Sabbath 21: Sensuality and Delight

Sabbath 21: Tripp's post, Megan's post.

Muller waxes rhapsodic this week about our sensual connection to re-creation. He starts by asking a great question: let's assume, for just a minute, that you're ready for Sabbath. You've actually turned off all the electronic gadgets, cleared your calendar, etc. What do you do to enjoy the day?

He then points out that the Jewish Sabbath ritual is wonderfully sensual--the sight and scent of candles, the taste of familiar favorite foods, soft cushions to rest on. Muller then goes into some detail about the sensual delights of physical affection, points out that the Talmud decrees that a husband's (ahem) obligations to his wife should be performed on the Sabbath, and quotes the Song of Solomon.... And then, his suggested exercise is......

Go for a walk. Barefoot. Indulge your senses.

Ha! A suggested Sabbath exercise of "now go enjoy the sensuality of taking a cold shower" might have been funnier. But I guess you just can't be a pastor and write a book that suggests that people go have sex. At least not one that suggests that you enjoy it.

(if you're getting mad at me right now, you go take a cold shower.)

First, to the exercise: I'm not much of an outdoorsy type, to start with. And my spouse has said several times that her idea of roughing it on vacation is a hotel that doesn't offer room service. It's not that I dislike nature, or that I don't spend time outside. But I'm usually indoors, or I'm outside with running shoes on, or I'm walking my dog, who seems to prefer sidewalks to grass. It's been a long time since I took off my shoes and stepped onto the earth (or the grass), as if I was stepping onto holy ground.

So I did. Fearing only briefly for stickers and chiggers and random dog poo and other suburban terrors, I went out for a walk, imagining that I was Moses, being told to take off my shoes and step into the presence of God... and I was surprised by the hair-raising holiness of those few minutes. No, it wasn't the feel of the grass and the dirt, or that there was a bush in my backyard that was on fire (but not consumed).

Muller touches on something true--we are sensual people. In my worship tradition, the engagement of the senses is an essential part of the sacraments of the church. We feel the splash of cold water, the touch of another hand, catch the scent of healing oil, taste the wine of the thanksgiving feast. These things provide moments, specific times and places, when we can be opened to the presence of God. And without the engagement of the senses, worship becomes an intellectual exercise, easily untethered from its original purpose and left to roam.

sabbath 20 extra: cartoons!

As promised, here are some of my recent cartoons.

Harvey does several teaching techniques to get our little linear brains out into cartoonland. We do pictures from squiggles, compound words (e.g., "bull-frog") and charaters out of letters or numbers (which I think he's calling alpha-pics). Anyway, here are some examples:

Sabbath 20: The Tyranny of Choice

Sabbath 20: Megan's post, Tripp's post

Here's my summary of Wayne's chapter (quoting him, as we read through the chapter):

(1) sometimes it is necessary to stop one thing so that another can begin
(2) What if we hear these [sabbath] prohibitions with different ears? What if...these teachings are...a useful boundary that keeps out things that would do us harm?
(3) freedom of choice can suffocate us; we drown in a sea of options.
(4) sabbath restrictions on work and activity actually create a space of great freedom; without these self-imposed restrictions, we may never be truly free.

My summary differs a little from Megan's; not that I think she's wrong, but Muller poked her in a sore spot this week and her response is appropriate.

My life's analogy to Muller's point this week is what it's like for me to tell my young son that he needs a nap. (We've almost, but not completely, outgrown the afternoon nap stage.) Some days, especially weekends when we're going full speed at some series of activities, he gets cranky. He almost always reacts the same way to my suggested nap: with an explosive negative response. I know a nap will help, he'll feel better, he'll enjoy the rest of the day, so I make him go rest. Lie down, I tell him, but you don't have to sleep.

Yes, sometimes I'm grumpy myself when I send him off to his room, but the point is that it's to help teach him that when he's tired, if he rests, he'll be better able to enjoy things.

* * * * * * *

Muller's suggested exercise is one that only tangentially touches on the chapter: do something creative and fun and refreshing daily. Some small thing. Snip a flower, tear a picture of something you enjoy out of a magazine and keep it with you to look at it during the day, sing, draw, dance...

I've been looking for a while now for an excuse to talk about one of the odd joys in my life... I'm learning how to draw cartoons.

We have an after-classes enrichment program at our church school, and one of the offerings is called "kid-tooning." The instructor is a fellow named Harvey S. Williams, the creator of a whole "who's who" of cartoon characters, including Bullwinkle, Tony the Tiger, the Trix Rabbit, the Raid Bugs, and a bunch of others. (I'd link you to a web site, but he doesn't have one)

Harvey is a wonderful guy, jovial, enthusiastic, and fun-loving. He loves kids, he loves to draw--it's a great match.

