The Fruitful Work of Rest (On Christian Rest, Part 5)

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. 

Sleep is mysterious to us because Rest itself is a sacramental mystery. Sleep is an icon and sometimes an avenue to rest, but one that often misses the mark. Many can reflect on their experience and find times that they slept all night and yet woke up exhausted. Further, we could continue to find examples of having restful sleep and still waking up restless and anxious. It is through sleep that we attempt to find the mystery of rest, and so it is no wonder to me that we construct such elaborate rituals and ceremonies to aid that attempt. Our liturgical impulse as humans perks up when we detect a call toward mystery. 

For a long time, though, I looked at sleep as quitting. It was what you did when you couldn’t do anything else anymore. Sleep was the begrudging activity of exhaustion; sleep was the cessation of productive activity. You did it as long as necessary to get going again. Like how I treat my poor cellphone, I never quite shut down but went into a suspended state and charged up. As a doctor friend once pointed out to me, this was a stupid way to live that was bound to cause physical and psychological damage. My liturgy of sleep never brought me to rest, because rest could not consent to meet me by such an unworthy approach. Rest required me to order my whole life differently–not just at the hour of collapse but well before it in the hours I was otherwise alert and strong and awake.

What I discovered after a lot of trial and error was that behaviors and attitudes throughout the day impacted my ability to fall asleep in such a way as to rest. If I opted for that second (or more honestly, third) cup of coffee, if I worked at my computer too long and didn’t take time to go outside, if I neglected nutrition and subbed too many starches for protein, and any number of little tweaks–that would have an effect on the end of the day. I began to notice a correlation: the more I attended to a moderate reflection on the work I was doing and how I was doing it, I didn’t lose productivity; in fact I grew more productive the less monomaniacal I was about being productive. And so my liturgy of life began to improve, and when diligently observed, began to produce actual rest at the last.

I suppose this should not be surprising, since the principle that produced health in that part of my life sings harmoniously alongside the very truths we’ve been discussing in this series of meditations. We discussed how the gift of God’s eucharistic Sabbath we receive on the Lord’s Day orients us around the truest sense of time and its significance. It orders us by a perspective that is capable of apprehending and appreciating when we are so that we are able to access the what and why and how we are. Through our participation in that divine rest of eucharistic participation, we become again what we are and we become a little more that which we will always be: the likenesses of God as revealed in Christ by the Spirit.

With such a gift extended to us, it is worthy to ask how we approach it. If I could find it appropriate to order my day with the end of attaining a restful sleep, how much more worthy should I find it to order life around attaining that great gift of eternal rest? Each day is a metaphor of a life, each day is what we really have, and the manner of those days becomes our manner of life? So how should we then live?

I think a good start would be to make attending Church and participating in the Eucharist the most important part of the week. See it as the beginning and culmination of time, the first and final moment of each week. Make it a priority that is kept relentlessly unless ill or traveling (and, even then, perhaps research a place to go to Church while away). Then, treat Sunday as a day to look back to the week prior and ahead to week after from a perspective of thankfulness for the gift of time already received and for the time that may yet come. Say thank you to God for as many specific things as is possible, and then do something that helps you celebrate being alive and in Christ with others. In my family growing up this looked like supper and board games with whomever wanted to come over). Now, it looks like playtime with the kids and a big family dinner with a special highlight given to something each person enjoys doing that the others take a moment to share and join their joy.

 Too often we see Sunday and the work of it as the dregs of the week, what we have left after a week of work (the primary things) and then a day-and-a-half of trying to feel like more than a worker before realizing we have to do it all again. Then let the week take shape around this. If Sunday matters so much, then Saturday night needs to adapt so that we are ready for it. It might be the day to do some laundry, to do some food prep for the week, to take care of the faucets, to get groceries. Sunday and its festivity awaits, after all. And of course, there are the days ahead in the week for which we’ve already given thanks. It’s why Morning and Evening prayer exist: to recollect in the subsequent days the presence of Sunday as a lordly presence of sacred time to sanctify them all at their outset and homecoming.With those fixed times in place, what else can the remaining moments become but the field of creative remembrance or anticipation of the Lord showing Himself again? 

I think another practical thing to do is to have a practice of reflecting each day. For my part, I have a note on my iPhone that I open up, activate the voice-to-text, and speak reflections into for five minutes. You would not believe how, when practiced, this has given me a sense of freedom from the rush and hustle of my day. The days are not less difficult; they are not less of a grind. But they are less soul-destroying. And of course they should be with that little bit of humanity in the midst. When combined with a bit of prayer and giving of thanks, that little corner of the day becomes luminous. As the Lord’s anointed time in-breathes our time-kept lives, we will find the space to breathe. That is a gift given to us for the purpose of cultivating sacred space for reflection and thanksgiving in our lives. It is the space our Lord creates and expands for Himself, a space designed to be His throne.

When we celebrate our Lord’s enthronement in our lives as Lord of Time, we are restored again to that Edenic vocation of walking and talking with God, of perceiving and experiencing all of life in His good company and under His provision. We will grow in the human excellences of attentiveness, quietness, and peace. And we will become the prophetic presence in our busy world that testifies to the Kingdom. When we order our lives around the ways of peace our Lord has revealed to us as the sure path to His true rest, we will find that in being freed from mere productivity we will receive in its place the grace of fruitfulness. And in the hour of death, at the end of our last day, we will be able to offer our lives to Christ once more with thanksgiving and receive from Him the crown of rest and then the life of Resurrection.