Yesterday was the third Sunday in Lent so I took a photo of a plate of colourful macarons. I’m still living with the practice of the Lenten Photo-a-Day project suggested by Rethink Church and yesterday, being Sunday, the word was celebrate. Every Sunday will be celebrate. Isn’t that beautiful?
I was celebrating Sunday yesterday with friends over macarons and theatrical plans. We were an international and ecumenical collection of folk, gathering for lunch and planning a peripatetic Palm Sunday play. Seven characters will be sharing their perspectives on the events which started Holy Week as the audience and cast wander together through the city. Jesus will be played by an Australian storyteller (she’s fantastic), Judas by a Scottish associate minister (singing, of course), and Mary Magdelene by a Princeton graduate from Michigan (currently locked in deep theological debate with he-who-will-be-Peter). As for me, I’ll be playing the role of Mary the mother of Jesus from the steps of St Giles Cathedral. Mad. Daunting. Celebration.
Then comes Monday, and today’s word is sabbath. Unconventional for a Monday, perhaps, and no pictures have been springing to my mind. Which was a fine way to start the day. I have been trying to go into each day with an open mind, just looking for whatever the daily word might suggest to me in the context of that specific day. One of the ideas behind the project is encourage you to pay more attention to the world around you. So I try each day to keep my eyes open for the word. Or maybe, more accurately, to keep my eyes open for the image that the word calls forth. To wait for the image to come into focus. Some days, it’s easy. A celebratory birthday cake. A tree full of speaking birds. And then there have been days when it’s slipped my mind completely. It happens. Life gets full. Some days, it’s felt right to share a photo I snapped sometime earlier. And then sometimes I find myself glancing up from whatever minutiae has been occupying my attention and bang! There it is. It was like that on Saturday. The word was beloved. And here’s what I saw.
Beloved indeed.
But today is sabbath and I haven’t a clue. I haven’t seen anything. It’s been a day of getting things done. A run to the corner store for breakfast supplies while the Spouse made the coffee. A shoulder bag crammed with toys and books and notes and my computer and diapers and did I remember my housekeys, too? The kids’ school was celebrating Book Day with a costume day so in the rush before school, I had to help Hagrid into her beard and coat while the Spouse made a marmalade sandwich for Paddington Bear to wear hidden under his hat. The Spouse and I continued our tagteam efforts, passing Plum back and forth to juggle morning meetings, writing and office time. From time to time, the word sabbath would surface in my mind and I’d gently nudge it away. Something would come into focus later.
Late in the afternoon, I stumbled across these words.
“To have peace with this peculiar life; to accept what we do not understand; to wait calmly for what awaits us, you have to be wiser than I am.”
– M.C. Escher
Preach it, brother. Words for my laughably unsabbathy day when I’m feeling foolish for trying to do too many things. By supper time, I’d sung She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain at least a thousand and twelve times, Plum was red in the face and grumpy – likely more teeth, possibly insatiably musical hunger – and Blue was already fussing about how many dishes he’d have to dry after supper.
Then I saw his socks. And it came into focus. There was sabbath.
I knit those socks last month from this crazy rainbow yarn that our dear friend E gave me at Christmas. It’s every colour all twisted together in mad combinations and it keeps your attention as you knit because you never know quite what’s coming next. Which can be what family life feels like. It’s really only when you put the knitting down that you can see that there is rhythm and pattern. There is something beautiful. The colours shift and contrast and there is something lovely there. Loved and lovely.
So my sabbath is socks. Or perhaps more precisely, the perception of socks. Sabbath is in the stepping back, in the looking past the craziness of “this peculiar life” and in seeing instead peace, acceptance, patience and wisdom.
Happy Sabbath, wherever you might find her.
