Last month, MHGS had the honor of sponsoring Christianity 21, a conference bringing 21 speakers for 21 ideas to teach for 21 minutes. This year, the conference speakers were all women, offering a unique opportunity to see through the female lens.

Learn more about Christianity 21 here.

What started as a collection of students attempting to express themselves creatively has morphed into a monthly event where both artists and non-artists congregate to experience honest humanity. Andrew Bauman tells the story of Free Form.

Free Form started two years ago in the living room of my house. Its purpose was to fill a hollowness in my creative self and for those around me I suspected felt similar. I knew I was meant to write, to speak, and to listen, yet longed to do it in community with other uncertain artists.

We began gathering together once a month with lots of wine, candles, some notes on napkins and our hearts on our tongues. Every month we would frequently be stunned at the beauty that would be birthed from our labor. The words, rhythms and tunes would move us all. If we came to Free Form at ease, we would leave disrupted, if we entered the space uneasy we would depart in peace.  Something divine has been experienced as we have created together. We somehow find each other, and in this finding we find our God and more pieces of ourselves.

Free Form has now morphed, more people, more beauty and courage, less intimacy and fewer glasses of wine. We have moved to the Green Bean Coffeehouse a non-profit coffeehouse on 85^th and Greenwood Avenue. This move has raised our awareness in the community of Seattle among poets, musicians, storytellers, and dancers alike.  We have many artists from MHGS, from the LGBT community, from the Seattle Poetry Slam, many published authors, accomplished musicians, and those who have written a poem/song for the first time. This space has become church for us all.

One of my favorite examples of this was about 5 months ago when I realized a 65 year old woman was invited up front to tap dance along with two Seattle hip-hop artist who were beat-boxing and rapping to her dance rhythms. It was beautiful.

May God grant us the courage to create in community.

Andrew Bauman is a 3rd year Counseling Psychology student. If you are in the Seattle area you can join him for Free Form, which gathers the last Saturday of every month.

Mars Hill Graduate School is as much a place of self-discovery as a place of encountering other people. Through her studies at MHGS, Jen Grabarczyk was able to embrace her artistry while also discovering the importance of theology and psychology as they intersect with her art.

Jen has recently completed her MACS degree, focusing on the role of the artist in the church and community. In the class and through her art, she offers a contemplative opportunity to interact with a part of her personal spirituality. As a student, Jen challenged students and professors to see what the artist brings to the conversation and has left an indelible mark on how MHGS cares for the artist.

You can see more of Jen’s art work at her personal site, where you can also find out about her art exhibits in the Seattle area.

When my husband and I were engaged, the pastor who married us recommended Mike and I interview couples whose marriages we admire. We asked each person two questions: What have you done well? What would you do differently? We listened intently, hurried back to the car, and transcribed everything we could remember into a notebook which we still have. This exercise turned out to be one of the smartest things we have done as a couple; those reflections have served as signposts in our journey.

Mike and I recently marked one year in Seattle, and we are anticipating him officially finishing his first year at Mars Hill Graduate School next week. In this year of intense transition, I have found myself going back to wisdom from my aunt who, in answer to our engagement questions, emailed us the following: “One of the most fruitful things we’ve done as a couple is to develop rituals. These rhythms of days, months, years have settled us, established us, defined us, united us, protected us. Little daily things and big annual events…You cannot possibly imagine how rich it is for your relationship to move in waves of rituals, which generate happy memories and give you identity, meaning.” If my aunt were using the language of Dan Allender, she would have said that rituals have helped them cleave together.

Developing an identity as a couple, cleaving to your spouse, is one of those core marriage issues. In Marriage and Family last spring, Dan said that to cleave or ”to cling means that you have held on so tight you cannot be broken apart. “ One practice which nurtures that interdependence is the cultivation of ritual and rhythm, concepts that challenge our deadline-driven culture. Rituals shift the question from “What must be done?” to “Who are we?” It’s easy to see why so much of the Law focuses on the traditions and rituals God establishes for his people: it helps keeps them focused on what they are really about.

