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Radical Sabbaticals
By Leonard Sweet, PhD

Sabbath was not designed to be a day to do what you please, Isaiah warned (58:13), but to do what pleases God.

Sometimes what pleases God is serious self-examination. The Hebrew term for the verb "to pray" is le hitpalel, which means "to judge oneself" or even "to struggle with oneself." Once in a while a sabbatical involves a season of prayer that puts one's life on God's plumb line. Every so often a sabbatical requires a pilgrim to become a theologian-in-residence on the road to who you are and to where you are headed in life's journey. Now and then life mandates an extreme season of study - "thinking is the dialogue of the soul with itself," contends Hans-Georg Gadamer - to discern the will of God and to decide what paths to take.

Radical sabbaticals are transformative , especially when it comes to one's work life. The new economic order is a time of polyemployment, not unemployment, a time when one will have less a "career" than a "careen," as philosopher Dallas Willard puts it (although in the nineteenth century career meant "racing course" or "rapid and unrestrained activity").

This makes radical self-scrutiny all the more requisite. Periodically we need to ask the most basic questions: Am I doing what God is calling me to do? Is my life pleasing to God? Am I a change-the-world person? Or in more biblical phrasings, am I being "created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life" (Ephesians 2:10 NRSV)? Though imperfect, does my "career" keep my soul sputtering and sparking into life?

People are feeling more pressed for time when they actually have more free time than ever. Why? Are we trying to keep ever more balls in the air?

During the last century, over 40 percent of a lifetime was devoted to leisure. In the next fifteen years that figure will be over 50 percent. How will we spend our "leisure time"? The original Latin word for school - skhole - meant leisure in the pursuit of knowledge. Our "leisure time" will be occupied how? On carrying out spiritual pursuits? On doing good? On reinventing ourselves for new missions and ministries? On being creative parents? On balancing our soul's core identity with the need for perpetual makeovers?

Or on entertaining ourselves until our life becomes a grotesque monument to irrelevance?

Or on deluding ourselves with the notion that we can keep all our options open?

A radical sabbatical ruthlessly closes some options. If there is one thing postmoderns resent, it is having to close options. With literally thousands of options to choose from, we think we can keep them all open. We think we can be whatever we want to be.

You can't marry all the pretty girls you meet. You can't work for every company in town. You have to close some options. You either turn away from the worship of gods created by human hands or you pay the consequences. In a culture where we have choices for this and that and the other thing, there are some no-choice choices.

No choice. You're going to die. No choice. You have to eat to live. No choice. You have to sleep. No choice. You are designed for the divine.

(Excerpted from Learn to Dance the Soul Salsa by Leonard Sweet, PhD. This book is available to purchase from our online bookstore.)