Adapted from a talk given at Modum Bad, a remarkable psychiatric hospital and learning center in Vikersund, Norway.
The bud
stands for all things,
even those things that don't flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing.
Galway Kinnell, “St. Francis and the Sow”
Preamble
We need conceptions of healing and renewal that embrace the whole human being. We need conceptions of human being and of physical and emotional health that embrace human experience more fully than we are accustomed to imagine. Such exploration requires an expansion of our accustomed ways of knowing, our practical epistemology.
In that adventure there are several paths to follow, some worn by many feet, some freshly made. The one suggested and illustrated here echoes the values upon which Modum Bad was founded. It may be appropriate, in this 50th anniversary year, to assess their significance and their presence in our midst today.
Re-imagining
Whatever one's healthy, toxic or nominal religious history and convictions about religious practice and belief, the experience of suffering, recovery and renewal is usefully conceived integrally as spiritual journey as well as psychological transformation. Human development and spiritual development are one story, one path, not two. Psyche and soul are descriptive of the same reality (they are, after all, the same words in the original Greek).
In this inquiry it is useful to turn to religious thought and practice with a fresh eye free of jaundice. These days, in the thin air of secular ascendancy, such wisdom is more often latent than manifest. Its relevance to a re-visioning or re-imagination of human development, suffering, healing and clinical practice, can hardly be taken for granted.
We may have to formulate a new language to quicken our hearts and minds. To do that responsibly and with care, we should start with a re-examination and reinterpretation of the old language. Such language will be unfamiliar to some, and may seem dauntingly archaic to others, irrelevant to our current challenges of growing, healing and living well with one another and with our patients.
The old wisdom, however, stands ready to be reawakened and drawn into our daily lives—even those of us determinedly secular in our sense of the world. We have only to suspend disbelief and imagine anew the stories and songs, the rituals and symbols, the praxis of religious life. We will need to contemplate and re-imagine words and concepts we have known and to which we may have become averse – God, soul, prayer, the sacred and the profane, ministry, the cycle of life, death and rebirth or resurrection, holiness and redemption, immanence and transcendence.
Such words, for most of us, have not lost their emotional potency, however much we have set them aside. Re-visioning can offer us – and those for whom we bear responsibility – freedom from constraint and a shedding of armor – relief, awakening and inspiration.
Re-imagining can be demanding, and may ask of us a full measure of empathic compassion – first toward ourselves. We shall have to shed at least some – and perhaps many – of our preconceptions and habits, and bring only our full presence—body, mind, heart and soul.
Let’s say that soul is the whole—our embracing integrity, our most capacious and harmonious identity, never fully manifest in consciousness. The instruments of soul are imagination and memory, soul’s emotional tone typically one of pathos and joy. In our partial awareness of soul we yearn (Senshucht is the manifold German word) for the wholeness that is already ours. We might say, then, that soul at once embodies and searches for presence. It is both dwelling and seeking.
The Norwegian word for pastoral counseling is sjelesorg, soul-work, soul healing. It should describe psychotherapy as an integrated whole.
For what, for who does soul long? For what do we engage in soul-work? For relief from suffering. To be seen and known. For reconciliation. For joy. For wholeness. For home among "all creatures great and small."
Consider the remarks of UCLA psychiatrist and neurobiologist Dan Siegel:
Elucidating the links between the physical brain and the processes of the mind has shed light on the deepest nature of the self. When we examine the deep layers of our neural selves, we come to glimpse not only the roots of our mental and social lives, but the essential reality of our selves as part of an integrated whole across the span of time.
It may be that our work as human beings is not only to seek meaning and satisfaction in our lives and to dedicate ourselves to alleviating suffering in others but to be a part of a larger effort to bring integration and healing into the many layers of our interconnections with each other.
As we explore and incorporate the many domains of integration, what seems to evolve naturally is the sense of being connected to a larger whole, something more than just our bodily defined sense of self in this time we call our "life." This [integration] enables us to become more fully aware of our interconnected belonging as we, in Albert Einstein’s words, "widen our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
The experience of Sabbbath: an example of re-imagining
The word “Sabbath” may evoke vague memories of onerous obligation and inconvenience. In all but a few marginal instances, Sabbath remains in Christian practice a small stub of its former self. We must dig deeper into the layers if we are to find suggestive meaning and value for our everyday lives.
[continued]
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 verb translated as "rested" is shabat, corresponding to the English noun sabbath: Friday sundown through Saturday sundown for Jews, Sunday for Christians.
To plumb 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 a useful distinction between sacred and profane. "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.
There is wisdom in setting aside a common day once a week as Sabbath time, a wisdom we may carry with us, within our souls. The Biblical injunction 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 knew but have forgotten. The purpose of ritual and regular practice – often itself in need of renewal – is to refresh our experience of the sacred.
If Sabbath is a realm of time, a way of being in time, Sabbath is also a dimension of consciousness and a way of being in relationship.
