Restlessness (On Christian Rest, Part 1)

My name is Hayden and I am a workaholic.

As a recovering work-addict, I have been obliged to a keen awareness of the patterns of work and leisure that surround me. Frustratingly, I have often felt like a recovering alcoholic living in a walk-up above pub row, immersed in the ambient noise of what I imagine to be great enjoyment and satisfaction happening just downstairs. All around me are impulses to feed a beast who is just biding the time it needs to grow large enough to feed on me. Like those who’ve struggled with any substance or habit will know, the addiction isn’t about the thing but about something else behind, beneath, beyond it. It is always over yonder. 

One of the difficulties with an unhealthy relationship to work, though, is that it is often hailed and rewarded. Failing to join in, like any kind of peer pressure, is also derided and punished. I’ve been in social circles before, in fact, where failing to prioritize life around work was seen as indolent, immoral, and impardonable. If you couldn’t rank highly in the inner circles of the work-addicted, then what were you even doing with your life? A common phrase from this community was something like, you can rest when you’re dead. And we believed it.

I no longer think that belief is founded. For one, if death is anything like sleep–as it is often said to be by the poets–it definitely can be an unrestful experience, particularly when the day prior has been wildly disordered and bereft of space to reflect and refresh. We treat ourselves like rubber bands–stretched to capacity before finally being allowed to snap back, a bit more distended each time. And like rubber bands, eventually we either break or are so misshapen from ill-use that we can no longer fulfill our reason for existence. If the rubber band has lost its rubbery-ness, how can it become so again? 

This habit, though, is not the root of our problem. Edwin Friedman rightly characterizes ours as an anxious age. It is because we have lost a truthful sense of ourselves that we have also lost a meaningful sense of where we have come from and where we are going. This latter ignorance becomes for us the ground of a general anxiety of soul–we cannot know unto what we are purposed or heading and so the formlessness becomes a protean monster with which we have to wrestle, individually and culturally, in every moment. Because we are an anxious people, we are also a restless people. Without beginning or end to define our place in the midst, all moments are neither here nor there, neither departing nor arriving. And so we can, of course, never really rest. Our lives become a treadmill in a lightless room. 

On the spiritual level, we understand the ultimate origin of this condition to be the Fall in Eden. There our vocation and its attending labor became the burden and sweat of toil unto death. Original sin at work in our members reduces fruitful work to vain exertion. We give our all to scratch out the means to sustain ourselves, only to find that each time we do we are left with a diminished self to sustain the next go-around until we finally collapse into dissolution, dust become dust again. Only a cynic would call this rest. The Lord Himself rested on the seventh day, taking His seat in the midst to celebrate His Creation and bless it with His presence. Our ‘rest’ by comparison is no culmination but a remainder continually cut in half, forever. 

Ironically, this remains unchanged in the way we craft what we call ‘recreation.’ Even the word itself is a clownish impossibility for creatures afflicted as we are. As the band Lover Boy put it: “everybody’s working for the weekend,” as though to arrive there will vindicate the toil of the week. But the end does not and cannot reward or rejuvenate because there is only space left for us to scrape together the remainder again. The manic optimism of Friday night leads to the morass of Saturday into the scaries of Sunday evening. Here we go again. The model of worldly rest is one of toil then collapse. Even our vacations and so-called self-care days are really just the application of a new coat of lacquer to our lives to give a temporary luster.

Sadly, religious people and even Christians often adopt this worldly model even while trying to baptize its means and ends. We leave that foundational brokenness of our being untouched, we do not seek again the baptismal self in Christ which situates us in the people of God and her history, her time. So we remain anxious, just now anxious Christians. Our lives are marked just as much by toil and collapse as before, but now we call them “acts of service” and “Sabbathing” (which they are not). Christians are just as capable as the world of being restless–without rest–which makes them just as restless in their aimless scurrying about as those without Faith.

This is not a shot at contemporary Christians, either. It seems to be a problem besetting the people of God throughout her history. In the summarizing indictment of Psalm 95, God assesses the restlessness and anxiety of His ancient chosen people in their wilderness journey. Remember that He had literally just led them by the hand from Egypt through the Red Sea and literally fed them manna and water in the wilderness: “Forty years long was I grieved with this generation and said, it is a people who do err in their hearts for they have not known my ways, unto whom I sware in my wrath that they should not enter into my rest.”

That we are invited to recite this Psalm daily in Morning Prayer is a good sign of its daily relevance. As we progress through these meditations, I will suggest that the means by which our Lord liberates us from the futility of toil and its inevitable collapse unfold over time through the observance of the Sabbath first among the Israelites and then as it becomes the Eucharistic life of the Church. It is through these dual calls to ‘remember’ that we are returned to the One who can fill our lives again with substance and purpose, relive our anxiousness, and produce within us the fruit of a rest that surpasses understanding. As St. Augustine famously said: “O Lord you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you.”