If work and play are two separate things, then work is when we earn and play is when we spend. That understanding encourages endless work, or at least as much as we can force on ourselves. But we know how work creates but also depletes; how play spends but also replenishes. In fact, work and play are parts of a single whole; they spin together:
Click here to watch a video of this sermon
In Unitarian Universalism our church year begins in September and ends in June, leaving July and August for what, exactly?
If we were a Christian church our church year would begin in December, or late November with the season of Advent. Advent begins the year by preparing for the birth of Christ. Then, after the church has spent a year tracing the whole Christian salvation story, Advent ends the year with preparation for the expected return of Christ at the Last Judgment. Advent loops the end of the story back to the beginning again.
If we were a Jewish congregation, our year would begin in early October or late September, with a holiday called Simchat Torah. Every year, Jewish congregations read the entire Torah, the first five books of the Bible. During the service of Simchat Torah they finish the annual reading, and then roll back the scroll to the beginning and start to read again.
In Islamic congregations, the religious year aligns with the first day of the Islamic calendar year: the first day of the month of Muharram, which this year will begin after sundown on July 29. The date moves up 11 days every year following a lunar rather than solar calendar.
In pagan religions the new year starts on February 2, which was celebrated as the first day of spring in Northern Europe. Pagans call the holiday Imbolc. Christians adopted the holiday as Candlemas. In America we know the holiday as Groundhog Day.
But in Unitarian Universalism, if you’re looking to celebrate the new year, the holiday comes in September, the Sunday after Labor Day, the service we call Ingathering, the first Sunday of a new church year.
Our church year runs from September through June. And then, in July and August, our churches traditionally take a break. Until about 40 years ago many of our churches actually closed for the summer months. Many of our church members were teachers and professors who were used to taking summer vacations. Our churches mirrored the school schedule.
And though we no longer close, it’s still our rhythm to honor the months of July and August as having their own character. Our summer programming is more casual, often lay-led. Rather than eliding the end of one church year directly to the beginning of the next, as other religions do, Unitarian Universalists take a breath between the end of one church year in June, and the start of the next, in September.
Find a stillness, hold a stillness, let the stillness carry me.
Find the silence, hold the silence, let the silence carry me.
Most spiritual traditions know the importance of rest, of course. It is from the Torah that we get the commandment to honor the Sabbath, the fourth commandment in the Jewish numbering, the third commandment for Christians. I like to think of our Unitarian Universalist summer break as our annual sabbath. Just as Saturday is a weekly Sabbath for Jews, we have an annual Sabbath: 10 months of work, two months of rest.
Our summer rest doesn’t mean that our spiritual task is forgotten for two months. Rather, our annual break reminds us that resting is a part of work. A healthy spirit needs both work and rest, just as a healthy physical body needs both work and rest. The Jewish Sabbath isn’t a time off from faith, it’s a holy day, the holiest of the week. It’s time off from one sort of work, to do mportant work of a different kind. This is a rest that is a kind of work. A Sabbath work that requires rest. Many of the ten commandments tell us to stop doing something, “Thou Shalt Not.” The fourth commandment tells us to do something: Honor the Sabbath. It’s a spiritual work assignment. A job description. A holy task we are charged to complete. Thou Shalt Rest.
In the Jewish Sabbath, and in our Unitarian Universalist annual sabbath, work and rest co-mingle. In summer we ease off our regularly programming so we can do the other spiritual work of resting up from the year just finished and preparing for the year to come.
We come together this morning to remind one another
To rest for a moment on the forming edge of our lives,
To resist the headlong tumble into the next moment,
Until we claim for ourselves awareness and gratitude,
That’s important spiritual work. But it’s also rest.
Because we think of work and rest as two different modes of being, we grudgingly give the bulk of our lives to work, while requiring a divine reminder to reserve time for rest. (There is no commandment to work, after all; it’s only resting that needs the authorization of God). Thinking this way, that work and rest are exclusive spheres makes thinking of the Sabbath as a time for work, of a spiritual nature, feels like a paradox.
But it really isn’t.
Because work and rest aren’t really divided into the neat little packages that we treat them as. Spiritual health comes when we understand that resting is a necessary part of work. And once we understand rest as a kind of work, we can accept the corollary, that our work, to be healthy, must be restful.
My husband has been watching a TV show on Apple TV called Severance. You may have seen it or heard about it. Severance just received 14 Emmy nominations, including for outstanding drama series. So most people admire it. I found it so annoying I quit after the second episode and let Jim watch the rest without me.
It’s a science fiction show. And like all science fiction the premise arises from a real life issue and then asks, “What if?” What if we created a world where reality was set up differently, where this present issue was solved in a new way? Then the fiction tells us what happens under these new rules.
In Severance, the issue at hand is what we call the Work/Life balance. We humans, in our current reality, fret a lot about the work/life balance. Are we burning ourselves out because we work too much? Do we stay too late at the office? Is even a 40-hour work week too much to be healthy and we should legally shorten the work-week? We check email late in the evening when we should be relaxing. We’re available by text 24/7, even when we’re lying on a beach somewhere sipping a Pina Colada.
We carry work around with us constantly. We’re always thinking about work. Working from home during COVID has made work encroach further into the whole of our lives. We’re stressed out and exhausted and our constant working leaves no room for the abundant pleasures of living. Life coaches tell us to attend to our work/life balance, but it’s impossible to balance when one side is so heavy and the other so light.
So Severance, the TV show, imagines a reality, where it’s possible to entirely sever your home-self from your work-self. A sort of mental switch can be inserted into the brain so that when you’re at work you’re just at work, with no knowledge of any life outside work. Work is your whole life, for one version of you.
