“Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work; but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; in it you shall not do any work . . . for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and hallowed it" (Exodus 20:8-11).
Without a doubt this commandment has done more for the observance of religion in Judaism and Christianity than any other. For it appears to establish unequivocally the special time for religious study and worship. Originally, it was set down arbitrarily with a multitude of prohibitions and restrictions, and with the maximum penalty of death.
To get the full impact of the early practice of the Mosaic Law, read the story (Numbers 15:32) of the man found gathering sticks on the Sabbath. There is no mention of why he was gathering sticks, but one can assume that it was a matter of a father gathering firewood to keep his family warm. But the commandments must be kept at all costs! So the culprit was brought before the elders, who condemned him to death by stoning. And all the congregation . . . stoned him with stones, and he died . . . as the Lord commanded. An interesting commentary on the prevailing God-concept! And on the fanatically rigid adherence to the Ten Commandments.
There is much confusion about the fourth commandment. What is the Sabbath day? And how does one keep it holy? You might say, "Everyone knows that the Sabbath day is Sunday." That is not correct. The Jews keep their Sabbath on Saturday, beginning with sundown on Friday. Among Christians the Seventh-Day Adventists observe their Sabbath on Saturday. And, from a purely scriptural point of view, they are probably correct. Saturday is the seventh day of the week, which Genesis says is the Sabbath day that the Lord blessed and hallowed.
Sunday was probably redesignated as the Sabbath day by Christian theologians who thought it more fitting to honor the "first day of the week" when Jesus was resurrected from the dead. Actually, the Sunday Sabbath was not practiced widely until it was developed by the Scots and the Puritans, who became as emotional about it as the followers of Moses were about the "seventh day."
The religious traditions in America have evolved from many influences of our Puritan forebears. Thus the Sabbath day has become an institution with punishment for its breach tailored slightly to meet our more civilized standards. People are no longer stoned, but it has been made a sin not to go to mass or to church. People have been conditioned to the churchgoing habit, chiefly out of fear of not going.
And, as Bliss Carman sings, "They're praising God on Sunday. They'll be all right on Monday. It's just a little habit they've acquired."
As part of the cultural and moralistic veneer of our modern society, it is important to be seen going to services on the Sabbath. It has become the badge of conventional respectability. At times it has been considered good politics to give high visibility to worship services in the White House.
The Puritan influence has also been responsible for "blue laws" and Sunday closing ordinances that prohibit some or all commerce in cities across the land. The courts have sometimes rendered opinions that certain items could be sold while other items are banned. In other words, one could pick up stones but not sticks on the Sabbath! A recent Supreme Court decision seems to have opened the way for the elimination of all Sunday restrictions. And there are those who are crying out that this is breaking the commandments. And it is true. For the decision may go a long way toward breaking the fourth commandment, reducing it to the basic essence, which is good.
One of the strange quirks of the Christian Sabbath is the hour of worship . . . eleven o'clock on Sunday morning. Has it ever occurred to you to question that time? Why eleven? Why not ten? Or twelve? Or even three in the afternoon? It might be startling to those who think of the eleven o'clock time as "God's hour" to find that it was set to accommodate farm people, for it is halfway between milking times. One may rightly wonder whether some of the rigid Mosaic codes may have such simple explanations.
There is much concern over what is called the "Secular Society." Preachers like to attribute this erosion of spiritual and moral values in the marketplace to the work of the devil. Without a doubt there is much that is immoral, and many who are amoral, in the world "out there." But it could be that at least part of the cause is in Sabbatarianism, a big word that means "worship of the Sabbath."
It is institutional religion that created the divisions of sacred and secular, and of holy days and weekdays. The church is usually a place set apart, conducted by a clergy, who are a class set apart, on the Sabbath, which is a day set apart. There is a tendency to go through the performance on Sunday, and then to put it all back into the six-day closet of unconcern.
There is a great cry for a return to religion and for teaching basic morality and the keeping of the Ten Commandments. However, it may be that the greater need is for the teaching of metamorality and the breaking of the commandments, reducing the Mosaic law to its underlying spiritual Truth. One good place to begin is with the fourth commandment and its crystallized emphasis on keeping the Sabbath.
The key to the fourth commandment is in the Hebrew root word shabbath, which means rest, intermission, desist from exertion. The emphasis is on the rhythmic flow of the universe: work and rest, outpouring and infilling. Even as a piano teacher may use a metronome to help a child to develop a sense of rhythm, the fourth commandment, dealing with the literal Sabbath day, was intended to help the Israelites to put stress on resting for health, and on times of prayer and meditation for recreation.
However, the Sabbath practice in contemporary times should be adapted to the cultural facts of life. To become a slave to the Sabbath for its own sake is like being tied to a metronome. Jesus was once criticized for doing healing work on the Sabbath and for permitting His disciples to gather food. This was still a very serious infraction of the law even in that latter day. But Jesus saw the Sabbath in a more spiritual light. In one fell swoop He broke the fourth commandment down to its basic idea, as He said, "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath." Thus did He seek to promote the idea of the Sabbath on the level of consciousness, and not just as a set time or day of the week.
