Waiting on God: Rest and Recreation in an Age of Anxiety
Preacher: Professor Tina Beattie, Professor Emerita of Catholic Studies, University of Roehampton
Readings: Genesis 2:1-4; Matthew 6:25-34
It’s Sunday. The day of rest. A day set apart to be holy. A day when even God is at rest.
I wonder how many of us are at rest today. I suspect that, like those dark little demons in medieval paintings, there are anxieties and insecurities buzzing everywhere around us. We are a culture obsessed with work and activity, with striving always to be better at everything, beset by fears that we’re never going to be good enough to make it – whatever that means.
I want to reflect more today on the significance of the Sabbath for our capacity to reflect in silence and wonder on the mystery of creation, and I’ve chosen readings that fit with that theme. I should also add that, growing up in a Presbyterian family in Zambia, my parents retained many of the customs and taboos of their Scottish upbringing. Thus it was that I never went to the cinema on a Sunday until I was nearly thirty, and I still sometimes look guiltily over my shoulder as I go in.
When I look back at the sermon I gave here in 2015, I spoke about the humility of Christ as a source of non-violent power – a transformation of power from within. I said, “Christians are not called to reject the world, to set ourselves apart from the messy and complex realities of life. We are called to inhabit and experience those realities differently, to acquire the mind of Christ so that we are sensitive to the vibrations of grace within the wounds of creation.” That latter theme – attending to the vibrations of grace within the wounds of creation – is my focus today.
Since I gave that sermon, much has changed. We’ve been through the pandemic and its aftermath, Britain has left the EU, and liberal democracy is disintegrating under the pressure of new forms of political and religious extremism and the escalating threat of global war.
In personal terms, having always lived in cities in Africa and Europe, my husband Dave and I have moved to a small house next to the dunes in Camber Sands, a quirky little seaside town on the south coast of England. I often think of the phrase, the landscapes of the soul, to describe the ways in which the environments we inhabit shape our souls. I’ve been learning what it means to live in a world of haunting solitude – salt marshes stretching away into infinity, and vast empty beaches sculpted by dramatic tides and howling winds. Imagine Saint Andrews without the golf course, the university, the restaurants and pubs, and you have Camber Sands. But for a few weeks in summer, London decamps to Camber Sands, and the town comes alive with the multicultural exuberance of holidaymakers – women in burkinis wading out into the sea next to girls in teensy weensy bikinis, beat boxes playing Grime and Jungle competing with Taylor Swift and Sufi chants.
My theological perspectives have shifted with this change in the rhythms and landscapes of my own life, but also with the growing awareness that we are living through a time of multiple crises and threats such as many of us have never experienced. In such a time, it’s tempting to plunge into a frenzy of panicked activism as if single-handedly we can stop wars, heal the planet, transform politics, and usher in the Kingdom of God. I ask what might happen if instead, we felt called to do less rather than more – to do nothing, and to discover the strange power of being powerless but not defeated.
So I want to focus on the Sabbath as a day of rest in an ecological context. I think particularly of creation and recreation, and what those words might mean. How, in recreation, are we recreated? How might we interpret the Christian faith in a more cosmic sense, not as a form of New Age romanticism but as a way of rediscovering the creation-centred cosmology of the earliest Christian thinkers?
In his 2015 encyclical on the environment, Laudato Si’, Pope Francis writes that ‘We have forgotten that we ourselves are dust of the earth (cf. Gen 2:7); our very bodies are made up of her elements, we breathe her air and we receive life and refreshment from her waters.’ He calls us to discover anew that ‘The universe unfolds in God, who fills it completely. Hence, there is a mystical meaning to be found in a leaf, in a mountain trail, in a dewdrop, in a poor person’s face.’
But our second reading today reminds us that distraction and anxiety are not new. They are perennial problems. Jesus urges his followers to stop worrying. He calls us to learn from the lilies of the field and the birds of the air. Clearly, in the first century no less than today, life was full of distracting anxieties and insecurities.
In the Old Testament we read of Job who experienced tragedies and losses that would leave any human being reeling in despair. His theologian friends tried to explain to him why God would allow him to suffer so greatly, and they were about as helpful as theologians usually are when they attempt to explain the problem of evil. When God does answer Job out of the whirlwind, it comes in the form of a series of questions that call him out of his introspective misery, and command him to look at the mystery and glory of creation. ‘Where were you,’ God asks, ‘when I laid the foundations of the earth?…when the morning stars sang together…who has the wisdom to number the clouds….Who provides the raven its prey, when its young ones cry to God, and wander about for lack of food?’ (Job 38-41) This torrent of questions goes on and on and on, until Job answers: ‘See, I am of small account’. (Job 40: 4)
In that beautiful Bach cantata sung by the choir (‘Nach dir, Herr, verlanget mich’ BWV 150), we hear the words:
Cedars must before the wind
often feel much hardship,
often they are overturned.
