NEW HYMN TEXT - For the Good of Our Being
Hi friends! Thanks for reading. My goal is to post once a week, but everyone knows that anyone in a pastoral position gets a free pass the week after Easter from all other commitments. This proves to be a fitting text for the post-Easter rest! As always, the best way to support this letter is to share it with those who might be interested. Thanks!
After almost fifteen years of ministry at Resurrection Covenant Church, my congregants have gotten to know me very well. It is more common than not for at least one person to approach me after the service and ask, “So are you going home to take your nap?” I am passionate about the Sunday afternoon nap—and naps in general—even as they seem to elude me as I age (which throws me back into the thorny question of theodicy: If God is all-loving and all-powerful, why do bad things happen to good people?). I love the pre-reading preparation, the heavy eyelid phase, the slow drift into unconsciousness, the post-nap daze where I awake unsure of the time, day, or even the basic facts of my selfhood. There is also something delightfully transgressive in taking a nap during the day when we are told we should be doing something productive, making something of ourselves, getting tasks checked off our ever expanding to-do lists.
And it is at the nexus of expected production and the frivolous daytime nap that we can grasp the countercultural, even revolutionary, nature of rest. For as consumer capitalism has morphed into even more time-sucking forms of late capitalism or neoliberalism, our lives are now lived in the shadow of tempus fugiens—time flying. Philosopher Jonathan Crary describes this new form of capitalism well in his provocative 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep when he argues that it is “characterized as generalized inscription of human life into duration without breaks, defined by a principle of continuous functioning. It is a time that no longer passes, beyond clock time.” Like the opening credits of 48 Hours, the ticking clock becomes the soundtrack for our anxious and hurried lives. And to the rhythm of the constant ticking, every person is turned into an entrepreneur who is only as valuable as their production, every subject is turned into a project of ongoing self-improvement and growth (see Byung-Chui Han’s The Burnout Society for an argument for why this has led to the particular contemporary malady of depression). Rest, then, is a basic claim of our intrinsic ontological value as human subjects without regard for our productive value.
For Christian ministers and scholars, there is also a deeper theological rationale for the good of rest. From Walter Brueggemann’s Sabbath as Resistance to Tricia Hersey’s The Nap Ministry, these thinkers argue that a consumer capitalist society also runs counter to the vision of God’s reign. The paradigmatic text for this is no doubt the fourth commandment of the Decalogue where the command to rest on the sabbath extends from the covenanted Hebrew people to the immigrants and enslaved in their midst to the animals in their fields and—in other parts of the law—even to the land they inhabit. Rest, then, is integrally and inextricably bound up with justice, and part of the reason we rest is to ensure that all creation can rest. (This is the inherent problem of “resting” by ordering our meals via Door Dash or buying things for same-day delivery on Amazon; if we are simply outsourcing our work to people who do not have the luxury of rest, we are not engaged in the just rest God commands.)
Rest, then, especially sabbath rest, is not simply a way that we can recharge our batteries at the end of a long week so we can be more productive when we hit the ground running on Monday morning. Instead, it is a social practice meant to help communities imagine how we could live in better relationship to ourselves, our neighbors, and the entire created order—to make the sabbath values of abundance, trust, community, and equity tangible in all our days until, as the African American spiritual sings, “Every day will be Sunday, and the sabbath will have no end.”
In this new text, I try to express the widening ripples of this sabbath vision of justice through each stanza with the first focusing on ourselves, the second on our neighbor, and the third on all creation. The “we” of the text is very intentional because I believe that if sabbath-keeping is to be an effective and sustainable model of resistance, it will necessitate communities practicing it together, making concrete choices to say no to the swarm of activities and events that masquerade as obligations and responsibilities (“It was the author of Walden, wasn’t it, / who made a sacrament of saying no.” -Jane Kenyon), and instead opting for a slower life lived in relationships closer to the ground.
For the good of our being,
we rest. We rest.
For a new way of seeing,
we rest. We rest.
For the life we are fleeing,
we rest.
For the good of our neighbor,
we rest. We rest.
For a pause in their labor,
we rest. We rest.
For a sabbath to savor,
we rest.
For the good of creation,
we rest. We rest.
For the earth’s preservation,
we rest. We rest.
For our home’s restoration,
we rest.
©2024 GIA, Inc.
