Month: May 2019

Posted on

Need My Sabbath

The Sabbath, what a concept. A day of rest. You know, God created the heavens and the earth then rested on the seventh day (Genesis in the Hebrew Bible). For most of my life I never thought much about the concept or the commandment (the fourth of the ten commandments) to honor and observe and keep holy the sabbath day.

I remember growing up in the 1950’s as a kid and Sunday was different in society and the business world. Much of business ground to a halt on Sunday, many stores and businesses were closed. It was just the way life was. We had “blue laws” which meant a lot of business closed for the day. My spouse says he remembers when J C Penny first opened on a Sunday, he was shocked and really stunned about the change.

I had one incident in my childhood related to this sabbath concept and practice. My childhood friend and I developed a lawn mowing business in our neighborhood. One family we mowed lawns for was a Seventh Day Adventist family, so they required that we not mow their lawn on Saturday and they let us know how important honoring the correct sabbath day was to them and their religion. For the first time I started to get interested in religion and theology as I thought about what they said and preached. I did some research and realized they did have a point. They really believed honoring the sabbath was a very important factor in living a holy and good life.

One other time the sabbath commandment really hit me, right out of the blue. I was in my twenties and walking along Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood on a Saturday night (okay, yes, I was bar hopping in my “wild days”). It was a very heavily Jewish and gay area. I was approached by an orthodox Jewish man who acted very desperate to find someone to help him out. Being the kind person I am (yes, being kind and bar hopping were not a contradiction for me), I lent him my ear and he told me he was really in a conundrum. It was his sabbath and he needed to listen to his answering machine for some reason. He explained to me that he is prohibited from performing any work on the sabbath, so he asked if I would come up to his flat and play his answering machine for him. Sure, I responded. So I performed my service as a decent human being by helping someone stay true to their “sabbath.”

But, aside from that incident in my childhood and the incident on the street in West Hollywood, the serious thoughts about sabbath observance pretty much did not enter my mind much. Like I said, the blue laws were the norm back then and I didn’t think much about the sabbath or a day of rest. For most of my life I worked at my airline job on Saturdays and Sundays. The only airline employees who had weekends off had many years of seniority (decades) and days off and vacations were bid strictly on a seniority basis. Holidays and weekends were days of work in my lifestyle. Didn’t really give any thought to the sabbath commandment.

So, fast forward to today, this stage of life I’m in now, usually called “retirement.” (I’m much busier now than I ever was during my working days, but that’s another topic for another time). Now, every day’s agenda is totally up to me. I set my schedule, I create the life I want now. It took me a long time to get to this point.

So, now I am revisiting the concept of the sabbath practice and commandment. I have read some excellent books on the subject, very thought provoking. I’m not going to get into the technical aspects of what is the real sabbath as far as religions and scriptures are concerned. In my life, in my culture and society, I find I need my “day of rest,” and what works best for me is a Sunday day of rest, a real break from daily routine. No matter what the week has brought me in my life, I do need a break from daily routine and totally rest my body and soul.

Sunday is my favorite day of the week now. I really shift gears and totally take a break. I always put everything off that in any way resembles work if I can, and I usually can, unless there’s a real emergency ( remember, Jesus healed on the sabbath… got him in a lot of trouble with the religious authorities).

I usually go to church. A good church that teaches real life spiritual principles. That’s my thing. I believe even an atheist can enjoy a sabbath day, the practice will work for anybody. But for me, a little extra spiritual boost is nice, a nice addition to my daily spiritual practices.

So, that’s the way it works for me now. I have come full circle from taking a sabbath day for granted (the 1950’s and the “blue laws” in our society), to not thinking about a sabbath at all for decades and then coming to fully embrace the whole concept of a day of rest, practicing keeping the sabbath holy or the Lord’s Day as the Christians in their early history called their Sunday day of rest.

Wally

Posted on

Something Better [ Post #22]

A theme that has played a part in and been a motivator in my life, in fact it has been my salvation, is the thought, the belief, the certainty that there is something better than what I am seeing before me, my present experience. I grew up being very depressed as a child and in my youth. Friends may find it hard to believe now that I have grown out of that darkness in my early life, but it is true. The internal thought that was in the back of my mind that “there has to be something better than this experience and feeling” truly was my salvation. It literally saved my life.

Somehow I survived my dark early years. I guess I always had hope of something better. I don’t know how I had that knowledge but I did. I knew in my bones, in my soul that there was a better experience awaiting me if I could just make it through the rough times. Looking back, I see now that I developed some strategies and techniques that aided my survival.

My process for breaking free from my shadow of depression and despair was leaving unpleasant situations and moving on. Now, I know a lot of people make a whole lifestyle of leaving situations and people and moving and running away, but they usually just take themselves and their internal emotional and psychological problems with them, never experiencing any real, permanent healing of their wounds or demons. Somehow, in my life, I really made forward movement and experienced true healing of my shadow side.

I experienced my early family life as very toxic and I left home as soon as I graduated from high school. I eventually put myself in a new setting, a new life, by going to college. It was not that I felt that I needed college, but I needed a new life and that seemed to be one way to find it. I healed many of my wounds by doing that. After college and a year of seminary, I left the academic world, realizing that I needed a break. I seemed to know, once again, that there was something better awaiting me if I just followed my intuition. Not long after leaving seminary I landed my job in the airline industry and began pursuing my dreams of traveling and piloting airplanes.

When my first significant relationship turned out to be a disaster I left it and moved on. I did not let it destroy me, and once again I figured that there must be something better. I did not habitually keep making bad decisions and choices and losing behaviors in my life. I made changes and moved on. If I discovered I was surrounded by toxic acquaintances and friends, I dropped them and found better relationships, just as when I left my family when I became aware they were a bad influence on me in many ways.

So, I say all this to show how, in my life, I’ve been driven by the knowledge deep inside of me that no matter how bad things may seem, there is always something better. We can always choose new thoughts, new ways of being, of behaving and relating to the world, life and people, including ourselves. We do not have to be stuck with what we think is a permanent circumstance or situation.

But it’s more than just changing the externals in our lives, running away, hoping something comes along to “save” us. We have to do a lot of internal, psychological work in the process of healing ourselves. We need to be open to forces greater than our limited, conditioned selves. Something better is always available if we open ourselves to that possibility and do the work we need to do. We have to be open, proactive, willing, courageous and sure of the fact that “something better” is awaiting our discovery.

I call that belief, that certainty, “faith.” I have used those tools to beat depression and negativity. Everyone is different and I really feel for those who cannot seem to beat their demons, to drive them out of their lives, those that always seem to live under that shadow of darkness. I am thankful that I have found tools and techniques and spiritual truths that have worked for me and lifted me to new levels of living and new life!

Wally