Thought and action entrust to God,
pay no attention to what howls against you,
for his word teaches quite otherwise.
So let’s reflect a little on what it might mean to rediscover our capacity for attentiveness to the natural world around us, to learn wisdom from the creation of which we are a part, to see rest and recreation as the recreation of ourselves.
G.K. Chesterton wrote that the world will not starve for want of wonders, but for want of wonder. The psalmist expressed what this wonder means: ‘When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is humankind that you are mindful of us, human beings that you care for us? (Psalm 8: 3-4) Comedian Peter Cook offers an incisive comment on the hubris of the modern subject when he inverts that psalm: ‘As I looked out into the night sky across all those infinite stars it made me realize how unimportant they are.’
The rediscovery of wonder calls for a change in our way of being in and relating to the world around us. In her book, Writing the Icon of the Heart: In Silence Beholding, Anglican hermit and theologian Maggie Ross explores the biblical significance of what it means ‘to behold’. She points out that in Hebrew and Greek versions of the Bible, the imperative form of the word ‘behold’ occurs more than 1300 times. She observes that ‘After God has blessed the newly created humans, the first word he speaks to them directly is “Behold” (Gen. 1:29).’ By contrast, in the New Revised Standard Version the word ‘behold’ appears only 27 times in the Old Testament and the Apocrypha, and not at all in the New Testament. The translations which render it as ‘see’ or ‘look’ sacrifice the rich resonances of what it means to behold as contemplative silence that attends to God’s activity within the world around us.
Ross writes that
Silence and beholding are our natural state. … It was in the context of beholding that we were given stewardship of the earth; it is in the context of distraction that we have (mis)managed it. As the pace of contemporary life accelerates and the rising tide of noise degrades the biosphere, the need to recover and, more especially, to teach and practice silence and seeking into the beholding becomes even more critical. (p. 11)
This contemplative beholding asks of us the hardest thing of all in our modern culture of striving and activity. It asks everything of us by asking nothing of us. It asks us to take time out simply to be.
Kate Rigby has written an ecological study of theological writings about the story of creation in Genesis, Meditations on Creation in an Era of Extinction. She draws attention to the seventh day which is often left out of traditional theological reflections on the six days of creation. This is because of a rather arbitrary division in the chapters in the Book of Genesis, with the seventh day being at the beginning of Chapter 2 instead of the end of Chapter 1, where it probably belongs. Rigby argues that to end with the sixth day risks losing sight of where we ourselves belong within the fullness of creation – not as its culmination and purpose, but as belonging within the harmonious communion of nature. She writes,
The culmination of the biblical story is not, in fact, the making of humankind, but God’s day of rest and enjoyment of all that had come forth, with the collaboration of sea and land, at the divine summons: the Sabbath day, in which we, too, are invited to join with the creator in celebrating the communion of all creatures. (p. xxxiv)
To read scripture as a creature among creatures, to let go of our hubristic idea that we are the pinnacle and purpose of creation, is I believe to read the Bible through new eyes. We might think of how feminist biblical scholars and theologians have challenged apparently enduring biblical truths, by exposing the extent to which patriarchal and sometimes misogynistic interpretations have warped the biblical texts and imposed meanings that privilege their male scholarly interpreters. I believe that the same process needs to happen in the way we read scripture in the light of the environmental crisis. You know, in the Gospels Jesus doesn’t say anything about homosexuality, but he has a great deal to say about how we treat the poor and the socially outcast, and as that second reading reminds us, time and again he draws our attention to the lessons that we can learn from the natural world and the rhythms of nature. Yet how much energy Christian leaders expend on matters of sexuality, compared to how little they speak out about about the gross injustices and environmental abuses threatening the planet and its most vulnerable communities – those who are crucified by our economic empires and their corporate powers. The life Christians are called to is hidden in plain sight in scripture, but do we have ears to hear and eyes to see?
Let me end with Wendell Berry’s poem, The Peace of Wild Things, which expresses much of what I’m trying to say today, about how in recreation we are recreated, and we discover anew the joy of being creatures in God’s very good creation:
The Peace of Wild Things
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.