And then, at the end of the day, as you leave the office, the mental switch resets, and now you have no knowledge of your work-self, and you’re just your home self. You have your friends, and your family, and whatever you do for fun. It’s impossible to do any work at home because you don’t even know what work you do. You just rest, not by commandment but by science, until the next morning when you drive to the office and switch back to work mode.
Ingenious, right?
But think about it for about two minutes.
Would you sign up for the Severance procedure?
I never would.
What kind of home life would you have if you could never talk about what you did at work that day? Not simply that you can’t talk about it, like if you worked in some top-secret facility, but you literally have no knowledge of how you spent your day since you left home that morning.
Wouldn’t your life feel not liberated but diminished? No sense of accomplishment. No sense of pride and satisfaction. No office gossip to share. Eight hours of your life just vanished.
And the reverse true, also. You arrive at work exactly as you left the day before. You haven’t spent the evening mulling over an interesting problem. You didn’t wake suddenly at 3am with a flash of inspiration. You had no conversation with a friend, or minister, that gave you a new way of looking at things. You have no connection to an outside world that gives you context for your work. It’s just the same people you see every work day, every one of whom is just as ignorant as you are about the larger world that gives our work meaning.
In the world of Severance, the workers arrive at work physically rested, because they actually did have a good long rest at home. But spiritually, and mentally, they’re just the same as they were at 5pm the night before, no stories to tell, no jokes to share, no excitement, no enthusiasm, no inspiration, and no plans, except to keep doing this work the rest of their life.
And for their home-selves, well, the severed workers do get a real night off every night. No checking email at 11pm. But they come home physically exhausted from work, just as before, only now with no sense of why. Maybe they filed tax returns for eight hours, or wrote research reports, or trained new hires, or cleaned bathrooms. Maybe it’s a job they love, but wouldn’t it be nice to enjoy the satisfaction of a good day’s work during a quiet evening at home? Or maybe it’s a job they hate, but now they’ll never know they should be looking for a new one.
The problem with the premise of Severance, the TV show, is that it takes literally and then makes literal, that slash in the middle of the phrase “Work/life balance.” But in truth our working and our resting are not so neatly severed. We need rest to recover from work, benefitting our home-selves, but rest also improves our working by stocking us up with inspiration, insight, and creativity. And we need good work to give our away-from-work selves a satisfying sense of pride while we enjoy our rest.
If we feel exhausted and burned out from work and don’t have time for our families or to do the things we really love, that’s not a “work/life” problem, that’s simply a work problem.
And if our “work/life” language is telling us that life is something that happens separate from work, then of course we’re going to feel miserable at work.
But life is not balanced against work. Work is balanced with rest, or play, or vacation, not with life. Life includes our rest and our work. If our lives are to be fulfilling, satisfying, healthy, then both work and rest must be fulfilling, satisfying, healthy.
And although I’ve been talking about work in the context of Severance, where people have office jobs, I mean other kinds of work, too, and retired people as well.
I saw an article recently about retirement planning where the author of the article says that the problem he sees with most retirement plans is that people carefully plan for their financial needs, but not for their needs of meaning and purpose, formerly filled by their work. The need to feel that one is appropriately using one’s gifts and making a meaningful contribution to our world and the lives of others doesn’t end merely because our time for paid work is over. We still need to give out, because giving out feels good. We want to feel useful, and valuable. Working and not working.
The balance we actually seek isn’t between work and life, but rather a balance between two kinds of living. In one mode of life we are building energy, gathering resources, increasing capacity. In the other mode of life we are giving out energy, depleting resources, using up capacity. If we’re constantly giving out more than we’re taking in we burn out, we’re out of balance.
But which of those energy modes is work and which is rest?
It seems to me, at least ideally, it’s both. They’re both, both.
Work perhaps feels most like a time of giving out, but work also brings in: satisfaction, pride, a since of purpose, self-worth, the necessity of feeling useful, the respect of others, friendship among our co-workers, not to mention earning a paycheck. Vacation feels like a regathering of resources, but who hasn’t come back from a trip feeling more tired than when we left?
At work we have experiences and learn ideas, and create relationships, which enlarge the rest of our life. At home we have experiences, learn ideas, and create relationships which enlarge our work. One feeds from the other, but each also nourishes the other. Rest gives us spiritually important dividends of fun, family, maybe adventure or beauty. Work gives us spiritually important dividends of purpose, pride, accomplishment, meaning. All are necessary to creating fulfilling, satisfying, healthy, lives.
On Monday, I returned from a lovely, big, vacation-trip to Europe. Jim and I were in Venice, Florence, Rome, and London, for three weeks. We had planned our trip two years ago around the every-other-year international art festival called the Biennale in Venice. And then COVID forced the Biennale to reschedule from last year to this, so we had to wait another year. This year we finally got to go.
We saw wonderful art, ate wonderful food, saw foreign cities, enjoyed the magic of Venice, experienced the history of Rome. Went to the opera in Venice and London, and more theater in London.
We refreshed ourselves, which is what vacations are for, and we exhausted ourselves. We got away from our usual work, both of us, but not really from our greater work, which is a part of our lives. I walked through a lot of churches and looked at a lot of paintings with religious subjects. I thought about the spiritual needs of congregation and mulled ideas for my preaching. And for my husband, who teaches world history, what could be more central to his work then walking through the cities of the Roman Emperors, and the Popes, and the Medicis?
Work and rest are not two separate spheres. They mingle and interweave and dance together. If we’re feeling burned out and exhausted it may be that we need not longer vacations but better work. Work that matches our gifts and serves the world. Rest that refreshes and invigorates. Work that refreshes and invigorates. Rest that matches our gifts and serves the world.
Until, at last, we realize we aren’t managing any kind of balancing at all, but simply living: healthy, satisfying, fulfilling – life.