While it all sounds good, my husband and I have found building rituals and rhythms into our life to be both much harder and much more important than we initially thought. Part of the difficulty stems from very different families of origin: tradition influenced nearly everything my family did—from holidays to Sunday morning—while Mike grew up in a much more autonomous home. I spent my first Thanksgiving with his family wide-eyed and amazed at how different our families functioned. For us, some of our rituals came easily: weekly date night, candles at dinner, cribbage at pubs, “Big Bang Theory” on Monday night television. But many have been hard coming and are still in process. We have found that traditions don’t develop without a significant intentionality on our part.

Yet, it is an intentionality worth pursuing. As Mike and I shape the movement of our life together, we are forced to ask: What do we value as a couple? How does the way we spend our time reflect those values? The answer to those questions anchors us whether in the busyness of everyday life or in the midst of significant upheaval—such as starting the counseling program at Mars Hill Graduate School. Yet through changing circumstances, our rituals remind us of who we are and who we want to be; they serve as a map to help us navigate deadlines, commitments, and expectations. And it is through rhythms of our days, months, and years that we learn how to cling together.

Kristin Mulhern Noblin always likes being a wife and sometimes likes being the wife of an MHGS counseling student. You can read more of her musings at Relief and on her personal blog; when she is not writing, she enjoys seasonal cooking and Seahawks football.

In a recent Essential Community course, students were asked to engage contentious issues such as religion, race, gender, and war. These writings are the fruit of their hard yet unfinished work.

A cursory scan over Amazon.com’s best selling books list over the past few years is telling of the rise of critical assessment of religion. Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris have become popular figures, each publishing bestselling and scathing accounts of what religion has cost humanity. Ironically what they assert is that religion blocks humanity from its humanity, that it stokes the fires of violence, isolation, and impoverishment of mind and soul. While thinkers like Dawkins and Harris have justifiably attacked religious belief for its intellectually stifling nature, we would like to extend their critique beyond the intellectual capping of wonder to a relational suffocation that the world has been suffering under for too long. The weight of humanity is too great, the problems we face too immediate, and our thirsts for beauty and truth too real to continue on this road of imagined self-importance that states that bitter line: “our truth is greater than your truth”. Instead, religion should, at the very least, connect us to our human experience instead of having our nature alienated from us.

The inescapable reality of history is that religion and specifically Christianity has at times caused great harm. The reasons for such acidic attacks of religion are, the rational believer must admit, honestly understandable. Christopher Hitchens, journalist and public intellectual, surmises that there is simply too much at stake to continue under the bondage of a religious master, that he argues, poisons everything. He exclaims that religion forms a concoction of piety and fanaticism that has impeded the forward motion of civilization. Noted atheist Daniel Dennet discusses how religion propels humans toward such a destructive dynamic that it has become imperative to study religion with the same ardor that we use for the natural and social sciences. Dennet writes:

It is high time we subject religion as a global phenomenon to the most intensive multidisciplinary research we can muster, calling on the best minds on the planet. Why? Because religion is too important for us to remain ignorant about. It affects not just our social, political, and economic conflicts, but the very meanings we find in our lives. For many people, probably a majority of the people on Earth, nothing matters more than religion.

Does this mean all is lost? Has the harm of religion truly eclipsed the beauty and goodness of religion? Is it only a force that stifles the wonder inherent to the human mind and heart?  Our hope is that not all is lost but we must acknowledge that perhaps now more than ever, we are bound to each other’s humanity. Religion can become the force that drives us to free ourselves from sectarianism and the fear of tainting our groups with the presence of the “other”. If there is anything that the broken state of the world has begun to teach us is that none of us are invulnerable to the strokes of tragedy and the perils of chance in this world. Religion can inform us of our dependence on each other and help us foster both a local and global identity that builds solidarity based on common humanity. Yet what does this look like? Is reconciliation within religion even possible?

Mutuality, reciprocity, and authenticity are values that have been lost to much of our individualistic, rational society, especially with regard to difference. We find difference threatening and uncomfortable. As Christians, we often struggle to have life-affirming conversations across denominational lines let alone participate in dialogue that encounters different racial and religious identities. Most people, on all sides of the spectrum find conversations like these difficult to pursue.