“Content dictates form.” This was one of Stephen Sondheim’s maxims for writing his matchless lyrics. In other words, what you want to say in a song will tell you how the formal aspects of that song—meter, melody, rhyme scheme—should be constructed. In a hymn about rest, I realized that the form itself should give a sense of the rest communicated in the words of the text. My idea was to include an interlude between each verse that would give the singer a chance to experience rest, and when I knew that was what I wanted, I knew the composer should be Sally Ann Morris because such formal challenges are her métier. She did not disappoint. Here’s my demo, and yes, I am getting a haircut this week:
You can purchase the music through GIA Unbound here. You may also consider playing an entire instrumental stanza in the middle or at the end of the hymn to further extend the rest.
Wonder-ings
As a hymnwriter, I can’t help loving a commitment to what many would call an archaic craft. Awe and beauty all over the place in this one.
Some time last year, I decided to take on the Vasily Grossman’s imposing Life and Fate, a novel that tells the story of several members and generations of the Shaposhnikov family in the Soviet Union during World War II. With settings ranging from makeshift bunkers of Stalingrad to the prison camps of Russia and Germany to the laboratories of the USSR, the harrowing narrative describes the many horrors of the war, but it is not simply a narrative describing death and destruction. While Grossman shows a basic distrust for all totalizing ideologies (the book’s implicit criticism of Stalinism led to its censoring by the Kruschev government, and it was only published in the West after Grossman’s death when it was smuggled out of the country), he still trusts in the goodness of humanity—tested and tempered but not overcome. This tenacious humanism is most clearly communicated when the matriarch Alexandria returns to her destroyed house after the war:
“And here she was, an old woman now, living and hoping, keeping faith, afraid of evil, full of anxiety for the living and an equal concern for the dead; here she was, looking at the ruins of her home, admiring the spring sky without knowing that she was admiring it, wondering why the future of those she loved was so obscure and the past so full of mistakes, not realizing that this very obscurity and unhappiness concealed a strange hope and clarity, not realizing that in the depths of her soul she already knew the meaning of both her own life and the lives of her nearest and dearest, not realizing that even though neither she herself nor any of them could tell what was in store, even though they all knew only too well that at times like these no man can forge his own happiness and that fate alone has the power to pardon and chastise, to raise up to glory and to plunge into need, to reduce a man to labour-camp dust, nevertheless neither fate, nor history, nor the anger of the State, nor the glory or infamy of battle has any power to affect those who call themselves human beings. No, whatever life holds in store – hard-won glory, poverty and despair, or death in a labour camp – they will live as human beings and die as human beings, the same as those who have already perished; and in this alone lies man's eternal and bitter victory over all the grandiose and inhuman forces that ever have been or will be.”
This seemingly unmerited hope in humanity pops up like persistent weeds throughout the narrative:
“Even at the most terrible times, through all the mad acts carried out in the name of Universal Good and the glory of States, times when people were tossed about like branches in the wind, filling ditches and gullies like stones in an avalanche—even then this senselessness, pathetic kindness remained scattered throughout life like atoms of radium.”
and:
…The powerlessness of kindness, of senseless kindness, is the secret of its immortality. It can never be conquered. The more stupid, the more senseless, the more helpless it may seem, the vaster it is. Evil is impotent before it. The prophets, religious teachers, reformers, social and political leaders are impotent before it. This dumb, blind love is man’s meaning.
Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer.
I’ll be honest and say I’m not always sure if I agree with this positive assessment of humanity; there always seems to be too much evidence to the contrary all around us—the seemingly endless cycles of violence and oppression, vast hatreds and petty prejudices. Yet, if humanity is indeed made in God’s image, perhaps that is the “small kernel of kindness,” Merton’s point vierge (virgin point) that he so movingly describes as
“a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us. It is, so to speak, His name written in us, as our poverty, as our indigence, as our dependence, as our sonship. It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely…. I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere.”
Maintaining our humanity, claiming that adamantine kernel of goodness even at the edge of the abyss, does seem, at least on some days, like a victory—senseless and pathetic, eternal and bitter—but victory nonetheless.
And a last note from Gustave Flaubert for those looking to increase their amazement at the world: “For something to be interesting, we need only look at it long enough.”
May you find communal spaces of rest where you claim the the gift—the right—to take a “long, loving look at the real” (Walter Burghardt)) and discover that the world is more curious and wondrous than you could have ever imagined.
Peace,
Dave