My four-month sabbatical begins tomorrow. I still have some emails to send, and some notes to write, and a few other things to attend to, but tomorrow I will turn off my email and suspend my Facebook account and will enter into a time of greater quiet for a while. And even though it will be an adjustment, and I will at times be restless and bored, even, I know that I need this intentional sabbath time.
In a departing post on Facebook I shared these song lyrics by Lucinda Williams (“Passionate Kisses,” made famous by Mary Chapin Carpenter): “pens that won’t run out of ink, and cool quiet and time to think.” That’s what I’m longing for these days—writing with pen and paper rather than with a keyboard, working with old-fashioned tools like a saw and hammer, rather than a cell phone and a laptop. Reading books printed on paper, spending more time out wandering under the wide sky.
I know how fortunate I am to get this sabbatical. And I’m so grateful for everyone who is carrying on, doing their work, being the church, while I’m away. More grateful than I can say. I promise to honor this gift by using it well. I don’t know exactly what that will look like, where this wandering journey might take me, or precisely what I will do on this sabbatical, but this will be figured out along the way. As Antonio Machado wrote, we make the path by walking:
Traveler, your footprints
are the only road, nothing else.
Traveler, there is no road;
you make your own path as you walk.
As you walk, you make your own road,
and when you look back
you see the path
you will never travel again.
Traveler, there is no road;
only a ship's wake on the sea.
On this sabbatical I’m imagining it as a kind of wandering pilgrimage—certainly not a straight or linear path. When I go fishing, I’m happy to make a path to the river, but once I’m there, I’m happy just to wander along the river, seeing what happens. It’s kind of a grownup version of a kid playing in a creek. And who among us couldn’t use some of that?
In these intense days, could it be that some sabbath time—whether that’s time to turn off social media or the news, or time to do something simply because it feeds your soul—could this time away help us to be more present to the challenges of these days? A sabbath, and a sabbatical, is not meant to be an escape, but rather, a going deeper, into one’s self and into the world.
Blessings and peace, my companions. You will be in my heart, and in my prayers, in this time we are apart. Stay safe, and be well. And may you find unexpected blessings in your wandering!
The Yellowstone River in the lower end of its Grand Canyon. A good place for wandering!