Sabbath Keeping

Rating:
Summary: Learning how to take the pause that refreshes
Review: Sabbath Keeping, a little jewel of a book by Donna Schaper, is one woman's account of her on-going journey of sabbath celebration.

Sabbath, a word with Hebrew origins, has to do with the important work of rest in our lives. In today's fast-paced way of doing life, we've lost the ability to step away from our work to rest, focus and play without a script or a list. There's a mystery waiting for those of us who learn the joy of "sabbath-ing."

Schaper helps us consider how we might more actively learn to do less, to enter into the playfulness and celebration of our lives through observing a sabbath, or time of rest, as a weekly ritual. Issues of decluttering our demanding agendas, prayer, border-making, daily life rhythm and pacing, weave into a model of what it means to pay attention to our lives in the most positive way.

Although written from a Christian perspective, her advice is embraceable by most of us:

"Sabbath keeping is so easy that it is terribly hard. We are all doing too much, and we know it is not enough; we cannot do more, but we know we must. Our gaze is unfocused, our expressions weary and worn..." In a world where many of us work on Saturdays and Sundays, traditional rest days of the past, how we can find other ways to keep sabbath with and for each other?

Schaper's little book helps us look inside to give ourselves permission to live with fewer plans, decreased expectations, a freer agenda so that we may take notice of the single elegant mystery of being alive.