In response to this antagonism and confusion, German theologian Jürgen Moltmann asks boldy, “Which god motivates Christian faith: the crucified God or the gods of religion, race and class?” Perhaps what is so painful about watching the Christian build walls of division between ethnic, religious, class, or other lines of human demarcation is the despicable irony of it all. Not only are ostracizing and marginalizing actions from Christians antithetical to Christian teaching, it shows, as Thomas Merton writes in Life and Holiness, “…contempt for the humanity for which Christ did not hesitate to die on the cross.” It is hard to read this and not be stunned at the terse truth Merton has made clear. Christ, on the cross, willfully chose to put to rest the viability of all human sin, degradation, and violation. Somehow the beauty of this Gospel message has been lost in the madness of establishing and defending so-called “Christian truths” often at the neglect of the marginalized, the poor, the imprisoned, and the environment, all of whom are God’s creation.

Christ, taking human form is not merely symbolic of God’s recognition of the plight of humanity, but Christ is the living, breathing, bleeding promise of God’s solidarity with humanity at its precise reality here and now. God through Christ initiates this incarnation, or “en-fleshment”, and the invitation is extended to those who would take on the title “follower of Christ”. To be Christian is to continue on as the body of Christ, living incarnationally as Christ had and has. Theologian Ray Anderson continues: “The kenotic community, therefore, cannot be distinguished from the world by splitting the solidarity of all humanity in Christ, and thus cannot take the form of one entity within humanity set against another.” In other words, it is the call of the Christian to counter all social strata and enter into the deep, dark, unknown streams of life and embrace the totality of humanity.

As Christians we believe humanity to be made in the image of the Trinitarian God, an all-embracing, all-encompassing, all-loving God who exists in perichoretic movement between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. What does it mean to see the intrinsic value of life, and the image of God in all the faces we encounter, no matter how different, broken or wounded? After all, as psychologist and spiritual writer Alan Jones writes:

We are what our brothers are. They and we stand and fall together. If they are contemptible so are we. If we are struggling after higher things so are they. One fate; one flesh and one blood; one story; one strife; one glory- this is the underlying secret of humanity.”

What does this encounter look like in practice? Yale Divinity School professor Miroslav Volf has outlined the seedbed of a third way in his work Exclusion and Embrace by demonstrating that we have competing justices between us, which is the cause of much human tension. Yet justice, by its very definition, should be for all peoples, for all time. So we must undertake the work of understanding the mindsets and perspectives of others in order to create a new understanding of what justice- or as Volf would say “God’s justice”, that we must utilize. He encourages us to welcome the voice of the other:

Let it suffice here to note that we enlarge our thinking by letting the voices and perspectives others, especially those with whom we may be in conflict, resonate within ourselves, by allowing them to help us see them, as well as ourselves, from their perspective, and if needed, readjust our perspectives as we take into account their perspectives.”

This means we must follow where Christ lead, in that both the oppressor and the oppressed must acknowledge a need for repentance. Volf’s work calls for the redemption of dignity from all camps of injustice, marginalization, and “otherness”. The oppressor needs to repent for what they have done to their victim, and the betrayal of their own inherent dignity that the act perpetrated. The oppressed need to consider the sin of withholding forgiveness from the oppressor. The notion of radical change being required from all lies at the heart of the Gospel. There are no camps, sides, or oppositions in the Kingdom of God. The crucified God’s arms stretch open like the father of the prodigal, welcoming home enemy and friend alike.

Christianity is not the only voice that shares such ideals and truths. We turn to the Eastern voice of Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, who published Living Buddha, Living Christ. In it he remarks on his peacemaking efforts both during and after the Vietnam War. He recounts the insanity of Christian killing Buddhist, North Vietnamese killing South Vietnamese. Using Psalm 46:10, Thich Nhat Hanh explores how similarly both Christianity and Buddhism are able to exegete the verse, and brings to us the idea of a settled “interbeing”. It is a state of concentration that allows the existence and comprehension of difference. “When we see the nature of interbeing, barriers between ourselves and others are dissolved, and peace, love, and understanding are possible. Whenever there is understanding, compassion is born.” Though it may seem to the more cynical or jaded reader that he speaks in abstract imagery, it shows us that a reasoned and human approach to interfaith dialogue can happen and the spirit the author possesses can move us beyond civility into fraternity.

