LAYING DOWN OUR BURDEN
Keep the Sabbath Holy
opening
Here. Come here. Take a moment to set aside that list you’ve been writing in fluorescent ink. The list that converts tasks into emergencies. Items like “feed the orchids” become “If I don’t accomplish this by 11:00 a.m. tomorrow morning the rain forests are going to dry up and it will be all my fault.” Or “If I fail to renew my automobile insurance I will probably crash my car and everyone will die.” Or “This friend just had her breast biopsied and that friend’s brother-in-law beat up her sister and my aunt just lost her job with the symphony and my nephew is contemplating divorce and I must call them all, and listen to them for an hour each, and dispense redemptive advice.”
Gather your burdens in a basket in your heart. Set them at the feet of the Mother. Say, “Take this, Great Mama, because I cannot carry all this shit for another minute.” And then crawl into her broad lap and nestle against her ample bosom and take a nap. When you wake, the basket will still be there, but half its contents will be gone, and the other half will have resumed their ordinary shapes and sizes, no longer masquerading as catastrophic, epic, chronic, and toxic. The Mother will clear things out and tidy up. She will take your compulsions and transmute them. But only if you freely offer them to her.
She Comes on Wings of Light
Why not?
Why not pretend for now that the Absolute (the Great Mystery, the Ground of Being) sometimes expresses itself in the body of woman? Pretending God’s a dude hasn’t exactly worked out for the vast majority of the human family, let alone the animal and plant communities or the air or the waters.
In the Jewish tradition (not known for its feminist history) the holiest of holy days—holier than the High Holidays themselves—is Shabbat, and she is female. Yes: the Sabbath itself is a feminine being. She is called the Shekinah, and she embodies the energies of both Malkah, the Queen, and Kallah, the Bride. She is the Holy Mother, favorite Sister, intimate Friend. She is the Beloved. In Judaism’s sister tradition, Christianity, she is Sophia, Holy Wisdom.
Among a certain circle of my friends (and the family members who let me get away with it) we set aside Friday evenings to welcome the Sabbath. In the tradition of our Jewish ancestors, we imagine her as a beautiful woman who flies in through every window on wings of light, penetrating and saturating each of our hearts. Her name is Shekinah and she “resouls” us. We need the extra dose of spiritual substance she brings so that we can navigate the holy holy holy terrain of Shabbat.
Shabbat is the Hebrew word for the Sabbath. Those who come from Ashkenazi families, as I and the majority of American and European Jews do, will likely be more familiar with the Yiddish version: Shabbos. I did not learn about Shabbos from my Jewish family. I received the Sabbath transmission from the late Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi at Lama Foundation, the original interspiritual community in the mountains of northern New Mexico, where Shabbat has been celebrated every single Friday since Reb Zalman first introduced it to us in the early 1980s. This is the model I still use when I celebrate Shabbat on my own, either at home or among the many communities I visit while traveling and leading interspiritual retreats. Over the years, our communal Shabbat practice at Lama has morphed into something only vaguely Jewish. But it draws on the contemplative essence of the ancient ritual and adapts it to meet both the spiritual thirst and the wariness of organized religion that characterize our times.
There are three parts to the ceremony: the blessing of the candlelight, the blessing of the wine, and the blessing of the bread.
In our community, we follow the custom in which the women—who carry the spiritual treasures and keep them safe—kindle the Sabbath lights. One candle represents chesed (loving-kindness) and the other gevurah (wise discernment). As the candles are being lighted, we cover our eyes, turning our gaze inward. “Blessed are you, Beloved our God, power of the universe, who sanctifies us with your commandments and invites us to light the candles of Shabbos.” Then, integrating the indigenous wisdom of honoring earth and sky, we turn together to each of the four directions, starting with the north and ending with the west, lifting our arms and calling out to the Shekinah: “Welcome.” After invoking each direction, we fold our arms at our hearts and nestle her there.
