Technology, Sabbath, and Trinity Sunday
This piece was originally written on May 27th, Trinity Sunday in the Christian liturgical calendar.
One of literature’s jewels, Ray Bradbury’s short story The Murderer (1953) [1], describes a psychiatrist living in the not-too-distant future who interviews a prisoner sentenced to six months of solitary confinement. According to the state, the prisoner is a violent criminal with mental health problems. His crime? He destroyed electronic devices. Tired from the undying noise of ambient music, radio watches, telephone calls, intercom messages, and interactive home technology, he decided to strike out, seeking the relief of silence. Without spoiling too many of the details for the reader, the “criminal” champions the need for genuine human experience above the sea of digital hustle-bustle. He stands up against the endless slipstream of unimpeded information, the crooked order of technology addiction, waving the banner of sweet silence.
Although written 65 years ago, The Murderer is prophetic of our current societal trajectory. The patient’s acts champion not only the need for limits in technology usage, they are symbolic of a larger pattern: we humans often find ourselves entangled in the things we make, and there is great need for us to center ourselves around what is natural. This can be glimpsed in moments of burnout, when life seems to us an endless and meaningless toil, like a great cloud of biting mosquitos that cannot be swatted away. “When will the busywork end?” “How can I ensure I keep my job for another year?” “Will my GPA be good enough?” “What do I have to do to avoid making a person not like me?” “Why is there always traffic?” “Why won’t my ex- text me back?” “When will my debt go away?” “Will my family ever stop fighting?” Times like these, when no relief is in sight, can pull us deeper into the vortex of restless anxiety. Yet they can also light our path toward the liberty of rest.
From the restless gyre which consumes much of human life, we learn of that which is good and lifegiving, that it is thoroughly unlike the churning, billowing seas. Goodness is not a loud alarm clock, nor is it a driver close on one’s tail. Goodness does not erratically jolt us with anxiety-laden text-tones at all hours of the day, nor does it secretly stare over our shoulder with performance evaluations. Goodness knows not of hurry nor of worry, and it feels no need to bark for our attention. One might say that goodness is more like a gentle St. Bernard than a yippy Chihuahua. Goodness is peaceful and giving, like a cold glass of water on a hot day. Goodness is patient and kind, a listening ear to a sad heart. Goodness is a hammock: just as the ropes and fabric conform to our bodies, so too goodness interacts upon our nature with gentleness. Indeed, Christ has said, “Come to me all you who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly of heart. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”[2] These words conjure an image of cattle fatigued from excessive plowing, perhaps driven at an unreasonable pace and bearing an uncomfortable yoke.
Every soul needs to replenish itself with regular sleep and pause, for hard work will kill a man(metaphorically and literally) if left unbridled. Sabbath, the day of rest in the Judeo-Christian work week, can be far more than a discipline when seen as a hammock of goodness. Sabbath comes from the Hebrew word “shabath,” which means “to cease.”[3] It is used in the Bible when on the seventh day of creation, God, seeing that all he had made was very good, ceased from his creative labors and commemorated the day. In this context, Sabbath is a day of blessing, wonder, and tranquility, a fountainhead of rejuvenation and recreation to admire and remember what God has done.
Amid the chaos of life, sabbath is an interim opportunity for communing with goodness, a window of a world where restlessness is dethroned. It is the exhale of relief at the end of a busy work week and the inhale of energy at the beginning of the next. Sabbath, when used properly, becomes the defining centerpiece of the week, the undertone for all of human labor.
In contrast to the way of anxiety, the way of rest is not sporadic, demanding, or competitive. The way of rest has a constant, quiet, and inclusive nature. To enter into the rest of goodness, one is not required to sweat and toil, building something great, for rest cannot be bought by great effort; neither can it be lost through poor effort—-goodness exists in a fundamentally different economy. It is not fighting for a time and place, it is not manufactured or earned: goodness is an endless gift. One can always dip into its placid waters and drink.
Now love is the very source of goodness. Love is in all that is good, and all that is good belongs to love. Everything good is an extension of love. Perfect, unconditional love is not manufactured or earned—-it is given in constancy. Yet, because love gives, a source is denoted. Something must exist to give the gift. Two now exist in love: the source and the sent. Love also is an act, a process whereby the source gives the sent. So now three exist in love: the source, the sent, and the act of sending. Yet each of these are contained in the sent, for to say that something is loving—-that something has an endless gift-like quality—-is to imply that love was given from someone, as something, and through some act. The three forms of love, giver, gift, and act of giving, are all encapsulated in the gift of love.
Another property of love is that it is unifying. One cannot provide an example of something that is loving where multiple things or persons are not brought closer together. Yet love unifies in a way that transcends substitution. Two lovers seeking to grow into perfect oneness will eventually find they cannot achieve it without embracing their differences, for it is a largely irrevocable fact that they are distinct in many ways. A marriage characterized by only one personality is deemed unhealthy, whereas a perfect marriage is not such that two persons are dissolved into one, but such that the two are wrapped together into a greater whole. A union demanding sameness is too weak to contain the energy of difference; perfect union preserves plurality.