In a small book of meditation on Sabbath, Heschel conveys 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 word shabat in Hebrew, in addition to the correspondence noted above, is one of the names of God; thus the intriguing suggestion, not quite explicitly drawn by Heschel, that God is both verb and 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 and redemption, the return of light and life. “All week—in profane time—there is only the hope of redemption. But when Sabbath enters 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.
If Sabbath is soul in time, spirituality may be conceived as soul in motion, at once
• craft or practice
• sustained and evolving relationship
• lifelong journey
Leif Gunnar Engedal speaks of “the root-metaphor of journey” in religious conceptions of human and spiritual development, and man or woman as pilgrim, living “within the eschatological perspective of ‘becoming,’…in a permanent exodus.” “All joy,” wrote the Christian medievalist C.S. Lewis, “emphasizes our pilgrim status; always reminds, beckons, awakens desire.”
Our hope and our practice may bring us more and more Sabbath time, closer to the experience of life as Sabbath. A thoughtful man of my acquaintance 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.
Yet our experience of sacred time must also be among our conscious and chosen reckonings, our craft as well as our gift, if we are to make the most of Sabbath. We need to learn and practice Sabbath, to tend Sabbath as a loving mother tends her child.
Otherwise sacred time may fade – as indeed it has – into the vagaries and shadows of memory and forgetting. Traditional prescriptions and proscriptions of Sabbath, when they remain alive and have not sunk, like dogma tends to do, into desiccated formalism and legalism, were designed to assist us in that task.
The more we measure and divide time, the less we allow its consecration. Heschel's language is vivid and sharp. The more we pursue "the profanity of clattering commerce, the screech 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 are drawn into Sabbath time—rest quietly and peacefully into stillness; find accord among body, mind and imagination; harmony, love and delight with one another and with the natural world—the less anger, agitation, tension, conflict and fear we feel.
That is why we are wise, sometimes, to turn off the computer, the television and the telephone and cell phone; avoid money and shopping; walk instead of drive; make love instead of work, fuss or war; play softly and cooperatively rather than competitively and hard; listen more than talk – welcoming, offering compassion, giving thanks. All these are contemporary examples of traditional Sabbath injunctions.
Thomas Merton was writing about most of us 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 that makes work fruitful.
Sabbath time is not otherworldly; it penetrates our everyday. We distinguish between sacred and profane, not sacred and mundane. Nor are sacred and secular antithetical.
Profanity, in its deeper sense, implies violence against self or others. It suggests falseness rather than truth, withdrawal rather than turning towards, fragmentation rather than wholeness, absence more than presence, seeming rather than being; mask (persona) or semblance instead of authenticity, withholding rather than giving, monologue instead of dialogue, collectivity rather than community.
Consider the scandalous question the Bal Shem Tov (founder in 18th century eastern Europe of the rich tradition known as Hasidism) put to his disciples: “Where does God live?” And his an-swer: “God lives wherever man lets him in.” Martin Buber adds,
Each of us is encased in an armor which we soon, out of familiarity, no longer notice. There are only moments which penetrate it and stir it to sensibility. And when such a moment has imposed itself on us and we then take notice and ask ourselves, ‘Has anything particular taken place? Was it not of the kind I meet every day?’ then we may reply to ourselves, ‘Nothing particular; indeed, it is like this every day, only we are not there every day.
When we are all there in the way Buber suggests, we experience ourselves more wholly and are more capable of dialogue with another – a spouse or friend, a child or parent, a co-worker or patient – dialogue that is attentive and coherent, sensitive and perceptive, nourishing and loving. We are mindful, caring. We see and are seen.
When we are not there, not present to another, or when someone we
value or depend upon is not present to us, we “miss” and are missed. In
extremity, if such absence is sustained and sufficiently comprehensive,
particularly in childhood, we die. “Missing” in English has two
complementary meanings: it is an expression of disconnection from
another, and also an emotional response to that disconnection. Such
missing, especially if sustained in childhood and not repaired, can be
very costly. It is an emotional and even neurobiological ground of our
experience of shame and
depression.
When we bring what Buddhists call lovingkindness into our lives with others, into the workplace as well as the home, when we are empathic and compassionate with ourselves and those we meet, we are living in Sabbath time.
Return – full circle - 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—“tranquility, serenity, peace and repose—rest, in the deepest sense of fertile, healing stillness. Until the Sabbath, creation was unfinished. Only after the birth of menuha, only with tranquility and rest, was the circle of creation made full and complete.
The Book of Genesis tells us that Sabbath is both part of creation and a rest from creation. So it may be for us.
We are beset by diverse demands and temptations. We hurry, we “multi-task,” we leap among objects of our fleeting attention, too seldom giving any our full devotion. Like the Persian mystic Rumi, we may yearn for another kind of leap, a Sabbath leap:
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 understood, of course, that such a leap was the first in a two-leap sequence. The second is the leap of return, the leap back into fuller consciousness, more reflective and collaborative dialogue, nourishing of mind, body, heart and soul.
