The Marginalian
The Marginalian

The Theology of Rest: A Modern Sermon About Living with Presence in the Age of Productivity

“Busy is a decision,” a wise woman once once reminded us. I often think about how our modern obsession with productivity is blinding us to the fact that being productive can be the surest way of lulling ourselves into a trance of passivity, where we coast through our lives day after day after day, showing up but being absent. I’ve previously written about our culturally conditioned tendency to wear our ability to labor endless hours as a badge of honor that validates our work ethic, but what it really bespeaks is profound failure of priorities and self-respect. We treat rest like a sin, not like the sanity-elixir and ambrosia of creativity that is.

Even as a nonreligious person who sides with Sagan and has great reservations about the church, I was taken with this sermon titled “The Theology of Rest” from New York’s Forefront Church. Delivered by a young female pastor, the sermon explores a predicament so essential and so common to us all that it transcends faith and falls closer to a kind of philosophical self-help for the modern age. Sure, there’s something disorienting about a religious service that takes on the performance-production of a TED talk and the aphorism-speak of a business writer, but all cultural material is a product of its time. (I’ve previously wondered whether the commencement address is the secular sermon of our day.)

At its core, however, the sermon touches on questions of choosing presence over productivity, defining success, and defining ourselves. And perhaps that is the value of modern spirituality — taking away from traditional religion the philosophies and belief systems that help us live better, nobler, more peaceful lives, and doing away with the G-word and that which doesn’t hold up to basic baloney detection. After all, that’s precisely what Tolstoy did in searching for the meaning of life. So watch and take away what you will.

We’re picking up cues from our culture about the way we live our lives and the pace at which we live our lives. Rest isn’t a priority, because so often rest is confused with laziness… Sometimes, rest isn’t a priority because we’ve incorrectly measured success.

[…]

Rest, instead of being something passive, is actually an act of resistance. We live in The City That Never Sleeps — so resting may be the most countercultural and spiritual thing we do with our lives.

Complement with Alan Watts on how to live with presence and a sobering look at the science of how sleep shapes our every working moment.


Published June 17, 2014

https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/06/17/theology-of-rest/

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