. I’m tired in a place that I didn’t really realize existed, if that makes sense.
CW: It does.
SH: And it has to do with a lot of things, you know, the political climate. I think like being in my 60s, my body is kind of physically, let’s admit it, it’s on the downhill. And some things are starting to catch up with me.
I’m just mentally tired. I’ve been in a very transitional faith space for over, well over a decade now. I’m tired.
CW: Yeah. I feel this deeply.
SH: And I have a feeling that you feel the same.
So that’s the first thing. I’m ready for a rest, so I wanna talk about rest.
And then also Sabbath is just so much more than I ever realized, like I said earlier, and I’m gonna give all the spoilers right now about what we’re gonna be talking about, okay? It’s about remembering what God has done, about trusting abundance. It’s about rhythm. It’s about letting go. It’s about a promise of rest.
It’s about not needing to earn or prove anything. Oh. It’s even about liberation and [00:05:00] eradicating oppression. Who knew that all of those things were in Sabbath? I had no idea.
And then also, as you know, my path has become one of kind of reawakening, reclaiming, and reinventing spiritual things for myself.
Concepts like prayer that I’ve had my whole life I’ve had to knock down to the ground and rebuild because I never felt like my spiritual life belonged to me, right? It came to me fully formed. And so I didn’t really feel ownership over it. And I saw Sabbath as something that I had potentially completely misunderstood and underestimated what I could do if I internalized it and made it my own.
Like, what would Sabbath look like for me? I had no idea about that, and so I’ve kind of wanted to find out. And I really think we are allowed to talk about things that are further down the path from where we are right now.
CW: Oh, totally.
SH: Like, I think we’re allowed to talk about stuff that we haven’t figured out, ways we wanna grow, you know, things that we can only glimpse from here.
In fact, I would say that this podcast is about 90% those conversations.
CW: I was just gonna say, “:confession time!”
SH: We, we talk in the direction that we wanna move, and so this is one of those conversations.
Okay, you know from being in conversation with me for six plus years that I’ve always hated Sunday. Hated it. Spent half the week being relieved that it was over, and I spent the other half dreading it, and that is just the truth.
I grew up knowing Sunday as a day of “We don’ts.” That’s really all it was for me. It felt like a day, to me, of somehow trying to prove our piety. Like, what other reason could there be for being made to keep your dress on all day or for denying yourself of even the, your most regular pleasures?
You know, the other kids in the neighborhood could play outside. I couldn’t play outside. Well, you know, what could the point of that be than proving how holy we were?
And that didn’t do much for me. But I love the idea of a day of presence. Of a day of being without producing.
Like, what would a generative day, a day that could actually throw energy into the rest of my life look like?
Sunday has never been that to me. Sunday was a draining day. I’m an introvert–church was hard. It was tons of work. I mean, there are just all these reasons that–
CW: You were a mother.
SH: Yeah. Personally, Sunday was a drain. But a generative day, yeah, I want that in my life.
So engaging with the idea of Sabbath really is an opportunity for me to understand where I’ve been and think about whether it’s possible that a thing that has never had any resonance for me whatsoever could be reconceptualized and reincorporated. I mean, can I do with Sabbath what I did with prayer? I don’t know, but I want to try.
CW: And are you serious? You really don’t know? Like, you’re–you don’t know…
SH: I don’t know! I mean, I guess my tendency so far in my life has been more to just throw the concept out. And I had never thrown prayer out, right? I kept a place for prayer in my life. I didn’t really keep a place for Sabbath in my life, if I’m honest. So do I wanna make a place for something I’d gotten rid of? That’s a really great question.
CW: Yeah.
SH: The Center for Action and Contemplation describes the Sabbath as, quote, “A practice to tend the fire within.”
CW: What?
SH: I know.
CW: Are you serious? That’s crazy!
SH: It’s beautiful.
CW: It’s beautiful, but come on. “A practice to tend the fire within?” I mean, that sounds crazy to me as a lifelong Latter-day Saint, and also, yes, please. Like-
SH: Right, right ...
CW: It’s your spiritual life, my spiritual life; it’s personal now. It’s an inside job, and it’s really all that I’m interested in anymore, is the within part. Like, I’m just done.
You started out by saying you’re tired. I’m tired and I’m done, Susan. Done doing things for external reasons.
SH: Right.
CW: So I’m really glad we’re talking about this because, like you, do I even care about Sabbath? I mean, I can’t think of a topic in our church that we make smaller than Sabbath. Like you said, it’s all the “don’ts.”
SH: Right,
CW: And it was the same way for me growing up as well. And if I were on, like, a rapid fire panel where they were just throwing out questions at me and they asked me, you know, “Describe the Sabbath,” all I would have to say were the “don’ts.”
I mean, if I thought about it long enough, of course, I would come up with more intelligent answers, but for the most part, it would be like, “Don’t go shopping. Don’t go out to eat. Don’t play with my friends on the street. Don’t watch TV,” or, you know, whatever. So I don’t know. This is really tough stuff.
Like, I kind of already have asked you the question of, have [00:10:00] you been able to reconceptualize and reincorporate what Sabbath means. And I think you already said no.
SH: Absolutely not.
CW: But you want to discuss that because, truly, I have not either, and that’s why I’m eager to talk about this.
Because unlike our myth episode, which I felt really deeply invested in, I am going to confess that I’m not sure I want to make Sabbath a big idea.
SH: Okay.
CW: But I want to explore it, and so maybe exploring it is the big idea part. Let’s go with that. I wanna talk about it. I wanna dip my toe back in to test the temperature of the water, even though I feel like I’ve already defined a lot of those dos and don’ts.
SH: Yeah. Same.
CW:. Ahem, I go out to eat a lot on Sunday. It’s really fun, Susan.
Sh: It’s the best, Cynthia!
CW: It’s really great1
SH: Who knew?
CW: You know what the funnest part is living in Utah County in Mormon Mecca, is when I go out to eat, I see everybody there in their, white shirts and ties and dresses, and I was like, “Wait, what? This was an option the whole time?”
SH: People were doing this the whole time.
CW: People were. Where was the memo? I did not know that people leave church and immediately go to Cafe Rio. Did not know that, you know?
SH: So funny.
CW: Anyway, so, even though, like, I’ve already redefined a lot of that for me, what I will do and don’t, my redefining so far hasn’t really made it big, expansive, and growing.
And that’s okay. Maybe I’m still, like, in the deconstructing Sabbath part.
SH: Okay.
CW: I don’t know.
SH: Okay. Interesting. I feel like I deconstructed Sabbath and then made absolutely no effort to do any kind of-
CW: Same ...
SH: reclaiming or reconstruction. So let’s talk about it. We’ll see if we want to.
Maybe we’ll return and report next season. Who knows?
CW: Maybe.
SH: Or maybe we’ll say, “Hey, nothing changed.”
CW; Maybe. Maybe.
SH: Still not for me. But at least understanding some of the history behind Sabbath and stuff like that was pretty mind-blowing for me. I learned stuff I never knew, and so I’m happy to share that information, and our listeners can decide for themselves whether they wanna take it and run with it, or whether it’s not gonna change a single thing they ever thought about it.
CW: Yeah.
SH: So let’s do it.
CW: I like that.
SH: We gotta– we’re gonna go so fast because we have like, 15 pages of notes here. It’s ridiculous. Okay?
If we’re gonna start a big conversation about Sabbath, we have to begin with our relationship to work. Like, what is our relationship to work, and where did we get our ideas about that?
