The Regent
Spring 2008• Vol.20, No.2
Leaving the Way
Loren Wilkinson
W
endell Berry, that Kentucky poet, prophet, and farmer whose wisdom has influenced many of us at Regent over the years, has the long habit of taking a walk on Sundays and writing a poem out of the experience. The most profound of these poems is the four-line aphorism with which his book, A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems, 1979-1997, closes: There is a day when the road neither comes nor goes, and the way is not a way but a place.1 An early name for Christians was “people of The Way,” and the image of the Christian as a pilgrim, one who is on a journey in search of a better place, is deeply engrained in Christian spirituality. (Consider, for example, works like Pilgrim’s Progress, or the great Welsh hymn, Guide Me O Thou Great Jehovah, the second line of which reads: “pilgrim through this barren land.”) It is good to be a pilgrim on the way, but that good is balanced by another, more elusive, good: the ability to be in a place at rest and at peace. That good is the goal of the biblical
discipline of Sabbath. And people have never been in more desperate need of Sabbath than we are in the 21st century, in instant touch as we are (through cell phones, Internet and e-mail) with every place on the planet, unable to be really at home and at peace in any place at all. Many Christians, reacting against various forms of Sabbath legalism, have pretty much discarded the Sabbath as the one irrelevant commandment. “The Way” for them is always another job, never simply a place to be, to be thankful for. Ironically, there is a broad movement in our increasingly frenetic contemporary culture toward what have been called “secular Sabbaths” (Google the phrase to see what I mean). The world is rediscovering what we Christians have often missed in our understanding of the gospel: that the Good News, God’s shalom, is always good news about people at peace in a particular place. The roots of the Sabbath are in the Genesis 1 creation account, which is first of all about the preparing of places
(the first three days); then about the filling of places (the second three days); and finally, at the end of the sixth day, about the image of God, Adam, male and female, being placed within the completed temple of God’s creation. But that is all prelude. The crown of creation is not (as we humans have perhaps too hastily concluded) humanity, but the Sabbath rest of the seventh day, with Adam as priest in God’s temple, offering the whole glorious gift back in peace to the Creator. We fail, regarding creation not as a gift but only as a job, and hence are pilgrims, merely “on the way.” The genius of the Sabbath is that it stops us regularly, not to recognize a particular place as specially holy (that is a pagan way; in the temple of God’s Creation everything is holy), but to lay aside our jobs, even our pilgrimage, to rest and rejoice with the Creator in the good gift of Creation. The Sabbath, as the great Jewish thinker Abraham Heschel put it, is a “palace in time,” reminding us that “it is not a thing that lends significance to a moment, but a moment that lends significance to a thing.” 2 Doing Sabbath is our priestly task, a task returned to we flawed imagebearers through Jesus, the perfect image of God. Discovering how to do Sabbath, in a creation degraded by our business, is a task for all of us. And, ironically, it is the challenge to let the way become for a moment no longer a way (our task) but a place (God’s gift). ~ Dr. Loren Wilkinson Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies & Philosophy Endnotes 1 Wendell Berry, A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems, 1979-1997 (Washington, DC, Counterpoint), p. 216. 2 Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man (New York: Noonday Press, 1951), p. 6.
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