24. Sabbath

“Keep the seventh day holy.  On that day, you shall do no labor.” –Ten Commandments

One of the earliest spiritual disciplines is to stop working.  We are never told, in those early texts, what we are to do, only that we must stop the toil of everyday life.  That toil is essential, it is the warp and woof of the molecular structure of who we are.  But it must never become all of our being. 

As human beings, we must create.  And our everyday work, even when we work for another, allows us to do that.  Even if our labor is security through the hours nothing dramatic happens, in our pay we create a living space, the means to purchase food, the bulk of our lives.  We must make something beyond ourselves, for this is the Creation impulse of the Spirit in us.

The Spirit, who created our form, recognizes that we must rest, even as he himself does.  He created us to be complex beings, both physical and spiritual omnivores.  Our souls are made to swallow and ingest all that we come across.  If our spiritual and mental diet consists of only one kind of action, then our souls become congested, sick, unable to create.  If our lives are centered around toil, then our spiritual diet is unbalanced, and it breaks our souls.

We must cease our labor, for a time, on a regular basis.  Traditionally, this is measured as six periods of labor, one period of ceasing toil.  This is not supposed to be a strict necessity, this time frame.  But it is a fair measure of health.  We work to create with our labor for six days and then we rest to create balance and ingenuity with a day.