Sabbath

"the Sabbath erects a weekly bastion against the commodification of time, against reducing time to money, reducing time to what we can get out of it, against leaving no time for God or beauty or anything that cannot be used or purchased. It is a defense against the hurry that desecrates time.”
-- Eugene Peterson

I love the principle, for years I have believed that the point of the Sabbath was to show that we are not slaves to this world and its material pragmatism. We exist in time, but only for a time; the sabbath is like raising our heads to breathe a different air.

That being said, I have no idea what, in our Christian liberty, the Sabbath should actually look like in practice. Certainly the legalistic dreariness of the puritan/Victorian version chills my soul. But there is a principle we forget at our peril, that we need to have time for the unnecessary, the immaterial, whatever is pure and lovely, whatever refreshes us from the grimness of daily life. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? We need time to re-attach our souls to the things that are unseen, and so much greater than the things that are seen, and to be reminded that even in the most ordinary dailiness of life, we were created for worship.