Sabbath Messages > Sabbath Message: June 17, 2006
Good Sabbath
June 17, 2006
And on the 7th day God rested and looked on what He had created and thought that it was good. Satisfaction can breed true comfort. Lately-perhaps since humans were created-we have had to search for good, for it is often hidden. Media searches for bad, for good doesn't sell. It is one of our many peculiarities that we pray for good but are kept rapt by evil. "We first make our habits and then our habits make us." (Dryden)
"Habit is the deepest law of human nature." (Carlyle)
As technology races towards frontiers, we are short of breathe, as we become creatures of habit and then its prisoners. So what can we look forward to?
"The happiest life is that which constantly exercises and educates what is the best in us." (Hamerton)
My solution has been to slow down, to give life a chance to breathe so that we can examine its soul, for the soul needs replenishment as well as contemplation. Without thoughtfulness there is only reaction and repetition.
A walk in spring or summer can be enchanting, when we pause to see what we are passing or coming towards. I personally love the smell of spring at the end of winter for it is delicate and delicious. It cleanses the brain, which requires this tune-up in order to prepare itself for coming battles and races. Slowing down doesn't always mean taking a nap. Rather it means to educate the senses so that they are tuned to blossoms, aroma, chirping birds, scamping rabbits and lovely thoughts. Rudyard Kipling noted: "smells are surer than sights and sounds to make your heart-strings crack."
As I have been temporarily shut down by painful legs, my eyes grasp what they can from my car's windows, but aroma is my imagination and memory. We must be able to store memory and experience so that we can sift through the feelings as if sifting through sand to find gold or diamonds, for hidden in our memories are the sum total of all the experiences of sense and soul.
Hopefully some of them-even most-can be of loves past and present, of the good we have shared, of parents gone and brothers and sisters still here, of adult children breeding their own, which is our form of reincarnation, as we pass our values from generation to generation, L dor L dor. As I write this I can look out the window at the little boy next door, raking the soil, as his Dad instructs, beginning a new garden. Thus each generation instructs and recreates.
Some cultures love their god so much that they can't wait to kill their neighbor as industry profits from acceptable murder. Yet it is in our power to teach the succeeding generation that love, kindness and peacefulness are the messages derived from the love of God and each other, that neighbor must be prized and protected, and neighborhood will attain peace, at last.
Time is the substance from which I am made and memory is the river that carries substance and myth.
"Whatever that be which thinks, understands, wills and acts, it is something celestial and divine." (Cicero)
So, on Sabbath, take life in your hands, slow down so that thoughtfulness can embrace your soul and bring you peace and fulfillment.
sandy
