Fake Rest (On Christian Rest, Part 06)

In my youth group, I was taught once that the best way to recognize a counterfeit is by carefully examining and remembering the real thing. The anecdote that attended this lesson drew from the training of experts who spot fake currency. As the story went, they spent long hours studying every detail of real money so as to be prepared to note any possible deviation from it. This was deemed a more effective method of preparation than exhaustively cataloging the fakes. With most important or valuable matters in life, we should be especially wary of fakes because these are the very things that are most worth the effort of faking. Likewise, over the time we’ve spent thinking about a Christian idea of what it means to rest, I’ve tried to focus on the real thing, rather than by focusing on all the false visions that run about in our world. Having done that for a few posts now, though, it seems helpful at this point to draw attention to three major errors that beset Christians when it comes to the Lord’s Day and, through it, the kind of rest He offers us. 

The first major error is called sabbatarianism. In general, this is a tendency toward an under-nuanced, rigorist practice of sabbath requiring the strict abstention of common work on a given day of the week. Sabbatarianism has been with the Church since the very beginning because a high regard for the Lord’s Day and the Sabbath Day it fulfills has been with her since the beginning. Over the centuries, sabbatarianism has been a quirk, a local habit, and sometimes a condemned heresy. While it is beyond our space here to elaborate on the full history of it, I think pastorally it becomes a problem when the day becomes the object of worship and sacrifice rather than the One to whom we draw near by means of the day. Zeal for setting aside time for the Lord is not a problem–or at least I hope not because that’s been my thesis this whole series! Rather, when a holy object becomes a totem of power to lord over others, excised from the Lord or the work of the Lord’s anointed people, then we have created an imitation that cannot bear or bestow life. This is the error of the Pharisee, whose presumed license to police the sabbath observance put them at odds with the Lord of the Sabbath Himself. 

In its current iteration, this is probably the error to which traditionalists like Anglo-Catholics are most prone. Our theology and practice hold highly the Eucharist as the beginning of time for us each week; it is our continuity with the Lord’s Day of Resurrection until the end of the age. Much of our evangelistic work over the last century has been in getting people to attend to the sublimity of communion. This is a noble intent. But I would observe, too, that our intense focus on getting people to go to Church on Sunday has, at times, diminished the integrity of the Liturgy with the rest of the sacred time of the week and the work attending it. We have held, both explicitly and implicitly, that a rigorist purity of the Mass will indomitably overwhelm the resistance of secularism. But this zeal has also excerpted the good gift of coherent liturgy from the whole praying life and mission of the Church. To the extent this has happened in a parish, it has become a kind of sabbatarian idol, and must be returned to its place, woven back into the whole and undivided garment of the Church’s priestly work before God. 

The second error is what I’ve come to call self-care-ism. In my experience, this is a tendency toward a rigorism that is similar to sabbatarianism, but one that is indifferent to communal rule, guided instead by individualistic, therapeutic deism. That being a mouthful of terms, we should unpack it. Sabbatarians are concerned, with extreme prejudice, that we’re all on the same page; self-care acolytes do not. Rather, self-care-ism is the fruit of a communal religious practice adapted to the tastes and tolerances of an individual, self-directed spirituality. It is asceticism-lite, tasting similar but without any lasting consequences because it cannot accomplish any lasting discipline. Moreover, this approach is always geared toward the therapeutic, a code word for that which produces a vague sense of inner satisfaction. In practice, I’ve seen this meaning, more often than not, the self-assurance that who I am is really important, but not too much is really required of me. Ultimately, this requires a deistic view of God, a technical term meaning a God who surely designed and created the cosmos, but who then keeps mostly to Himself except to perform a few key moments of history. God the Trinity cannot be too near in the world of self-care. The Father cannot become more than mere progenitor of existence, and surely not a good and caring Person intent on raising us up to our full glory. The Son and His Cross cannot be more than an inspirational motif, and surely cannot be the way all things attain to the fullness of eternal life or else are lost. The Holy Ghost has to remain benevolently a warm fuzzy feeling we get, not the dove descending, invasively within as the Spirit who searches and refines with fire every thought, word, and deed. 

