In my youth group, I was taught once that the best way to recognize a counterfeit is by carefully examining and remembering the real thing. The anecdote that attended this lesson drew from the training of experts who spot fake currency. As the story went, they spent long hours studying every detail of real money so as to be prepared to note any possible deviation from it. This was deemed a more effective method of preparation than exhaustively cataloging the fakes. With most important or valuable matters in life, we should be especially wary of fakes because these are the very things that are most worth the effort of faking. Likewise, over the time we’ve spent thinking about a Christian idea of what it means to rest, I’ve tried to focus on the real thing, rather than by focusing on all the false visions that run about in our world.

The Fruitful Work of Rest (On Christian Rest, Part V)

As a priest, I spend a fair amount of time thinking about ritual, and find that I spot pretty quickly instances of ritual when I encounter them in the wild. One such ritual caught my eye recently in the context of a conversation about how people go to sleep. It began with a few parents sharing stories about the routines surrounding bedtime for their children of various ages. And even though they were not initiates of the same rites, the basic shape of their liturgy was the same: some sort of dinner, bath, story, and lights-out. Those present without kids spoke in similar terms of food, Netflix, hygiene and beauty, and then surprisingly elaborate rites including sound-machines, CBD oil, melatonin, mindfulness, and still usually-fitful sleep.

Come Away and Rest (On Christian Rest, Part IV)

In our previous post, we talked about the extending of the horizon of the old covenant Sabbath through the Resurrection of our Lord, how He makes that Sabbath the occasion for a new work through His rising again. As should be apparent by now, the Sabbath means something very different for the Christian than it meant for the Jew, even if they are continuous with one another in the Person of Christ. It will help if we look to the Gospels for guidance.

The Lord of the Sabbath (On Christian Rest, Part III)

Sabbath is remembrance. It is to remember and anticipate through a moment the world of God’s great seventh day, of Creation as it is known with God enthroned, consecrating all things and celebrating them with delight. But modern people have a difficult time approaching remembrance because they consider it a matter of ‘thinking’ rather than ‘being.’ This is not how the Scriptures communicate ‘remembrance’ to us.

Remembering the Sabbath (On Christian Rest, Part II)

We closed Part I by thinking about the futility of our toil and how it can only deliver expiration and collapse rather than real rest. We came to understand that we must somehow be returned to the Lord’s anointed rest, that seventh day of Creation that consecrated the whole creative work. I would like to propose that the means by which we are led back into that rest, despite our continual tendencies to avoid it, is to attend to the remembrance of the Sabbath as it becomes the Eucharist through its fulfillment in Christ. In this post, we will take a look at the first of the two.

Restlessness (On Christian Rest, Part I)

As a recovering work-addict, I have been obliged to a keen awareness of the patterns of work and leisure that surround me. Frustratingly, I have often felt like a recovering alcoholic living in a walk-up above pub row, immersed in the ambient noise of what I imagine to be great enjoyment and satisfaction happening just downstairs. All around me are impulses to feed a beast who is just biding the time it needs to grow large enough to feed on me. Like those who’ve struggled with any substance or habit will know, the addiction isn’t about the thing but about something else behind, beneath, beyond it.

Who Will Wake Me Up?

One of the great gifts of being a priest is being able to have frequent, good conversations with children in the parish. Their questions are my favorite because they come from an unpretentious—and often unrelenting—sense of curiosity. But one must be cautious. Their occasional and developmentally appropriate tendency to pepper adults with questions proves disarming until, all of the sudden, they ask something so central to the human heart and the life of faith that we can only be halted. For those who’ve been given the privilege of teaching children, our role is always to be ready for these moments. They can and do have the potential to make a life-long impact and much depends on what we are prepared to say when the opportunity arrives.

The Lord of the Sabbath

Sabbath is remembrance. It is to remember and anticipate through a moment the world of God’s great seventh day, of Creation as it is known with God enthroned, consecrating all things and celebrating them with delight. But modern people have a difficult time approaching remembrance because they consider it a matter of ‘thinking’ rather than ‘being.’ This is not how the Scriptures communicate ‘remembrance’ to us.