We commonly know Sabbath as a day of rest corresponding to the Biblical seventh day of creation, in which "God finished the work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that he had done in creation." (Genesis 2:1-3) The Hebrew word translated as "rested" is shabat, corresponding to the noun sabbath: Sunday for Christians, Friday sundown through Saturday sundown for Jews.
To understand the reality of Sabbath more deeply, we must consider not only the character of that day and the meaning of shabat, but inquire into the nature of Sabbath time, keeping in mind the distinction between sacred and profane discussed elsewhere in Reckonings. "There is
a realm of time," writes the great scholar of Jewish ethics and mysticism, Abraham Joshua 
Heschel, "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." That is Sabbath time. While there is great wisdom in setting aside a common day once a week as Sabbath time, a wisdom that may reside within our souls--the Biblical command to keep the Sabbath is the only one of the Ten Commandments to begin with the word "Remember," as if it refers to something we already knew, but may have forgotten--Sabbath time is not limited to that day, but is a way of being in time. If it is not a familiar practice, one might start with an hour--in which one is less likely, in any event, to be interrupted.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
Heschel, in his small book of meditation on Sabbath, first seeks to convey an understanding that may not coincide with our common intuition: Sabbath, wisdom, holiness, life in its most vivid authenticity, has to do essentially with the sanctification of time. The verb shabat in Hebrew, in addition to the correspondence noted above, is one of the names of God; thus the intriguing conclusion, not quite explicitly drawn by Heschel, that God is a verb, not a noun. ("Even God," writes Heschel, as if we should know better, "is conceived by most of us as a thing.")
The essential spirit of Sabbath is that of reanimation, redemption and resurrection. All week--in profane time--"there is only hope of redemption. But when the Sabbath is entering the world"--in sacred time--"man is touched by a moment of actual redemption; as if for a moment the spirit of the Messiah moved over the face of the Earth." Sabbath is the soul in time, and time is full of such moments, if we have eyes to see and ears to hear.
Indeed, our hope and our practice may bring us more and more Sabbath time, even to the experience of life as Sabbath. As one wise soul recently wrote to a dying friend,
"This sacred time is not about convenience or inconvenience; it isn't about meeting deadlines. It isn't about you (or anyone else) being in control. This sacred time is about learning to trust the eddies and shoals of the River. It is... about mystery. It is a broader, deeper, infinitely more significant agenda that is beyond our charting. It is singularly about you and your union with the Other. It is beyond our reckoning."
It is our choice and our gift, then, our craft and our practice, if you will, to make the most of Sabbath. The traditional prescriptions and proscriptions of Sabbath, when not sinking like all dogma into formalism and legalism, are designed to assist us in that task. The more we measure and divide time, the less we allow its consecration. (Think, in mundane terms, of the difference between digital and analog watches.) Heschel's language is particularly vivid. The more we pursue "the profanity of clattering commerce..., the screetch of dissonant days,... the nervousness and fury of acquisitiveness and the betrayal in embezzling [our own lives,]" the farther we move from Sabbath.
The more we rest quietly and peacefully into stillness; find accord among body, mind and imagination; harmony, love and delight among one another and with the natural world; the less anger, agitation, tension, conflict and fear we feel; we are the more drawn into Sabbath time. That is why we are wise to turn off the computer, the television and the telephone; avoid money and shopping; walk instead of drive; make love instead of fuss (or war); play softly rather than hard, and without competition; listen more than talk, be quiet, let it be. If prayer is familiar, let it be prayer of thanksgiving, not petition or repentance.
Thomas Merton was writing about good folks when he said, "There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence [that is] activism and overwork... To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence... It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful."
To return to the Biblical roots of Sabbath time, through the words of Wayne Muller, "The ancient rabbis teach that on the seventh day, God created menuha--tranquillity, serenity, peace and repose--rest, in the deepest possible sense of fertile, healing stillness. Until the Sabbath, creation was unfinished. Only after the birth of menuha, only with tranquillity and rest, was the circle of creation made full and complete." (Sabbath: Restoring the Sacred Rhythm of Rest, NY: Bantam Books, 1999) The Book of Genesis tells us that the Sabbath is both part of creation and a rest from creation.
What I want is to leap out of this personality
And then sit apart from that leaping--
I've lived too long where I can be reached.
- Rumi
Wendell Berry's Sabbath poems written between 1979 and 1997 are gathered in a volume he called A Timbered Choir (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 1998). Here is one from 1996:
Some Sunday afternoon, it may be,
you are sitting under your porch roof,
looking down through the trees
to the river, watching the rain. The circles
made by the raindrops’ striking
expand, intersect, dissolve,
and suddenly (for you are getting on
now, and much of your life is memory)
the hands of the dead, who have been here
with you, rest upon you tenderly
as the rain rests shining
upon the leaves. And you think then
(for thought will come) of the strangeness
of the thought of Heaven, for now
you have imagined yourself there,
remembering with longing this
happiness, this rain. Sometimes here
we are there, and there is no death.
