That the is a rhythm
to life and that human beings need time to rest in order to thrive
might be a negated idea but it is hardly a new idea, and if I am
honest I don’t see Nicola Slee offering anything new to our
understanding here.
The book takes as
inspiration, and as the structure of its chapters, one of Wendell
Berry’s Sabbath Poems, and to the extent that this book acts as a
commentary on Wendell Berry’s work it has some interest – but
perhaps this could have been equally well achieved with a shorter
more focused article.
Each chapter
includes some extracts from Slee’s journal, these are reproduced is
a rather small faux handwriting font which for me rendered them
virtually unreadable – perhaps due to my need for new glasses and
touch of dyslexia – so I can’t really comment on whether these
were enriching or not.
One thing that did
set me thinking was whether the question of Sabbath gives a challenge
to active church-going, because “Sabbath is a different kind of
space altogether, when we are invited into not-doing, not-knowing,
not-inteding, not-working, not-pursuing.”. The consequence of the
combination of the empowerment of the laity and decline in numbers
attending is that for an increasing proportion of church-goers Sunday
is no longer a day of rest but instead dominated by “doing”
Church. If we want to keep the kind of Sabbath Slee advocates we
will probably need to steer clear of the average Church.
No comments:
Post a Comment