Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

In seminary, everyone seemed to talk about self-care an awful lot. The intellectual and emotional rigors of the program coupled with the expectation that most of us following a pastoral vocation would need to develop some habits that could prepare or mend or sustain our spirits through the often exhausting work of pastoral care meant that it was clear to see the wisdom in growing some sustainable patterns of self-care. Many times, folks recommended having or keeping a sabbath day, often meaning: a day in which, on principle, no work was to be done, no emails read or written, no phones answered, no social media engaged, no chores done. A day set apart for rest.

Which sounds great. But of all the practices folks recommended for self-care, I think this one—this keep-a-sabbath-day one—is particularly perniciously misleading…at least as described.

Now…don’t get me wrong. I’m a great believer in rest! And whether or not I believed in it, Dear Friend, it’s clear we need it. It’s easy to get exhausted, particularly in these difficult days. It’s also easy to confuse “doing nothing” with rest. In fact, “doing nothing” can often become it’s own exhausting project: we “do nothing” in order to produce the rest we need—it is its own form of work!

But Beloved, rest is actually a practice of prayer: a practice of returning to the open and loving heart of the Real—the Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ—in order to abide there, to be rooted there, to receive the healing, the nurture, the wholeness, that only a return to our rootedness can provide…and to allow God to do God’s work in us. Our bodies need to rest in sleep, our spirits need to rest in prayer. I’m a great believer in rest!

And this is why I find the appropriation of sabbath language for self-care to be misleading. The rest that the sabbath imagines for us is indeed about resting in God, returning to God…and in returning to God, turning in love to our neighbor, to the world around us. This is part of what our Office Gospel is about this morning, in which the hungry are fed and the wounded healed on the sabbath, not as an act of witness against sabbath rest, but as a witness for what sabbath wholeness looks like…and as a testimony to what is possible when we truly rest in God and allow God to make of us instruments of the healing and wholeness God has always desired for us and for our weary and broken world. The sabbath isn’t about self-care as it’s usually understood, but about self-giving in love and care for others through a discipline of prayer, through a discipline of rest.

Dear dear Friend! Self-care is important. Sometimes even doing nothing is important! But I think we miss the plot considerably if we imagine that sabbath is about us and not for the good of all. There is certainly great wisdom in developing a self-care plan or pattern, but if resting in prayer is not part of that pattern, if engaging in those practices that make us available to the grace of God and make of our lives living windows onto the wholeness of God is not part of the pattern, then our self-car is bound to have less to do with care and more to do with self. And our understanding of what sabbath really is, how it’s really needed by us and the world, will be distorted.

Friend, I hope that today you can find rest in the arms of the One who, working in and through you, can do infinitely more than you can ask or imagine!

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+