Puritans viewed labor as a divine calling. Now, just-
CW: Of course they did.
SH: Put that in the context of everything you know about being a Latter-day Saint. Are you surprised? Of course you’re not. You did your job and everything else to glorify God as a Puritan. So work was perceived as virtuous for its own sake, right?
Through work, we could fulfill God’s purposes, and we could get rich too. Bonus. Okay?
You’ve maybe heard a phrase, “the Protestant work ethic.” Yes?
CW: Yes.
SH: Yes. That actually came to us via German sociologist Max Weber in 1905, and the “Protestant work ethic” is a framing of work not just as a necessity, but as our spiritual duty and a core component of our moral identity.
Okay? Our moral identity, actually as Puritan descendants, is framed around work.
CW: I totally believe this
SH: This, of course, helped to set the stage for the development of capitalism. Okay? But however, capitalism (didn’t see that coming) has come with some problems, right?
CW: Just a few.
SH: It’s come with problems.
Well, I mean, think about it. If you walked into a Mormon church and started an attack on capitalism, I think people would rise to defend that with as much vigor as they would defend any gospel principle.
CW: Yes.
SH: I really do. I really do believe that. Like, we-- this stuff is in our DNA somehow. So Richard Rohr knows that about us and every other Christian, and he has a lot to say about it.
And this is from something called “The Gospel Economy,” and he says this: “Capitalism is based on quid pro quo reward and punishment thinking and a retributive notion of justice. This much service or this much product requires this much payment or this much reward. It soon becomes the entire, and I do mean entire, frame for all of life, our fundamental relationships, even marriage and children, our basic self-image, ‘I deserve, you owe me,’ or, ‘I will be good and generous if it helps me, too,’ and a faulty foundation for our relationship with God.”
CW: Ooh.
SH: I know.
CW: Faulty foundation.
SH: Harsh words, but it rings true to me. I’m gonna motor right on because we’re gonna get to, I think, some of why this rings so true. But anyway, glorifying work makes us prone to all kinds of problems. It makes us prone to [00:15:00] being caught up in anxiety, performance, perfection.
I feel like people will sacrifice almost anything: their health, their well-being, their relationships, for the sake of their commitment to work.
CW: Yes.
SH: Yes. I’ve seen it time and again.
I lived for years with a man who was largely married to his job, and there were many good reasons for that and reasons why that happened.
CW: Right.
SH: But I mean, it, it really was… His career really was the center around which so much turned in my life and in our family life. Because it was, like, built on it. It was built there.
CW: Sounds familiar.
SH: Yeah, I have a feeling maybe it does, and I think a lot of women right now are maybe going, “Yes, this sounds familiar.”
And I think maybe mothers are-- this could be just a totally gross generalization– but I think mothers may be less prone to building everything around a career because I think once you have children, you-- women don’t have that luxury sometimes-
CW: I think that’s fair.
SH: …in the same way, and I say that with some trepidation and realizing all the limitations of what I just said, but I also think there’s a kernel of truth there.
____________________________________________
We become cogs, basically, in this corrupt economic system that runs on constant greed and production. Does that sound fair?
CW: I mean, if you’re gonna use the word cogs to describe us humans in this system, that’s ouchie already, and yet, yes, this sounds sadly true.
SH: I mean, I feel that way in the United States.
I feel like the people are kind of regarded as cogs in the economic system. I really do think that’s what it’s built on.
SH: Okay this quote comes from Cindy S. Lee from a piece called “Our Unforming,” and this is the piece that started it all for me with Sabbath that came to me via the CAC. And she says this: “We cannot rest well unless we unform our distorted practices of work. We also cannot truly find rest as individuals until all in the community can also find rest. In the Old Testament scriptures, the commandment to keep the Sabbath was not just an order to rest. Rather, the Sabbath establishes a liberative spiritual practice to address our unjust and unethical systems of work.”
CW: Oh, man. Okay, it’s all coming back to me now because I remember when we were studying this and you just kept texting me about this article that we had read. So it’s coming back to me.
SH: That sounds like something I’d do.
CW: Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I love the idea of what she’s talking about. I love the idea of addressing the unjust and unethical systems in a convo about the Sabbath. I mean, I recently heard Scott Galloway, who’s a big podcaster, a professor at NYU. He said that in America, the sky is the limit for earning potential, but that our safety net is a concrete floor with spikes in it. And I was like, “That is the truest thing I have ever heard about living in America, especially right now, I feel like, in late-stage capitalism. But anyway.
SH: It’s just getting worse.
CW: Yeah. Yeah, it’s just getting worse. And so basically, like all the people that Jesus was worried about, the poor, the sick, the marginalized, the immigrants, like they all fall through. And this is just me speaking as an American seeing what’s going on in society, like they all fall through that flimsy, held together with safety pins safety net. Like people are just falling through left and right
SH: Oh yeah, a lot of them are living on those spikes. They’re living on that spiky concrete floor while the rest of us are working so hard doing everything we can to keep ourselves above-
CW: Above ...
SH: those spikes.
CW: The concrete spiky floor.
SH: Right?
CW: Yeah. Yeah.
SH: Ooh, ouch. Ouch.
CW: Yeah.
SH: If you’re gonna have a conversation about Sabbath.. If you’re gonna talk about myth, you go to Joseph Campbell; if you’re gonna talk about Sabbath, you’re gonna go to theologian Walter Brueggemann.
He’s done a lot of work on this, and the first thing I did was buy his famous book about it and read it.
So he builds it around this idea that our unhealthy relationships to work are like the system of slavery in Egypt. People are viewed as machines to increase the wealth of those in power, and there is no rest for anyone in this kind of system.
CW: Oh.
SH: And he says this: “The Fourth Commandment is the most difficult and the most urgent of the commandments in our society because it defies the most elemental requirements of a commodity-propelled society specializing in control and entertainment, bread and circuses, along with anxiety and violence.”
CW: Wow.
SH: So for the Israelites, the Sabbath law came in to break the system and to do like a hard reset after they were freed from Egypt.
For us, the Sabbath can break the cycle in a similar [00:20:00] way by forcing us to stop continually trying to do more and gain more.
CW: That’s a tall order.
SH: It’s a tall order. We’re forced off the hamster wheel for at least 15 seconds.
And it’s hard to see the hamster wheel when you’re on it, right? But when you get off-
CW: Yeah.
SH: Then I think you have a view of what the poor hamsters who are still on there are doing that maybe you didn’t have when you were running the race.
CW: Yeah. Okay, before we leave this section where you started out asking the question, “What is our relationship to work?” I kinda wanna jump in and say I was thinking of Pete Enns, and I feel like I’ve quoted his book, How the Bible Actually Works several times on our most recent episodes, just because I had decided to dive back into it and reread it again. And he has this section in the book called “Laws Don’t Stand Still for Long.”
And so when you ask, “What’s our relationship to work?” I think it’s worth comparing what was work, you know, for a Mesopotamian group of people during the Bronze Age like? What is work for me, a modern person in the 21st century. I mean, you don’t even have to go back to the Bronze Age. Like, just go back to, you know, 100, maybe 150 years ago, right?
SH: Exactly.
CW: Before electricity.
SH: Yeah. Right.
CW: People, before we had electricity, people stopped working when the sun set.
