Rilke's Swan

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
June 1, 2014

The Fourth Commandment is to rest. What do you do to rest? What might a “sabbath” be in your life?

I have been tired lately. It’s been May, when we all have all of our end of school year festivities, field days, picnics, lots of weddings, papers to write, exams to take or grade. Lots of us have been tired. You know it’s bad when the doves in the tree outside sound like they’re saying “File folder. File folder.” Last week I was what I call “stretcher tired.” I wrote a piece about it. Here’s how it goes:

The Stretcher and the Swan

I came up on an accident the other day. Emergency Services people were putting a woman on a stretcher. They were tender, attentive, capable. She was being taken care of. Traffic was being directed competently around the wreck. It would be cleaned up, hauled away. Taken care of. A fire truck was pulled up beside the ambulance, its chunky lights flashing. Standing by, just in case a fire happened. So they could take care of it. That was one well-taken-car-of situation. I wanted to be on that stretcher. I wanted calm and capable people to be taking care of everything. It looked restful. I was tired. I was the kind of tired you get at the end of a month-long project. I had pushed through to the finish and I’d make seven mistakes along the way but the thing was done. I was the kind of tired you get when you have ten different people feeling in their heart that you should have done it differently. Their way. I was the kind of tired you get when your house is messy, your grass is too long, your car is cluttered and there is a dent in the door and your gas tank is empty, along with your bank account. A tiny piece of me thought it would be restful to be lying down on clean sheets, fussed over in a clean hospital room, brought jello and chicken broth and straws that bend, have people worry about me.

Usually I think it’s a good day when you don’t have to take a ride in an ambulance, and I got back to that state of mind pretty fast. Anyway, I talked to a friend of mine who used to work in an emergency room and she said what happens when you come in is that fast moving people with big scissors cut off all your clothes. That didn’t sound restful at all. She suggested I pay for a day at a spa where helpful, calm people fuss over you all day long, and you get to rest, but no one cuts off your clothes with scissors. It’s cheaper than a hospital stay, when everything is all added up, and you can drive your car home afterward.

I know now that when I have a “stretcher day,” when being helpless looks good to me, that I just need to rest. How did I get to be a grown up and not know that I need to rest sometimes? I think I used to eat instead of resting. That doesn’t work any more. Resting used to sound weak to me. I used to work sick. Well, I still do that. I used to have two speeds, a hundred miles an hour and full stop. Crash. I thought you were supposed to go and go at full speed until you couldn’t go any longer, then you sleep. Then you wake up and start again. As I get older I’m adding more gears. I have “slow” now. Some days.

The poet Rilke wrote about a swan, how awkwardly he moves on the ground, but, lowering himself into the water, allowing himself to be carried, “wave after wave,” he writes, while the swan, unmoving and marvelously calm, is pleased to be carried, each moment more fully grown, more like a king, further and further on.”

The wisdom of one of my holy books, the I Ching, talks about the wisdom of not doing. I get tired when I forget and start to act like I’m the source of my energy, my love, my creativity, like I’m the one who works things out, who sustains my friends, who gets things done. I’m learning to begin to experiment with letting go, with allowing wave after wave to hold me up and move me along. May I be granted the wisdom to know when to paddle my feet now and then.

Connecting with the deep power in which we live in the way to rest. It’s a way to let go of trying to fix things that are not our business. It’s a way to let go of trying to control things that cannot be controlled. We, like the swan, have to move into our element, stop doing the things we’re not built to do.

Finding our element, finding what we were designed to do, moving in the deep power that our forbears the Transcendentalists called “The Oversoul,” is one way to rest from the frantic and awkward efforts we make to do and be what we think is necessary. Another way to rest is, as my therapist/trainer would say: “Don’t just do something, stand there!”

This is where the fourth commandment leads, I think. This is the commandment that tells us to rest, to keep the Sabbath Day holy. We were tortured with this as children. On Sabbath, we were only allowed to go to church, read the Bible, memorize the Bible, eat or nap. When we would watch other families headed to the lake on Sunday, we’d say “They’re going to the lake!” and mama would say “Honey, they’re Catholics.” I always wanted to be Catholic. Mama would let us play sometimes on Sunday, but she kept it between the lines. Instead of playing “Battleship,” where you divide a paper into a grid of squares, within some of which your battleships lurk, we’d play “Going to Jerusalem.” We had donkeys in the grid, and your opponents were the thieves trying to set upon your donkeys as you made the treacherous climb up through the gorges to Jerusalem.

