
A comedian recently quipped that today’s information technologies have effectively rendered several things obsolete, most notably phone books and human courtesy. That’s also true for human rest. Fr. Rolheiser writes that “as we get wrapped up more and more in mobile phones, texting, email, Facebook, and the internet in general, we are beginning to live with the expectation that we must be attentive all the time to everything that’s happening in the world and within the lives of our families and friends.” The spoken and unspoken expectation is that we are always available, as are others. We are becoming more enslaved and more compulsive in using mobile phones and the internet. For many of us, it is now existentially impossible to take off a day, let alone several weeks off, and be on a genuine holiday or vacation. The rhythm of time, as God designed it, is meant to give us regular, weekly time off the wheel, some “Sabbath-time” when ordinary life, ordinary pressures, ordinary work, and ordinary expectations are bracketed, and we permit ourselves to stop, to shut things down, and to rest. This is the intention of “Sabbath rest.” For most people over sixty, we grew up when our churches and our culture still took the concept of the Sabbath (for Christians, especially the idea of not working on Sunday) more seriously. I still remember my great Dodger hero, Sandy Kofax, refusing to pitch a World Series game that was being held on the Sabbath. The critical question is: Can we step off the treadmill of phones and computers on Sundays and be genuinely available to celebrate the Sabbath? Author Wayne Muller wrote in his wonderful book, “Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal, and Delight in Our Busy Lives,” tells us that time off the wheel, the time when we take our hand from the plow and let God and the earth care of things, while we drink in, if only for a few moments, from the fountain of rest and delight that God intended for the Sabbath. It’s a great read if you, like me, too often fail to “rest” on the Sabbath, having trapped yourself in the need to respond to any and everything in this 24×7 world we live in. Take a breath, and take time to rest in the Lord.