On Sabbath

We commonly know Sabbath as a day of rest corresponding to the Biblical seventh day of creation, in which "God finished the work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that he had done in creation." (Genesis 2:1-3) The Hebrew word translated as "rested" is shabat, corresponding to the noun sabbath: Sunday for Christians, Friday sundown through Saturday sundown for Jews.

To understand the reality of Sabbath more deeply, we must consider not only the character of that day and the meaning of shabat, but inquire into the nature of Sabbath time, keeping in mind the distinction between sacred and profane discussed elsewhere in Reckonings. "There is a realm of time," writes the great scholar of Jewish ethics and mysticism, Abraham Joshua Heschel, "where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to control but to share, not to subdue but to be in accord." That is Sabbath time. While there is great wisdom in setting aside a common day once a week as Sabbath time, a wisdom that may reside within our souls--the Biblical command to keep the Sabbath is the only one of the Ten Commandments to begin with the word "Remember," as if it refers to something we already knew, but may have forgotten--Sabbath time is not limited to that day, but is a way of being in time. If it is not a familiar practice, one might start with an hour--in which one is less likely, in any event, to be interrupted.

Abraham Joshua Heschel

Heschel, in his small book of meditation on Sabbath, first seeks to convey an understanding that may not coincide with our common intuition: Sabbath, wisdom, holiness, life in its most vivid authenticity, has to do essentially with the sanctification of time. The verb shabat in Hebrew, in addition to the correspondence noted above, is one of the names of God; thus the intriguing conclusion, not quite explicitly drawn by Heschel, that God is a verb, not a noun. ("Even God," writes Heschel, as if we should know better, "is conceived by most of us as a thing.")

The essential spirit of Sabbath is that of reanimation, redemption and resurrection. All week--in profane time--"there is only hope of redemption. But when the Sabbath is entering the world"--in sacred time--"man is touched by a moment of actual redemption; as if for a moment the spirit of the Messiah moved over the face of the Earth." Sabbath is the soul in time, and time is full of such moments, if we have eyes to see and ears to hear.

Indeed, our hope and our practice may bring us more and more Sabbath time, even to the experience of life as Sabbath. As one wise soul recently wrote to a dying friend,

"This sacred time is not about convenience or inconvenience; it isn't about meeting deadlines. It isn't about you (or anyone else) being in control. This sacred time is about learning to trust the eddies and shoals of the River. It is... about mystery. It is a broader, deeper, infinitely more significant agenda that is beyond our charting. It is singularly about you and your union with the Other. It is beyond our reckoning."

It is our choice and our gift, then, our craft and our practice, if you will, to make the most of Sabbath. The traditional prescriptions and proscriptions of Sabbath, when not sinking like all dogma into formalism and legalism, are designed to assist us in that task. The more we measure and divide time, the less we allow its consecration. (Think, in mundane terms, of the difference between digital and analog watches.) Heschel's language is particularly vivid. The more we pursue "the profanity of clattering commerce..., the screetch of dissonant days,... the nervousness and fury of acquisitiveness and the betrayal in embezzling [our own lives,]" the farther we move from Sabbath.

The more we rest quietly and peacefully into stillness; find accord among body, mind and imagination; harmony, love and delight among one another and with the natural world; the less anger, agitation, tension, conflict and fear we feel; we are the more drawn into Sabbath time. That is why we are wise to turn off the computer, the television and the telephone; avoid money and shopping; walk instead of drive; make love instead of fuss (or war); play softly rather than hard, and without competition; listen more than talk, be quiet, let it be. If prayer is familiar, let it be prayer of thanksgiving, not petition or repentance.

Thomas Merton was writing about good folks when he said, "There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence [that is] activism and overwork... To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence... It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful."

To return to the Biblical roots of Sabbath time, through the words of Wayne Muller, "The ancient rabbis teach that on the seventh day, God created menuha--tranquillity, serenity, peace and repose--rest, in the deepest possible sense of fertile, healing stillness. Until the Sabbath, creation was unfinished. Only after the birth of menuha, only with tranquillity and rest, was the circle of creation made full and complete." (Sabbath: Restoring the Sacred Rhythm of Rest, NY: Bantam Books, 1999) The Book of Genesis tells us that the Sabbath is both part of creation and a rest from creation.

What I want is to leap out of this personality
And then sit apart from that leaping--
I've lived too long where I can be reached.

- Rumi

Wendell Berry's Sabbath poems written between 1979 and 1997 are gathered in a volume he called A Timbered Choir (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 1998). Here is one from 1996:

Some Sunday afternoon, it may be,
you are sitting under your porch roof,
looking down through the trees
to the river, watching the rain. The circles
made by the raindrops’ striking
expand, intersect, dissolve,

and suddenly (for you are getting on
now, and much of your life is memory)
the hands of the dead, who have been here
with you, rest upon you tenderly
as the rain rests shining
upon the leaves. And you think then

(for thought will come) of the strangeness
of the thought of Heaven, for now
you have imagined yourself there,
remembering with longing this
happiness, this rain. Sometimes here
we are there, and there is no death.

