Being the Rest
How might we be?
Breathe in peace. Breathe out rest.
This week, while I am attempting to put some thoughts together about the embodiment of rest, my schedule is busier than ever. It's funny how the reality of life interacts with the things we have our minds set upon sometimes.
As I continue this unplanned series on being, I find myself contemplating the wonder of rest. Rest follows peace, naturally, as a soul at peace can come to rest (or action for that matter) without tension. At peace there is clarity of thought and action. There isn’t any, “well, I’m not quite sure, but my best guess is maybe something around this approximation.” There is simply yes or no, then the actions come. Without this kind of peace and clarity rest is hard to come by. Rest is not something that can be forced and it's difficult to train. Many habits of thought and action must be interrupted for rest to become the norm. There are many hacks for getting to sleep, getting better sleep, waking up refreshed, and more. Most of the hacks have to do with gaining a greater knowledge of the physiology of sleep, and making adjustments there. While these often help with rest, they do not account for the deeper aspects of the person – the matters of the heart and mind that affect the body. What the myriad of hacks do tell us is the importance of and desire for rest that exists.
The experiences of rest, like easily going to sleep, are markers of, for lack of any better terminology, a well-balanced life. I’m not saying a good work/life balance but rather simply a well-balanced life. This idea encompasses, our jobs, relationships, responsibilities, and pursuits. What work we must press into to have a well-balanced life is different for every individual, but the general direction of the work is the same. The questions is, “What are the particular needs of an individual, in their unique context, for their inner being to come to rest with ease?”
The Pursuit of Understanding
At different points in my life, I have taken on specific pursuits for the sake of understanding. I spent three years trying to define the word love, after failing to define it in a very important moment. In the past three years I've been trying to cultivate an understanding of my own life that leads to the kind of rest that cannot be separated from who I am. Wouldn’t it be a thing if one of the ways I was recognized was as a person who rested.
One of the keys I’ve discovered so far is the idea that my experience of rest is dependent upon what I rest upon. My ability to rest is dependent on the status of my inner person. If any part of my inner being (this of course, includes social relationships) is in turmoil, unsettled, or at worst under attack in some way, then rest is a practical impossibility. If, however, my thoughts and feelings, wants and desires, and social relationships, are at peace, then regardless of the state of my environment I may experience rest.
But what is that thing that I can rest upon that will provide peace for my inner person such that I can come to rest? What is it that removes the thoughts and associated feelings of “I'm missing out” or “I've forgotten something” or “something might catch me off guard” and “I’m failing at my responsibility”? As each of us journeys through life we accumulate a mental map or view of the world. We learn as we go, trying to remember how things seem to work. Or at least how they worked the last time we were in this situation. We experience how people interact in business, in various industries, in games, at play, when there are high stakes involved, or low ones, when different levels of trust, fear, wants, and pain all interact. With every experience we adjust our own understanding of the world. We might begin to adjust our own actions. Every proposition of life – if you do this, you will get this – is a proposition of how the world works. There is an assumption of causality, of a way we may live to experience the life we hope to have. As far as what we as individuals can control in this context, to a significant degree at least, choice is at the center. As we come to rest, we make choices based on what we believe to be true about the world around us. We rest upon the propositions of life that we hold to be true. We have chosen to rest upon these propositions. To go just a little deeper, it may be more accurate to say that we rest upon the propositions of life that we act upon as if they were true. Notably these propositions may be different than the things we ourselves profess to believe. Take, for example, the person who may be found saying that generosity is a good thing that everyone should exercise, but may never be found giving (never acting on that professed belief) themselves.
Resting Upon Something Greater
In a world that is full of things that can engender fear, pain, and confusion, what we attempt to rest upon can be a great help or a great hindrance. I see little room for a middle ground here. If we rely on our own ability to manage our thoughts and feelings, bodies, and social relationships, to come to rest, our success rate may be less than desirable. Of course, there is a lot we can do, and that should not be minimized. However, trusting in our own effort in this regard is not the best of plans.
The most specific proposition I have found in my own journey to rest is this one:
“Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”
Here, Jesus flat out gives us the way. In this proposition, rest isn’t even something that we achieve. It is something we are given. What do we have to do to get it? We have to come to Jesus. What does that look like? How do I come to someone who is not present to me in the same way my next-door neighbor is present to me? Prayer, the ongoing conversation between human beings and the divine, that has been instituted in order to facilitate relationship. There are other methods of approach, disciplines as they may be called – meditation, study, silence, solitude, fasting, and more – that we can experiment with in order to draw us closer in interactive relationship with Jesus. The closer we get the more we know who Jesus really is. The closer we get the more we get a taste of what Jesus can do with us in our lives. The closer we get the more we rest upon the person of Jesus, and by extension God, and God’s Holy Spirit, and because of that resting our lives can begin to change. We rest upon Jesus’s knowing and revealing God to us. We rest upon Jesus having all power in Heaven and in Earth. We rest upon Jesus loving us.
This, of course is a radical proposition, but so is the idea of being able to go to sleep with ease in the midst of the multitude of crises that engulf the world, let alone our individual lives, in any given moment. By resting upon something, or rather someone, that is trustworthy, powerful, good, and loving, we can lay ourselves down to sleep knowing that we are cared for. We can rest.
Being the Rest
If you have experienced a time, even a moment, in your life in which you found this kind of rest, do you know how special that was? Would you be willing to share that gift? What might it look like to show up as rested, restful, even resting with others? One thing to note is that rest is opposed to hurry but not opposed to speed. Hurry and speed are different. What we may encounter in others as we show up rested, is their hurry. The pace of our being, having been immersed in rest, will rub up against their habituated hurry. There may be sparks. Fair warning: the sparks may happen within ourselves as we venture closer towards that which we can rest upon, too.
But for others there is more we can do. We can make spaces, conversations, even work, all times that are undergirded by a restful nature. We can take time – notably time others don’t think they have – to stop and listen. We can ask more questions to really know what might be happening with our friends and neighbors. We can be present with them in their lives. In the good times we can celebrate. In the harder times we can share in the challenges. We might not be able to solve them, but we can surely share the burden such challenges place on our friends. These actions of generosity require a rested soul. They require someone who has found a good thing to rest upon for the actions to be readily available and spontaneous. Upon being available, our approach to others will be to freely offer an experience of rest from the overflow of rest that our own soul is experiencing. We might not be able to alleviate one another’s burdens, but maybe we can do what we can to facilitate a nap.