Things slow down in the summer months, and all our lives are touched by this welcome change of pace. The arrival of the season may herald the end of academic classes—bringing with it more precious time with children and grandchildren. It may mark a season of office vacations or adjusted summer schedules, or simply a spirit of reprieve and relaxation in the long days of the year’s most hospitable months. Less frequently, though, does summer’s rest prompt reflection on its meaning. One 20th-century philosopher argued, in an influential book, that leisure is the very basis of culture, that feasts and festivals aren’t mere luxuries. Rather, they reveal essential truths about the human condition, and the meaning of our precious, counted days which are usually so consumed with activities and obligations.
While our intuitions might confirm this argument, it remains necessary to pose directly the question that our hunches raise: what, after all, is rest? Just as peace is not simply the absence of war, the notion of rest—as it emerges in the most ancient text of the Western tradition—is not just a name for the recovery that follows exertion, an instrumental interruption that enables further effort. To identify the true character of rest, we must clarify, first, its connection to work.
Two very different kind of productive activity are to be found in Genesis. The most relevant to any discussion of work and rest is the postlapsarian imposition of toil which follows immediately after the fall. Having fractured his spiritual communion with God through disobedience, humanity now needs to sustain himself through the effortful overcoming of nature, just as he now propagates himself only through the painful “labour” of childbirth.
But the pains imposed on humanity’s subsistence and procreation mirror, in a broken and limited way, the second kinds of “work” one finds in Genesis: the blessed, active, and effortless creativity with which this first book of the Bible begins. In God’s creation, the bringing forth of new paradigms of order and existence in ever greater degrees of complexity and complimentarily is always followed by benediction, a recognition of the good that has been achieved. This culminates, of course, in creation’s seventh day, the Sabbath, without which the entire cycle is, in some sense incomplete.
As a unit of time, the week is unique in not being directly connected to cosmic realities such as a diurnal rotation (the day), a lunar cycle (the month), or a solar orbit (a year). One could say, then, that the single act of creation that does occur on (and through) the Lord’s own day of rest, in Genesis, is the establishment of the week itself, that template of human life which is itself modeled on this divine original. While human work after the fall no longer has the effortless, harmonious character of divine creation, the Sabbath retains much of its prelapsarian character because it remains the place where God and man meet.
This, then, is the true meaning of rest: contact with the reality of creation. The achieved fruit of effort is not simply relaxation but liberation, as one becomes free to contemplate the work of one’s hands. Even a child can revel in something as simple as a well-ordered room, and we ourselves know similar satisfaction on larger scales: the cleaned house, the mown lawn, or having bureaucratic matters like bills and taxes and email being finally cleared away. Such achievements give a hint of the contemplation that every human product invites, especially those works of culture which give access to higher realities: to truth and to beauty and the goodness that they represent. Even if we ourselves are not the authors of such immortal works, we can celebrate the re-creation of nature in art, the performance of music and theatre at concerts and plays, and even the achievements of the intellect that we understand through sustained study. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote: “one must be an inventor to read well.”
Contact with the reality of creation—God’s creation—happens most obviously in nature, where the magnificence and magnitude of the world before us, and the starry sky above us, evoke our admiration and awe. The calm and the silence that such contact affords can, initially, feel quite humbling: the felt sense that humans are only a small part of the vast cosmos in which we find ourselves diminishes any pretenses we might have of grandeur or self-importance. And yet, as pacifying and chastening as the “voice” of nature may be, its silence is pregnant with the praise that only man can make. For we are the only part of creation that can contemplate; we alone can burst forth with songs of praise for the beauty that the world possesses, but which it celebrates only in us.
And, as those songs of thanksgiving swell in our hearts and catch in our throats, to Whom do they rise if not God, the Creator of the world’s beauty and bounty? Contact with the reality of ourselves and of our nature, then, ultimately leads us to contact with the reality of God. The rest of the Sabbath, then, is really an invitation to the “work” of praise, in which we find our true rest. In this paradox, the age-old philosophical distinction between being and becoming, of stasis and change, is overcome, and a Trinitarian dynamism between these seemingly opposed modes intervenes. For in the very rhythm of creation and its contemplation that we find in the work-and-rest pattern of Genesis, there is an echo, in the created order, the Divine life of the Triune God: the active, joyful begetting of the Son, and the mutual, beatific embrace in and through the Spirit which they co-equally and co-eternally possess, exchange, and share.
Daily life and its duties are real enough. But in the rest which punctuates our labour, and the contemplation that it affords, one can glimpse higher realities, fuller truths, and touch the ultimate ground on which human life and its rhythms unfold. The summer, then, offers to the year what every Sunday does to the week: a moment in time to step outside of it, and to rest in the knowledge (and the self-knowledge) of God’s creation.
