Sabbath Quilt

I have two jobs--one in a downtown Indianapolis bookstore and another cleaning private residences. These jobs, plus trying to have a life, keep me busy . . . . . too busy.

Most Americans are overworked, overscheduled and overbusy. We live with calendars and PDA's in one hand, laptop or cellphone in the other. Recently large numbers of us have taken to multi-tasking or doing more than one thing at a time.

I long to break my frenetic life with rest that refreshes. I need to stop at an oasis for awhile and drink some cold water and strengthen my forces for the journey ahead, whatever it may be.

This is why I began thinking about the concept of sabbath. A rabbi friend told me that sabbath is at the very core of the Jewish faith. She said: "It is like a vacation once a week."

I could use that vacation. The problem is that I have so many competing tasks. Sunday, a day I attend mass at Christ Church Cathedral and when I don't have to go to the book store or clean houses, is the logical and traditional candidate for my sabbath.

Yet, even this "day off" becomes a magnet for all of the things that I was unable to do during the week. For example, there are bills to pay, groceries to buy, unanswered phone messages to answer, the laundry that needs laundering and the house that needs cleaning. Sound familiar?

The need to introduce some balance and equilibrium into my multi-tasked life has caused me to try to "keep sabbath" on Sundays. I have been working on this for about five years. Following are some of the things that I have learned:

1. The core activity of sabbath for me, as I indicated above, is attendance at the liturgy. In this liturgy of Word and Table, I find myself reflecting on the big issues of life and death in light of the Christian narrative. Because my work involves being on my feet or working physically, sometimes it is only during the liturgy each week that I am able to sit still. This in itself is restful.

2. At home I try to signal a change of pace with some special touch. And this is where the quilt comes in. I have a beautiful quilt that I keep folded in the armoire during the week. One of the first things I do on Sundays is to place it on my bed. This bed cover is what I call my sabbath quilt. Just having it visible reminds me that the rhythm of the week has changed, if only for a day. Another special touch is the icons which are arranged in an icon corner in the living room. It is usually on Sunday morning that I light a candle and burn incense at the icon corner and offer a prayer for whatever is on my mind.

3. Sunday is also a day when I try to extend some special act of hospitality to friends or family. It is easy to pull out the slow cooker and prepare a roast beef dinner and invite a friend. Just the smell of the roast beef reminds me of my childhood and youth when we almost always had a roast beef dinner after church and when friends visited each other. As an alternative to dinner, Sundays are when I try to find people to play board games with me. Even though I almost always lose at Scrabble, I love playing it. What better way to spend a Sunday afternoon?

4. Generally, I have declared a moratorium on spending money on Sundays. I work in retail all other days of the week. I want to give consumerism a rest. I don't think that sabbath can be practiced in malls.

Sometimes it is impossible to bring together worship, special touches , hospitality, and a boycott on spending on a given Sunday. Sometimes the best that I can do is to put the sabbath quilt on the bed or light a candle next to the icon of the Holy Mother. I wish that this were not the case but I live in a culture that gives very little support to the concept of a day of rest and restoration. Maybe there is a special residential cleaning that I have to do (as I did today). Maybe there is an urgent meeting at the bookstore that is required. Maybe I just need to do the laundry.

When this happens I remind myself that there will be other occasions when I can practice sabbath. At the very least, I can put out the sabbath quilt as a reminder that, as the Scriptures attest, even God needed rest after the exertions of creation.

More Sloppy God Talk

Everywhere you turn in this country, people are talking about God.

You might think that I, as a person of faith, would like this. I don't.

If God is really holy, mysterious, beyond the limits of our minds and human experience, then God is not a toy which becomes a convenient explanation for whatever, whenever.

Example: This past week evangelist Pat Robertson threatened the people of Dover, Pennsylvania with God-sent natural calamity because they voted out school board members who voted in a thinly veiled religious version of the origins of human life.

Example: An acquaintance whose family lives in Evansville, Indiana where the terrible tornadoes struck last week, reported to me that his family was relieved that God had "protected" them from the twisters. He was irritated when I asked him why, then, had God not protected the people who were victims of the tornadoes.

In both of these examples God's action is remarkably impervious to human suffering. In both examples, God's action is totally self-serving: Pat Robertson gets a validation for his crazy far-right rantings and my acquaintance reasons why his family is spared the randomness of a natural act.

At the root of much sloppy God talk is the firmly embedded notion that God is omnipotent. This means that God is all-powerful. Christians have been drenched with notions of omnipotence in prayers, hymns, sermons for so long that it is almost impossible for them to imagine God in any other way. Yet, at the same time they -- we -- talk about the cross where God made no intervention at all to save Jesus. Omnipotent?

The problem gets really complicated when you try to reconcile the idea of a loving and just God with the idea of an all-powerful God. Or when you try to explain mind-boggling evil. What was the omnipotent God doing during the Holocaust of the Jewish people or during the genocide in Rwanda or during Katrina or the tsunamis?

I think that the only way to be a person of faith and maintain intellectual integrity and compassion is to abandon the idea of omnipotence. Maybe God isn't orchestrating all events with purposes in mind. Maybe we need to try to find signs of God's presence in otherwise inexplicable situations and events. This shifts discussion to more tangible terms. So, in the case of Katrina, we find God's presence in the caring of neighbors or in the resilience of the victims or in the courage of the volunteers and others who went into New Orleans just after the floods.