We see this dialogue happening again through the work of Canadian journalist/advocate and practicing Muslim Irshad Manji. Manji, in the post September 11th era, made it her goal to report on the abundance of good news that came in the form of interfaith services, between Jewish clergy extending their support of marginalized Arabs.  It was the Christian leadership in her native Toronto that contacted her directly, expressing concern for her safety and concern over the fear for her life. It is in this context that Manji writes, in her work The Trouble with Islam Today that love via praxis does not recognize a necessity to mark, analyze, study, or deconstruct the other before acting. It recognizes the human being staring back at itself.

The shared hope found in both of these voices, Buddhist and Muslim, shows how deeply seeded Gospel tendencies are set in hearts around the world, and that we are not as far away from each other as we so often assume. Take also the gentle words of the Dalai Lama who writes:

To reduce hatred and other destructive emotions, you must develop their opposites- compassion and kindness. If you have strong respect from others, then forgiveness much easier. Mainly for the reason that I do not want to harm another. Forgiveness allows you to be in touch with these positive emotions.  This will help with spiritual development.

Consider also Jesus’ words for which we have all heard, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” and how they are far more complicated than they seem. The complexity of religion is in learning how to love when it means loving in difference. Love is most definitely not safe.  Especially in areas that are most precious to you, namely your faith.  It will shake you, maybe you will question what you thought before, and maybe you will change. And how can you not? As Moltmann proclaims:

The art of loving has to be learnt. We learn it through joy in each other, through forgiveness of guilt we experience, and through the continually astonishing miracle of the new beginning. In that ‘wide space where there is no cramping’ we accept one another, grow with one another and unfold from one another. Part of love is friendship, which knows how to combine affection with respect for the other person’s liberty. That means respect for the mystery of the other, and his or her still latent and unrealized potentialities. If love stops, we make a fixed image of each other. We judge and pin each other down. That is death. But love liberates us from these images and keeps the future open for the other person. We have hope for one another, so we wait for one another. That is life.

Any authentic relationship has the capacity to free us into spaces of mutual renewal.  However, without a willingness to risk our dogmas, our comfort, and our individuality, true relationship is nearly impossible with those we love, much less with those who are strikingly different.  Are we willing to risk all, as Christ did, even our faith itself in order to contemplate and hold the voice of the stranger?

Karen Bergquist, from Cincinnati folk-pop band Over the Rhine sings: “Except for this confession that is poised on my lips, I’m not letting go of God. I’m just losing my grip.”  This speaks not of a request to give up God or religion, but to instead loosen our fearful fingers from around our idol of God in order to embrace the other. Spiritual writer and Catholic priest Henri Nouwen writes: “We can only perceive the stranger as an enemy as long as we have something to defend. But when we say, ‘Please enter-my house is your house, my joy is your joy, my sadness is your sadness and my life is your life,’ we have nothing to defend, since we have nothing to lose but all to give.”

One community in Manhattan, Faith House, has attempted to step into this complexity of religious difference by establishing an intentional community where people of different backgrounds and religious philosophies eat, work, and play together. In their mission statement they write:

We want to start a new kind of community in which we can discover The Other (individuals or groups other than those we belong to), deepen our personal and corporate journeys, and together participate in repairing the world. In this endeavor we will honor and learn from teachings, practices, and suffering of people from religions, philosophies, and worldviews, different from our own. Instead of isolating ourselves into like-minded groups or melting together into a single-minded organization, we will learn to live together with our differences and in a way that contributes to the wellbeing, peace, joy, and justice in the world. In this endeavor we will always be a courageous, hospitable and learning community.

The mission of Faith House demonstrates that the movement beyond civility and tolerance does not merely lie in the minds of naïve and starry-eyed peoples. It can lie in the minds, hands, and kitchens of ordinary life. May we continue to find glimpses of these subversive happenings of shared life that transcend the platitudes and niceties that block us from encountering the full humanity of our neighbors.

Religion does have the potential to free us to hear the many voices alive today and it can bring us to places of liberation, embrace, and community. We can no longer accept the violence we inflict on one another because of difference. It is imperative as Christians that we hear these voices and herald religion accordingly- as an agent of healing, welcome, and embrace.