I called him an artist one time, and he corrected me--"I'm a cartoonist." Maybe that's why I've loved drawing with him, and why I never learned how to draw myself. I always wanted things to look right, for the perspective to work, for the lines to meet, for the shading to make sense. I never doodled in the margins of my homework, because it never looked right--I did geometrical shapes and patterns instead.

Ah, but if it's a cartoon, it's supposed to be a little silly. Bullwinkle doesn't look like a real moose, right? The funnier, the better. There are still rules on what works and what doesn't, but they're inherently flexible. Harvey's constantly telling his students, "you can't mess up. It's just different, that's all. Or, if you don't like it, start over. No big deal."

Here's where I really need to learn more about blogger software, and take the time to scan some of my drawings and put them up here. To do that, I gotta go borrow a scanner, and... okay, okay, I'll figure out how to do it, so you can see my silly frogs and camels and roly-poly bears. Real soon now...

Sabbath extra: Easter break

I've been recently chastised for lack of Sabbath posts, and lack of explanation. mea culpa.

The Three Amigos (or whatever we're calling ourselves) decided to take a few weeks off for Palm Sunday, Easter, and the week following. We'll return to your regularly-scheduled programming next Sunday.

Sabbath 19: Selling Unhappiness

Sabbath 19: Megan's post

This chapter contains a great paragraph:

Sabbath is a time to stop, to refrain from being seduced by our desires. To stop working, stop making money, stop spending money. See what you have. Look around. Listen to your life. Do you really need more than this? Spend a day with your family...sit with your spouse on the couch, hang out--do what they do in the [catalog advertisement] picture without paying for it. Just stop. That is, after all, what they are selling in the picture: people who have stopped. You cannot buy stopped. You simply have to stop.

...then, at the end of the day, where is the desperate yearning to consume, to shop, to buy what we do not need? It dissolves. Little by little, it falls away.

Amen, Wayne!

But the rest of the chapter, unfortunately, is a diatribe against consumerism whose train of thought derails (in my opinion). It makes a little more sense when the previous chapter and this one are combined. Under the umbrella of a section called "the pursuit of happiness," the previous chapter says "money can't buy happiness" and this one says that if you participate in an understanding of the world where you consume to be happy, then your fundamental state has to be unhappiness, so that the things you buy can make you (momentarily, but never completely) happy--until you take Sabbath time to stop and realize that you really do have enough.

I think Tripp has it right--Muller is aiming at simplicity. It's just the whole "thus the free market canonized grasping, conumption, and desire as the essential human impulses" thing that gets under my skin.


The first time I ever encountered the idea of the Sabbath as a break from spending money, it was in conversation with another priest. She was the massively overworked type; I caught her, one day, strung out and exhausted, and asked when the last time it was she took a day off. She explained that today was the Sabbath for her, and the way she kept it was to not spend any money... not even for a diet coke out of the machine. This sounded just a little bizarre to me (and yes, I became the goyim who would buy her sodas from the machine that day), and I thought it missed the point of a day off. But it was an odd enough idea that it stuck with me, and grew on me over time. After thinking about Muller's anti-consumer rhetoric for a couple of weeks, I think he's got a significant point to make for modern society, and I'm going to have to keep ruminating on the idea of non-participation in the wheels of economy as a Sabbath practice.


Muller's suggested exercise this week actually made me laugh out loud when I read it. His suggestion: practice some "slotha yoga," a cute name for staying in bed in the morning when you wake up. Let yourself wake up, Wayne says, and spend the next hour in bed...

My beloved probably said it best (just picture her counting on her fingers, please): This is the advice of (1) a morning person, who has (2) no children at home, (3) no pets, and (4) no job.

I honestly can't recall a stretch two days in a row in my whole life (not since summers in junior high school) when I woke up without an alarm clock of some kind. Wayne might say that my life is seriously out of balance... but the point is, I can't even imagine what his exercise looks like.

I tried a modified version, this Sabbath day (which is why this post is late): I got up, made coffee, walked the dog, took the kid to school, came home, got back into my pyjamas, and lazed around all morning. I even took a morning nap. (this is exactly what would happen if I tried Wayne's exercise as suggested: about three minutes of contemplating restfulness, followed by immediately going back to sleep) I deliberately didn't work on anything, not even (at the risk of losing husband points) fixing the broken upstairs toilet. I played games; picked up our son early from school, and walked the dog. To my surprise, at the end of the day, I felt slightly disgruntled at not having accomplished anything all day!

