faith and work on Quitting

The US Golfer George Archer had a relatively successful career on the PGA tour, winning won thirteen tournaments, including the 1969 Masters. As he drew closer to retiring from the sport, he wasn’t ex...

If you don’t believe in the resurrection of the dead, look at any office at quitting time.

Sabbath ceasing means to cease not only from work itself, but also from the need to accomplish and be productive, from the worry and tension that accompany our modern criterion of efficiency, from our...

Sabbath requires surrender. If we only stop when we are finished with all our work, we will never stop—because our work is never completely done. . . . If we refuse rest until we are finished, we will...

Keeping sabbath may involve us in relinquishing certain kinds of power on behalf of other kinds. If we allow it, sabbath may bring us to true authority, true power. The road is that of letting go, rat...

I can lose my job; I might be released from a position. My career can come to an end when I retire from the organization I work in. But my vocation comes from God; it remains and is not in the end som...

The American Golfer George Archer had a relatively successful career on the PGA tour, winning thirteen PGA tournaments, including the 1969 Masters. As he drew closer to retiring from the sport, he was...

I can lose my job; I might be released from a position. My career can come to an end when I retire from the organization I work in. But my vocation comes from God; it remains and is not in the end som...

Sabbath is about four things: ceasing, resting, embracing, and feasting.

The command to celebrate the Sabbath, and therefore to cease and abstain from all our own knowledge, work and volition, even from all our arbitrary surrenders and inactivity, from all arbitrary quiesc...

Don’t underestimate the value of doing nothing, of just going along, listening to all the things you can’t hear, and not bothering.

The only way to avoid mistakes and criticism: say nothing, do nothing, be nothing.

In his Rule for monasteries, St. Benedict considered grumbling a serious offense against community life. He wrote, “If a disciple grumbles, not only aloud but in his heart … his action will not ...

The end of labor is to gain leisure.

If the Book of Job reaches across two and a half millennia to teach anything to men and women who consider themselves normal, decent human beings, it is this: Human beings are sure to wander in ignora...

You stay alive in the practice of leadership by reducing the extent to which you become the target of people’s frustrations. The best way to stay out of range is to think constantly about giving the w...

Ambition has no rest.

What differentiates a weekly Sabbath from a vacation? Quite a bit, in fact. When my son was four, he learned how to put his head underwater when swimming. Elliot can hold his breath for a good ten sec...

A New York Times story reports on the positive impact school recess has on academic performance. Here’s how it begins: “The best way to improve children’s performance in the classroom may be to take t...

The Benedictine nun Joan Chittister recounts a story she once heard by a communications professor, which she said fundamentally changed the way she thought about success and failure: A young boy was...

The best way out is always through.

Sabbath is an act of resistance.

Since failure is our unforgivable sin, we are willing to ignore all forms of deviance in people if they just achieve the success symbols which we worship.

Because of the modern rhythms of work that are mediated through personal computers and phones, people, in the words of one cultural commentator, “leave the office, but they do not leave their work. Th...

Studying your own failures as well can make them seem less earth-shattering. One researcher suggested in a 2010 article in Nature that people maintain a “CV of failures,” a written list of the things ...

As we keep or break the Sabbath day, we nobly save or meanly lose the last best hope by which man rises.

Sabbath is that uncluttered time and space in which we can distance ourselves from our own activities enough to see what God is doing.

I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no ‘brief candle’ to me. It is a sort of splendid torch, which I have go...

Sabbath is a period of 'trying on' God's promised completion, trying on God's future. Sabbath is not rest for a privileged few while all others serve them – that's tourism. Sabbath...

The spiritual rest, which God particularly intends in this Commandment, is this: that we not only cease from our labor and trade, but much more, that we let God alone work in us and that we do nothing...