INDWELLING
The Shekinah is the indwelling feminine presence of the Divine. According to the ancient teachings, she resides in exile during the rest of the week, and on Shabbat she comes home. It is our task to receive her. It is her task to awaken us to what is real (Love) and to who we are (Love). We need to enact this ritual again and again, week after week. We are endlessly forgetting and remembering. In fact, we could look at all spiritual practices, all rituals and ceremonies and creative arts, as bells designed to wake us from the slumber of our separateness.
Nobody can seem to give me a good answer for why the Shekinah was ever sent away. It has something to do with embodiment. And the masculine religious model. As we have already seen, the world’s great religions seem to have convinced themselves that the purpose of life in this world is to transcend this world, including our bodies—especially female bodies. Meanwhile, the Shekinah is about immanence, infusing all matter and all spirit with her glory. She is the shattering of the One into the blessed pandemonium of the many. She pours and spills and overflows into All That Is. She is unbounded and uncontrollable. Not good news for the prevailing power structure, whose job it is to contain and legislate. The Shekinah is subversive.
And so she is linked to missing the mark (the literal definition of the word sin). There’s a rumor in the rabbinical literature that when Adam and Eve dared to pluck the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, the Shekinah withdrew from creation. Another suggests that when humans forgot the truth of the one God and began misbehaving, the Holy One cast them into the desert, and she went with them. Both are narratives of separation. Which is the true meaning of sin: separation from God (or the illusion of separation from God, because that which is One cannot be divided). When we treat multiplicity as a problem and designate unity as the solution, we equate embodiment with evil. No wonder the rabbis sent the Shekinah away.
I’m not knocking Oneness. In fact, as I mentioned in the previous chapter, I have spent my life engaged in a perpetual dance of longing and union, bowing down under the weight of yearning for the Beloved and rising into the formlessness of the Divine embrace. Like my namesake, the sixteenth-century bhakti poet Mirabai, I do not perceive this love dance as a malady to be cured but rather as an opportunity to celebrate the terrible beauty of the human condition. The fire of our desire melts the boundaries that divide us from our source, and we surge back home. “For the raindrop, joy is entering the river,” says the Sufi poet Ghalib.
She Turns Grapes into Wine
Which brings us to the second of the three Sabbath prayers: the kiddush, the blessing of the wine. The empty kiddush cup is a symbol of the heart that cries out in longing for God. The wine is the quantum response of love rushing in and filling us to overflowing. It turns out that (as all the traditions tell us) the Holy One yearns for union with us as ardently—more so!—as we desire union with the Holy One. All we need to do is lift our empty vessel, and we are instantaneously filled. On Shabbat we pour the wine to the brim so that it sloshes onto the dish beneath it and splatters the tablecloth and stains our hands. Divine Love is messy and riotous; it is intoxicating.
And love is meant to be shared. We pass the kiddush cup around. We each take a sip and wish one another “Shabbat shalom”: May the peace of the angels settle on your heart; may it spread throughout the whole world. “Blessed are you, Beloved our God, who brings forth the fruit from the vine.” That is, may the grapes convert into a magical potion that releases you from the tyranny of the head and brings you back to the sovereignty of the heart.
Shabbat is about reclaiming the power of love longing. Like the Bride in Solomon’s Song of Songs—the startlingly sensuous book of the Torah (the Old Testament)—we rise from our bed, and, disheveled and rife with need, we rush out onto the darkened streets and plazas searching for the One who captivated and then abandoned us.
This love language is not unique to Judaism. We see it in the epic Hindu poem the Gita Govinda, where Radha, the quintessential divine lover disguised as a cowherding girl, and Krishna, the blue-skinned Lord of Love who lures the maidens with the song of his celestial flute, weave in and out of private anguish and conjugal ecstasy. We find it in the ancient Sufi story of Layla and Majnun, in which Majnun goes mad with unrequited love and takes his own life, and then, when Layla hears of his death, she dies of heartbreak. We recognize it in the bridal mysticism of Christianity, in which the soul merges with the Divine in an intimate union that dissolves the distinction of subject and object. There it is in the form of Brigid of Ireland, guardian of brides, whose triple nature blends goddesses from all over the Celtic world with a Christian saint and a folkloric figure revered for her loving touch, transforming everyday tasks into sacred realities. And we encounter it among countless indigenous communities who name twin mountain peaks after legendary lovers parted in life and reunited in the afterworld.