Much of astronomer Carl Sagan’s work in the 1980s came to us as a warning of how so many of our endeavors have lead us not just down paths of folly, much of our doings have lead us, plainly, to death. So we conclude here in the beautiful spirit of that staunch agnostic: we are indeed one planet. Our religions must serve our solidarity and global identity so that we can live out communally in a way that transcends civility and tolerance. In a way that is utterly human. Is that not what Christ came to do? To free us to be ourselves under God? Let us remember, let us hope, and let us live, together.

Written by Stephanie Abram, Rachael Clinton, Tim Tetrault, and  Sara Vander Woude

The MHGS Art Gallery highlights local Seattle artists and offers our school the opportunity to view the world through a new lens. This month’s feature is Kelly Jue’s series, “Saints.”

The artwork that I do is always an expression and overflow of my relationship with the Lord. It is my hope that those who view my work, see and experience something of what the Lord has shown me.

[Show as slideshow]

You can contact Kelly through her email.

In a recent Essential Community course, students were asked to engage contentious issues such as religion, race, gender, and war. These writings are the fruit of their hard yet unfinished work.

We, in the West, experience time linearly in the sense that we look to the future always planning, saving and dreaming- believing that more is better. So we acquire advanced degrees, better jobs, bigger SUV’s, larger homes- and in the getting our hunger becomes all the more insatiable and we again aim higher- what will finally stop us? We focus so one-dimensionally on the future that we spend little time remembering or being. We pretend to own time and forget that it is a gift and in response, time turns its back on us- we feel disconnected and disembodied. Our nutrition and eating habits are divorced from earth cycles; our livelihood has nothing to do with the natural seasons of planting, waiting and harvesting. There is nothing that paces our lives other than the anxious ticking of the clock and the continual onslaught of the work-week followed by evenings or weekends of exhausted dissociation. There is a sense that time mocks us even as it is getting away from us.

The task, oddly, is not to catch up with time or get it back, but to enter into it submissively instead of trying to control it. It seems as though the only spiritual category we know to give us access to a more humane experience of time is the Sabbath. In my Protestant/Evangelical tradition, Sabbath is handled rather loosely for being the fourth member of the Decalogue. I was taught that Jesus had abolished the Sabbath and Sunday replaced it as the Lord’s Day- a day to attend church and “rest.” Most Evangelicals know of Sabbath in two ways. First, we know that it bears deep cultural and historical meaning for the Jews as a day familial celebration and religious ritual. Secondly, we know that it has been legalistically distorted in many traditions that value it, giving us righteous justification for not participating in such a works-oriented and burdensome activity. For us, the true significance of Sabbath is for us theologically remote.

I do not believe the Christian can merely “import” the Sabbath as a spiritual discipline that will “fix” our sense of being overworked and at loss of time. Long ago we lost and no longer have the communal systems and theological categories around the Sabbath that can infuse it with meaning. We need a bridge to give us access to the Sabbath- and for that we turn to the sacrament of time- the Eucharist. But what does the Eucharist have to do with time? And what does the Sabbath have to do with the Eucharist? Our Protestant crisis regarding time is circular- we have an anorexic view of the Eucharist because we have an undefined view of time and we have an undefined experience of time because we have a shallow theology of Eucharist. We need something that times us and our lives so we turn to Sabbath through the only door available and find ourselves seated at a great and good Table.

Theologically, we cannot separate Sabbath from the Lord’s Day yet we find that in many Protestant traditions Sabbath is but a footnote, if that. In order to step towards a theology of Sabbath, we must first note that what is needed is a deepening, widening, or broadening (an increase of meaning) regarding our theology of Eucharist as an eschatological reality.

Two brief personal vignettes. My tradition taught that the Lord’s Supper is about remembrance, yet a cultural sense of the past remained unarticulated. As a child, I was instructed to prepare for Communion by remembering and confessing the sins of the week and acknowledge the action of Christ on my behalf. I remember feeling forgiven yet very much alone as I would eat my neatly parsed cracker and drain my tiny cup of juice. Somehow we are more familiar with remembering in the context of shame and regret than in the category of gratitude, much less joy or delight- we know memory only in the first person and ours is a culture of amnesia.

