I have just returned from a 3-month sabbatical. A sabbatical is intended to be the gift of an extended time of rest and re-creation, usually once every 7 years or so, which is offered within the terms of my role as an ordained minister. I’m hugely aware precious, privileged thing a sabbatical is. Something that the vast majority of people in employment can only dream of. So in that there is perhaps a pressure to ‘make the most of it’
My employer is likewise keen to ensure I ’make the most of it’. Church employers these days recast the sabbatical as something snappy like ‘extended ministerial development leave’. Which leaves you in no doubt what this is about, and puts a certain amount of pressure on you to make sure that that is achieved. I therefore filled out the form from my own CofE Diocese with the plan I had made for how I was going to use these 3 precious months. I felt pretty happy with what I’d come up with and, having gained agreement from my Diocese, set about making arrangements.
However, an unease was growing in me. I began to feel that I was going to be just as busy in sabbatical achieving all my personal development goals as I was during my usual work. I reflected that many of the things I had planned to do, visits here and there to explore ideas with people, were things I might justifiably be doing in my normal working time. What is a sabbatical? Is it just that time where we catch up on all those important/non-urgent things we might do but didn’t have time?
So I ditched the whole thing! (Sorry Bishop!) And, following a conversation with my spiritual director, decided that my sabbatical was fundamentally about walking into the wilderness. It was about letting go of everything and putting myself quite deliberately in a place of desolation and need. Within that space my diary stopped its insistence that I was clearly doing useful and important things by the nature of its clutteredness. Within that space I sought only to attend to what God might offer – how God might lead me through the wilderness and out the other side.
The root of sabbatical is of course Sabbath. A sabbatical is an extended Sabbath. It is a rest from the agenda of work. And from the personal agenda and agency of work. Let’s face it, those of us who minister as a profession like to think we are doing the Lord’s work, but how much are we really just doing our own? I guess part of the gift of Sabbath (and it is primarily a gift in creation) is in finding out the extent to which we have made ourselves little gods and put our own agendas in place of God’s. Sabbath is about reacquainting ourselves with the ‘God who is God’.
But I think this extended Sabbath has been for me an invitation in a deep truth that God is the God of time. Modernity wrested time out of the sacred and put it to work. Clocks moved from the monastery to the marketplace. Time moved from a being a creature to a commodity. The accelerated nature of the modern world has made our diaries/digital planners etc. the keepers of time. And so life is lived forward within a fierce framework of time laid out for us by our agenda and schedules, and the agenda and schedules of others. Common to both is a underlaying value in the precious resource of time, which must be spent wisely. Time must be made to count. We must measure our days. Time must not be wasted.
There were times during my sabbatical when I felt guilty about my lack of agenda, my lack of plan. A deep sense I was wasting time. But into the wilderness a path began to emerge. Encounters with people. Invitations to stay at places and meet people I would not have done otherwise. Connections were made and themes emerged from conversations and experiences which could only have done so in such an unplanned space. Providence took the lead. Incidences of ‘serendipity’ became common. And as I emerged from the wilderness I looked back. I spent a morning prayerfully reflecting on all that had happened. I tried to describe its richness and gift – to give shape and form to my experience. All of this was gift. Surprise. Grace. And I found myself asking, what if we lived more or our lives backwards? What if life was less planned and more ‘found’? What would a diary look like that trusted in the God of time? That trusted the fruit of our ministry as not so much in making things happen, but giving space for the kind of happenings that are the life of God?
His Light Material 