Posted by John R. Boettiger

How the Foreign Policy Consensus Protects Itself

What follows is a quote from Arthur Silber, and many links that take us on a tour of his mind.

This blog has a kind of perennial identity crisis, partly because I have been using it as a receptacle for things that interest me but don't have a place to go yet.

In the EFM program, we are encouraged to guide thought along theological lines, and to do exercises of reflection. The reflections are on our own individual lives, and also on the culture, the issues before the citizenry, this time in history, on history itself, and on a kind of philosophical thinking.

Silber's blog is called "Power of Narrative" which is a wonderful title in and of itself. Because of instantaneous communication, the narrative of events is more powerful and makes a more long-lasting impression than the event itself --- at least for those at some distance to the event, those who haven't experienced what is being talked about first -- hand.

Like the gospels. Like gossip. Like TV "News".

This aspect of the underlying assumptions, what is the heart of the matter? interests me more and more.

*************

{From "Trapped in the Wrong Paradigm"}

When you argue within the framework and using the terms selected by your opponent, you will always lose in the end. Even if you make a stronger case about one particular issue, your opponent still wins the larger battle -- because you have permitted the underlying assumptions and the general perspective to remain unchallenged.

{From "How the Foreign Policy Consensus Protects Itself"}

Here is a brief excerpt from Gabriel Kolko's The Age of War: The United States Confronts the World, on the same issue -- and note how Kolko's argument parallels that offered by Bacevich:

But collective illusions have characterized the leaders of most nations since time immemorial. They have substituted their desires, ambitions, and interests for accurate estimates of what may occur from their actions. At best, intelligence organizations gather data of tactical rather than strategic utility. An infrastructure of ambitious people exists to reinforce the leaders' preconceptions, in part because they too are socialized to believe what often proves to be illusion. But bearers of bad tidings are, by and large, unwelcome and prevented from reaching the higher ranks of most political orders. It is extremely difficult for nations to behave rationally, which means accepting the limits of their power, and what is called intelligence has to confront the institutional biases and inhibitions of each social system. Thus deductive, symbolic reactions become much more likely, notwithstanding the immense risks of their being wrong. The US war in Iraq and the geopolitical folly of its larger strategy in the Persian Gulf is but one recent example of it.

It is all too rare that states overcome illusions, and the United States is no more an exception than Germany, Italy, England, or France before it. The function of intelligence anywhere is far less to encourage rational behavior--although sometimes that occurs--than to justify a nation's illusions, and it is the false expectations that conventional wisdom encourages that make wars more likely, a pattern that has only increased since the early twentieth century. By and large, US, Soviet, and British strategic intelligence since 1945 has been inaccurate and often misleading, and although it accumulated pieces of information that were useful, the leaders of these nations failed to grasp the inherent dangers of their overall policies. When accurate, such intelligence has been ignored most of the time if there were overriding preconceptions or bureaucratic reasons for doing so.

This is the second common error concerning intelligence, which is the failure to understand its actual uses. As Kolko discusses, intelligence in fact is utilized "to justify a nation's illusions" -- or, in Bacevich's terms, to protect and ensure the continuation of "the prevailing foreign policy consensus with its vast ambitions and penchant for armed intervention abroad."
********

How the Foreign Policy Consensus Protects Itself

Andrew Bacevich, author of the enormously valuable The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War, writes about the Iraq Study Group and its purposes:Even as Washington waits with bated breath for the Iraq Study Group (ISG) to release its findings, the rest of us should see this gambit for what it is: an attempt to deflect attention from the larger questions raised by America's failure in Iraq and to shore up the authority of the foreign policy establishment that steered the United States into this quagmire. This ostentatiously bipartisan panel of Wise Men (and one woman) can't really be searching for truth. It is engaged in damage control.

Their purpose is twofold: first, to minimize Iraq's impact on the prevailing foreign policy consensus with its vast ambitions and penchant for armed intervention abroad; and second, to quell any inclination of ordinary citizens to intrude into matters from which they have long been excluded. The ISG is antidemocratic. Its implicit message to Americans is this: We'll handle things - now go back to holiday shopping.

The group's composition gives the game away. Chaired by James Baker, the famed political operative and former secretary of state, and Lee Hamilton, former congressman and fixture on various blue-ribbon commissions, it contains no one who could be even remotely described as entertaining unorthodox opinions or maverick tendencies.

Instead, it consists of Beltway luminaries such as retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and lobbyist Vernon Jordan. No member is now an elected official. Neither do its ranks include any Iraq war veterans, family members of soldiers killed in Iraq, or anyone identified with the antiwar movement. None possesses specialized knowledge of Islam or the Middle East.

Charging this crowd with assessing the Iraq war is like convening a committee of Roman Catholic bishops to investigate the church's clergy sex-abuse scandal. Even without explicit instructions, the group's members know which questions not to ask and which remedies not to advance. Sadly, the average Catholic's traditional deference to the church hierarchy finds its counterpart in the average American's deference to "experts" when it comes to foreign policy. The ISG exemplifies the result: a befuddled, but essentially passive-electorate looks for guidance to a small group of unelected insiders reflecting a narrow range of views and operating largely behind closed doors.