This dynamic tension lives inside each of us, whether or not we are in touch with it. The yearning that burns at the heart of our intimate relationships reflects the universal impulse toward union. It is at the root of our insatiable hunger to love and be loved.
The good news is that on this holy day of Shabbat, lover and Beloved are reunited. The Bride returns from exile, and the Bridegroom descends from his transcendent absorption. Heaven and earth meet and meld. The masculine and feminine aspects of the Godhead are unified, and Reality is restored to wholeness. This cosmic drama unfolds on the stage of our own souls. It shines from the candle flame and brims from the kiddush cup.
She Feeds Us with Her Body
Now it is time for the breaking of the bread. Like a shy bride, the challah, a soft, plaited bread made with eggs, oil, and a spoonful of honey, has been hiding, covered, until we have blessed the wine. Now we lift her veil and lay our hands on the braided loaf (in our house we have been known to wrap a couple of rice crackers in the decorative challah cloth or even pretzels, in a pinch). “Blessed are you, Beloved our God, who brings forth the bread from the land.” We tear off pieces of the challah and feed each other from the bounty of Mother Earth.
The Earth, the Earth. Maybe we had forgotten that we belong to her. This Sabbath ritual is designed to remind us. “Our sister, Mother Earth,” St. Francis calls her. On Shabbat we renew our vow to connect with and protect her, to honor and exalt her, to treat her as family.
After the Friday-evening ceremony, all of Saturday, until the sun goes down, is about hanging out with the Shekinah and laying all other distractions aside.
I have the great fortune of living in the high desert, surrounded by national forest. When I am home between frequent travels, I walk every day in the foothills behind our house. It doesn’t matter if the snow is piled up to my thighs or the wind is whipping the hood off my head or the sun is frying my face: I gather my dogs, Lola and Ruby, and off we go. On Shabbat, the robust determination of my regular trek becomes a languid encounter with the body of the Mother. I slow down and remember to praise her with my footsteps. I caress her with my breath. I thank her. I may be hiking the same trails I traverse during “ordinary time,” but on Shabbat I set out to walk what the Diné people (also known as Navajo) call the “Beauty Way.”
In Judaism the highest mitzvah (which is both a blessing and a commandment) is to make love with your spouse on Shabbat. So sometime between Friday night and Saturday afternoon we are meant to reach for our beloved. This may be an earthly human, one to whom we are married, with whom we are in a committed relationship, or whose heart opens our heart enough to make us take off our clothes and merge our bodies. Or it may be with our divine Beloved who lures us with the song of an invisible flute, which on Shabbat we can follow all the way to its source, like tracing a tributary back to the mouth of the sea. On Shabbat, we have the time to rediscover our lover as the embodiment of the journey home.
At its best, Jewish wisdom affirms the body as holy and our connection to the Earth as sacred. Food, sex, art, and beauty are all evidence of the loving presence of a loving God who, on Shabbat, reveals herself as the Shekinah: indwelling, immanent, available.
She Lingers Awhile
The Sabbath is about rest, about laying down our burdens, about unhooking from the compulsions of the to-do list. On Shabbat, said the twentieth-century spiritual activist Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, we build a temple in time and take refuge there. “Six days a week we live under the tyranny of things of space; on the Sabbath we try to become attuned to holiness in time. It is a day on which we are called upon to share in what is eternal . . . to turn from the results of creation to the mystery of creation; from the world of creation to the creation of the world.”
Eve Ilsen, Reb Zalman’s widow, spoke to me about the femininity inherent in this time of “not doing.” We have prepared with care, making food ahead of time so that our labors are light when the Sabbath comes. It is a deeply receptive time, quintessentially feminine, sensual, fecund. Shabbat is the time of the spiritual zygote, Eve says, a fusion of the DNA of the feminine and masculine principles of the universe, form and formlessness, earth and heaven. “An egg without receiving sperm is just an egg.”
