welcome September 6, 2004 Issue

Coming Soon! The big rest flip-flop

Warren Bolon

First, the usual sobering factoid: Annual vacations for United States workers are the shortest in the industrialized world—8.1 days after a year on the job (Bureau of Labor Statistics), compared to four to six weeks for Europeans. Even workers in the rising industrial super-colossus China get three weeks off.

Americans work first, rest later, maybe. Some Europeans think they are work-crazy. Some Americans see Europeans as just plain lazy. Neither loony nor slacker himself, author and educator Kirk Jones argues that we need to focus on regaining life's "sacred pace." I agree with Kirk, and he is just as spiritually centered in real life as he looks on our cover, orbited by two of his joyfully spinning children, Joya and Jovonna.

There's something powerful to be learned from the Hebrew word sabbath, which translates literally as intermission—the Creator's creative pause, as opposed to empty pauses in creativity. The even bigger flip-flop idea, though, is the work/rest model presented in the Bible's first creation story (Genesis, chapter 1 and the first few lines of chapter 2). Consider the sequence in that recurring phrase: "And the evening and the morning" (were "the first day," "the second day," and so on, through the first six days of creation). Evening, or rest, comes first, and morning's light follows, flows. Creative rest before creative action. God "rested on the seventh day" (and the word rested in Hebrew is the source of its offspring word, sabbath). Perhaps evening and morning are not so much segments of the day as they are complementary phases of Love's sustaining energy.

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