Sabbath, Chaos, and Control

As I continue on through Bill McKibben's difficult, disturbing Eaarth, my reflections on Maryann McKibben-Dana's (no immediate relation) book about Sabbath continue to echo about in my head.

One of the threads that repeated several times in that thought-provoking book was the idea of Sabbath as that place where we permit chaos to enter.  Sabbath becomes that place where we stop pouring ourselves into the structures that frame our lives, the schedules and demands and expectations that leave us continually anxious, ever behind, always stressed and struggling.  It is energy, not form.  It is freedom, not order.

I feel that, but I found myself wondering if it is something else.  A Sabbath day is not random, and it is not disordered.  It is free, yes, but when I take sabbath time...long meditative walks, times to write or draw, times to read and grow...they do not feel like chaos.  They feel calm.  They feel serene and ordered and at peace.

It's a different order.

The structure of sabbath matches the intent of creation.  Our crazy, competitive, acquisitive stresstival of striving does not.   It is a poor match for the Creator's intent.  It feels like chaos, or at least like a structure so poorly suited to change that it shakes us violently, tossing us about as it itself is tossed.

What does striving look like?  What does sabbath look like?  My mind went for visuals.   And as I thought that, I found myself drawing out an image from a movie, as I often do.   It was from the movie "Contact," a delightful bit of hard sci fi direct from the mind of dear ol' Carl Sagan himself.

In the scene, Jodie Foster is being sent to meet with extraterrestrial intelligences that have contacted humanity, in a device whose design has been provided by those intelligences.  Humanity has made one modification to that design:  the command chair in which she sits.

That chair, my metaphor-mind suggested, is our scheduled life.  And sabbath?  Sabbath arrives at the three minute mark of this little video snippet.

Sabbath Idling

This morning, it was cold and lightly drizzling, the damp dangling whisker of a winter storm that's pounding the Northeast.   But it wasn't raining hard enough to kick in Dad Protocol Tango, which involves me shuttling the kids down to the bus stop in the Prius.  Poor, fragile creatures that my boys are.  Ahem.

That doesn't mean that there weren't plenty of cars lined up.  There are pretty much every morning, more if it's raining, but there if it's shining, too.  They are running, their engines burbling for warmth and power, middle schoolers sitting in the back seat, waiting for the bus.  The parents are what appears a half and half mix of stay at homers and "Dear God Hurry Up Bus I'm Late" parents.

Today, it being just a few degrees above freezing and damp, there was a small line of cars, all idling.  Clouds of carbon-rich condensate filled the air as I walked past, leaving my twelve-year-old to stand by himself in the rain.

The next bus stop was the same, and and in front of a half-dozen houses in my neighborhood, vehicles sat idling and empty, anticipating the arrival of their driver.

Encountering this standard suburban behavior echoed peculiarly off of the two books I've been reading.

It's Double Down McKibben week for me on the Kindle, as I went from reading Maryann McKibben-Dana's Sabbath in the Suburbs to reading Bill McKibben's Eaarth.  Having read the first, the neurons in my brain that hold the word "McKibben" remembered I'd wanted to read the second.

The first is a book by a pastor in my neck of the woods, one who serves a church just a mile or so from the neighborhood where I grew up.  It's about the struggle to find sabbath time in a dual-career, multi-kid schedule-berzerker American suburban life.  It was a thoughtful, practical and nicely-written book, although I found reading portions of it peculiarly stressful.    Part of that may be that she's just so much more organized and driven than I am.  But perhaps it was more the way those dynamics reminded me of what life had been like before our full-time income disappeared in a downsizing.  Yes, this heartless-CEO-inflicted Sabbath time is nice, but in a few more months, it ain't gonna be so pretty.

The second is a book by an environmentalist, one that declares that climate change is no longer a threat, but our reality.  The title of the book derives from his suggestion that we've basically turned Earth into another planet, less Yavin and more Tatooine, less Bradbury's wildly fecund Mars and more like actual Mars.  He names that planet Eaarth.  The book has been pretty relentlessly horrible, in a "time to stock up on canned food and ammunition" sort of way.  I haven't yet gotten to the recommendations about how we can get by on Eaarth, but if he started talking about Rebreathers and the Water of Life, I wouldn't be surprised.

The common theme to both books?  Our deadly busyness.  The driving, striving churn of suburbia...the thing that makes us stressed and crazy...is the same cultural engine that's pouring carbon into the atmosphere.

With two texts harmonizing in my head, there was a peculiar irony in all those rushed suburban parents in idling cars, slowly heating their children's world so they can be warm and dry in the moment.  If we were a little more sabbath minded and intentional, who knows what benefits might arise?