In Old Testament times, people were afraid to name God. I think that this was because once we begin playing with the term, we trivialize it or use it for our own purposes.

Public discourse in this country would be served inestimably if people would hesitate to invoke God at every turn of the corner. And it would be served if people of faith would try to hammer out more intelligent God talk.

More on How Big Is Family? Kurt Vonnegut's Idea

A few weeks ago I posted a short reflection on how the family in the USA is way too small. If you haven't read it, check it out on this blog site.

This week I was reading a new release by Hoosier author (but now living in New York City) Kurt Vonnegut, author of Slaughterhouse Five and Breakfast of Champions and many other novels. This new book is titled "A Man Without a Country," New York: Seven Stories Press, 1985.

The work is divided into short reflections that ramble here and there on a series of great ethical and social issues. As you read the book you have the feeling that you are having coffee in a diner somewhere with an eccentric uncle who, in his late years, has decided he doesn't give a damn what you or anyone else thinks. He is going to say whatever he wants, however he wants. And in Vonnegut's case, he wants it on record.

Maybe I feel a little close to Vonnegut even though I never met him because my son went to the elementary school #43 that Vonnegut also attended. And someone told me that in the early years of this arts and crafts style apartment building in which I live, the Vonneguts also lived here. There are still Vonneguts running around Indianapolis.

In discussing the family, Vonnegut says that "It used to be that when a man and woman got married, the bride got a lot more people to talk to about everything. The groom got a lot more pals to tell dumb jokes to". But the extended family has disappeared to the extent that "When a couple has an argument nowadays they may think it's about money or power or sex or how to raise the kids or whatever. What they're really saying to each other, though without realizing it, is this: 'You are not enough people!'". Conclusion: "A husband, a wife and some kids is not a family. It's a terribly vulnerable survival unit."

After discussing how the Igbo children in Nigeria may be taken to meet hundreds of relatives, Vonnegut states that "I would really, over the long run, hope America would find some way to provide all of our citizens with extended families--a large group of people they could call on for help." Vonnegut is right: We need to look to Africa for the way family supports its members. And even there it is fast disappearing.

Thanks, Kurt Vonnegut, for writing on a better version of family values. And if you should ever happen to stumble on this blog site, leave me a comment.

Mug of Hot Steaming Coffee and Belonging

After almost twenty-five years of marriage, one December day I packed my things and moved to a Victorian bed and breakfast in downtown Indianapolis.

The reasons for this move are not important and, anyway, I wouldn't put them up on a public blog. What is important is that after so many years of family life, I suddenly found myself by myself. There was no noise in my apartment unless I made it. And it was always dark inside when I came home at night.

No doubt about it, I was glad to have broken loose. But, I did not have any close friends. Sure, there were work colleagues but they seemed embarrassed when I wanted to talk about what had happened. So, the phone rarely rang. I felt very much alone.

I missed being around people. I also missed the house I had lived in and the things that were in that house. None of them were fancy or valuable. But, all the same, I missed being around my things. All of those things told stories and through them I could construct my own narrative.

This sense of solitude was compounded by the terrible winter weather that year. It was bitter cold. There were heavy snows and I was trying, for the first time in my adult life, to do shopping, get to work, go to church and all of the other things I needed to do, without a car.

I remember the first Sunday after I left. I had gotten up very early to get ready to attend mass at Christ Church. Next to the bed and breakfast were some townhouses. My third floor bedroom looked down on these townhouses and on their windows.

Just below my bedroom I could see the open curtains of a townhouse bedroom. There was a lamp that exuded a warm glow by the window. And on a little round table with a kind of Laura Ashley cloth, there was a ceramic mug of hot steaming coffee. I gazed at it for a long time--imagine, me a coffee voyeur!

Somehow the combination of the mug of steaming coffee, the Laura Ashley textile, and the golden light spoke to me. It all seemed to underline that, hey, Daniel is very much alone and not in a real house, just a bed and breakfast. And only yards away, there are people who live in real homes, with their own things, and they wake up on Sunday morning to steamy coffee mugs and long sessions of New York Times and maybe soft classical music or Miles Davis Kind of Blue.

Gazing on that mug of hot steaming coffee I realized that I was at an "in between" place. I had left where I was and did not yet have my own place, my own routine . . . . . . not even my own coffee mug or coffee maker! I ached with loneliness. And I wanted to belong again to people and to a place.

Being at an "in between" place was like living in an existential parenthesis. The old had been left behind but what was to be, to become had not yet happened. How could I know that it would take almost a decade to accumulate my own things, establish another routine, build up an extended family and live in a place long enough to love it?

Today was a beautiful November day in central Indiana. I woke up at 6 am when it was still dark outside. The amber glow of the victorian era streetlights gave a beautiful patina to the sidewalk, the street and the trees. Inside this century old apartment, I had my books, art, music, some antiques, furniture and heirlooms. There are pictures of my partner, my kids, my mom and sister. In one corner of the living room are the holy icons.

On this early morning I smelled the coffee brewed by my timed Coffee Maker. I turned on one living room lamp and sat in an easy chair slowly sipping coffee, thinking about the day ahead. The coffee was in a sturdy hand-made mug that I bought on the Navajo reservation near Farmington, New Mexico several years ago.

When I went to shave, I left the mug, steaming, on the windowsill. When I placed it there, I thought: "Now I too belong."