Week 8

If I'm being perfectly honest, this week's readings from Norman Wirzba's Living Sabbath Rest: Discovering the Rhythms of Rest and Delight did not instigate a lot of thinking in me. During our small group discussion, my group concluded that Wirzba's description of Sabbath rest seems to be fairly synonymous with Christian living, so few of his main points seem to branch off very far from anything I've learned in a Sunday school classroom over the course of the past twenty years. Hence, such a lack of profundity rendered me thoughtless, and I found our discussion of these chapters to be rather empty. There's my brutal honesty for the day.

I did have a moment of confusion, though, while I was reading chapter twelve of Wirzba's novel, entitled, "Sabbath Worship;" I had difficulty establishing where Wirzba identifies the problem with worship in our society. Specifically, I couldn't tell if Wirzba thinks the necessary change needs to be mental or volitional. When it comes to diagnosing the problem, he seems to go back and forth between an inappropriate mindset and an inappropriate course of action, and while he certainly agrees that there are currently problems with both aspects of worship, his conclusion as to where the core of such problems lies is unclear.

For example, Wirzba writes, "Our common failure at worship reflects a profoundly disoriented life, an inability to examine carefully and honestly who and where we are. It suggests that we have not adequately grasped our situation in life as creatures made in the image of God, sharing our lives with other creatures, all dependent upon God and each other for our well-being" (155-156). This suggests that modern worship is not a reflection of Sabbath rest because of a mental failure; we, as Christians, do not fully understand the importance, context, and meaning of our worship, and it therefore is not what it ought to be. That makes sense, and I would have to agree with that.

However, Wirzba also writes, "Because there are no limits to the goodness of God, no detail that escapes God's notice or affirmation, there are no limits to the times and places wherein praise and worship to God are fitting . . . When we punctuate key, though mundane, events in the day with praise, we consecrate our life and our living to God. We can sanctify our daily routines- when we rise and go to sleep, fill our car with fuel and our stomach with food, smell a flower or see a child smile- when we intersperse them with 'Sabbath moments' of praise and thanksgiving" (157). This suggests, rather, that the problem with our worship rests in how we choose to live our lives; we, as Christians, do not act in a manner reflective of the worshipful life to which we are called. That also makes sense, and I would have to agree with that as well.

Our thoughts and are actions, undoubtedly, are interrelated, and each has influence over the other, so both certainly ought to be reevaluated in order to start embodying a Sabbath mindset in worship. However, Wirzba seems to write to conclude that the solutions to our problems are specific enough that they can be limited to one of these aspects of our worship, but he fails to adequately conclude which aspect is more problematic. That was my analysis, at least. Hence, I was left confused; where exactly is the problem, and how do we fix it?

To answer my question, I posed another question: is worship as a whole more mental or volitional? I thought that if I could determine the essence of worship, then I could more easily clarify what Wirzba is asserting. However, the problem is that that is a very difficult question. I don't know whether the basis of our worship lies more in how we think or how we act; personally, I find each to be equally important. Thus, Wirzba should not attempt to reduce the problems of our worship to either a mental or volitional fallacy, which I'm sure was not his primary intention in writing as much as it was my own interpretation. However, he should rather establish that the seemingly limitless potential manifestations of our worship imply a seemingly limitless amount of potential problems with how those manifestations are produced; worship is too broad to be corrected this easily, so while there is value in identifying needs for corrections, the practicality of such identifications is moot.

That's my analysis, at least.