Saturday at last

Saturday at last

(Written by Dan McDonald)

 

            Saturday is an idea as much as it is the seventh day in a calendar’s week. For many of us, Monday through Friday is owned by our jobs, Sunday by our church, and so Saturday becomes the day for chores, family outings, enjoying nature, any number of pursuits. I haven’t had a Saturday like that for a while. I have been working Monday through Saturday, 12 hours a day. But today is Saturday, really Saturday in spirit as well as name. A day I get to relax, do some chores, probably take my camera for a walk, and write, and perhaps go to the art museum that is free on the second Saturday. Maybe this evening I will go to the little restaurant serving food in the style of the small Caribbean Island known as Domenica. I hope everyone finds their own special way to savor and enjoy the specialness of a Saturday.

            I am grateful that my six weeks of long hours of work have drawn to a close. But I am also grateful that this season of long hours has not been as grating upon my soul as these seasons have been in the past. I have to give thanks to God for preparing my soul to wander through the wilderness of these long hours that are not particularly suited to me. I am a dreamer who feels an extra need to reflect and contemplate, or I feel myself becoming a lunatic feeling invaded by a hostile world seeking to possess me until I howl in the night. I need down time to retain a semblance of sanity. I need down time the way some need to be busy.

            Several books have helped prepare me for this wandering in the wilderness of long work hours. These are the books I have been reading this year. Each of these books has helped sustain me in my wilderness.

 

 

            Celebration of Discipline by Richard J. Foster was written to help Christians learn the ways Christians have always sought to meet with God in the many means to that end at our disposal. It is a classic now, although written in the 1970’s. I had been told long ago that this would be a good book for me to read. I imagined it was a book that it was not. I’ve always felt the weakness of my meandering ways, the dreamer in need of discipline. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be disciplined, but that each attempt failed and left me more miserable than before. But this was not a book about getting your life in perfect order, but instead was a work about developing the habits that enable you to commune with God and discover the grace of his communion. This was the sort of book that helps a dreamer to integrate his meandering lifestyle with a discipline that really matters.

            Heavenly Participation by Hans Boersma is written to an Evangelical world discovering mystery as part of the Christian inheritance. He is trying to encourage those pursuing mystery to realize that in the history of the Christian tradition the roots of understanding the world as a sacramental tapestry, a tapestry where God is discovered in connection with and not severed from his creation. There is real knowledge of God but it is a knowledge wherein we know in part and our joy is that we are known fully. The world in which we live was created in and through the Word, and the Word became flesh. God is present as much in a 72 hour work week as in a reading from the Scriptures, but to be understood in a way that neither diminishes the Scriptures or our labors. The book was written by an Evangelical theologian who has appreciated insights from Catholic theologians who have sought to call the church back to the insights of the Church Fathers. One of the insights I have most appreciated is a view of our Christian lives within the Living Tradition around the table of our Lord. The banquet served at the Lord’s Table is participated in by men and women and children from all times and places. There is significance in each participant’s experience of the life of Christ whether one comes from a medieval European setting, a modern New Yorker’s experience, or that of a convert in a third world country. The Living Tradition is not merely a creed preserved through history as important as that is, but it is also what each of us brings from our experience of life to the table as we participate in the grace and mercies of God. A 72 hour work week does not separate me from the Lord’s Table. It simply becomes something I bring to the table as I partake of the Lord and his mercies. Our places in life are a part of our participation in the life of Christ. That should be a comfort to know as we face the struggles, sorrows, labors, temptations, and difficulties of life not only in our individual lives, but alongside the lives of others sitting at our Lord’s Table.

