Category Archives: sabbatical

Retreating with Keating

I began my sabbatical last week with three days of retreat at a friary. Amidst the rhythms of prayer and seaside walks, I read Fr Thomas Keating’s Invitation to Love. I haven’t read any of his work before, but I wanted to deepen my practice of centring prayer and a quick bit of research suggested that this book would be a good place to start. I say deepen my practice of centring prayer; it would be more honest to say resuscitate. There have been times when I’ve got into something of a rhythm with periods of 10-20 minutes of silent, contemplative prayer (charismatics might be more familiar with the language of soaking or sitting in the presence or abiding) but since parenthood arrived, I have barely managed a handful of unhurried stints of resting in God.

The book draws fairly heavily on mystics like St Anthony, John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, as well as some psychology. I feel the need to check the psychology in with friends who know about that sort of thing, I’m not sure how well it has aged since the early nineties. Regardless, it was a good, challenging read.

Keating speaks particularly into a dilemma I have tried to articulate before: the challenge of change and spiritual growth when my go-to methods of change and growth – discipline, self-help and hard work – are exactly the things that I want to change.

Much of the book is about the journey from the false self to the true self. Keating describes the false self as the ‘emotional programs for happiness’ that we learn from a young age – those motivations, patterns, values, and practices that we learn in order to survive and to meet unmet needs.

Crucially, we cannot take the journey from the false self to our true, in-Christ selves by relying on the methods provided by the false self:

‘The conscious resolution to change our values and behaviour is not enough to alter the unconscious value system of the false self and the behaviour they engender’

This hits against the same dilemma I’ve been wrestling with. Keating’s solution?

‘Only the passive purification of contemplative prayer can affect this profound healing’

In previous posts I’ve wrestled with the idea of surrender – and the danger that the language of surrender can be Christian-ese for abdicating responsibility for my own discipleship. Keating seems to be suggesting that contemplative practices – and especially centring prayer – are how we surrender, how we learn to depend on God and not on the ‘emotional programs for happiness’ of the false self.

A sabbatical seems like a good time to try this out, so I’m aiming to sit in silence, to rest in God ‘beyond thoughts, feelings and commentaries,’ for at least 20 minutes a day. So far, I’ve mostly found the practice quite frustrating – I’m confronted with the sheer volume and mundanity of my internal chatter, and with my discomfort for silence. But Keating would urge caution with expecting quick results from the practice. I think he’s right when he warns that ‘our expectations of what should happen and our commentaries about what is happening are the causes of most of our anxiety and distress.’ The goal is communion with God: becoming the integrated, calm, non-anxious person of love I have been created to be. But Keating is clear that God will inevitably surprise and subvert our methods of getting there.

Let’s see how it goes.  

Setting Out On Sabbatical

My sabbatical has begun. As I’ve spoken to people about it, especially people outside of the church-y world, I’ve noticed that it is a word in need of definition. Either people haven’t heard of a sabbatical before, or maybe they remember their minister taking a year out to do some study, or something more akin to an academic sabbatical. Though I’d be excited by the prospect of study leave, I’ve been convinced that these next three months of sabbatical require a different approach. At its root, sabbatical (like sabbath) derives from the Hebrew shabbat, which means to stop. It is a ceasing from work in order to rest and delight, to re-root my true identity in God, and to resist a culture of overwork, frantic busyness and joyless anxiety. Reading over notes I took from Ruth Hayley Barton’s Embracing Rhythms of Work and Rest, I was particularly struck by these lines:

‘Knowing that sabbatical is a gift from a loving God – and not merely a gift from one’s church or institution – makes quite a difference… Rather than feeling guilty or entitled, I was able to gratefully receive sabbatical as God’s care for me, a beloved child’

I have not struggled to recognise the immense privilege that it is to work for an organisation that has a generous sabbatical policy, and that has allowed me the freedom to design this time according to what I need. But I had, perhaps, been less alert to the basic goodness of God – who wove rhythms of sabbath rest into creation and whose invitation to me in this season is to rest in his goodness.

This last year has been tough. Adopting has been joyful but also the hardest thing we have ever done. I love my job but this has been the toughest year of work I’ve known. Changes in our team, transitioning into our second decade as a movement and financial struggles have presented big challenges. My response to those challenges has been to be strong and rely on hard work. I have taken it upon myself to find solutions and save the day, and as a result I have lived at a pace that is not sustainable or healthy.

As I settle into sabbatical, my temptation is to try to optimise – to freight it with expectations, goals and ambitions. I have drilled myself in a self-centred, industrial mindset that frantically seeks to extract the maximum productivity from every opportunity. If my sabbatical is about stopping work, then I think it will require me to go deep down to the roots and to part ways with this industrial mindset.

I want this sabbatical to be a time of slowing down enough to love others well, of being present and interruptible and unhurried. I want to cultivate what John Swinton calls ‘timefulness,’ an alertness to God’s presence in the every-day and a simple delight.

Perhaps that simplicity is key. I’ve had fads on minimalism but my life over the last year has felt cluttered and complicated. My faith is fragile and distracted. Scandals and frustrations at older leaders I had looked up to have bred a creeping cynicism and distrust. I worry that I am becoming harder, sharper, and more judgemental rather than softer, wiser and kinder.    

I’m hungry for simplicity. I walked on the beach a few days ago and the words of psalm 23 came to me. I sang it over and over into the wind. If this sabbatical is to have any aim (and I am very cautious of loading it with the goals that my industrial mindset craves) then I think it is this: to go back to the basics. To return again to the Lord who is my shepherd. To strip away the baggage, the ego, the pride, the self-reliance, the frustration, the cynicism, the shame – and to know that I lack nothing, that I need fear no evil, that his goodness and mercy follow me all the days of my life.

This sabbatical is an incredible gift and I want to choose simply to receive – without needing to justify or earn it. I want to simply receive and to delight in God’s goodness. If that is all I do, that will be enough.