faith and work on Stillness

Jean-Dominique Bauby was widely esteemed as one of France’s most prolific and influential journalists. His work widely shaped the quickly evolving cultural landscape of Europe during the 1980s and ’90...

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...

Work is not always required. There is such a thing as sacred idleness.

Modernity slowly weakened spirituality, by design and accident, in favor of commerce; it downplayed silence and mere being in favor of noise and constant action. The reason we live in a culture increa...

The words: "On the seventh day God finished His work" (Genesis 2:2), seem to be a puzzle. Is it not said: "He rested on the seventh day"? "In six days the Lord made heaven and...

Without great solitude, no serious work is possible.

Sabbath honors the necessary wisdom of dormancy. If certain plant species, for example, do not lie dormant for winter, they will not bear fruit in the spring. If this continues for more than a season,...

It’s the rest in a piece of music that gives it resonance and shape.

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

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

Your body knows about schedules. It gets used to those times of day when it says, Feed me right now. I’m hungry, and those times of night when it says, Get me to bed. I’m exhausted. Your body will spe...

O God of Peace, you have taught us that in returning and rest we shall be saved, in quietness and confidence shall be our strength; by the might of your spirit lift us, we pray to you, to your presenc...

The green oasis, the little grassy meadow in the wilderness, where, after the week-day’s journey, the pilgrim halts for refreshment and repose.

In contrast (and contradiction) to cultural mindlessness (that can hardly be underestimated!): The Sabbath and its observance may cultivate a theological mindfulness. . . . How so? The Sabbath sanctif...

There is a realm of time 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.

By illustration, I have been told that when a cow is born, she innately senses that her departure from her mother’s warm womb to a cold, scary, unknown world outside is upon her. In response, she will...

Six days a week the spirit is alone, disregarded, forsaken, forgotten. Working under strain, beset with worries, enmeshed in anxieties, man has no mind for ethereal beauty. But the spirit is waiting f...

Our madly rushing, neurotic society needs the therapy of the silence and quietness that flows from a day kept holy, really holy. A day when our thoughts are of God, our actions are tempered by a desir...

He who cannot rest, cannot work; he who cannot let go, cannot hold on; he who cannot find footing, cannot go forward.

Shabbat is like nothing else. Time as we know it does not exist for these twenty-four hours, and the worries of the week soon fall away. A feeling of joy appears. The smallest object, a leaf or a spoo...

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

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...

I find my thoughts drifting to the Sabbath, the day of rest, the seventh day of the week, and perhaps the seventh day of one’s life as well, when one can feel that one’s work is done, and one may, in ...

The most exemplary nature is that of the topsoil. It is very Christ-like in its passivity and beneficence, and in the penetrating energy that issues out of its peaceableness. It increases by experienc...

Contemplation is also the response to a call: a call from Him Who has no voice, and yet Who speaks in everything that is, and Who, most of all, speaks in the depths of our own being: for we ourselves ...

The antidote to exhaustion is not rest but wholeheartedness.

arrives in the world, scattering a song in the silence of the night: eternity utters a day.

Stop for one whole day every week, and you will remember what it means to be created in the image of God, who rested on the seventh day not from weariness but from complete freedom. The clear promise ...

Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance and order and rhythm and harmony.

A being is free only when it can determine and limit its activity.