Dear Friends in Christ, Beloved Parish,
As you all know, in the last two weeks of June, I transitioned into my three-month sabbatical. I still had some pastoral visits to make and some other background work to accomplish, but now as we'v moved into July, I’m fully entering into my time away. My sabbatical will stretch from now until the second full week of September. I’ll officially return on Wednesday, September 14, beginning my time back by saying 10am Morning Prayer with our weekly Prayer group that day.
During my sabbatical, the Rev’d Dr Haywood Spangler is presiding over the Eucharist and preaching each Sunday until September. For the two Sundays in September that I’ll be away, the Rev’d Dr Ross Wright will preside and preach. Melissa Hawks is preparing and printing the bulletin inserts each week, so any additions or changes to the Prayer List should be sent to her via email (pianohawks@gmail.com). Any pastoral concerns or requests for a priest should be directed to our senior ward, Sid Skjei (skjeitel@yahoo.com), who will make sure they are addressed. Also, Marshall Taylor (marshman503@gmail.com) will be sending out the weekly E-Newsletter via Constant Contact when he gets out of the hospital and gets into his new routine. Debbie Murphy (murphydeb@embarqmail.com) will be sending the weekly E-Newsletter until then and will be available to send out any other Constant Contact emails to the parish that may need to be sent. So, let me take this opportunity to thank all of these folks—clergy and laity—who are making it possible for me to take this sabbatical, and let me also thank all of you for supporting me.
Apart from some traveling in August for vacation and to visit family, I will continue to be in the area, at home, throughout my sabbatical. I also may pop by the Parish House during the week to pick up a book or the like from time to time. So, you may possibly run into me at the church or in town. If you do, feel free to come by and say, “hi.” Just because I’m on sabbatical doesn’t mean that you need to ignore me or pretend you don’t know me if you see me around. (Now whether you want to ignore me or pretend you don’t know me is another thing altogether!)
So, if I’m not really going to be “away” on my sabbatical, you may be wondering just what it is I’ll be up to. Well, let me first say that given different circumstances, I would have loved to have used this time for an extended trip somewhere like England, especially as part of a program, course of study, or conference. But with Sarah working (and June and July being two of her busiest months all year) and an 18 month-old on our hands, it just wasn’t feasible to make such plans. That said, I can’t think of a better way to spend this time than with my son. And then in August, Sarah and Thomas and I will vacation with friends for a week in the Outer Banks; visit Sarah’s family for a week in Saint Augustine, Florida; and visit with my family for about half-a-week at a house rented by my dad in Virginia Beach.
Many different businesses and institutions have adopted the sabbatical as an option available to their employees. They often intend their sabbaticals to be times of respite from regular duties for the purpose of some specialized productivity from the employee. But, in the language of the Articles of Religion, this expectation of special productivity overthroweth the nature and meaning of “sabbatical.” The word, “sabbatical” comes from the Hebrew word, shabbat, or as it’s more commonly rendered in English, sabbath. The fourth of the Ten Commandments exhorts us to “keep holy the Sabbath day” because God rested from the work of creation on the seventh day and hallowed it thereby. In this way, Scripture instructs us that work is good (God acknowledged each act of creative work in the six days of creation as “good” and “very good”), but work finds its end and perfection and ultimate meaning in that paradise where God’s creatures rest in and with their God.
The Decalogue teaches God’s people to set aside a day of the week for rest, not just for themselves but for their servants and the resident alien among them and their beasts of burden. More than that, Scripture extends the sabbath beyond just a day in the week. According to the Torah, every seventh year was to be set aside as a sabbath year (or sabbatical year), during which even the land itself was to rest, lying fallow for the whole year, and debts were forgiven. This served as a reminder that work and productivity are not goods in themselves but are good when they are properly ordered toward and perfected in a time when all of God’s creatures together can rest with and delight in God. In these ways, we’re to “remember to keep holy the Sabbath.”
In other words, Time itself, along with all of Creation, will be fulfilled when it rests in God’s love (see Romans 8:18-39). Therefore, God instructs us to build rest (in and with God and with one another) into our schedules and calendars to remind us that our work, like our lives, will find its ultimate meaning and value when it is perfected and rests in God’s love. When we remember this truth, then our work will find its proper orientation toward the love of God and the love of our neighbors. But we need these sabbath reminders because our work can so easily take over our lives. This is most especially true when our work is good and meaningful, in which we rightfully take pride and find joy. It’s precisely in such a situation as this that we’re most likely to be tempted to think of our work as an end in itself. And it’s precisely in such a situation as this that we’re most likely to sacrifice other good and important things in our lives to our work—things like health and well-being, friendships, family, and even our relationship with God. Sabbath is an antidote to these temptations.