            I read Dorothy Day’s The Long Loneliness. It was a wonderful story of a woman who wanted to see a world where life, labor, worship, and community were not opposed to one another, as they often seem to be. I found her reflections helpful for our own times. She was wary of seeing the needs of humanity taken over by the state and its bureaucracies. She felt the state too much tended to the needs of the empowered to sustain a life where wage slaves were kept from creating freedom and communities by making a system of exploitation livable instead of reshaping community life away from the system of exploitation. She understood that at times there was usefulness helping the poor alongside Communists and anarchists, but that always the Church in Christ’s name should offer a distinct enabling and nurturing of our humanity. There is a lesson for us in this political season. We may favor one political agenda or another as the best means to enable a free and just society, but ultimately our Gospel is a Gospel that reaches out to humanity in the fullness of our needs so as to confer upon us both the forgiveness of our sins and the ability to hear the command to get up and walk. This comes through incarnational life. God, in Christ, entered our worlds to bring us forgiveness and to teach us to walk, and the Church and we as Christian people are never any more fruitful than when we set aside our privileges and enter the world that too often we are content to describe as “those people.” The story of Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day is that they chose freely to live as the poor among the poor to bring hope and encouragement and fullness to the poor.

            It has been a strange and fruitful season for me. Three seasons of life have coincided in an enriching manner. As a Christian who tries to live at least a bit according to the Christian calendar it has been the season of Lent where we recognize Christ in the Wilderness, and we seek to be shaped by his Wilderness experiences as we participate in little ways in his experience. I realized that my six weeks of long hours were for me, a sort of time in a wilderness. It was also in addition to the Lenten season a political campaign season. It should transform how we as Christians view the political realm when we have gone out to meet Christ in the Wilderness. We hear messages, sermons, and homilies on how Satan tempted Christ in the Wilderness by taking him up to a high mountain and revealing to him the glory of the kingdoms of the earth. He offered him all these kingdoms for the small price of losing his soul. Then we see the spectacle of political campaigns, and sometimes you can see men and women wanting to use government to help others. But often you can see and feel the hunger for fame, power, glory, control. Do we believe that a desire to have America would have been something Jesus would have said – O yes give me that and I will honor your name and say whatever I have to say to have control of America? Yet don’t we feel how that is happening as we become obsessed with who controls the reigns of power on the Potomac? Life in the wilderness leads me to reflect upon the lust for power which is a spiritual disorder injected into our veins by the strike of the serpent whose nature has always been to maim and kill. When I vote for a candidate it will not be so much because of his ideology as it will be because I feel there is a decency about this man or woman’s humanity.

            I have been keeping up this Lent with a Lenten book of meditations called Giving it Up written by Maggi Dawn. I enjoy her way of writing to incorporate the wholeness of the Christianity that surrounds her. She has lived the Christian life among conservative and progressive Christians and her writing reveals someone who refuses to set aside what she has learned in Christ from both. Her reflections on the Scriptural passages illuminating the season of Lent have always been brief, thoughtful, made to order for the lives of modern men and women, and yet full of Christ and reflective of the tradition of our ancient faith.

            Finally, I have enjoyed reading through Christie Purifoy’s Roots and Sky. It is a memoir of her family’s first year of living at their home in Pennsylvania called Maplehurst. The book is a sort of memoir of a unique but ordinary Christian living in the world. She explores discovering God in a garden, or building a picket fence, or having an Easter egg hunt, or taking chainsaws to a fallen tree after a storm. Christie Purifoy is one of the people whom I think of as an internet friend. We have never met. We have only exchanged a few brief words on occasion but her blog site is a special place where a tired person can read a simple expression regarding life focused on a subject that seems perhaps common place. But the common place is not a trivial place, rather it is where one meets God who meets us unexpectedly in the common places. I like to describe Christie’s website as a haven where she offers a place of rest. You will do well I think to make the journey over to Christie’s website home at http://www.christiepurifoy.com/

            Six weeks of 72 hour work weeks has given me too many pages to write. I don’t do brief well. Still I hope if you have had time and patience to read these words that there may have been a blessing for you in these pages. It is time for me to get to things other than writing. The trees in front of my house were beautiful this week with white petals, but the white petals are dropping off while green leaves are appearing. So there is stuff to see and do here.

 

And

 

            God bless and thank you for stopping by.