But you and I, everyone listening, we all have access to bright light 24/7, and so I think the law of the Sabbath probably should change as well. These laws don’t stand still for long. What in your life, Susan, has ever stood still? So I think applying wisdom liberally, which is the whole point of Pete Enns’ book, How the Bible Actually Works, I think applying that wisdom liberally is really crucial when considering whether anything biblical is applicable to our modern lives.
And I know that sounds like I’m kicking the Sabbath to the garbage can, like, “Eh, it’s not applicable.” It’s not. I just really strongly resonate with that idea that laws don’t stand still. And I am going to need to reframe Sabbath for me. And more on that in a little bit, but I just wanted to kinda jump in and answer your question of-
Sh: Yeah. No, it’s such a good point. It’s such a good point, I think. And as you’re making that point, I’m thinking, “Well, I haven’t stood still, so of course the law needs to change for me.”
CW: Yes.
SH: Because I have changed.
CW: Yeah.
SH: So my approach to everything (so much more to say on that) is changing.
CW: Go on. Go on.
SH: Yeah. Okay. Okay, I wanna stop here and I’m gonna go through it fast ‘cause there’s so much information, and there are all kinds of good places I’m gonna link to at least one podcast in the notes where you could really get a great overview of this that I don’t have time to really give all the context of in this conversation.
But there’s so much Sabbath history, like where we get the law and what the original law was about, all that kinda stuff, so I wanna talk about that.
Mosaic law regarding Shabbat, which is what the Sabbath was called, Shabbat, which was Saturday, right?
CW: Yes.
SH: Well, which still is Saturday. It was about physical rest. It was about refraining from work.
But early Christians, and I’m talking early, like as early as 115 AD, so, the New Testament is pretty young still at this point, right?
CW: Yeah.
SH: They began celebrating the Lord’s Day, is what they called it, on Sunday. And that was different from Shabbat. That was a day celebrating resurrection and emphasizing spiritual rest-
CW: Yeah
SH: or resting God. So-
CW: That’s a good distinction.
SH: Yeah. Two different concepts there. And for a time, some early Christian Jews making the transition into Christianity observed both days.
CW: Really?
SH: Which I think might be where we get our weekend. Because if you think of the Jewish Sabbath starting-
CW: Okay.
SH: Friday night, right? And then you’ve got Friday night to Saturday night, and then you’ve got to Sunday night. Because, you know, do you ever feel like on Sunday night things start to pick up again for the week? It’s like-
CW: Always
SH:... getting the kids ready to go to school, right, all of that. It’s like, “The weekend’s over, guys.” “The fun’s over,” ... on Sunday night. Well, I think it’s, I think we see a natural rhythm to that, how that developed when we consider the history of how this came into practice. And Christians have focused on Sunday, of course, because Constantine decreed Sunday to be a day of physical and spiritual rest in 321 AD.
So he kind of married the two into one day and said, “This is the official one.”
CW: Interesting. That’s how it was systematized then.
SH: That’s how it was systematized. Okay. But if you’re reading Paul in the New Testament, Paul has the part where he says, “Whether you do it on Saturday or whether you do it on Sunday, whatever day you do it on, don’t judge each other for however you practice this.”
So they were straddling a time where [00:25:00] it was probably kind of rocky, I would imagine. I would imagine people had strong opinions about what celebrating the Sabbath really meant.
Sabbath has been with us from the very beginning, and I mean Genesis. It starts right there because we hear that God created everything in six days, and then on the seventh day, God rested.
And there’s, gosh, so much that I could say about that, so I hope if people are interested in some of this history, they’ll do some looking into it because there’s a lot of nuance, that it adds to the law as it initially came to us. The law is rolled out twice in the Old Testament, so we get it first in Exodus 20, verses 8-11. And the Exodus version grounds the Sabbath in those seven days of creation, in that pattern that we see introduced in Genesis. And Shabbat, the word Shabbat actually means stopping or to stop. That’s what the word translates to.
CW: That was crazy learning that. Crazy. I had no idea.
SH: Yeah,
CW: No idea.
SH: So the Sabbath is tied to the creation story, is about kind of a cosmic rest period after a period of intense work and creativity: Creation. On the seventh day, God rested and hallowed that day. God sanctified that day at that point.
CW: Okay, in the podcast that you’re referring to that you shared with me, thank you, so I learned all of this alongside you. It was really interesting. As they were talking about the Sabbath and about the creation and God resting on the seventh day, I thought, “Here we go again, Susan. Aha. Hebrew poetry.” Because we’re recording this episode on the heels of our Big Ideas myth episode.
SH: Right.
CW: And I found it really interesting to learn that there are three lines of the creation poem, narrative myth, whatever we’re calling it, that have the word seven in them, and then each of those lines that has the word seven has seven words in them.
So I mean, in Hebrew, right? And so I’m like, “Oh my gosh.”
SH: It’s so amazing.
CW: It is like this is such- It’s so cool ... poetry, right? You think about like a haiku poem, and you think about how that is structured.
SH: Right, right.
CW: And it has to have this many words and this many lines, and it was the same in the creation story and of course, using the number seven, so just amazing stuff.
So I once again proclaim again that I like looking at the Bible as Hebrew poetry now, and it gives it so much more depth and meaning.
SH: And this is part of the-
CW: Just had to throw that in.
SH: No, it’s so good because this is part of why I say, all of this was really meant to establish rhythm.
CW: Rhythm.
SH: This is about a rhythm of life, a rhythm of creation.
The, actually the seventh day never ends. You see the other days end in Genesis. Right. The seventh day doesn’t, right? So we’re still in the seventh day, and we’re heading toward this period of cosmic rest for everyone and everything, but it hasn’t been realized yet. So like, yeah, it’s so poetic, and the way that they lay it out just reinforces that rhythmic sort of element of it.
CW: Love it. Love it.
SH: So cool.
Okay. Deuteronomy, it’s phrased largely the same, but then we get something different at the end, and so this is Deuteronomy 5, verses 12 through 15, and Deuteronomy grounds the Sabbath in the liberation of God’s people from Egypt. So Sabbath functions as sort of a weekly Independence Day.
It’s this time when Israel is supposed to set aside sacred time to remember that they were once under the oppression of Pharaoh.
Ruth Haley Barton, who is a spiritual director and seminary educator says this in a piece called “Finding Freedom Through Sabbath Resistance.” I’m gonna link all of these amazing pieces and people can go and read them.
But she says this: “By instituting the Sabbath, God intervened in human history to make right something that had gone terribly wrong, and reestablished a pattern present in creation that had been tragically lost.” Because the slaves in Egypt were made to work 24/7.
CW: Yeah
SH: This is what she’s talking about here. We’ve lost the rhythm, right?
In the Exodus narrative, the God who is free to rest on the seventh day is calling the people God loves to participate in His freedom by embedding it in their national identity.
CW: So good.
SH: So cool. Okay, and then in Leviticus 25, things get really crazy because we get the–completely wild, to me–Sabbath year in verses 1 through 7.
CW: I had no idea.
SH: And then we get the Sabbath jubilee. I had no idea either. Actually, I think Rob Bell blew my mind with this some years ago, but I hadn’t really taken time to find out what it was about. So, that’s verses 8 through 55, we get the Sabbath jubilee.
Okay, in the Sabbath year, which happens every seven years, the land rests [00:30:00] and remains unharvested, so you don’t get to plant anything or take anything that grows.
And can you imagine? Can you imagine?
CW: Nope.
SH: No. I can’t either. What do you do the rest of the time? I’m totally silent about this.
The rest of the time... Yeah, I know. It would, like, the degree of…. Well, the way that this points to God’s abundance, I guess, is staggering to me. You’re being made to trust in the abundance of the earth.
CW: So good ...
SH: Through this kind of law, and it’s so good, and I can’t really think of anything like it.
It would be like if on Sunday, on the Sabbath, Latter-day Saints sat back and expected the meal to materialize for them. Which is, like, absolutely the opposite, in my experience.
CW: Okay, Susan, I love that you actually chose that example because as two women who have spent our whole adult lives preparing big meals on Sunday for families, like, that’s, like, the penultimate thing you can, I can think of It is. Like, someone serve me a meal? What? What?
SH: Yeah. I know.
CW: It’s so funny to me. Hence why I go out to eat on Sunday ‘cause someone else has to make me the meal, and that’s-
SH: Same ... the only way it’s gonna happen. Like, finally I’m getting my payback. Finally leaning into the abundance. Of course, that’s the abundance of other people’s work. That’s a problem we have we have-
CW: Right.
SH: Okay ... plenty we can talk about that. But anyway, yes.
CW: Move on. I hear you.
SH: Okay, so, that’s what happened in the seven years.
Okay, the Sabbath jubilee year, which comes on the 50th year, so you go through seven of those cycles Right? You get to the 49th year. The next year, Sabbath Jubilee, the land rests and remains unharvested, and all the slaves get freed.
And ancestral property and lands that have been sold in those 50 years revert to their original owners.
It’s like a total reset. Debts get forgiven, right? It’s like liberty, rest, and restoration.
CW: Yeah.
SH: And so we’re gonna come back to those later. Like, can you imagine a total societal reset every 50 years? I mean, I think we’re ripe for one right now.
CW: Yeah.
SH: It’s been more than 50 years, and I think we’re ripe.
CW: Susan,
SH: I think you- ... I had no idea about this stuff.
CW: Oh, how many times a week do you text me and you say, “Can we hit a pause button? Where is the pause button right now?”
SH: Exactly! I want the giant cosmic pause button.
Okay, so that’s the Old Testament Sabbath law, which is, you know, where it’s introduced to us.
In the New Testament the teachings of Jesus and Paul both emphasize the Sabbath. It’s mentioned over 50 times. And by the way, any time they’re talking about Sabbath in the Bible, they’re referring to Shabbat.
CW: Yes.
SH: Friday sunset to Saturday eve, right?
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SH: Jesus, does Jesus keep the Sabbath? Did he have a lot of respect for that? Well, I mean, I guess it depends on who you ask because.
CW: Depends on who you ask.
SH: We see Jesus heal more than once on the Sabbath.
What that is about actually, is breaking the bonds of captivity. This is a liberation. This is Jesus demonstrating liberation.
CW: Love it.
SH: Healing someone is liberating them, right? And so he’s telling the Pharisees basically, “The Sabbath was made for humankind, not humankind for the Sabbath.”
CW: Best scripture ever.
SH: And that means, like, this is a law that can be customized. It’s for you to put to work in your life.
David Roberts, who is a progressive Christian writer on the staff of Patheos has a piece called “Liberation Keeps the Sabbath Holy,” and this is what he says about that: “Jesus defines the Sabbath through the lens of liberation, the liberating center of our lives by which we should define all our other days.”
In other words, he doesn’t want the Sabbath to just be part of our week. He wants it to be part of us. “Jesus isn’t afraid of work creeping into the Sabbath. He is afraid of the Sabbath never creeping into our daily work.”
CW: That is it.
SH: That’s it.
CW: That is the perfect redefinition of, well, not redefinition, explanation of the Sabbath being made for us. And I think, I don’t know, how much has that scripture meant to you, Susan, that the Sabbath was made for us, not us for the Sabbath? Like especially if someone-
SH: Honestly never thought anything much about it until now.
CW:Oh, really? What?
SH: Yeah.
CW: Okay. Okay, well then this is where we’re different because I- that scripture has meant so much to me as I have redefined my faith life and what I’m you know, the dos and the don’ts and what I’m gonna change, and all of that. Like that has been the most meaningful scripture for me, and I do mean meaningful as in like filled with meaning in reassembling my faith. Like I use that verbiage for all kinds of LDS things. Like the temple is made for us.
We are not made for the temple. Or like the Word of Wisdom was made for me. I was not made for the Word of Wisdom. Do you know what I mean? [00:35:00]
SH: Wow. Yes. Yes.
CW: I have been asking myself, I have been just tossing in new words into that scripture about the Sabbath for myself for years as I’ve been redefining a lot of this..
SH: How come I did not feel... How come I didn’t ever see that?
CW: I don’t know. I should have been texting you about that, you know?
SH: Yes, you should have.
CW: But it has been super meaningful for me, and I mean even for folks who are not religious or not even sure if they wanna be religious anymore, like how much are we hearing in society about a secular Sabbath?
I’m thinking of the author Jonathan Haidt. He is constantly going on podcasts and writing books and advocating for structured technology fasts, right? Like making a day here and there different than the other days. And I think this goes back to redefining the law because now we have these little computers in our pockets that go everywhere with us, and is that really healthy to have access to that?
SH: Right. Well.
CW: So, so yeah, once again, the Sabbath was made for us. And we get to define What is meaningful to us on those days, on that day.
SH: That might be like the most transformational thinking of this whole conversation, actually.
CW: Oh! Okay!
SH: I think really leaning into that scripture can give you permission maybe, I guess, to do whatever you need- CW: Yes, it’s permission giving!
SH: to do with this. It’s permission giving.
CW: 100%.
SH: Straight from Jesus’ mouth. Yep,
CW: Yep.
SH: Okay. We’re so short on time, but I wanna talk for a second about Sabbath as liberation theology.
CW: Oh,
SH: We have to. Because like we talked about the Beatitudes as liberation theology, who knew? But the law as couched in the memory of slavery, which was the second way that it was given to us, was about a break from making bricks for Pharaoh.
But it wasn’t just about that. It was about the idea that no one needs to be making bricks for Pharaoh.
CW: Nobody.
SH: So Sabbath was not really about the individual, it was about changing the economic engines that were driving society and sort of our entire societal relationship to work, and good luck rooting work out of the Puritans.
I think that was a tall order. But imagine thinking of our modern-day Sabbath as resistance, as weekly resistance against economic exploitation, against consumerism, against internalized oppression. I mean, I love the idea of rest as political action and spiritual resistance.
CW: Just love it.
SH: Dismantling systems that equate work with productivity.
Okay, the last one is Sabbath as disruptor. Sabbath disrupts the idolization of our work and our ego connection to it, which I think is huge. We are what we do. What happens when you’re at a cocktail party, someone says to you, “So what do you do?”
CW: What do you do?
SH: That’s just where it all focuses. It reminds us to depend on God as our source of life rather than on our own efforts. Adele Calhoun, who’s a pastor, says, “If you aren’t resting, you are a slave to something.”
CW: Oh, gosh. Preach!
SH: Preach.
