Dear People of Christ Church,
This week in our Lent series, we continued our conversation about prayer, along with several of the SSJE brothers’ meditations on work. Brother Geoffrey talked about how he’d learned from their experiences with sustainable farming at their retreat place in West Newbury. As the brothers have experimented with raising pigs, chickens, growing plants, and collecting seeds, they’ve learned about sustainability: you don’t take out more from the land than you put in.
Sustainability is a concept that the Christ Church vestry has talked about a lot; how are we careful about the commitments we undertake as a parish to be sure we can be faithful to the core of our mission. There are so many things we could be doing in our own lives and as a parish—really good things!—but we have to choose the ones that God specifically calls us to at this time and this place, not just those things which might be good in general. The same goes for our own lives; there is a line between finding the joy in serving others and being trapped by the drudgery of more that you can do. And there are seasons, too—season of hard work and seasons of rest. Brother Geoffrey ends up on the word “balance;”—it’s a word that gets kicked around a lot, most often in reference to not having enough of it. I recently ran into a review of a book by poet and philosopher David Whyte, who writes:
[Work/life balance] is a phrase that often becomes a lash with which we punish ourselves … ; People find it hard to balance work with family, family with self, because it might not be a question of balance. 1
Instead of thinking of the things we do as outside of ourselves—a core “me” that spends its energy on parenting, then writing sermons, then parish administration, then being a spouse, then a friend—what if instead each of those identities were woven together in whole? Instead of a “me” as a fulcrum in the middle, what if you were yourself all the time? What kind of life would you live?
One place to start is to try to envision a different fulcrum; instead of “me” as the middle, what would it mean if God were the middle? This is what’s most striking to me about thinking about the Ten Commandments. At first glance they seem so ordinary and so like a general humanist way of living: who wouldn’t think a society based on avoiding theft and murder would be a good idea?
The difference comes in the reason for avoiding all kinds of bad behavior: I am the Lord your God. What it means for God’s providence and love for us to be the center fulcrum is a different sense of freedom, a new place of interpreting our lives. If nothing can separate us from the love of God, then we’re given a new freedom in Christ to offer ourselves. The Sabbath is the one place where this is made most concrete. And, of course, the Sabbath. The Sabbath is God’s making-sacred of time, God’s gift of taking hold of us in time for God’s self. No working, no buying, no selling. Because we are God’s.
There’s a lot at stake in shifting that fulcrum point away from our individual selves. If God has already reconciled me to God, then I’m judged by more than the quality of my last sermon or the readership on my last blog post. My kid messing up isn’t a wholesale condemnation on all of my parenting, it’s an invitation to come closer to each other and for us both to try something different.
Take a minute to re-center yourself in God’s grace. What does your work look like now? How do you feel about yourself? How can you let that grace be your fulcrum? What would help you bring that into each day?
Blessings,
Sara +