In Bible College I recall the many intense discussions around the elements; we would try to explain, argue or defend ideas about what “happens” to them. Even the term “the elements” conjures images of Scientists picking apart something natural in order to analyze and understand it. It seems preferable to refer to Christ’s body and blood, as Alexander Schmemann makes a point to do, as “the gifts.” Who tries to understand a gift? It has only to be received. We no longer try to understand- we merely enter and receive because whatever happens “to bread and wine happens because something has, first of all, happened to us, to the Church… we have entered the Eschaton, and are now standing beyond time and space.”

Abraham Heschel speaks of the Sabbath as the window into eternity, even the source of it. When time is entered with such a degree of intentionality and ritual, it allows time past, present and future to become available to the participant in the sense that time opens itself up, or unfolds. In the Jewish tradition, time is seen as thick, layered, rhythmic and eschatological, it opens and closes and every moment is pregnant with promise and possibility. Jewish philosopher, Walter Benjamin once said the reason the Jews were prohibited from investigating the future was because “every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.” For this reason, it can be noted that time is the only thing that we partake of equally. To be preoccupied with time is to be preoccupied with inclusion for not a single moment belongs exclusively to one being- the heart of the Sabbath is communal.

Christian Orthodox theology uses similar language to describe the Eucharist. “In the Eucharist we are standing in the presence of Christ, and like Moses before God, we are to be covered with his glory.” The call to remembrance that is embedded in Christ’s Eucharistic instructions necessarily requires a communal and eschatological perspective. The mysticism of Orthodoxy requires this liturgical practice to be more than merely a symbol- the Eucharist is not the honoring of an event, but rather, the fulfillment of that event in present time. As much as it is an opportunity to contemplate gratefully one’s personal experience of being saved, it is “the sacrament of cosmic remembrance: it is indeed a restoration of love as the very life of the world.” As much as memory may be personal, an act of co-mmemoration is profoundly communal. As we participate in the Eucharist together, “we return each other, in Christ, to God” and enter his love.

A deepening theology of Eucharist will consist of an Orthodox understanding of joy as the primary category through which to engage the Table. Schmemann notes that joy cannot be defined or analyzed, rather, one has only to enter it, and the only way to enter into joy is through “one action which from the beginning has been for the Church both the source and the fulfillment of joy, the very sacrament of joy, the Eucharist.” Similarly, the Sabbath is the structure within time that requests our submission and requires us to let go in order to fully experience its power.

Both the Eucharist and the Sabbath hold as their central themes the deep notion of delight- joyful gratitude in response to the being and action of God on our behalf. Both are invitations to worship, both provide sustenance, both serve as counter-narratives that specifically address the drivenness and consumerism of our society. One author has said of the Eucharist, and I will say the same of the Sabbath, that its celebration “challenges some assumptions of contemporary American society. The demise of regular patterns of family dining in fact diminishes Catholic notions of sacramentality and the way we experience Christ’s presence at the table.”

The Jewish Day of Delight was a festal day, one that admittantly became clouded by tedious ritual in Israel’s post-exilic history that continues to this day, but nonetheless was profoundly connected to the time beyond time when one would feast eternally in and with God. The theological significance contained in the Eucharist for Christians parallels the theological significance of the Sabbath for the Jews because they are so theologically linked through a relationship in time that is no mystery, per se, but that often goes unnoticed. The Eucharist does not replace the Sabbath for Christians; it does however, join it in the category of the eschatological feast, through which the meaning and significance of the Sabbath bursts into Christian theology. Moltmann says plainly that the Lord’s Day (Sunday) does not abolish or supplant the Sabbath- “The Christian feast-day must rather be seen as the messianic extension of Israel’s Sabbath.”

“Time always points to a feast, to a joy, which by itself it cannot give or realize.” There is no question that both the Sabbath and the Eucharist are feast oriented, both propose a rhythm of the practice of communal feasting that is eschatologically unfolding. They move us forward and yet each time we participate, the experience is never the same for it is a rhythm that celebrates difference. Kierkegaard writes about the idea of “non-identical repetition” which David Ford applies to the Eucharist in that it can be understood as a repetition “recollected forwards.” Time in this sense is neither circular nor linear but something of both; time in Sabbath and Eucharist is eschatologically rhythmic and its destination is a feast.