CW: I just really love this idea of Sabbath as disruptor, and this is maybe what I’m going to take for my takeaway for the episode. Because I’ve been working on it so hard already, so maybe it’s just more of the same for me. But I think I told you before, maybe even said it here on the podcast, I think that I’ve been trying really hard to just let myself be bored instead of grabbing my phone, like in doctor’s offices and such. And I got this idea from Arthur Brooks, right? He’s on this whole kick of writing all these books about happiness and how we measure happiness and things like that. And so, you know, I’ll sit in the doctor’s office and instead of grabbing my phone, I’m in the optometrist, it’s dark, you know, ‘cause they dilated my eyes, and-
SH: Right
CW: I’m just sitting there bored and thinking and breathing. And so more and more, I’m just looking for these quiet disruptors of my work or productivity, scrolling, whatever. And I don’t know how I feel about Sabbath as an entire day. Again, laws don’t stand still.
SH: Right.
CW: But I do know that I’m actively working on Sabbath moments.
SH: Love that idea, Sabbath moments. Okay. Yes. Well, like I can get behind that.
CW: Exactly. This is kind of the whole thing about meditation. That’s really all it is disrupting to try to, like, get back to what really matters. And so. I’m doing little things, Susan. Like, when I’m reading novels, I’m only reading them in paperback. I’m not reading them on an iPad, a Kindle. I’m not reading on my laptop, whatever.
I stopped wearing my Apple Watch because I’m sick of all the productivity, “Here, you haven’t got your steps in.”
“Oh, shut up.” I’m sick of all the productivity.
SH: Don’t start with me.
CW: Don’t start with me today, you know? So yes, my Apple Watch is uncharged in a drawer, been there for months. I leave [00:40:00] my phone in another room.
And it’s just been so interesting to read all the research about this from all the smart people out there who have data on it. And they’re talking about the importance of boredom and why it’s important, because that disrupts the default mode network.
Being bored makes us think about things that might be kind of uncomfortable. I mean, right, Susan. Spoiler: that’s why you and I reach for our phone. It’s because we don’t wanna sit there and be uncomfortable and alone with our thoughts. So I’ve just been trying so hard to embrace the disruptive part of Sabbath.
I wasn’t calling it that, but I’m gonna start calling it now, these disruptive Sabbath moments, and embrace the boredom.
SH: I think we absolutely get credit for things we’re already doing. So go ahead and relabel your disruption behavior as Sabbath behavior.
CW: Yeah.
SH: You know? It can add, like, more nuance and context really, to more meaning to what you’re doing, but what you were already doing, because it was feeding you.
CW: Well, and this is how bad it is, and I totally believe this even though I was surprised when I heard this data. They put a bunch of people in a room alone, nothing with them, and they said, “Okay, sit here for 15 minutes alone doing nothing, or you could push this button that will give you an electric shock.”
SH: Did they start shocking themselves?
CW: Yes.
SH: Get out.
CW: People, they didn’t say how many, but there were some people, this is all from Arthur Brooks. There were some people that actually preferred to push the button and shock themselves rather than be alone with their thoughts.
SH: That is really something.
CW: I know. I know.
SH: I believe that. So yes. I have no trouble believing that at all.
CW: No trouble believing it.
SH:That’s crazy. Oh, wow.
_________________________________
SH: Okay, here’s where we’re gonna turn toward our church specifically for a minute.
CW: Oh, good.
SH: I’m rubbing my hands together. Even church, where the idea of Sabbath originates for us, reinforces an unhealthy relationship to work.
CW: Oh, say more, Susan.
SH: Cynthia, could Latter-day Saints even remake our relationship to work? Is that even possible? This is an uphill, because I think that would be as hard as getting Latter-day Saints to accept grace.
CW: That’s a really good parallel.
SH: We would really be swimming against the current on this, I think.
Richard Rohr has more to say about that in “The Gospel Economy,” and he says, “Let’s contrast this meritocracy, this punishment and reward economy, basic capitalism, which we in the United States all drink in with our mother’s milk, with what Jesus presents, which I’m going to call a gift economy. In a gift economy, there is no equivalence between what we give and how much we get. Now, I know we’re all squirming. We don’t like it because we feel we’ve worked hard to get to our wonderful middle-class positions or wherever we are. But until we begin to live in the Kingdom of God instead of the kingdoms of this world, we think, as most Christians do, exactly like the world.”
“We like the world of seemingly logical equations. Basically, to understand the gospel in its purity and in its transformative power, we have to stop counting, measuring, and weighing. We have to stop saying, ‘I deserve,’ and deciding who does not deserve. None of us deserve. Can we do that? It’s pretty hard unless we’ve experienced infinite mercy and realize that it’s all a gift.”
CW: I just… I know Richard Rohr’s a Catholic, but come on, that’s the most Mormony quote ever in this whole episode. I mean, I’m trying to imagine what life would be like if I lived in the Kingdom of God instead of the kingdom of this world, like a place where rest wasn’t earned.
SH: I mean, we have the idea of Zion that we nod to.
CW: Is that what Zion is, Susan?
SH: I think Zion would be equalized work, and I think that it would be spiritual rest and probably also physical. I think it–yes. I mean,I think it is. I think that’s what he’s talking about. I think living in the Kingdom of God means living in Zion, doesn’t it?
CW: Okay. I mean, yeah, but I just, until you said that-
SH: We don’t believe it right now. We don’t believe it.
CW: No, we don’t believe our own stuff, for sure. No. I mean, I just–
SH: We don’t believe there’s a Zion, Cynthia.
CW: Silly us.
SH: That’s crazy talk.
CW: I just read an article this morning. Okay, truthfully, I’m sitting at breakfast with my husband. He read the article to me out loud, which is pretty much the same thing. But he was reading a story, tragically, about a general authority who just passed away unexpectedly, and they were quoting his son at the funeral, and he said something about, like, “My dad hasn’t been released. He’s still doing missionary work.”
And I thought,“Oh my goodness, even in death, which one could argue is like the ultimate kingdom of God, even though [00:45:00] Jesus said the kingdom of God is here and now. Like even in death, we focus on work like that.” And I’m not gonna take anything away from somebody in their moment of grief. If that’s what gives him comfort, knowing that his dad is on the other side working, okay.
But it blew me away because- work is what gives us peace in death? Really?
SH: I’m not sure that I’ve heard Latter-day Saints talk that much about peace in death or rest. What I’ve heard my whole life is Latter-day Saints talk about how our work continues on the other side of the veil.
Yeah. This is what I’ve heard Latter-day Saints talk about, that our work continues. We get there and we’re gonna be doing missionary work. That’s exactly what I’ve heard.
CW: Oh my gosh.
SH: So I think that is a very LDS idea about what happens in God’s kingdom, I guess. But anyway-
CW: Yeah ...
SH: Richard Rohr disagrees, and I would love to side with Richard Rohr on this one.
Okay, the question becomes, Cynthia, how much work do we owe God? I’ve told you before about my stake presidency member explaining to me one night that we should go to bed every night, quote, “completely worn out in the service of the Lord.”
Oh. Nadia Bolz-Weber has something to say about this. “When we add ‘Get more rest and take Sabbath seriously’ to our to-do list, we might be tempted to think of it as nothing more than a scheme to fuel us back up just so we can do more work. After all, it is our work that is so very important since that’s the thing that justifies our existence, and the world really needs us.”
“But the wise Rabbi Abraham Heschel reminds us that Sabbath rest is actually about stopping long enough to see that God’s redeeming work in the world goes on with or without us.”
CW: Oh my goodness.
SH: We are not responsible to do all of God’s work in the world, Cynthia.
CW: That’s gonna be my second takeaway from this episode. That’s amazing.
SH: That’s a hard one for Latter-day Saints because we build temples specifically to do God’s work in the world, right? I mean, we very specifically connect those dots that we’re doing God’s work, so that’s tough.
