“Our heart is restless until it finds rest in you.” Augustine.
After years of volunteering and then working at The Hermitage, a contemplative retreat center in Three Rivers, Michigan, I eventually learned that the most important gift we had to offer our guests was rest. I would tell retreatants “It is in rest that we most make ourselves available to God.” Rest is a gift to receive and not a state that can be achieved. In rest, we let go of ambitions and the desire to control and learn to improvise with the Spirit. Silence is often a catalyst to rest.
My 21st century self, however, is trained in anxiety and striving, where rest is a luxury available for purchase by the rich. The capitalist rest they sell is only a tool for you to “recharge” and return as a more effective producer/consumer. My Mennonite self is trained in the virtues of hard-working service, and the sense of never doing enough. Is a well-rested Mennonite an oxymoron?
Tricia Hersey’s wonderful book Rest is Resistance, reminds me that the pinnacle of God’s week of creation is not humanity, but rest. Rest reclaims our bodies and our time from being mere economic tools serving the idol of productivity. “Much of our resistance to rest, sleep, and slowing down is an ego problem. You believe you can and must do it all because of our obsession with individualism and our disconnection to spirituality,” Hersey writes.
As attractive as the gift of rest is, we find it so hard to receive. Our restless hearts are addicted to self-validating busyness. Yet, God continues to extend the gift rest waiting for us to empty and extend our hands. May we learn to value the liberating quality of our rest more than the quantity of our productivity.
Originally published in the Canadian Mennonite