Developing views of the Sabbath understand the command to rest as having more to do with ancient Hebrew notions of delight as opposed to our exhausted and dissociative modern notions of “rest.” Sabbath is far more about the creative engagement of the sensory in community that doesn’t shut us off from others but opens us up to them making possible a more just and sustainable world. For Heschel, it is the intentional engagement of the sensory in the context of feasting and delight that deepens one capacity to feast more deeply in heaven. Keeping the Sabbath is essentially a preparation for the feast of the Kingdom of God- the eternal and inexhaustible feast that “should be anticipated by a wealth of diverse forms of celebration.”

Ritual and repetition are not Evangelical words, in fact we are bored with ritual. We anxiously await the latest fad book around which to construct a sermon series instead of submitting ourselves to the Lectionary. We want new songs because we long ago tired of singing the same old Psalms. We pray our own prayers because the prayers of the Saints are not personal enough. Yet, in our resistance to ritual, we create new ritual because we cannot live without it- it is a most anthropological phenomenon. In fact, it has been suggested that “every time we encounter something that transcends the human person we ‘humanize’ it with ritual.” It is ritual that protects us from “unmediated religious experience.” Ritual and repetition decelerate and delay the numinous so that we are not consumed in the encounter- perhaps we have this to keep in mind when we become bored by the monotony of ritual- we are grateful that it ensures our survival while at the same time we want nothing more than to be consumed by the Divine.

The beauty of ritual is that it is never truly the same. Ford argues that the more “decisively and gloriously” the ritual is completed each time the more it is able to compel us to a deeper and more precise articulation of praise. This is why Kierkegaard is able to say that ‘repetition is always transcendence’ and the by definition, the Eucharist “is the eternal repetition of the great act of love accomplished for us” that forever moves us closer to God. Such is the language of love in that it “remains endlessly unvarying yet it is experienced as fresh and new each time it is spoken.” We move closer to the heart of God, indeed, as Orthodox theology will articulate, the hope of humanity is to be united in Christ and it is the Eucharist that connects us most deeply with the eschatological union of all in Christ. The Feast is the context of love, a space for the development of a human freedom and free play that liberates the people of God because what we move towards is not a retirement or payday, but a rich celebration of diversity.

Ritual must exist in order for a community to come together and celebrate. The rhythm offered in the Sabbath and the Eucharist in the context of feasting and worship make community possible. We often forget that we come to a table that is not ours to host or lay out- we attend at the invitation of God. It “is not a feast we laid out for ourselves, according to our own personal preferences. It is God’s feast. We attend by invitation and not simply to satisfy our own particular needs.” The community can only unite around a ritual to which we all submit. In this repetition we delight in each other in the presence of God because at His table, we are at leisure.

Joseph Pieper writes in his seminal text, Leisure as the Basis of Culture, that humankind is most human in the context of leisure, a condition that he articulates with precision as one that finds it’s locus in the religious festival, whose foundation is worship and sacrifice. Similarly, I argue that it when we are leisure in this sense that we experience time in such a way that we are timed not by the endlessly inhumane rule of the clock but by the seductive, non-identical repetition of the Feast that doesn’t leave us feeling disconnected but integrated. One Orthodox theologian has referred to this table as “the eternal repetition of the great act of love accomplished for us.” Love invites, whispering a command through which Sabbath and Eucharist give us the ability to sit down and resist the demand of the world of work upon our souls as resources to be used up. “When we sit down to eat, we are consciously removing ourselves from the world of work and means and industry, and facing outwards, to the kingdom of ends. Feast, festival, and faith lift us from idleness and endow our lives with sense.”

If ordinary time leaves us feeling disconnected, than the Feast does the opposite because if it is a table “spread by God and hosted by Christ, it must be a table with many connections.” We find ourselves, each other and God in the integrative spaces of the Sabbath and the Eucharist. The habit of feasting is the beginning point for the healing of the world. It is because of this that the Evangelical tradition needs to increase its theological meaning around the Eucharist as only then will we be able to harness the healing power of the Sabbath. Together, these gifts impact our experience of time and offer us the possibility of hope in our driven society that there is a deeper rest beyond the dissociative down-time of the weekends- there is a great and good Table that awaits and this is an invitation to prepare ourselves, deepen our capacity for joy- so that we will know how to feast with God. Come, the table is ready.

Phillip Nellis is a recently graduated with his MDiv from MHGS. This paper was birthed out of his research work for Dan Allender’s recent book, Sabbath.