SH: Okay, back to Cindy S. Lee, who is my original mind blower on the Sabbath.
She says this: “In letting go, we acknowledge what we can’t do and what we need God to do. Rabbi Abraham Heschel writes, ‘Rest on the Sabbath as if all your work were done.’ Rest is knowing we’ve done what we could do this week, and now we need to receive grace. Rest is the center and heart of our work because it acknowledges that in the end, no matter how hard we work, we continue to be dependent on the grace of God.”
CW: Yes.
SH: This is why I brought grace into it earlier. Because I think they’re very much the same kind of thinking, this idea that we have to, we owe it to God to earn, do, produce, you know, everything that we can.
CW: Okay, but that, Susan, for us as Latter-day Saints is such a total paradigm shift.
SH: Oh, total.
CW: I’m not sure it’s possible. Like rest as refuel, versus rest to view God’s ongoing grace.
SH: Exactly.
CW: That is huge.
SH: It’s huge. That is really huge. And yes- I’m gonna keep talking about it because there is more. As a younger LDS woman, a young mother, you know, with a house full of children the Sunday day of rest often included getting the kids ready for church with extra curling of hair and pressing dresses and stuff like that.
Starting Sunday dinner by prepping in advance, often the day or night before and having to shop for it and, you know, all of those things. Getting everyone to church. My husband also often had callings that took him away on Sundays. So getting everyone to church, teaching a class when I get there or leading a choir or performing a speaking assignment, right?
Going to extra meetings after if I’m in a presidency or whatever, we’d have a meeting after. Going to firesides later. Going home to finish preparing the largest meal of the week, cleaning up. Oh, okay. And I mean, where was the rest, Cynthia? Where was the rest? So it’s like, I feel like it’s easy to see where my LDS view and dread of Sabbath came from.
CW: Absolutely.
SH: I went looking a little bit on the church website to see what some of the official messaging was, and I pulled a quote from Russell M. Nelson from a talk called “The Sabbath Is a Delight,” which I thought, “Is he being ironic?” But no, he wasn’t.
But this quote explained a lot to me, and here’s what it said: “How can you ensure that your behavior on the Sabbath will lead to joy and rejoicing? In addition to your going to church, partaking of the sacrament, and being diligent in your specific call to serve, what other activities would help to make the Sabbath a delight for you?” And then he goes on to mention teaching your family the gospel, doing family history, rendering [00:50:00] service to others. He compares the Sabbath to tithing. It’s what we owe to God.
CW: Wow.
SH: So with tithing, we consecrate our money, and with the Sabbath, we consecrate our time back to God. And then he says this: “Not pursuing your own pleasure on the Sabbath requires self-discipline. You may have to deny yourself of something you might like. If you choose to delight yourself in the Lord, you will not permit yourself to treat it as any other day. Routine and recreational activities can be done some other time.”
CW: Susan, I just have to point out really quickly that I think there is a gender difference here and especially with Russell M. Nelson having been a man who was born in the 1920s, right? Like he came from a totally different structure where maybe the Sabbath could be a delight for him. But come on, where is the delight in that whole list you just read a few minutes ago?
SH: That’s what I felt. And, like, specifically denying yourself of things that might bring you pleasure. That is not the definition of a generative day for me.
CW: No. It kinda is opposite of what you were just, what we were talking about a minute ago about grace. Right. Like, this is like the total opposite antithesis of grace.
SH: And it comes directly from the highest levels-
CW: Yes
SH: ... of church teachings. So there, there’s a reason that I grew up trying to divorce myself from the Sabbath instead of trying to embrace it. And this is why I didn’t want it. I didn’t want what he was describing.
SH: Cindy Lee has something to say about this, and she says, “The issue is not that people aren’t taking their faith seriously. They’re just exhausted.”
CW: Ding, ding, ding!
SH: “An event-based church dependent on attending programs and volunteering becomes just another job to juggle with our work lives and family responsibilities.
The rhythms of the church don’t match the rhythms of people’s lives. Churches aren’t known as places of rest. Instead, we are just as busy in the church as we are at work.”
SH: “People burning out from never-ending church events indicates there is something seriously wrong with our understanding of Sabbath.”
CW: Okay, that makes me think, do you remember a few years ago when the church announced, we’re gonna start limiting extra Sunday meetings?
SH: I do.
CW: Okay, so it wasn’t just my area. This was a church-wide thing, right?
SH: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that’s part of why we cut the schedule back to two hours instead of three hours.
CW: Okay, but how’s that going? ‘Cause I feel like that sure fizzled fast. Like, I think collectively we are aware that there’s a problem, like that Cindy Lee quote that you just read. We’re aware there’s a problem, but I just think the tractor beam pulling us back into productivity is just too strong.
Like, our mascot is the worker bee, and that’s real, and I don’t know. I felt like there was a real concerted effort for a while to limit Sunday meetings, and then I feel like we just fell right back into old ruts.
SH: Yep. Totally agree. Totally agree. They get announced all the time. I hear them all the time announced in my ward announcements, “There will be a fireside for parents of children 12 to 18. There will be- ... seminary graduation. There will...” I mean, it’s just–
CW: There’s mission prep classes.
SH: There’s always something.
CW: Yes. Yes. Always.
SH: Exactly. There’s always something, and that’s hard to give up.
And also when they cut the church schedule, they didn’t say, “Go home and do whatever you need to do to rest and refuel yourself and your loved ones.” They said “This gives you more time to teach the gospel at home.”
CW: Right. Come Follow Me.
SH: It’s crazy.
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SH: Okay, now I wanna shift and talk for a minute about how Sabbath can introduce a regular practice of letting go. You and I had our Big Ideas episode about letting go, and we’ve talked a lot about practices this season, I think because both you and I are trying to figure out ways to incorporate some of these things into our lives, and that sometimes requires practice, right?
So let’s talk about that here. Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, one of my absolute favorite thinkers in these matters of faith, says, “In Judaism, we have the Sabbath, a dedicated day of stillness each week, where we make space for all the things that are important but not urgent. Not every culture has a Sabbath, but life without dedicated time for renewal, like a life without exercise or music or a sense of humor, is a lesser life.”
Okay, so day-to-day life is about production and progress and gain. I think that we can all agree that that’s what it’s been about for most of us. Whether we want it to or not, right?
CW: Exactly.
SH: I mean, that’s just what our days are about. Rest is about letting go. And Cindy Lee says this: “In the scriptures, work and rest are not opposites. Together they create a cyclical rhythm, a continual embodied movement of unforming and reforming. As we enter into rest, we unform through [00:55:00] practices of letting go. We then experience a holy rest through the practice of stopping. When it is time to work again, we carry our holy rest into our work. Rest is the center of this rhythm, and work flows in and out of our rest.”
CW: Wow.
SH: That is the paragraph that I read in her piece that made me say, “I want that.”
CW: You want this. Right here.
SH: I want rest to become the center, and I feel like that’s a direct opposite of the way my life as I’ve known it so far, has been structured.
CW: I mean, the idea of rest being the default and work flowing in and out.
SH: Yeah.
CW: I don’t know.
SH: I don’t know either.
CW: What would that even look like?
SH: It’s huge. But I love it. I don’t know.
CW:I love it too.
SH:Something in my soul craves it. Something in my soul understands it as being deeply true, even if I don’t know how to practice it in my life. She goes on to explain that we get part of this wrong, like we have made work the center of the weekly rhythm, right, not rest.
So our identities are tied to our work. They’re tied to our doing rather than to our being. And that is why things like learning presence has had to become a practice for me because I don’t know how to just be.
I have never learned how to do that. Instead, we have this world where even our families revolve around our work, and then our society, it leaks over onto everything because our society has become set up to abuse workers, basically.
Employers are gonna take every possible thing that they can get from you, right? And then we never get rest even when we take a day off because we’re thinking about work instead of being present to our rest. We never practice letting go.
Nadia Bolz-Weber in a sermon on “NoTime to Rest,” says this: “I myself have only two speeds, go and stop. But when I stop, it’s not like I’m resting. I’m just collapsing because I can’t go anymore, and I don’t think that’s what sacred rest means. I think that maybe we’ve made an idol of multitasking and hyperactivity.”
CW: Okay, Susan. If you ever get assigned to give a lesson or a talk on the Sabbath, promise me you read that quote.
Promise me. Because that is just so bananas, so antithetical to everything I’ve been taught as a Latter-day Saint. I mean, it just rings deeply true, right? How can Sabbath be a day of rest when really we’re just collapsing because we can’t go anymore?
SH: Right. That’s not rest.
CW: That’s not rest.
SH: That’s not the same as rest.
CW: Not the same.
SH: A rest-centered rhythm as I think about what that could look like and how it might function, could be an antidote maybe to some of the effects of living immersed in this soup that we swim in of competition and scarcity and consumption and striving and abuse and greed and, like, all of the ills, all of society’s ills that you can think of.
If I could get to a rest-centered rhythm, I feel like that would-- I don’t know how much of it could undo, but it could at least, it could be an antidote. It could help undo the effects, I guess, maybe, of some of those things, ‘cause you’re never gonna get rid of all those things.
CW: You’re not.
SH: This is the world we live in. It’s the world I’m gonna live in till I die. Nothing is gonna change that much, you know, in the next 20 or 30 years.
I picked up a book by Rob Bell that I was reading along one day having no idea that it had anything in the Sabbath, anything in it about the Sabbath, and then I turned the page, and here’s a chapter called “Sabbath,” and I went, “No, Rob, no.”
I was liking this book. I don’t wanna read about the Sabbath. But by the time I finished that chapter, I was like, “Yes, Rob, yes, I want this.” He described how he and his wife decided that they might want to try incorporating Sabbath into their lives, and how it was kind of a disaster in the beginning. It didn’t go well for them, and that’s because they had absolutely no idea how to be. And when they had no idea how to do it, it drained them to be trying to do it.
It was not a generative practice for them. It was an exhausting practice trying to do something that they didn’t have any idea how to do. But he talked about taking time to actually be present, and it reminds me of when you were talking about being bored. He started-- He talked about some of the things that started to come up for them, and that leaning into those things that were coming up actually started to give them an entryway, an access point to the gifts of what Sabbath could be.
And so this is just a quote from that chapter. He says, “Sabbath forces you to listen to your life. Sabbath is a day when you are fully present to your pain, your stress, your worry, your fear. Sabbath is when you let whatever you’ve pushed down rise to the surface. Sabbath is a day when things that are broken get fixed, [01:00:00] when things within you that have torn are mended.”
CW: Okay, Susan, just hearing that quote in context of what you just said about how your initial was like, “Skip this chapter,” but then of course it’s Rob Bell, so you knew he would have something good to say.
SH: Right. You read it anyway.
CW: Like, yeah, you read it anyway. Makes me think, okay, did you love that because you have Sabbath trauma? It sounds like Rob Bell had Sabbath trauma and–
SH: Oh, I think he did. But, like, as a pastor for years, as someone who spent his life building a church, how would you not have Sabbath trauma?
You totally would.
CW: Oh, I totally remember reading in one of his books,, when he had an absolute mental breakdown, like he was crying in a closet on the floor. It was either before-
SH: Fetal position
CW: ... or after a sermon. Yeah, he’s in the fetal position.
SH: Yep. Yep.
CW: So yes, he totally gets it, and I love that he is in this. Just this one paragraph here, and I read this book, but it’s been a few years, how he’s trying to reframe Sabbath as well.
So we’re not alone.
SH: No. We’re not alone, and that’s kind of what I have seen again and again as I prepared for this conversation. And just knowing that has been healing for me. Like, okay, I’m not the only person who hasn’t known what to do with this, hasn’t wanted to do anything with it, and, you know, all of that, who didn’t grasp what God was trying to do, I think in, when this rhythm was conceived.
SH: Okay, Cynthia, let’s talk about “How can rest become holy?” Like, how could we learn to see rest as virtuous for its own sake?
CW: Yes, please.
SH: Isn’t it ironic that in Jesus’ religion, we don’t see rest as inherently worthy? I mean-
CW: It’s not just ironic, it’s sad.
SH: “Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn of me, for I am meek and lowly in heart, and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”
What did we miss?
CW: What did we miss?
SH: In those verses? I think that we think of scriptures like that the exact same way that we think of being saved by grace, that Jesus meant after all we can do.
Like, he didn’t say it, but that’s the quiet part.
CW: That’s the quiet part.
SH: Which we mistakenly interpret as after we’ve already done everything that we possibly can do and we’re going to bed exhausted in the service of the Lord, right?
Cw: Right, right.
SH: I think that’s exactly what people don’t say out loud, but what they tack on when they read those verses.
CW: That’s so sad.
SH: We see Jesus remove himself and rest repeatedly in the New Testament.
CW: Yeah. Boy, we missed it, didn’t we? We really missed it there.
Sh: We missed it.
CW: I mean, this is why I think learning to meditate, and by meditate I mean, like, being quiet, being still, being bored, has really been so hard for me because I 100% absorbed the, I don’t know, “it doesn’t have any value unless I can measure it” work ethic.
I mean, for crying out loud, I majored in business management with an emphasis in financial services, which is all about-
SH: You were literally trained for this, Cynthia.
CW: Literally trained to measure things, particularly money.
SH: Right.
CW: And I’m glad it’s not just me, that even you, an English major, also absorbed that “If it can’t be measured, it doesn’t have any value; it doesn’t count” work ethic. Yeah.
Sh: It doesn’t mean anything. Right.
CW: Gross. Gross. Really gross. Like, who gets…
CW: Who... I mean, okay, and here’s... I mean, and this is kind of what we’ve been talking about the whole time, but I’m just gonna kind of put a fine point on it here. Like, who gets to define rest and worship?
SH: Well, that’s a great question.
CW: I mean-
SH: That’s a really great question.
CW: Okay, I’m gonna, I’m gonna go in the way back machine here and tell you about two different roommates I had. One roommate, we’re freshmen, it’s our first semester at BYU. I’m sitting on my bed, it’s Sunday, I’m listening to, I don’t know, the radio, a CD, or whatever, and she comes in and physically turns off my radio and said, “This is not Sunday music.”
SH: Of course she did.
CW: And I was like, “My mother is 600 miles away. You are not her.” You know? So I was, like, totally ticked about that, okay?
Second roommate, ‘cause this poor roommate went home sick and had to have surgery at the end of the semester. So the roommate who took her place, we would get into–neither of us had a car–but sometimes she would borrow her sister’s car, and we would get out of church, get in the car, and we would drive around the hills in Provo, and we would blast music, not churchy music. And it just felt like the most worshipful thing to be with my friend who I love, who I still love, and I actually sent this message to her on her birthday in February.