Jesus himself, whose work was nothing less than our salvation and the redemption of all Creation, took time to rest in and with his Father. In Mark 1:35, we read how Jesus, after pouring himself out in teaching and healing the sick, “rose [early in the morning] and went out to a lonely place, and there he prayed.” And the Gospel according to Luke (5:16) suggests that this was a regular thing Jesus would do. Indeed, when the disciples returned after Jesus sent them out to extend his work of proclaiming the Good News of the Kingdom of God and healing the sick, Jesus took them on a sabbatical retreat, saying, “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while” (Mark 6:30). Jesus’ invitation is extended to us today just as it was to his disciples back then.
When the y’all offered me this sabbatical, you extended Jesus’ invitation to me. Y’all have invited me to “remember to keep holy the sabbath,” to rest in and with God. However, this isn’t just an extended vacation.
I was originally meant to take this sabbatical during the summer of 2020, but the pandemic put an end to those plans for both that year and the next. These past couple of years have been difficult for everyone. I don’t need to rehearse here the litany of losses I suffered, the life-changing events I experienced, and the challenges I faced during that time. Most of you already know most of that story, and you have each had your own trials that you’ve endured, whether related to the pandemic or not.
Now that this sabbatical is finally a reality, it will be a time for me to intentionally rest in my relationships with my friends, my family, and my God. I’ve already mentioned the opportunity this sabbatical gives me to spend time with my son and wife, and the several weeks of vacation in August with family and friends. In addition to this, it will be a time for me to spend with God in an especially personal and intentional way. In other words, it will be a time to cultivate my personal prayer life.
Prayer is at the heart of our relationship with God. Prayer names the interaction of each and all of us to our God. What does it mean to be in relationship with another person?—simply this: to interact with that person. At the very least, it means to communicate with them. But the more intimate the relationship becomes, the closer you get to the other person, the more varieties of ways to interact become available—for example, eating together, exchanging an embrace, and even sitting in silence together at times of vulnerability. This also is true of prayer in our relationship with God.
The highest form of Common Prayer and corporate worship is Holy Eucharist. The liturgy of this celebration and “sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving” incorporates many of the ways that we pray. In the hymns, we communicate to God our gratitude, praise, and love. In the collects, the confession, and petitions of the Prayers of the People, we speak to God about our deepest needs and desires. And in the reading of scripture and its explication in the sermon (by God’s grace), God speaks to us. In the Holy Communion, we share a meal with God. But more than that, in Holy Communion, God in Christ gives the Divine Love (that just is God) to us as sustenance. This is an act not unlike, but more intimate, than an embrace. It's like an embrace because it is both a sign of love and gives the love it is a sign of. But it is more than embrace for by it, Christ dwells in us as we came to dwell in him through Baptism, just as he abides in his Father, and his Father abides in him (John 14:10-11). This is why we celebrate the Eucharist during each weekly sabbath.
This highest form of Common Prayer, Holy Eucharist, is the soil and seedbed in which all our ways of praying are grown and cultivated. Even as I’ll be in the pews (for a change) in Common Prayer with various congregations for their celebrations of Holy Eucharist during my sabbatical, it is these other ways of praying that I hope to make the focus of my time. The types of prayer I hope to cultivate and by which I plan to rest in and with God during this sabbatical are four: the Daily Office, Study, the Prayer of the Heart, and Contemplatio.
The Daily Office are Morning and Evening Prayer in the Book of Common Prayer. During my Ordination liturgy, in the part known as the Examination, I promised to “be diligent in the reading and study of Holy Scriptures, and in seeking the knowledge of such things as may make [me] a stronger and more able minister of Christ,” and to “persevere in prayer, both in public and private, asking God’s grace, both for [my]self and for others, offering all [my] labors to God, through the mediation of Jesus Christ, and in the sanctification of the Holy Spirit” (BCP 532). These promises have traditionally been understood to refer, at least in part, to saying the Daily Office, with its daily lectionary readings. While prayer and the study of scripture are part of my daily life, I often struggle to maintain the discipline of saying the Daily Office from the Prayer Book—especially, when work and life become hectic. So, I hope to use this time of sabbatical to restore the habit and discipline of saying the Daily Office of Morning and Evening Prayer.