...

The ISG will provide cover for the Bush administration to shift course in Iraq. It will pave the way for the Democratic Congress to endorse that shift in a great show of bipartisanship. But it will hold no one responsible.

Above all, it will leave intact the assumptions, arrangements, and institutions that gave rise to Iraq in the first place. In doing so, it will ensure that the formulation of foreign policy remains the preserve of political mahatmas like Baker and Hamilton, with the American people left to pick up the tab.

In this way, the ISG will make possible - even likely - a repetition of some disaster akin to

let me offer these links to some previous essays on this specific topic:

Trapped in the Wrong Paradigm: Three Handy Rules (See Rule 2, in particular.)

The Paradigm that Will Not Die

Undying Myths, and Sullivan's Lies on the Path of Penance

Walking into the Iran Trap: A Decision of Policy -- and the Intelligence Won't Matter

The Irrelevance of Intelligence Again, and Collective Illusions

And Still One More Time: Stop Helping the Warmongers

posted by Arthur Silber

To every people the land is given on condition. Perceived or not, there is a Covenant, beyond the constitution, beyond sovereign guarantee, beyond the nation's sweetest dreams of itself. The Covenant is broken, the condition is dishonoured, have you not noticed that the world has been taken away? You have no place, you will wander through yourselves from generation to generation without a thread. Therefore you rule over chaos, you hoist your flags with no authority, and the heart that is still alive hates you, and the remnant of Mercy is ashamed to look at you. You decompose behind your flimsy armour, your stench alarms you, your panic strikes at love. The land is not yours, the land has been taken back, your shrines fall through empty air, your tablets are quickly revised, and you bow down in hell beside your hired torturers, and still you count your battalions and crank out your marching songs. Your righteous enemy is listening. He hears your anthems full of blood and vanity, and your children singing to themselves. He has overturned the vehicle of nationhood, he has spilled the precious cargo, and every nation he has taken back. Because you are swollen with your little time. Because you do not wrestle with your angel. Because you dare to live without God. Because your cowardice has led you to believe that the victor does not limp.

Leonard Cohen: Book of Mercy, McClelland and Stewart, 1984, Toronto.

All Souls' Day 2 November

All Soul's Day is the last day of a triduum (a three-day celebration) of commemorations of the dead dating back to pre-Christian eras. Starting with the Eve of All Hallow's (Halloween) then continuing to All Saints Day.

The pre-Christian Celts of northern Europe held a three day festival known as Samhain, during which they paid particular attention to the memory of their dead. The Church Christianized this festival by giving new meanings to the customs of Halloween night, and by offering a vision of the Communion of Saints that is remembered on All Saints Day, November 1st.

The last day of this Christianized commemoration of the dead is known as All Soul's Day, falling on November 2nd. On this day, the Church remembers all of the faithful departed who died peaceable deaths with the expectation of Christ's promises of eternal life. These were ordinary people, who were not given the status of sainthood by the Church, but who were nevertheless saintly communicants. These days, most Churches call all Christians saints, a concept referred to as the Common of Saints. However, it must be remembered that this is an ancient theology that has only recently been reclaimed.

For much of history, a person known as a "Saint" was only a person who had done some heroic deed for the benefit of the Church and the Faith, or who had died specifically because of their proclamation of that faith (ie, martyrs). These were the persons who were honored with canonization and were remembered on the Church's calendar. They were believed to have ascended directly to heaven at the deaths and welcomed there by God.

The Feast of All Soul's was added to the triduum at a much later date than All Saints Day or All Hallow's Eve. Even after Samhain in the north had ceased to be remembered, the Celts still had a cultural impulse to celebrate for three days, as if they knew they were supposed to be doing so but couldn't remember why. Elsewhere in the Church, monasteries had established the custom holding requiem masses for the brothers of their order who had died. These requiems were held at different dates throughout the year, depending on the region and the monastic Order. The Church thought it reasonable to unify all of these commemorations on a single date for the sake of liturgical order. Therefore, by the turn of the Second Millenium, the Church had established the triduum of commemorations that began on October 31st and ended on November 2nd.

In the Latin world (southern Europe and Latin America), All Soul's Day is known as the Day of the Dead. On this day, families are reunited in the cemeteries where their ancestors are buried. During these family reunions, they decorate their ancestors' tombs and hold parties which begin in the afternoon and continue on into the evening.

These are not morbid celebrations, as one might expect, but very happy and positive celebrations that are intended to bring back happy memories of the ancestors that are very much included in the celebrations.

(adapted from Mission St. Clare)

O God, the Maker and Redeemer of all believers: Grant to the faithful departed the unsearchable benefits of the passion of Your Son; that on the day of His appearing they may be manifested as Your children;

through Jesus Christ our Lord, Who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

November 02, 2006 | Permalink

Give us Grace so to follow these Your blessed saints in all virtuous and godly living, that we may come to those inexpressible joys that You have prepared for those who truly love You; through Jesus Christ our Lord, Who with You and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen.