SEVEN

LOSING MY RELIGION:
Stopping Legalism

Last summer I finally made the journey home, back to southern Ontario. Southern Ontario is not my home—I never lived there, and except for two early childhood visits and several recent work-related trips, I’ve spent little time there. But both of my parents grew up in southern Ontario, in a variety of little towns outside Toronto bearing names—Godrich, London, Waterloo, Breslau, Guelph, Lindsay, Lakefield—that echo cities and towns and villages in the homelands of the German, Dutch, and English immigrants who settled here centuries back, who longed to carry a piece of their own pasts with them and tuck it into the streets and buildings of this new place, hoping it would work its way through, rub its scent into this unfamiliar landscape.

Southern Ontario feels like home to me because so much of my personal history is hidden here. See, that slow brown river is where my dad fished, snagging scowling bass from its reedy shallows. And there’s the squat brick house where he grew up, and the upstairs window he crawled out at night to skulk off with his drinking pals. There’s the street on which my uncle got hit by a car and dragged thirty feet, and down which my mother ran screaming, announcing, prematurely it turned out, his death. There’s the bank where my parents met, two tellers snapping crisp bills or smoothing crumpled ones, shyly glancing at each other across the wickets, seeking opportunities to brush one another’s arms and make it seem like clumsiness.

This is home because it’s thick with aunts and uncles and cousins I’ve lived apart from most of my lifetime but whose faces are like looking into mirrors—carnival mirrors that skew you slightly, make your nose thinner or chin longer or forehead wider or ears more crumpled.

It’s odd to meet them now, all these years later. We share bloodlines, wide swaths of genetic material, deep pockets of memory. Many of us have eyes the same shade of green, with the same feline glint. Our voices rise and fall with similar pitch and cadence, and this one’s laugh—a staccato sharpness with a hint of wheeze—mimics that one’s. Our patterns of fretfulness and recklessness and obsessiveness overlap. Many of us like to read the tangled intricacy of maps. We think too much about money and food. We fret about weather, though none of our livelihoods depend on it.

These are people I’ve been missing my whole life, people who complete me and explain me in many ways. These are intimate strangers. I know them, but not by the usual means. I know them by the whisper of heredity, the thickness of tribal memory, quirks of instinct, rumors of shared wounds. There is, at the roots, a deep-down entanglement. There is a shared cache of private folklore that shapes us.

Sabbath is the stranger you’ve always known. It’s the place of homecoming you’ve rarely or never visited, but which you’ve been missing forever. You recognize it the moment you set eyes on it. It’s the gift that surprises you, not by its novelty, but by its familiarity. It’s the song you never sang but, hearing it now, know inside out, its words and melody, its harmonies, its rhythm, the way the tune quickens just before the chorus bursts. It’s been asleep in you all this time, waiting for the right kiss to wake it.

Life is meant to be much different—fuller, richer, deeper, slower—from what it is.

You know this. You’ve always known it.

You’ve just been missing it your whole life.

But Sabbath is elusive. It is hard to grasp, like the shadow of the wind. Pressures in and around us conspire to muddy our remembrance of it, dry up our keeping of it.

It’s like Molvania, that tiny, mountainous, landlocked eastern European country just now emerging from the shadow of Communism. Santo Cilauro, Tom Gleisner, and Rob Sitch have written the definitive travel guide to this old-world nation of shoe cobblers and goat herders. In fact, they’ve written the only travel guide. An old fur-capped man, scruffy-browed and bleary-eyed, grins gap-toothed from the book’s cover, holding up a glass of garlic brandy, a traditional Molvanian breakfast drink. Behind him stretches a blighted landscape of stony earth and barren trees. Above him looms a wintry sky.

Everything you ever wanted to know about Molvania—its history and geography, its legends and lore, its ethnic groups and dialects, its quirks and taboos—it’s all here. The authors have assiduously researched and compiled, along with maps and charts and photos of historic sites and not-to-be-missed attractions, a wealth of information. Each page has a patchwork of sidebars and insets that are crammed with travel tips and tourist warnings. For instance, on page 85, under the section “Where to Eat?” there’s a photo of several shirtless men, their meaty backs lacquered with sweat, bent over plates of food, gobbling like dogs. The caption: “When dining in certain parts of southern Molvania, it is considered rude to ask for cutlery.” Or flip back to page 78, under the accommodation section, and find this warning: “Due to erratic water pressure, guests at Vajana’s top hotels are advised against using bidets (frekljsqirts). As one recent visitor pointed out, ‘There’s a fine line between personal hygiene and colonic irrigation.’” Every few pages, Philippe, the travel guide’s world-weary explorer, weighs in with a bit of hard-won travel wisdom. A sample:

I was traveling through Svetranj some years ago with a group of friends who suddenly had to leave me. Tired of the usual tourist traps and tacky souvenir shops, I hailed a cab and asked the driver (in my best Molvanian!) to take me somewhere I could get a real sense of the country’s heart and soul, somewhere I belonged. Two and a half hours up the road he dropped me off in a vast wilderness that I later recognized as the Great Plain. A few days later, when I collapsed from hunger and hypothermia, I realized it was one of the most authentic travel experiences I ever had. Unforgettable!¹

Quaint. Charming. Exotic.

The whole thing’s a spoof.

Molvania—“a land untouched by modern dentistry”—doesn’t exist. The authors have gone to elaborate lengths to parody, down to appendices with conversion tables for currency and distances, a serious travel guide. Their mimicry is so note-perfect it takes reading many pages, with increasing double takes, to catch on to the joke.

Everything about Molvania is a hoax.

That’s my fear, writing about Sabbath. The thing has proved so elusive, so mirage-like, we’re beginning to wonder if it really exists, or whether all books about it are works of clever invention, mythologies disguised as histories, travel guides concocted as parodies of the real thing.

There are two main things that do this, make Sabbath an invented country, a place we read about but never get to.

One is busyness. The other is legalism.

Busyness is more our problem now, and I talked about it earlier. But for a long while, legalism was the hound that chased Sabbath, kept it gaunt and haunted. That certainly was the situation Jesus met up with in Galilee and thereabouts: the towns jostled with sticklers for the rules, men who studied every nuance of Sabbath rigmarole, who watched every move Jesus made, who whipped themselves into every shade of purple over his infractions. They made a kind of sport of it, devising sting operations to see if they could get Jesus to do something outlandish and, in their eyes, illicit on the Sabbath. He typically obliged, knowing full well what they were doing.

The low point, I think, is an event told in all three synoptic Gospels. Jesus heals a man with a shriveled hand, flouting, let’s say, Injunction 218, subsection 3c, clause ii, of the Pharisaical Manual of Rules and Protocols. The sticklers fly into a rage. Cursing and rending of clothes. Veins bulging from foreheads, cords jutting from necks, fists clenched so tight that fingers flame red and knuckles blanch white. None of this, apparently, forbidden on Sabbath. And then: “The Pharisees went out and began to plot with the Herodians how they might kill Jesus” (Mark 3:6).

Two things are remarkable about this. One, Pharisees and Herodians despised each other. The Pharisees deemed the Herodians toadies of Herod and puppets of Rome, bent on destroying righteousness for the sake of fashionableness. The Herodians saw the Pharisees as reactionary bigots, rednecks and yokels trying to drag the nation back into the dark ages with all their finicky purity laws. To Pharisees, Herodians were soft as rot. To Herodians, Pharisees were brittle as blown glass. Each group represented to the other everything wrong with Israel—which makes them, of course, reminiscent of certain groups alive and well today.

Yet they unite over a common enemy: Jesus. Jesus has so affronted their very different scales of values that they will link arms to eliminate him.

The second remarkable thing is that they plot murder on the Sabbath. As they see it, healing on the Sabbath is forbidden, but plotting murder is perfectly acceptable. This is legalism at its most flagrant. Legalism is the reduction of life to mere technicalities. It substitutes code for conscience, ritual for worship, rectitude for holiness, morality for purity. The most bizarre lines of reasoning appear completely natural to a legalist: you must never heal on the Sabbath, but you can plot the death of those who do.

For the longest while I felt a smug pleasure in sitting in judgment of these legalists. And then I realized I was one of them. At the very least, I was keeping score of their keeping score. But that was, indeed, the very least. It went much deeper than that. As I started to keep Sabbath, I noticed the exact same tendencies they exhibited taking root in me. I developed some rules, good rules, I thought, but rules all the same. At first I exhorted myself to keep the rules. Then I castigated myself for not keeping the rules. Then I prided myself for keeping them, if not perfectly, then at least better than other people did. Then I started to find fault with those other people, people who didn’t have the same rules I had or who didn’t keep the rules as consistently as I did. Then I found myself getting angry with those people when they dared to feel tired or stressed. Well, if you had kept the Sabbath holy—as I do—you wouldn’t feel that way, now, would you?

It’s not too far from here to plotting murder.

The attraction of legalism is that, despite all its complexity, it’s mindless. It requires little or no personal engagement. It’s sheer mechanics, simple arithmetic, no more difficult than cranking a hoist or measuring a length of board. You just follow orders. You match the parts to the diagram and apply pressure. It need draw nothing from your heart, your mind, your strength, your soul. It’s like paint-by-numbers: it requires no artistry, no imagination, no discipline, just dumb, methodical obedience.

And the attraction of legalism is its inherent rewards. Legalism feels good, in a perverse sort of way. It strokes our egos, fills us with the pleasure of achievement, knowing we spelled all the words correctly, and in such a nice, tidy script to boot. And it’s even better if we accomplish this where others have failed. It’s like winning a race: it wouldn’t mean half as much—indeed, it wouldn’t mean anything— if our triumph didn’t imply others’ losses. The secret impetus behind legalism is its competitiveness. The point is not just to win: it’s to beat everyone else. Read “beat” in that last line however you wish.

But is Sabbath-keeping inherently this way, rulebound and rival-mongering? It certainly seems so, since every time we’ve paid it any mind, we’ve ended up in a tangle of injunctions and imperatives and comparisons.

But then there’s Jesus.

Jesus broke virtually all the Pharisees’ Sabbath rules. He blew them over like card houses, dismissed them as man-made claptrap. Jesus provoked his opponents as much by his aloofness as by his defiance: he just didn’t seem to care that they had worked so hard on their code books, on the intricacies of policy and etiquette, on spelling out in infinite and infinitesimal fine print dos and don’ts by the armloads. One minute, Jesus seemed to break their rules as an impish prank, a way of getting their goat, and the next as a holy crusade, a full assault on their arrogant presumption. Yet he couldn’t have cared less about winning or losing; some other standard of conduct motivated him.

It makes you wonder: Does God have any rules about Sabbath? Or did we make them all up ourselves?

It turns out, God gave only broad and general prescriptions for the Sabbath—cease work, mainly—and here and there an oblique clue. The only incident where a real and actual rule is broken is in Numbers 15, and we learn about the rule in the breach, through the breaking of it. A man is caught gathering brushwood on the Sabbath. Those who catch him haul him in to see Moses and Aaron—implying that this is a serious matter, since Moses long ago established that he would handle only the weightiest rulings (see Exod. 18). Moses asks God what is to be done, and God invokes the death penalty (this is likely the proof text Jesus’s opponents were thinking of when they sought to stone him).

But such living by its very nature is deadly. Anxiety and stress are our number one killers. I heard recently a story about Meyer Friedman, the psychologist who devised the Type A/ Type B personality profiles— where Type B is placid and limber, taking life as it comes, and Type A is two-fisted and bristling, taking life by the horns. Friedman’s initial insight that led to his personality theory came after a discussion with a chair upholsterer. The upholsterer said that most of his business came from replacing the upholstery on the chairs in cardiologists’ offices, the chairs wore first, and quickly, on the front edge. Apparently, heart patients are so impatient that, even while listening to their doctor’s life-threatening diagnosis or lifesaving prescription, they sit taut and restless, poised to flee, chafing at the delay.² At the edge of their seats. The very reason their hearts are sick is written in that threadbare upholstery.

It’s killing us, our worry, our hurry, our need to gather one more armload of brushwood, our haste to get out of the heart doctor’s office and back to the fast food and the fast lane. We take our rat poison to thin our blood clots and scurry back to the rat race to clot our blood some more. The death verdict is inscribed in this way of life.

Not long ago, I was trimming my lawn in a terrible hurry. I had a stack of chores to do, and daylight was fading. I was in too much of a hurry to hunt down my safety glasses that day. I was almost running with the weed trimmer, muttering near-expletives every time its aging motor stalled. I was praying—I’m not kidding—that the cutting cord wouldn’t run out before I finished. At the edge of the front garden, I held the head of the weed trimmer close to the ground to scalp the lawn, to scrape it down to bare earth. The whirring cords plucked an embedded stone and, like David with his slingshot, flung it hard into my left eye. I fell, clutching my face, yelping. When I got up, I could barely see. My injured eye felt like the chunk of rock had slivered into it. I pried my eye open to make sure I still had sight. The sun’s brightness stung my retina. My vision was waterlogged. The world looked as the sea does when I’m diving and my mask fills up. I had to shut the hurt eye. My good eye, in sympathy, shut too.

I staggered into the house, groped my way into the bathroom, scooped cold water onto my face. I rummaged through the medicine cabinet, tipping and scattering bottles and vials, looking for an eye patch. None. I sacked my wife’s makeup tray and found cotton pads, the kind she uses to swab off cosmetics.

And what did I do with these? I stuck three of them, with Scotch tape, to my injured eye, then went out and finished the trimming.

I just couldn’t stop. When would the work get done if not now?

Later, reflecting on my drivenness, I felt a deep and shameful kinship with that nameless man in Numbers, picking up sticks, packing one more fistful of twigs under his arm. Not able to stop.

But apart from that one story in the Bible, it’s silent on specific rules. This silence is curious. Elsewhere, in Leviticus, Exodus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, God prescribes explicit and detailed instruction regarding sexual conduct, priestly garments, dietary concerns, the removal of mildew, the kinds of polyester forbidden. But on Sabbath, almost nothing, only the repetition of general guidelines: rest, cease from work, celebrate, remember, observe, deny yourself, delight yourself.

I think God must be protecting us here from our temptation to clutter simple things. Where in other matters—diet, dress, sex, hygiene—God felt the need to spell things out in tedious and meddlesome detail, here he’s taciturn, vague, dropping random clues, giving only broad hints.

Sabbath-keeping is more art than science. It is more poetry than arithmetic. It is something we get a knack for more than memorize procedures about. It is like painting: Done by numbers, it comes off stiff and blotchy. But done with discipline and imagination and passion, it both captures and enhances life.

Isaiah sets up an odd tension that reinforces that more-art-than-science nature of Sabbath-keeping:

“If you keep your feet from breaking the Sabbath
and from doing as you please on my holy day,
if you call the Sabbath a delight
and the LORD’s holy day honorable,
and if you honor it by not going your own way
and not doing as you please or speaking idle words,
then you will find your joy in the LORD,
and I will cause you to ride on the heights of the land
and to feast on the inheritance of your father Jacob.”
The mouth of the LORD has spoken. (Isaiah 58:13–14)

If you do not go your own way, you will find your joy. We keep Sabbath by both a refusal and a pursuit: we refuse to go our own way, and yet we pursue our own joy. Legalism wants to name, in every jot and tittle, both that refusal and that pursuit. It seeks to pinpoint the precise nature of what we’re to shun and what we’re to run after.

But God leaves such things unspoken.

Yet clearly, doing as we please, going our own way, is not the same thing as finding our joy. These, in fact, are opposites.

Most of us know this already.

We know that when we do as we please and go our own way, we often as not court misery. We demand our inheritance, squander it, and end up in a pigpen, hungry and spent. This is one of the largest ironies and mysteries of being human: we insist, with pride and stubbornness, on getting our own way, even when that way plunders us wholesale. Paul describes it this way: “For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. . . . For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war . . .” (Rom. 7:18–19, 22–23).

Sabbath rest is negotiated in that space between not getting or going our own way and finding our true joy.

I discovered that in my postgraduate year of university. I began then to visit my wife’s ailing grandma Christie. I knew Grandma Christie—Jean Christie—only when she was old, her hair downy fine and bluish white, her skin creased and fragile like crepe paper. I had never known the hearty, wise, fierce, shrewd, tender woman my wife and her cousins described. I knew Jean only in her decline.

The Alzheimer’s that would finally ruin her mind was already eroding its edges, making it hard for her to remember simple facts, pull up common words. She was sweet—not cloyingly so but sweet like a fall apple, and with just enough of the Scottish Calvinist crispness of her upbringing still in her to know the sweetness wasn’t to be presumed upon. She was the family matriarch, indulged and revered by her eight children and many grandchildren, and increasingly her great-grandchildren.

So it was hard for many of them to watch her fail. Her memory got rapidly worse. She spun off into long, garbled soliloquies, involving people and places she must have known years before, in the old country. They were just strangers and rumors to everyone else. Her mind was a tottering house haunted by childhood ghosts. She talked almost constantly, a slurry of broken words and jumbled thoughts. She puffed up like raised dough from some new medication and then wizened up like a raisin from loss of appetite.

So the family did the hard thing and placed her in a care facility— just to get some meat on her bones, and then she’d move back. In the meantime Cheryl and I, newly married, moved into Grandma Christie’s town house, to tend it in her absence.

She never came back. She deteriorated. Her memory darkened or went snowy blank—however these things happen—and she fell mostly silent. She barely ate. Her skin sank into her bones.

It was around then I had a deep conviction that I was to visit her, weekly. I can’t remember who else visited her regularly. I had only the conviction that I was to do so. But I didn’t want to go. I had been a few times before, with Cheryl, and it scared me: the ward’s biting smell of urine that no amount of scouring with bleach could expunge, the musty old man with the blighted eye, cursing Germans, the woman tied to her wheelchair, haggard and brambly haired, who clutched a life-size baby doll and made a shrill and spooky sound like an infant crying. The nurses were gruff and imperious, tired of what was, in effect, a room full of large and unkempt toddlers who needed feeding, changing, bathing, chasing down, cleaning up after, breaking up squabbles among.

This is where Jean was, bedridden.

I had to force myself to go at first. If I hadn’t the deep conviction, the sense that God was asking me to do this, I wouldn’t have done it for anything. Even then, I made excuses, begged off the first day I intended to go on some minor distraction. But finally I tightened my resolve, and I went. After that, I went almost every week.

And liked it. Loved it, even. It got so it was one of the highlights of my week (there was also playing hockey late Sunday nights, and every Friday morning treating myself, upon a 7:30 arrival on campus, to a large coffee and a gooey cinnamon bun warm from the oven in the student cafeteria). But seeing Jean was one of the things I looked forward to most. It was good to be able to put my books aside, step out into fresh air, drive to the hospital, and find Jean where I’d last seen her, in her bed by the window. She was completely silent now, only a thin Mona Lisa smile on her face and a faraway gaze in her pale blue eyes. I discovered what people so often do in situations like this: that I began going for her sake, but kept going for my own. I went, in sheer obedience, to be a blessing—and ended up receiving one. I would return from my time with her feeling as though I had entertained angels.

Jean died the year Cheryl and I moved away. The family asked me to do the funeral, which was an honor deeper than any of them knew. There were many eulogies from her children and grandchildren. I was surprised by much of what they said. They talked about a woman I didn’t know, never had the pleasure of meeting—a woman young, spry, feisty, frugal with money, spendthrift in everything else.

I knew only a woman frail and quiet, a woman, I think, content just to wait. She was a woman who heard things, things no one else had ears to hear. She was a woman whose eyes shone and grew clear when you spoke her name but otherwise had in them the mist of a thousand miles. She was a woman whose lips crimped in the way people’s do when they know a good secret but aren’t letting on.

Visiting her that first time, I had to fight against doing as I pleased. I had to resist going my own way. If I’d done that, gone there, I’d never have visited Jean. But I obeyed what I believed God told me to do.

And there, in the most unlikely place, I found my joy.

That’s a long story to make a brief point: that Sabbath-keeping is grounded in a stark refusal we make to ourselves (“It is a sabbath of rest,” Leviticus 16:31 says, “and you must deny yourselves”). We stand ourselves down. We resist that which six days of coming and going, pushing and pulling, dodging and weaving, fighting and defending have bred into us. What we deny ourselves is all our well-trained impulses to get and to spend and to make and to master. This day, we go in a direction we’re unaccustomed to, unfamiliar with, that the other six days have made to seem unnatural to us. We do this, this traveling in the opposite direction, maybe for no higher reason at first than that God told us to do it.

But joy is found here. The time you spend playing soccer with your children, or antique-shopping with your spouse, that you otherwise might have spent writing memos for Monday morning or scrubbing walls for your in-laws’ visit next week—that time turns out to be a blessing as much for you, maybe more, than for them.

The law of Sabbath is not legalistic. It is a command given to save us from ourselves. If anything, the Sabbath command breaks us out of the prison of our own selfishness: it undoes our legalistic bent to go our own way.

One evening I was preparing for a trip that I had to take the following morning. Cheryl was out, and it was my job to get the girls in bed. I was grumpy about that. I wanted to rush them through their bedtime routines. I was legalistically bound to my own timetable. That’s what I wanted: to go my own way, please myself.

“Read us a story, Dad.”

I had no intention of reading them a story. I was too busy. I had too many things to do. I got them a snack and told them to brush up, get in bed, go to sleep.

“Please, Dad.”

I stopped. I slowed.

I went in the other direction.

“You girls want a story?”

“Yes!”

“Which one?”

“You choose!”

So I went to their room and looked at the books. I have my favorites: Max Lucado’s Just in Case You Ever Wonder, Phoebe Gilman’s Something from Nothing, Robert Munsch’s Love You Forever, Margery Williams’s The Velveteen Rabbit, a few others. The girls always expect me to pick one of these when they give me the choice.

But something else caught my eye: Dr. Seuss’s Mr. Brown Can MOO! Can You?, a primer for very young children, children who are a long way off from reading on their own, who are just beginning to explore the world of sounds. My girls outgrew this book years back.

I picked it and hid it behind my back—our routine when I choose the book, so they have to guess which one I’ve got. They went through the usual suspects. No, no, no, no. I started laughing, couldn’t stop. I pulled the book out from behind my back, and they laughed too.

“Sit up straight, children. We’re going to read.” So, with Sarah on my left and Nicola on my right, we began: “Oh, the wonderful things Mr. Brown can do! He can go like a cow. He can go MOO MOO. Mr. Brown can do it. How about you?”³ And then, laughing hard enough to cry, we all let out bullhorn rumbles of long, cacophonous moos.

On it went: squeaking like shoes, buzzing like bees, sizzling like sausage, whispering like the flap of butterfly wings. We laughed the whole way through.

They went to bed happy, and I got on with my work, happy myself, and productive. I finished in plenty of time.

The next morning I was downstairs reading my Bible when the girls awoke. I heard their footfalls on the floor above me. I heard them go into the kitchen and their mother greet them, ask what they wanted for breakfast.

And then I heard something that filled me with wonder. It filled me with joy. My two girls, Sarah, Nicola, sat at the table and mooed like Mr. Brown, then fell into a fit of giggles.

And to think I almost went my own way and missed that.