A Radical Sabbath
Adapted from Time, by Philip L. Barlow, in the Themes in the Doctrine and Covenants series, available for purchase at Amazon and Deseret Book.
When modeling and teaching of the Sabbath, my goodly parents, Latter-day Saints from birth, were encouraging rather than heavy-handed. This was prudent, given their children’s temperaments.
Despite wise and faithful parents, a vague reluctance sometimes came upon my young self when the declining Saturday afternoon sun made long shadows. Thoughts of the morrow–a more regulated day–encroached. Transposing my imagination from an antebellum Missouri village to the twentieth-century suburbs of Salt Lake City, I retained enough Tom Sawyer in my blood to find the prospect of preachings and formal Sunday attire to be constricting. Saturdays were precious commodities, after all, partially free from school and weekday obligations. Sunday loomed over my Saturday evenings as a time invasion from the near future, an infringing shroud to my weekend merriment. It meant the impending demise of freedom, ball games, “capture the flag,” and diverse adventures in the hills above our Bountiful, Utah home. A parental sales pitch about the coming pleasures of Sabbath rest fared as poorly in my ears as my kindergarten teacher’s command that we lay down on our mats each afternoon for 30 minutes of quiet and nap: an interminable prison for a restless boy pining to play kickball. These were my Saturday night specters: time-specters anticipating Sunday compliance.
In retrospect, as actually lived, the first day of the week was not so very confining. Expectancy eclipsed fact. I had nice teachers and friends at Church, and I enjoyed taking the sacrament. I even allowed myself some cheer when, organ booming, I joined the hymn-singing congregation in a rousing “Welcome, Welcome, Sabbath Morning” or “High on a Mountain Top” to launch the services. After morning meetings, a lovely roast beef dinner was apt to await, with our nicest dinnerware laid out if we expected guests. Sometimes, our home teachers would later appear, issuing an upright message, or else I would make neighborhood rounds of my own, collecting fast offerings or visiting assigned families with an older companion. Most of the day I spent with friends or family. Sometimes, we succeeded in remaining more subdued than on other days, as dictated by our understanding of what we’d been taught.
Getting Serious about the Gospel
With the autonomy of young adulthood, the stakes seemed to rise. My peers and I entered college and the grownup world. Those who studied this world, as well as merely preparing for a career, also encountered complexity and ambiguity. Some friends continued in the faith with little turmoil; others grew confused, indifferent, even hostile.
Over time, I was provoked to face my mirror more searchingly than in earlier life. Not to drift from the Church with friends who did would require compelling reasons. I was not preoccupied solely with a distant afterworld. I was more immediately moved by the question of how I was to exist in the here and now. The quality of my human life was up for grabs. As I became more exposed to the world’s cacophony-–to its wonders, puzzles, conflict, and calamity-–I had to judge in what voices I should invest. How was I to employ my days, and with whom and to what end? In what did I fundamentally believe, and on what grounds? Who and what was I to become?
This experiment was as applicable to the slice of time we call the Sabbath as to other gospel principles. Hence, I interrogated my understanding of it. I interrogated others and heaven, too. Taking the sacrament remained meaningful to me and meeting regularly with the Saints seemed good, but how essential to me were Sabbath days as a whole? Was I confident, deep down, that the ascetic Sabbath routine spelled out in Doctrine and Covenants 59:9–15 would somehow make me holy? A summary question at last governed the others: Of the sundry choices before me, would it genuinely benefit me, and please God, if I were to expend one-seventh of my remaining life as I had on Sundays past? Keeping a more encompassing Sabbath as defined by section 59, I realized, would be a larger debit on my time–my life–than tithing is on my means.
Conversion
Provoked to and by such inquiry, I decided to put God’s word to the test, as God’s word advises. I weighed my questions through study, thought, prayer, discussion, and observation of people–especially myself. My six-month experiment centered on the attempt, for one day each week, to live a radical Sabbath: to separate sacred Time from mundane time more thoroughly than ever I’d previously done, to see what would transpire. Each Saturday, I took brief but real pains to design what the following day would entail within the seemingly spartan constraints of section 59:9–15. My friends may have thought me immoderate, but the experiment intrigued me–a good project for the curious.
The unobvious outcome, deepened over time, amounted to a revelation–an “uncovering” of truths that had abided all along. The outcome was also a conversion, a “turning ‘round” to living differently in time for one day each week. I did not succeed perfectly, but even my weakness served to corroborate an insight: When I lived a thorough Sabbath, life went better than when I didn’t. Faith flourished; fear faded.
When I kept my new Sabbath, I became smarter: less distracted by trivia or annoyance, and more attuned to wonder, worship, other people, and the things that matter most. Because of the Sabbath, my prayers changed. At times it seemed the day became prayer, not wholly on my knees but centered on listening, attention, service, and an inner celebration of life and trust and freedom. Although I continued to plead to the Lord, sometimes, I did so with a near-absolute proviso of “thy will be done,” more aware that my own will, untethered from God’s, is a peril. Hence, I came to pray less for what I want than to be open to what already surrounds me, to see the Lord’s hand in all things, to see new potential in what that means. And to make more room for the privilege of being, of abiding, of choosing, of (even hard) experience (Doctrine and Covenants 122:8). In attentive Sabbath mode, I seemed better able to detect those in need and how I might act in allegiance with them. And to better detect others who were not so much in need as to be reverenced and learned from. Personalities notwithstanding, every person I met when I was in Sabbath mode fit at least one of those categories.
Because of the Sabbath, my awareness quickened to some unceasing invitation. To and from God? From and to eternity? Moments of the day began to feel like a portal: a beckoning to something wider and finer. My capacity for joy expanded despite a simultaneously enlarged compassion for the world’s ails. In this frame of mind and heart, it seemed I was taking in more reality on this day: more color, nuanced sound, texture, possibility, prompting, education, meaning, love, and awe.
How was it so? This enhanced aliveness, strange but simple, became possible because the new Sabbath made more psychological and spiritual “space”–hence more “Time”–to apprehend what was all about me. Unhurried and unbored, I wasn’t trying to “use,” “solve,” “check off,” or “prepare” things during the day so much as to notice them, to be among them, to marvel, and to respond as scripture describes: “with thanksgiving, with cheerful hearts and countenances” (59:15). When steeped in such gratitude as this, I found I was full of grace: more conscious of the giftedness of all things, including each breath. This, in turn, spawned joy. Ironically, this kind of joy deepened when fasting. The abstention from stomach comfort freed me for heightened attention to my experiment and to an alliance with those in want. It brought a sense of empowerment: I was capable of pausing the ordinary world.
As a complement to joy, my confidence seemed to wax stronger in the presence of God and in the acceptability of life. I came even to rest differently through this new Sabbath–because I rested not only from overt labor or causing others to labor but from the tugs of obligation and everyday consciousness. I no longer used the Sabbath merely "to recharge my batteries” for the work week ahead, although recharging was a natural by-product. Instead, I began to use the other days of the week to live towards the Sabbath, where consciousness, gladness, and life had grown more keen. In my stricter rules for the day, I found not confinement but freedom. More precisely: by my chosen confinement (my letting go and fencing off of the mundane) I found myself unshackled from mundane preoccupations and their attendant anxieties. I discovered that the rewards of enacting the guidance of Doctrine & Covenants section 59 in earnest were surprising–and the process surprisingly practical.