Another way of prayer that is, perhaps, the most natural to me, is the way of study. I’m always engaged in the study of scripture, the great works of our tradition, and the writings of more modern theology and biblical studies. During this sabbatical, however, I will have more time to engage in this form of prayer by having the opportunity to read more (if Thomas allows). Some of the books on my list include:
-
Metaphysics by Aristotle,
-
The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate that Changed Our Understanding of Time by Jimena Canales,
-
You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature by David Bentley Hart,
-
God After Einstein by John Haught,
-
The Perfectly Simple Triune God: Aquinas and His Legacy by D. Stephen Long,
-
Creation: A Guide for the Perplexed by Simon Oliver,
-
Philosophy, God and Motion by Simon Oliver,
-
Celestial Hierarchy by Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite,
-
Divine Names by Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite,
-
Mystical Theology by Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite,
-
The Fullness of Time: Jesus Christ, Science, and Modernity by Kara Slade,
-
Systematic Theology, Volume 2: The Doctrine of the Holy Trinity: Processions and Persons by Katherine Sonderegger,
-
On the Holy Trinity by St Gregory of Nyssa,
-
On the Making of Man by St Gregory of Nyssa,
-
The Jesus Prayer by Kallistos Ware.
We’ll see how many I get through. I’ll also be working on improving my Biblical Greek and, perhaps, writing a few book reviews.
The third type of prayer I hope to begin to cultivate is what the Eastern Orthodox call the Prayer of the Heart. This is the practice of repeating the Jesus Prayer in concert with your breathing. The Jesus Prayer can take several forms. A short form of the prayer is: Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me. The longest form of the prayer is: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God: Have mercy on me, a sinner. A prayer rope or prayer beads—like the Anglican Rosary—can be helpful in this practice. The point is for the words to become so familiar on the lips through the habit of repetition that they come to inhabit the mind whenever it isn’t otherwise engaged until they eventually lodge in the heart, so that you pray without ceasing (I Thes 5:17). Now, this is too lofty a goal for me. But I hope to schedule a set amount of time each day during my sabbatical for the practice of this prayer.
The fourth and final form of prayer I’d like to build towards during my sabbatical is Contemplatio. I leave the Latin name of this prayer type untranslated because the two English translations most often used—contemplation and contemplative prayer—can cause confusion. In our modern lexicon, the word contemplation seems to have a vague and generic connotation of considering or thinking about something. Similarly, the phrase “contemplative prayer” has become an umbrella term for a whole range of prayer practices not necessarily connected to ancient and medieval Christian Contemplatio. For those ancient and medieval Christians, Contemplatio was the highest form of personal, individual prayer (just as the Eucharist is the highest form of Common Prayer). Similar to the Prayer of the Heart, Contemplatio must be reached through an ascent from verbal prayer to mental prayer. But the mental prayer that precedes Contemplatio—known as Meditatio—engages the inner intellectual sight that we use in imagination rather than focusing on the repetition of words. Still, Contemplatio ascends past this to the prayer of silence, where words and images are transcended before the God who transcends all the categories of Creation. (You can read St Augustine’s account of one of his experiences with Contemplatio in the ninth book of his Confessions).
Like the Prayer of the Heart, the discipline and ascent of this form of prayer is the endeavor of a lifetime and not achieved in a three-month sabbatical. This is why the Prayer of the Heart and Contemplatio are usually practiced most successfully by monks and nuns (not unlike meditation in Buddhism). But, again, during this sabbatical, I can at least set aside time each day to devote to this discipline.
In all of these forms of prayer, I will be resting in and with my God, which is the reason and purpose of a true sabbatical. And so, it seems, meet and right to conclude this letter with a prayer:
O God of peace, who hast taught us that in returning and
rest we shall be saved, in quietness and confidence shall be
our strength: By the might of thy Spirit lift us, we pray thee,
to thy presence, where we may be still and know that thou
art God; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
-The Book of Common Prayer, “58. For Quiet Confidence,” p 832
Nik+