It is interesting that the fourth commandment emphasized prohibition of all kinds of work by all classes of workers. Undoubtedly, this has given rise to the modern day "rights of workers. But what about mothers and homemakers? In all times of history, while the men were caught up in a meticulous observance of the many religious practices, mother was still cooking and cleaning and caring for the family. Good reason for freedom movements for women, and for "breaking" and not just keeping the commandments.
In the Genesis story of creation, on the seventh day God rested. It seemed logical to assume that man, too, should rest on every seventh day. However, modern Bible scholarship and the facts of geological life have insisted that the creation story does not deal with time, but with stages of unfoldment. The seven steps of the creation outline a process that is just as relevant to building a house as creating a world. From a more metaphysical perspective, the seventh day of creation implies, "When you have put your mind, heart, and hands to a project, then let go and let God breathe life into it that it may become a living form."
The native Hawaiians have an unusual word for visitors to the islands: haolis. It seems that when the Christian missionaries first arrived they set about to convert the natives from their pagan ways. They set up little chapels in which the people should worship God. Being a peace-loving people, the natives were easily led into the new discipline. But they found one thing quite strange. Whereas in their Kahuna practice they always followed their times of worship of the gods with a period of silence "to breathe life into their devotions," the Christians simply rattled off their prayers and got up and walked out. So the natives called the Christians, and later all visitors to the islands, haolis. The word means without breath.
This is the spirit of the fourth commandment. "Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy." Take time to let Spirit breathe life into your whole being, to pause and become centered in the divine flow of life, love, and substance. The word holy means whole. There is a wholeness within you always. Wherever Spirit is at all the whole of Spirit must be. And, because Spirit is omnipresent, the whole of Spirit must be present in its entirety at every point in space at the same time. The Sabbath day is the time, any time, when you remember the allness of God that is present right where you are as the fullness of all that you are and all that you need or desire.
To keep the Sabbath holy is to do your work, whatever and wherever it may be, in the awareness of the divine flow of power, intelligence and creativity. Do what you do with enthusiasm and vigor, and then, synchronizing with the rhythm of the universe, take time occasionally to pause, let go, and enter the inner chamber and shut the door.
In every city there may be seen marvelously committed people who get up a little earlier every morning to attend a mass or service on their way to work. Others may run off to a chapel for a time of prayer or meditation during their lunch hour. This, in itself, is to break through the surface meaning of the fourth commandment and its one-day-a-week Sabbath. However, a little less conspicuous but no less committed are the thousands of people who practice some form of meditation right where they happen to be, at home or at work. Charles Fillmore pointed to the ultimate in Sabbath-keeping when he said that within every person there is a church service going on all the time (Fillmore Wings, The Body of Christ, paragraph 10), and one needs only to enter in and experience it.
As I have repeatedly stressed, the commandents were created by Moses as important guidelines for primitive people. Even as a parent builds a fence around the yard to restrain the wandering toddler, and then progressively eliminates it as the child matures and understands the reasons for self-discipline . . . so Moses created the Decalogue of "Thou shalt nots," containing positive aids to self-realization that are fully understood only as they are progressively broken out of their crystallized shells.
The Sunday Sabbath observance is important as a metronome of balance. We should not take it lightly, for until we get a sense of rhythm of life we need its continued reminder to take time to infill. But it is not enough simply to have Sunday away from work. The worker may demand Sunday off, and then get into projects equally as draining, and even "moonlight" on another job. Americans typically have such frantic weekends of busyness that they may look forward to going back to work on Monday to rest up. In the process it may be that the Sunday holy day has become a hollow day.
One meaning of Sabbath is "period of rest." How many persons engage in true resting on the Sabbath? Or even think of rest? Most persons who think of themselves as very religious give Sunday rest little thought. They may attend worship services somewhere, and then spend the remainder of the day at golf or a ballgame or weeding the garden or driving to the beach or the mountains. Rest is the furthest thing from the mind or experience of most persons on weekends.
Does this imply that one should just sit and twiddle his thumbs hour after hour on Sunday? Of course not. Boredom will get us nowhere. I simply want to point up how unrealistic and even hypocritical our Sunday-Sabbath attitudes have become. The true Sabbath is not just a day, and does not involve just "going to services." These things are excellent disciplines, and all those whose early training included them are better for it as adults. But keeping the Sabbath holy is more a matter of creating new patterns of living in which the spiritual "pause that refreshes" is equally as important as the work to achieve.
A highly successful businessman has a prayer time in his office every morning at ten o'clock. This has been a morning ritual with him for over twenty-five years. His secretary takes no calls and all business must wait while he has his ten-minute Sabbath. Yet, the man never goes to church, and regularly plays golf on Sunday. His religious friends call him a sinner and pray for his salvation. Actually, the man's church is an inner experience that he faithfully observes every day. Is not this more spiritually infilling than a once-a-week show of going to services?