The Ten Commandments were given to a group of people who had been enslaved, and whose ancestors had been enslaved, back through 400 years of generations. It’s easy to imagine that they could have used some instructions relative to work. Rest was demanded. There were lists, eventually, about what constitutes work on the Sabbath. No planting, no gathering, no threshing, no grinding, no sorting. None of these is simple, as thousands of years of thought has gone into their meanings.

Take sorting, for example, which is defined as separating the desirable from the undesirable. Sorting or selecting is permitted when three conditions are fulfilled simultaneously. It is absolutely imperative that all three conditions be present at the time of the sorting.

1. B’yad (By hand): The selection must be done by hand and not a utensil that aids in the selection.

2. Ochel Mitoch Psolet (Good from the bad): The desired objects must be selected from the undesired, and not the reverse.

3. Miyad (Immediate use): The selection must be done immediately before the time of use and not for later use. There is no precise amount of time indicated by the concept of “immediate use” (“miyad”). The criteria used to define “immediate use” relate to the circumstances. For instance if a particular individual prepares food for a meal rather slowly, that individual may allow a more liberal amount of time in which to do so without having transgressed “borer.”

Examples of Permissible and Prohibited Types of Borer:

1. Peeling fruits: Peeling fruits is permissible with the understanding that the fruit will be eaten right away.

2. Sorting silverware: Sorting silverware is permitted when the sorter intends to eat the Shabbat meal immediately. Alternatively, if the sorter intends to set up the meal for a later point, it is prohibited.

3. Removing items from a mixture: If the desired item is being removed from the mix then this is permissible. If the non-desired item is being removed, the person removing is committing a serious transgression according to the laws of Shabbat.

So if you are making beans, you may sort the beans from the small stones that are in there

Trust human beings to take a rule which says you must rest one day out of seven, as God did when creating the earth, and make it so complicated that you need to call your lawyer before you do something on Sabbath to make sure you’re not breaking the law.

We need to rest. What’s so hard about that? It’s hard for us. “I work hard and I play hard,” our TV heroes say. We answer “how’ve you been?” With “Oh, busy. Crazy busy.” It’s true too. Crazy busy.

“Work is not always required… there is such a thing as sacred idleness, the cultivation of which is now fearfully neglected.”

– George MacDonald

A study by neuroscientists at the University of California says that there are complimentary brain networks that toggle back and forth. One is used for times in which we are paying attention, focused, trying to get things done. The other, which they call the Default Mode, is activated during times of rest, daydreaming, and other non attentive but awake times.” DM brain systems activated during rest are also important for active, internally focused psychosocial mental processing, for example, when recalling personal memories, imagining the future, and feeling social emotions with moral connotations.”

Rest Is Not Idleness: Implications of the Brain’s Default Mode for Human Development and Education

Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, Joanna A. Christodoulou, and Vanessa Singh

Educational theorists are now trying to figure out how to balance attention demanding situations with time for internal reflection, daydreaming and doing nothing.

It’s okay to rest. In fact, the neuroscientists say that activating the DM network is good for recalling our past, processing our present, planning our future. Writers know it’s good for creativity. Artists of all kinds know if they don’t spend enough “do nothing” time, the brain lies down in the road like a tired mule and no amount of shouting and jumping up and down will make it move. Rest instead. Take a Sabbath. The DM network is activated when one is not focusing on external stimuli. It doesn’t toggle over when you’re paying attention to video games, a book, TV, although all of those are restful activities. Meandering. Sitting in the back yard staring at nothing. Ruminating. These are ways we connect with the part of us that balances our sometimes frantic activity. When we are rested we think and remember, plan and process better. Imagine someone was going to pay you a thousand dollars to figure out how to create a Sabbath in your day, or in your week. See what solutions occur.

The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean– the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Mary Oliver, The House Light Beacon Press Boston, 1990.

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