As it pertains to the Lord’s Day, self-care-ists maintain that every Christian should take a day of the week to rejuvenate and play. As with the sabbatarians, these are not bad objects of desire. But as before, they are excised from the whole meaning of the Sabbath-Lord’s Day. Eucharistic participation is an objective refreshment and nourishing of the most significant dimension of our life, but it does not kid us into thinking that an immediate sense of gratification is always in the cards. The Lord’s Day will always pull us together and together toward God to die and be raised again to new life as a figure of the whole story of salvation. It is an all-out assault on the foundations of the world’s attempt to subsist without God. The Lord’s Day simply cannot fit into the narrow space allowed by self-care, because self-care always says to God: “give me enough to make me happy now; give me enough of you to make me feel less selfish for doing only what I want.” Self-care-ism puts the cart before the horse; it’s a good thing to rest and recreate, but unless these are the fruits of our Eucharistic work in Christ, they just make us lax and indolent, and ultimately prone to despair. 

The third error is broadly known as  secularism. This is a tendency to reject rigorism about the sabbath and rest in general by insisting that the ordering of our day and our spirituality are discreet matters that don’t obligate one another. Sometimes this stems from a kind of cynical misreading of St. Paul when he writes to the Galatians: “But then, indeed, when you did not know God, you served those which by nature are not gods. But now after you have known God, or rather are known by God, how is it that you turn again to the weak and beggarly elements, to which you desire again to be in bondage? You observe days and months and seasons and years. I am afraid for you, lest I have labored for you in vain.” I have heard this applied to the observance of the Lord’s Day or any holy day to mean that such observance is an accessory to faith, but inessential. Those who are thus-minded disregard that St. Paul is talking here about pagan or political holidays, and that he observably keeps the ancient Jewish feasts in light of their Christian fulfillment. They resist the notion that the worship of God means that God is Lord of all our minutes and hours and days and that our common life in Christ means ordering time, assigning a specific day to say ‘stop and pray together.’ Secularism is self-care-ism that starts to disregard the self which replaced God. It is a tendency to say that the god-things are elsewhere than the us-things, and that apart from a few obligatory intersections they are only nominally related. 

Ultimately, the observance of the Lord’s Day as the consummated Sabbath is a response to the Lord’s comfortable words: “Come unto me, all you who travail and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” Sabbatarianism is the attempt to control the invitation apart from the one who invites. Self-care-ism is the obscuring of the one who invites, leaving only the mercurial warmth of being the invited, and dosing ourselves with comforts in a vaguely spiritual way. Secularism is the end-game of these tendencies, a reversion to the toil of work interrupted by coping mechanisms and declining enthusiasm. Eventually, Sunday becomes just one more day in the morass of time. Unless we are rescued, we end from the place we started this series, in the exhausted striving of workaholism, dust ground into dust again. God save us.

It will always be possible  to be drawn into counterfeits of any good thing. The closer we get to the best things, the more deceptive are those counterfeits and the more potent they are for doing us harm. To enter into the Lord’s rest is the highest aspiration, and it obliges us to diligence in all of the little icons of His rest that fill our lives and their rhythms. It’s why we must attend always to the gift of time we have been given, and the shape of that time experienced through Christ. It’s why, if you’re still with me here, I’d love to segue elegantly at this point into a seventh post in which I say, with exactitude of thought and depth of poetry, what that rest exactly is…not what it seems like, but what it really is. But we have only seen it in a mirror dimly. I cannot put to words exactly what that rest is like, because I have known it only in fits and starts and all the little intimations of immortality we receive as signs of hope along the way. And so I must close with a glimpse at it from the edge of our world, through a greater imagination than my own: 

“…the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at least they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before” (C.S. Lewis, The Last Battle).