For me, Shabbat is both a contemplative practice and an act of social and environmental justice. It is contemplative in that taking a Sabbath from our quotidian lives is synonymous with showing up for whatever arises, moment by moment, with heightened attention and availability. On Shabbos, I unplug from electronic devices and break my addiction to communications. The messages pile up, but the sky does not fall. When I testify to the bountiful fruits of this custom, many of my friends and students explain to me that they are way too busy (substitute important) to take off an entire day a week. They cannot afford it. There are too many demands battering at the doors of their life. Too many emails and texts and Instagram posts to respond to—and to respond to immediately! Spaciousness feels like laziness, looks like boredom, smells like danger.
I used to feel the same way. I would light the candles on Friday and say, “Hi” to the Shekinah, but by Saturday morning I was back to my old trick of trying to run the world. Keeping the Sabbath holy has taught me that I cannot afford not to observe Shabbat. And the Universe graciously expands the container of time to hold my practice and support my rest.
Keeping the Sabbath holy can also be a revolutionary act. Engaged as a practice of voluntary simplicity, it can subvert capitalism. From sunset on Friday to sunset on Saturday I try not to spend money, burn fossil fuels, or otherwise contribute to the pattern of overconsumption to which privileged Western white people like me have grown inured. I am endeavoring to lighten my carbon footprint. I approach this day as a Sabbath from feeding the machine of commerce that is responsible for bulldozing the lives of those on the margins and causing terrible suffering. The Shekinah opens my ears so that I can hear the cries of the world.
She Returns to Exile
How could she leave us? Shabbat is a taste of Olam haBa, “the world to come” in Hebrew. She is so sweet and delicious, so blessed and sublime, that we cannot bear to be parted from her when the sun sets on Saturday. And so the Holy One, it is said, in her infinite mercy, grants us not the standard twenty-four hours but twenty-five. We are given an extra hour to get used to the fact that we must return to the world of working and consuming, producing and manipulating. It’s not that these things are inherently bad; it’s that they tend to lead us away from her and so from our felt interconnection with All That Is.
There is a ritual for this, too. It’s called Havdalah. At the closing of Shabbat we gather again and light a special braided candle, symbolizing that sacred and ordinary time are intertwined. The two flames merge. Then we bless the wine. Next—and the soul poetry of this part slays me—we inhale from a box of fragrant spices so that we will not faint with sorrow that Shabbat is over and the Shekinah is returning to exile. Finally, we share the sanctified wine and save a few drops to douse the flame with. We wistfully bid her farewell.
Shabbat is about harmony. It’s about restoring balance—the balance between the masculine and feminine aspects of our own souls and the balance of power between women and men. It’s about building community and remembering our interdependence with each other and with the Earth herself, taking responsibility for our habits of consumption and allowing ourselves to rest and recharge. Shabbat is about forging a direct relationship with the Shekinah, the feminine face of God. It’s about taking refuge in her arms.
Her time of exile is over now. We do not need to keep sending her away. We are called now to reinstate the feminine to her rightful place in our lives, in our relationships, and throughout creation. She belongs here and it’s time to celebrate her presence, draw on her strength, drink in her consolation, and let her guide us in repairing the world.
Set aside a regular day—once a week, a day a month, a weekend—as a Sabbath. It is, of course, not necessary to follow the Jewish tradition of Shabbat, which begins with lighting the candles on Friday evening and ends with Havdalah at sunset on Saturday. Pick your own time frame and find your own way to keep the Sabbath holy. The important thing is to cultivate a regular practice of laying aside all daily concerns and letting yourself rest.
Read, write poetry, color in a coloring book, take a hike, make a beautiful meal and feed your loved ones—anything that reconnects you with your soul. Keep a journal of your experiences so that you can reflect back to yourself the gifts that arise when you open the door to deep rest and loving attention to the moment. (If you choose to write, see “Writing Practice Guidelines”.)