I guess I'm enough of a people person that trying to 'stop' without having my family and friends around to be stopped with (my Sabbath days are spent alone) defeats the intent of the suggested exercise. Oh well, better luck next week.

Sabbath 18: The Gospel of Consumption

Sabbath 18: Meeegan's post, Tripp's post

I think Muller gets to the point he wants to make for this chapter rather towards the end: "Happiness is the single commodity not produced by the free-market economy." He goes on to say that when we are happy, we don't feel the need to buy anything, and that the Sabbath is supposed to be a day of delight, a day of being "at peace with all we have" rather than yearning for more.

Muller points out that the United States (most of his assumed audience) leads the world in consumption, and if the rest of the world followed our example we'd denude the planet in incredibly short order.

To get there, though, he goes in a direction I just can't follow. He says that we now follow a gospel of mass consumption, as in, consumption will make you happy. He hints that there's some kind of huge dark big-brother conspiracy among manufacturers to promote this gospel (either that, or he anthropomorphizes "the market" and says that the market has made greed the essential human impulse).

Um... no.

Basically, this week's chapter sounded like a warning against conspicuous consumption (and I happen to agree with him on that, by the way) that Muller has force-fit into the ongoing theme of Sabbath rest.

I also disagree with his basic premise in this chapter: that money can't buy happiness. Yes, it can! Maybe I should draw a distinction between two situations: poverty, or a paycheck-to-paycheck existence, versus a certain financial stability. I know of nobody who has come from the first to the second who isn't far happier in the latter condition. But to draw the distinction between comfortable and rich... Muller might have a point there.

If we say that money can't buy happiness, then are we saying that global poverty means that most of the people in the world are happy, and we should leave them alone? Of course not!


* * * * * * *

Muller's suggested exercise this week sounded interesting: go to a favorite store, one where you particularly enjoy shopping. Walk around for an hour in that store, but do it knowing you're not going to buy anything. Pay attention to how you feel. Let yourself feel the tug of buying. Listen to the things tell you "you want me, you would be happier if you had me." Walk away, hopefully free of the impulse to buy things, feeling a sense of sufficiency.

Okay, this sounded interesting in principle. But, I'll admit ahead of time, I haven't done it yet. We've had multiple house guests for the last week, and I haven't spent an hour on his exercise. I'll try to do it, but I'm not sure how much help it's going to be for me, because I don't really enjoy shopping in the first place. I don't wander and look at random things. I'm not even sure what store I should go to for the exercise. (A bookstore, probably) I'm also skeptical that the exercise would make me more frustrated rather than more rested. We'll see how Megan and Tripp do with it.

Sabbath 17: The pursuit of happiness

Sabbath 17: Tripp's post, Meeegan's post.

This week, we enter a new section in Muller's text, this one titled "Happiness."

His main point in the chapter, as I see it, is to draw a distinction between the gratification of desire and the state of happiness. Gratification fades. Gratification, in fact, can become an insatiable monster. Happiness, Wayne says, is more about being enjoying what you have than about the acquisition of more or better things.

Jesus taught his disciples (and teaches us) that God's desire for us is that we live in happiness and peace. Muller says, "finding happiness in life is universally perceived as an essential human endeavor." He references several other philosophers and religious leaders who have similar messages.

Side note: I'd always understood Thomas Jefferson's famous phrase "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" to mean, not the chase of happiness, but the occupation of happiness... meaning that it is a right of humanity to choose one's life work, rather than having it determined by someone else, and to do something that you find happiness in.

I've been gently disagreeing with Muller for much of the book, when he tries to draw distinctions between "work" as a draining activity and "rest" as an energizing activity. A good bit of what I do that could be called work is actually energizing for me. Not all, of course. Some of it is exhausting.

Muller says that when we look for happiness in a market-driven world (my words, not his) that we tend to look to consume, to buy our happiness. But this is a trap--to consume is merely to gratify desire. In an echo, or a deliberate recall of his last section, he says that happiness only grows in the soil of time.

So, he says, as the sabbath exercise, be grateful this week. Recognize the blessed nature of your life. Count your blessings, name them one by one...

Okay, can do. It's a simple exercise, almost cliche if you're not careful, but one with rich rewards. Give it a shot for a day if you've never tried it. If thanking God for the things that bless you is too hard, try it this way: I'm grateful for this food. I'm grateful for a roof over my head. I'm grateful for my friends...