After returning from a three-month sabbatical, Canon Clark reflects on the difference between simply resting and truly reconnecting with God. She shares two simple spiritual practices that can help us quiet the noise of daily life and remember that, above all else, we are God’s beloved children. (Time: 6:55.)
Video Transcript
This is Canon Clark in the Diocese of Newark. I’m speaking to you today, just returned from a wonderful three-month sabbatical, and I am so grateful to all the people of the Diocese of Newark and the Bishop for this wonderful time away.
I loaded my two rescue mutts into the car a couple of days after Easter and headed to Ohio for a month, where I rented a house near my son’s college. This was a great time to relax, watch lacrosse, cook burgers and hot dogs for my son and his friends, to let the dogs be in a sorority dog parade, and all kinds of other fun activities. In May I availed myself of a renewal opportunity that The Episcopal Church offers to clergy called Credo. I met some wonderful soul friends, and was further restored by that time in Oklahoma at an Episcopal camp. In Peru – my son and I took the trip of a lifetime to Peru, which I had truly dreamed of since I was a very small child. I closed out the time of sabbatical with a five-day silent retreat at a Jesuit center.
And we’ve talked a fair amount in our diocese in the last few years, about the importance of Sabbath and sabbatical. The Bishop has invited us to “Summer of Sabbatical” to talk and dream about Sabbath and so on. And some of what we’ve talked about is the importance of rest for our overall well-being and for our spiritual lives, and how gratitude and seeking things that give us joy and seeing the goodness of what we have done and of God’s creation, how that can restore us and connect us to God.
And I want to add another piece of this, I think it’s often really important for us to regularly restart, reboot, reconnect. Not simply to rest, but to kind of do for ourselves what we sometimes do with technology that we find frustrating, and that is kind of turn it all the way off and turn it back on again, as a way of decluttering, if you will, of allowing ourselves to be more open and to connect more fully with God. Because one of the things that God offers all the time to all of us is the opportunity to connect with God, just as God’s beloved child, not the product of our responsibilities and our worries, not as who we are vocationally or in our family vocation, not as anything other than God’s beloved child. And that can be really hard for us in a world that is full of need, full of noise, and where it can seem like we only matter because of our achievements or what we do.
And I want to offer two ways for us to practice this kind of restarting and reconnecting with God simply as God’s child. One is something that’s been called Christian meditation. You can actually find the website of the World Community of Christian Meditation, wccm.org, and it’s a wonderful practice of disconnecting with worry and anxiety, and simply connecting as our most basic selves before God, with God, as God’s beloved child. And one of the best ways to do this is simply to sit quietly, to close your eyes, and to kind of clear your mind, and to not make clearing your mind another activity. If there’s lots of to-dos and worries and things like that that are going through your mind, you just kind of let them float by as you sit there quietly. And when you’ve gotten used to that practice either in a single sitting or more likely by trying it more than once, then you can start to reach out to God with yourself in the silence and with some of the noise of all those things quieted down simply by not giving them attention, by letting them go by and focusing on God. When you do this, you can imagine God gazing on you with love, and you looking back at God with love, as two good friends, as siblings, however you want to picture it, but to use your imagination in that quiet that you allow God to create for you, to connect with God as God’s child. It’s amazing what this practice can do in even just a few minutes a day – five minutes, 10 minutes.
The other one I want to suggest is using a psalm as a way to pray. We do this all the time, of course. I want to suggest it as a way again of quieting our mind and disconnecting from the specific worries and to-dos that we may be living with, and to simply come before God as who we are and where we are. Psalms that I really like for doing this are Psalm 55, Psalm 91, or Psalm 139. You probably might have your own, and I want to suggest simply reading it at least once a day for the rest of the summer, and using that as a way to connect with God in a different way that isn’t so cluttered with all the worries of our daily lives. You can also try writing it out in your own words or writing your own psalm. But again, the idea is to be renewed and restored by connecting directly with God and leaving aside all the other things about who we are and what we worry about.
And this is one of the blessings of Sabbath and sabbatical. And I am again so grateful to have had that opportunity, and I offer these practices to you as a way to try some of that yourself and to connect with God in a different way as God’s beloved child. God bless you and keep you.
Possible resources:
