12.19.09
Sabbath Appreciation
Today is a Sabbath unlike most of the many others I’ve spent since 1969. If memory serves, my church, Sligo Church, has failed to hold services on only two or three Sabbaths in the last 40 years due to inclement weather. So today’s closure due to heavy snowfall is a relatively rare event.
As I watch the snow pile up—15″ to 19″on the sunroom roof just beneath my daughter’s old bedroom window—I am multi-tasking: oscillating between watching the Loma Linda University Church’s broadcast, skimming an article in The Times Literary Supplement‘s online site (Times Online), and making these journal notations. Though seemingly incongruous these varied activities in their way help heighten my appreciation of Sabbath rest in general and this Sabbath in particular. How so?
On this day when I’m free of compulsion to do work of any kind, by virtue of these varied activities I have serendipitously lighted on several sources that have each contributed to my spiritual enrichment. The absence of the need to keep some appointment or complete some imposed or voluntarily assumed task liberates my mind to wander anywhere it pleases, alighting on ideas that resonate or fascinate at the given moment in time.
I serendipitously found one such fascinating idea or insight in the 18th December 2009 essay by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks in the aforementioned Times Online. Sacks’ essay is titled, “Credo: Thank God for the Courage to Live with Uncertainty” http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article6962016.ece.
I consider the piece a type of “Psalm of Thanksgiving:” successive paragraphs begin:
I thank Him for the love that has filled our home… I thank Him for the blessing of grandchildren… I thank Him for those rare souls who lift us when we are laid low… I thank Him for the gift of being born a Jew…
The two “verses” of the psalm that I find so resonant and fascinating then follow:
I thank Him for the atheists and agnostics who keep believers from believing the unbelievable, forcing us to prove our faith by the beauty and grace we bring into the world…
I thank Him for the gift of faith, which taught me to see the dazzling goodness and grace that surround us if only we open our eyes and minds. I thank Him for helping me to understand that faith is not certainty but the courage to live with uncertainty, not a destination but the journey itself…
This last sentence puts me in mind of Hebrews 11:1; in the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible it reads:
Now faith is the substance of things hoped for the evidence of things not seen.
There’s an unmatched lyrical, poetic quality to the KJV version. But the same text in Today’s English Version (TEV) gives it a little ironic twist that is echoed in the sentiment expressed in the last sentence in the above excerpt from Sacks’ essay:
To have faith is to be sure of the things we hope for, to be certain of the things we cannot see (Heb. 11:1, TEV).
Amen!