That’s been my thing, is I, like, text a friend a favorite memory I have of them, and I said, “My favorite memory of you is driving around Provo after church blasting our music,” and her saying out loud to me, “How could people think this isn’t worshipful?”
Like, she’s there, [01:05:00] we’re friends, the windows are down, the breeze is blowing in.
Like, one experience, the experience with roommate number one felt very limiting to me. First of all, nobody likes being bossed around.
SH: Right, right.
CW: Second of all, the second roommate experience felt very expansive. Like, she was describing this, like, expansive moment as we were together riding around on a Sunday afternoon listening to I don’t know, something like Depeche Mode really loud on the radio. So I don’t know.
SH: Love it. No, love it.
CW: Just a contrast in experiences there.
SH: Absolutely, and I testify that this difference that you have pointed out between these two roommates is true because this has been my experience as during my life I have found things that reset me and gave me glimpses, I guess, of a kind of oh joy, I hate to use that word, of something–something larger, I guess, that I, some feeling I wanted in my life and didn’t have. Like, I’ve found practices like that, none of them, none of which would’ve been deemed appropriate on the Sabbath Day by many members. So, like, who gets to define this?
CW: Who gets to define it?
SH: That is the question. Yeah and I hope we leave our listeners thinking about that question because–spoiler–you get to define it.
CW: Spoiler.
SH: You do. You do. The Sabbath was made for you
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SH: Okay, in addition to physical rest, we need psychic rest from striving and anxiety. We need an intentional time to reconnect with God or with our deepest selves or, you know, whatever it is that we’re reaching to connect with in our lives. And who could say anything better about this than Mirabai Star?
And she says, “It is an initially reluctant dropping down into the emptiness and an ultimate experience of peace when we stop doing and rediscover simple being. It is the Sabbath of the soul when we heed the call to cease creating and remember that we are created.”
CW: Okay, can I add a subtitle? Our episode title is Big Ideas Sabbath: Rediscovering Simply Being.
SH: Oh, so good. Yes, that’s exactly it. Yeah, she nailed it. I think that’s exactly it.
CW: She nailed it.
SH: Yeah, that’s the whole “consider the lilies” thing. They were created. This is what Jesus is saying. God has done this work already for you. Why are you working? It’s been done.
And then one more line from Rob Bell, “When we spend a day being fully present, we quickly discover how much of the rest of our lives we aren’t fully present.”
And I think that’s what you’ve discovered, like sitting in a doctor’s office being bored.
It probably has had your attention like, “Oh, wow, I don’t do this very often.”
I don’t pay attention to all these thoughts very often. Okay. I mean, I don’t know what any of this would look like. I was trying to think of what spiritual practices of rest and attention could be and I think that they would need to be things for our minds and things for our spirits and things for our bodies, and I think that we could probably all come up with ideas in all of those categories, and we would also know which of those categories we were most hungry for.
CW: I think so.
SH: Like where we really needed the rest. Yes. And so, like, I would encourage people, if you wanna start thinking about Sabbaths, to think about some of what that might be.
Like for years, I got the side eye from my family and from other church friends that I went for runs. I know I’ve talked about this before.
CW: Yes.
SH: I called them praise runs. You could find me running up the street on Sunday morning with tears streaming down my face, listening to music that absolutely was not Sunday music–it was running music–but having a spiritual experience.
CW: Love it
SH: It was working on my body, it was working on my spirit, it was freeing my mind.
It was like everything that I needed.
So, anyway, women, you have the ability to figure this out if you want it, and it is gonna look different for everyone.
All right, I wanna give the last word to Nadia Bolz-Weber. Will you read it for us?
CW: You bet. Oh my gosh, I’m glad we’re giving her the last word. I think we gave her the last word on our myth episode as well.
SH: We did a couple... Yeah, we did.
CW: So, okay.
SH: ‘Cause she’s so good, Cynthia.
CW: I know. She’s so good. Okay, she says, “The rest of the shepherd who makes you lay down in green pastures is not about time off from work. It’s about time off from all forms of worthiness.”
“Sacred rest is a break from the am I productive enough, lovable enough, safe enough, thin enough, rich enough, strong enough worthiness system we live under. The sacred rest that is yours never comes from being worthy. It never comes through adopting the right kind and the right amount and the right quality of spiritual practices, although if those bring you a sense of wellbeing, then by all means don’t set them aside.
“The rest that is yours and mine comes from the promise of the gospel that [01:10:00] Jesus came to save sinners, that Jesus came to heal and love and save the sin sick and the over-functioning, that Jesus came to give rest to the weary and the restless, to give rest to harried housewives and overworked social workers and mildly depressed executives.
“So rest. Rest knowing that you are justified not by your busyness, but by grace through faith. Rest in the knowledge of how madly God loves you, not because of who you are, but because of who God is. Rest in that, not because you should, but because you can.”
SH: Thank you.
CW: Moment of silence for that.
SH: Thank you. So good.
CW: Thank you. Yes.
SH: Thank you. Yes I can’t wait to continue thinking about this subject from the perspective of Sabbath because I can.
CW: I really think, Susan, we’re gonna have to revisit this in six months. I want to know, ‘cause I really do wanna know in six months if this really had resonance for you, or if it was just fun to talk about. So to be continued?
SH: To be continued. Thank you.
CW: Thanks.
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Voicemail 1: Hey, Cynthia and Susan. It’s Lynn. I’ve been listening to some of your older episodes in between your newer episodes releasing, and I was listening to one of your revisits of the topic of what women don’t get, and it just made me think a bit more about priesthood ordination and authority through priesthood keys.
And I was talking to my husband about it, and I told him that if I ever had the opportunity to speak one-on-one with a general authority, I would just genuinely ask what it is that makes priesthood necessarily... well, priesthood ordination and authority through keys necessarily exclusive to the male gender.
Because as far as I understood it through all of my study and research there was nothing inherently about priesthood ordination and authority through keys that requires the holder to be male. And my husband kind of just sat there and thought about it for a moment and said, “You know what? You’re right.
I don’t think there is any reason why it’s exclusive.” And so I told him, “Well, if it’s, if there’s no reason for it to be exclusive, then why can’t it be inclusive?” And he thought about it and he said, “You know, I never thought about that.” And I just, I’m so grateful that I am one of the lucky few that has a husband who’s willing to listen to me when I talk about things like that, and he doesn’t immediately assume that I’m, like, leaving the church or something.
So just fun things to think about from you guys.
Voicemail 2: Hi, Cynthia and Susan. I listened to your podcast last week where you were raging, and I really loved it. And then later on in the week, I had a conversation with the Relief Society president in our ward, and she mentioned multiple women talking to her about how they were worried that with the change in Sunday school presidencies, men were going to feel even more not needed in church.
And I just had to laugh because what do you mean men aren’t needed in church? Literally, the church is run by men. They only make wards based on how many men are in the area. And I just I don’t I don’t understand. And it’s not even, like, a guarantee that women are going to get that calling in the first place.
And I think the men will be fine. I really think they should be fine here.
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SH: Oh, wait. Oh, no, this is you. Sorry. Go for it. Oh, yeah.
CW: It was just me.
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SH: Yep. I’m going to skip. We’re running so short on time that I’m gonna skip.
CW: Are we? We’re at 40 minutes.
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SH: Rabbi Abraham Sesil... I can’t pronounce that
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