This is not to denigate the church or to criticize frequent Sunday attendance. The world needs what the churches can give, and every person may be immeasurably blessed by being a part of that giving. However, churches could be much more effective and Sunday attendance would be much greater if the emphasis were more on teaching than on preaching, on helping people to find their spiritual center within rather than on demanding loyalty to a place of stone and stained glass. There is growing awareness today, even among churchmen, that the declining influence of the church is in large measure due to ecclesiolatry—another big word meaning "worship of the church."
Henry Drummond, the Scottish preacher, angered many of his confreres in the ministry when he said that the main purpose of the Church was to help people to get along without it. He was not espousing the breakup of the Church but rather the breaking down of its creeds into a practical way of life. He was saying that the Church should see itself like a school or a college, whose role is to make the student a self-reliant person and to make itself progressively unnecessary. He felt that a good Christian was not just a faithful Sunday communicant, but one who experienced his communion with God often, wherever he might be, by entering the quiet sanctuary of the soul.
To remember the Sabbath day is to periodically check up on yourself to determine if you are moving, thinking, working, loving. and living in the flow of universal rhythm. You might sit on the beach and reflect on the ebb and flow of the tide, or watch the rising and setting of the sun. Then, become aware of your body and feel the same balancing rhythms at work: the beat of your heart, the constancy of the diastole and systole. Did you know that there is a contraction and dilation of the heart seventy-five times a minute, week after week, month after month, and year after year as long as you live? How can this organ work so hard and for so long? By frequent rest and renewal. You see, the heart is not constantly at work. Following every contraction there is a vital period of relaxation. Studies have revealed that out of every twenty-four hours the heart is still for a total of fifteen hours. Isn't that amazing? It is this rest schedule that enables the heart to go without stopping for scores of years. The heart, thus, has its constant Sabbath.
Have you ever noticed that, on finishing a job or a difficult problem, there is a tendency to heave a sigh? It is a symbol of relief and release from tension. This is a kind of Sabbath. And beyond the sigh comes an inbreathing that could symbolize an inflow of the Spirit. Experience this right now: Heave a sigh . . . and then draw in a long breath. Let the sigh indicate the completion of the creation, the Sabbath rest, and then think of the long inhalation as the inspiration of the Almighty [that] giveth them understanding (Job 32:8, A.V.). Remember to make this identification with the sigh that invariably follows any task. It is but one small step beyond this to the disciplined practice of the presence of God all through your day.
To keep the Sabbath means to discipline yourself to regular periods of prayer or meditation. To keep the Sabbath holy means to do all that you do in the awareness of inner power, and thus to have frequent silent parentheses to remember your oneness with the divine flow.
Inherent in the Sabbath process is the experience of creative resting. It is a kind of relaxation that involves more than simply physical inaction. It is plugging in to the divine action that makes the physical possible and vital. It is not just a matter of sleeping. For one may sleep without creatively resting, and one can rest well without sleeping. This is an important thing to remember when, for instance, you fall asleep during a meditation. Do not feel guilty about it, for you probably needed the sleep. But later, you can and should resume the practice of creative resting.
You may say, "But why should I rest when I am not tired?" Actually, many persons are tied up in bundles of mental and physical tension even without knowing it. Some persons may not have truly relaxed for years. In this frustration of the divine flow it is extremely difficult not only to fulfill your capacity for happiness and success, but to get a sense of oneness.
The old hymn sings, "Take time to be holy." Take time to become established in the consciousness of wholeness, oneness with the divine flow. The benefits are great. You will increase your ability to make decisions and to unfold creative ideas. You will be "in the world-but not of it." You will easily rise above the challenges of human relations. And you will regularly experience the most effective beauty treatment. It will iron out harsh lines from the face and smooth away the bags under the eyes. It will improve your disposition and your health. In the marketplace of life peace may seem elusive and even unattainable, but it comes easily to the mind that is disciplined to creative resting.
By all means keep the fourth commandment. Go to church on Sunday when and if you can. But do not delude yourself by thinking that your Sabbath obligation ends at twelve noon on Sunday. Let it be a time of practice of the principle and process of oneness which is integral to every moment and every experience of your life. You are a spiritual being, with the responsibility to unfold your "imprisoned splendor" all along life's way. Make the commitment to walk that way in holiness, in wholeness.
When you have broken the fourth commandment out of its traditional shell, vou will be free forever from the binding concept that the creative flow of God comes only on a special day or in a special place. You will know that the Presence is always present, wherever you may be. And then the true essence of the commandment will be made real: Get in tune with life's universal rhythm through regular periods of creative resting, and, as in Genesis, God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being (Genesis 2:7). Not just in a once-and-for-all experience, but in a constant rhythmic process, and of course, calling for commitment and daily practice.
© 1987, Unity Books
Reprinted with permission.
