Week 6Fall Week 6
Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.
—Matthew 11:28
My great-grandmother was a lifelong Baptist who spent the last four decades of her life worshiping with the Methodists because by then there was only one church left in her community. Mother Ollie gladly attended Mass at my family’s Catholic church in Birmingham, too, but she never drifted from her quiet adherence to the King James ways of her youth.
She was so quiet in her convictions that I was ten or twelve before I noticed that she went straight back to her room after church every Sunday. On other days, she was busy—shelling peas or snapping beans, crocheting or quilting or sewing—but on Sunday her hands fell still, and her sewing machine sat silent. The foot-pedal Singer she’d ordered from a catalog sometime during the early twentieth century was in daily use until a few weeks before her death in 1982, but she never sewed on Sunday.
When I went looking for her help with a tatting project one Sunday afternoon, I found out why. Tatting is a kind of lace made of tight knots tied in very fine string. The trick is to tie the right kind of knot without tangling the string into the wrong kind, but I had made so many of the wrong knots that I couldn’t figure out how to unpick the tangle and start again. I found Mother Ollie sitting in a chair under the window, her Bible in her lap. The book was old, with edges so worn they curved inward toward the pages, as soft as a puppy. I knocked on the open door. “Mother Ollie, can you help me with this?”
All these years later, I think about the ache it must have caused my great-grandmother, the one whose bedroom I shared whenever the house was full, to disappoint—even in this slight way—a child she loved so much. But that day she could not help me with my needlework. “Not today, honey,” she said. “The Lord tells us not to work on the Sabbath.” And handwork, by definition, is work.
I’ve thought of that conversation many times over the years. Sunday has never been a day of rest for me. I’ve always used at least part of the day to catch up with work, with laundry, with grocery shopping, with the Hydra of email. People tend to imagine that the life of a writer is mainly a matter of mooning around, waiting for ideas to bubble up, or sitting down with a beautiful pen and an elegant notebook, recording the fruits of inspiration. But no. Most writers I know spend more time writing responses to email than anything else.
I started devoting Sunday afternoons to email almost as soon as it was invented because I realized that emailing on a Sunday, when offices were closed, meant a reply wouldn’t come flying right back to me, creating the need to answer yet another email. But I don’t know anyone who takes Sunday off anymore. These days, emailing someone about a work matter on Sunday isn’t any different from emailing them on Monday.
And yet it’s not as though the world stopped on Sunday in the Lower Alabama of my childhood. The crops—and the weeds—in my grandfather’s fields continued to grow, whatever the day. My grandmother still had papers to grade and lessons to plan. The peas in the bushel basket on the back porch would not shell themselves. Nevertheless, my people put their work aside on Sunday to nap on the daybed or sit on the porch and rock. They didn’t ask themselves, as I do, whether they could “afford” to rest. God obliged them to rest, and so they rested.
There are many, many people for whom this kind of Sabbath is not an option. People who work double shifts—or double jobs—just to make ends meet truly can’t afford to rest, but I could reorganize my life if I tried. I could focus on priorities, spend less time on things that matter little to me and make more time for those that matter most. Somehow, over the years, I had simply learned to live without feeling permitted to rest.
That changed after my first book tour, a series of bookstore stops around the country for a book that didn’t appear until I was already fifty-seven years old. Possibly I was just too old by then to learn the art of solo travel: of lying in a different bed night after night and actually sleeping, of finding my way through new cities and new airport terminals. I love meeting book people with all my heart, but all my body was in revolt by the time I got home.
I sat on the sofa with my laptop, planning to get started on the ninety million emails that had piled up in my absence, but instead I fell asleep. I tried the wing chair next to the sofa with no better results. When I found myself looking at the one clear spot on my desk as a good place to lay my head, I gave up and went to bed, rousing myself barely in time for supper. Then I slept eleven hours more.
The commandments don’t identify by name which day of the week should be the Sabbath. They don’t even mention the need to attend church. “Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy,” reads Mother Ollie’s Bible. “Six days shalt thou labor, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work.”
Reading those verses again made me wonder: What if resting, all by itself, is the real act of holiness? What if honoring the gift of our only life in this gorgeous world means taking time every week to slow down? To sleep? To breathe? The natural world has never needed us more than it needs us now, but we can’t be of much use to it if we remain in a perpetual state of exhaustion and despair.
It’s hard not to work on Sunday, but I do try. I take a walk around my favorite lake, the best possible way to celebrate a day of rest in autumn, when the temperatures have finally dropped, the rains have finally come, and Middle Tennessee is serving up one fine day after another.
In fall, the beautyberries gleam in all their purple ripeness beside the last of the asters and the snakeroot flowers. Behind its mother, a fawn forages, its springtime spots beginning to fade. A great blue heron stands on a downed tree at the edge of the water, preening each damp, curling feather and sorting it into place. Every year a fallen log just off the trail boasts a majestic crop of chicken of the woods, and the seedpods of the redbud trees are ready to burst. The crows are talking in the treetops, and the sound of a lone cricket invariably rises up from the skein of vegetation next to the lake. I never fail to stop and listen. Its song is as beautiful and as heart-lifting as any hymn.