Sabbatical is an end in itself

God encourages time that is holy

This summer, I am doing nothing. At least that is what I am supposed to be doing. I am on sabbatical — the strange privilege of academic elites and pretentious clergy. (I fall into the latter category.) Every seven years, as the tradition goes, we beneficiaries of this rare entitlement are to leave behind our normal jobs for a few months to pursue those important aspects of our professional lives, which more pressing demands always seem to shove to the back burner. A university professor sets aside teaching responsibilities to engage their research, and an Episcopal priest like me reads, prays, and goes to church without needing to put everyone else’s spiritual needs first.

But spending three months attending to the work we normally ignore is antithetical to the religious concept of sabbatical. Laden with guilt, that is how I have justified this time off — as an opportunity to be renewed in my own faith in order to be more effective when I return. Nevertheless, despite my need for economic justification, the Bible does not envision sabbatical as a tool for productivity or a means to an end but as a good and holy end in itself.

In Leviticus 25, God tells God’s people that, after six years of sowing, pruning, and gathering, “in the seventh year there shall be a sabbath of complete rest for the land, a sabbath for the Lord.” Rather than instituting a primitive form of crop rotation designed to yield greater harvests, God makes it clear later in that chapter that the bounty of the sixth year will be enough to sustain them through the sabbath of the seventh. In other words, the year of rest is not intended to make the other six years fruitful; it is the six years of labor that find their fulfillment in the year of sabbath.

Although the luxury of a sabbatical is provided to a very few, I think the holiness of sabbath rest is something that all of us can pursue, but it requires a commitment to counter-cultural ideals like those found in the Bible. Whether given a day or a semester, the invitation of our Creator is to set aside that time not merely as an opportunity to rest from our labors but to pursue our truest selves. As those made in the image of the One who created all things in six days before resting on the seventh, we have not been created for the purpose of economic gain but to glorify God. In the creation story, God calls all things good, but God hallows the Sabbath day — the only part of creation that God calls holy.

In his book “The Sabbath,” Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote: “The Sabbath is not for the sake of the weekdays; the weekdays are for the sake of the Sabbath. It is not an interlude but the climax of living.” When we stop defining ourselves by what we can accomplish, we return to our true nature. No matter how much time we have off, it should be our focus and not merely a break from work.

The Rev. Evan Garner has served as the Rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Fayetteville since July 2018. Before that, he served in two parishes in the Diocese of Alabama, where he was ordained in 2006. He trained for ordained ministry at Ridley Hall in Cambridge, England, and at Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria, Va. Email him at evan@stpaulsfay.org.

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