Supposing that the St. John the Apostle was correct to say, “God is love,”[4] then there are three forms of God: a giver, a gift, and an act of giving, which are all fully embodied in the gift. In other words, a Father, a Son, and a Holy Spirit, which are all fully embodied in the Son. As love has three forms and one substance, so does God. And this is beyond contradiction, for love embraces difference in its unification. The Father, the Son, and the Spirit all are bound to each other in love. This is exactly what orthodox Christian tradition has upheld through the centuries. The authors of the Nicene Creed said of the Son,
“We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God,
begotten, not made,
of one Being with the Father.
Through him all things were made.
For us and for our salvation
he came down from heaven;
by the power of the Holy Spirit
he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary,
and was made man.” [5]
In this, it is clearly claimed that Jesus is united to God and is the fullness of God: he is "one Lord," "the only Son of God," "God from God," "true God from true God," and "of one Being with the Father." The creed also speaks to the problem of earthly suffering and how God addresses it, although it may not be apparent on the surface. To say that Christ is eternally begotten is to say that he is an endless gift of love, the river of all goodness. It is also to say that whatever lacks this eternal, begotten quality is somehow apart from goodness. Thus, evil is marked by an anxious manufacturing, rather than an endless gifting.
In light of this dichotomy, it becomes apparent the story of human depravity is embedded in the creed. The world being made through Christ implies his goodness has been imprinted on everything, that love marks all things. However, an anxious clamor has taken hold on the world, one which is decisively different from the peace of the eternally begotten, the rest of the endless gift: humans make things and get ensnared by them.[6] Sabbath’s quiet has been forgotten and in its place a great, tiresome noise has filled the airwaves. So, God enters the world, simultaneously through the way of divine gift, “by the power of the Holy Spirit he became incarnate of the Virgin Mary,” and the way of human making, “and was made man."
The two aspects of Christ's incarnation, giving and making, were in complete harmony: God gave his Son to humanity, and God made his Son a human. Being conceived in a virgin's womb, being conceived by the power of God, and the phrase "became incarnate" all evoke a breath-like quality, that Jesus came to humanity through an act of divine love. On the other hand, the word "made" hearkens to the nature of human life, that we are plagued by restless making. Yet "make" does not reduce humanity or "making" to evil. For God could not both be good and make the Son a human if either making or humanity were essentially evil. God's act of making himself a human, of subjecting himself to human nature, was an act that did not lack the rest of goodness.
How did he do this? Unlike the destructive manifestations of human nature, God did not become ensnared by his making. Earlier I commented that Ray Bradbury's fictitious, digitally-addicted society pointed to a larger trend: that we humans often find ourselves entangled in the things we make, and there is great need for us to center ourselves around what is natural. The problem with human nature----the problem that causes all the ills and evils in humanity----is that we act and create in a way that does not conform to our nature, that we fail to facilitate how we naturally operate. It is a problem of ergonomics (ergonomics is derived from the Greek words "ergos" and "nomos," meaning "work" and "law," respectively). An ergonomic chair conforms to our body, but our words, devices, and behaviors often do not conform to our nature. The things we make are unergonomic, and therefore we feel entangled by them. To have peace, then, we must speak, create, and act in a way that honors the fullness of ourselves. We must make things that reflect our true nature, our fullness. The need we have for harmony between making and gifting can only be resolved if our making perfectly reflects ourselves. So, if Jesus were a perfect reflection of God, it would be possible for God's act of making himself human to possess the rest of goodness. Thereby, his making was an outflowing of love; in him, work has the quality of an endless gift.
Because both natures of life, divine and human, are harmoniously wrapped together in Jesus, he is an open door between the way of the endless gift and the way of the manufactured life. He himself is the sabbath our souls crave, and through him alone can we reenter the rest of goodness. His descension from heaven to earth is “For us and for our salvation.” It follows that the Church and everything good in the world are the very extension of love’s being, and that Jesus is continually seeking to take things and persons damaged by the throngs and fetters of anxious clamor, include them into the family of God, and heal them.
Today, on Trinity Sunday, we recognize that through Jesus, the Holy Trinity is wrapping the world up into himself, and he brings the relief of silent, uncreated bliss.
In short, from the troublesome toil of life, we learn that goodness, in contrast, is calm and constant. If love is the giver of all that is good in the world, then love also is calm and constant----it has the quality of an endless gift, not a thing that is made but a thing that is given. Love has three forms: giver, gift, and act of giving, which are all fully contained in the endless gift, and so does God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, which are all fully contained in the eternally begotten Son, precisely what is upheld by the Nicene Creed. Jesus rescues us from the stressful uproar of this world; he is a champion who destroys the devices that beset us and seals to us the rest of love's silence.
[1] Bradbury, Ray. The Murderer (1953).
[2] Matthew 11:28-30
[3] http://lexiconcordance.com/hebrew/7673.html
[4] 1 John 4:8
[5] The Nicene Creed, public domain.
[6] By "make," I do not merely refer to things we make with our hands; I am speaking to a larger theme of human activity, that everything we do is a "making" of sorts, for everything we say, think, or enact contributes to a story within the history of the cosmos. Whether we know it or not, we are always working toward some purpose, we are always making something.
