Sabbatical Was Not "Restorative"

“How was sabbatical?”

Many people have asked me over the past several days. It’s a tough question to answer. After I stammer a bit, some folks helpfully offer, “Was it restorative?”

It’s not a bad question. We usually think of time away from work as a means of getting “recharged,” or “filling the tank,” or whatever metaphors we use when we slide into vacation depleted and burned out and needing some uninterrupted time to get our energy and mojo back.

Sabbatical isn’t like that.
At least, it hasn’t been like that for me.

That could be because I’m parenting teens at a very labor-intensive time to be parenting teens–perhaps you’ve heard our culture is in an adolescent mental health crisis?–but it’s more than that. Sometime around mid-August I realized my tank was pretty empty. It may be even emptier than when I started in June.

Those of you privileged enough to have had a sabbatical may have experienced your time differently. But for me, sabbatical wasn’t a time for reading the tall stack of books I never had time for while working, or for doing a nice deep journaling dive with some well-curated questions, or for developing some new spiritual practices that will surely stick this time because I have the requisite 21 days to get the habit formed.

Once we got back from Scotland, I did very, very little. Picked up a book, read half a page here and there. Journaled a sentence or two. Didn’t run much; walked some. Completed the daily Wordle and the Framed, but found the Moviedle too intense.

Got blissfully bored.

In the midst of these banal doings, there were important not-doings. I disengaged from social media even more than I already had. I replaced my morning doomscroll with the sunny side of the internet: cute animal videos, knitting patterns, Ted Lasso memes. I enjoyed simple, even silly things.

By unplugging from most breaking news sources, I had space to go deeper on what’s actually happening in the world, and experience anew the grief of the past several years. That grief became a portal to reflect on climate change, coming quickly and already here, upending a lot of our world. We’re not ready. We’re not really getting ready, though I thank God for historic new climate legislation. The pandemic was a preview, revealing our vulnerabilities and our opportunities to change, but too many still want to go “back.” Back to what?

I recently heard Barbara Brown Taylor talk about these hard, often sad times we’re in, and I can’t stop thinking about her words. First, she sets the stage for us, using the metaphor of wilderness to describe the disorientation so many of us feel:

In the beginning, you weep. Because all the familiar landmarks are gone, because you don't know where you are… You're hungry, you're tired, you're lost, you're alone, it's getting dark. So now what? If you're a pray-er, you pray. If you're not a pray-er, you pray. What else can you do once you've come to the end of what you can do for yourself? It's time to find out what faith means out beyond the boundaries of where you were warned not to go.

Here’s what she suggests to survive the wilderness: a so-called “subsistence spirituality”:

It'll never sell. It sounds way too meager. But wouldn't it be interesting to cultivate a way of being with God and one another that is lean enough to live in the wilderness for as long as necessary? …You'd have to make peace with pain and with impermanence, not once but every single day. You'd have to be able to see the sacramental possibilities in the tiniest piece of bread. And I think you'd have to imagine the wine.

But above all, you'd have to have some, some, some kind of faith that God is in the wilderness, that the desert is for you, not against you, whether you survive it with your subsistence spirituality or not. Because that's what the religion of Jesus says, that the finding of life is all wound up with a losing of it.

There's no fat in [subsistence spirituality]. There's no padding that would allow one to ask why things are so hard or so scary. Subsistence spirituality may even be what Jesus had in mind, when he said a blessing on the poor in spirit.

Somewhere around the fourth time I listened to this talk I remembered that a newly-baptized and commissioned Jesus spent forty days in the wilderness and was weak and famished at the end of it. He began his ministry spent, sleep-deprived, and starved almost unto death; he must have had to learn how to eat again, taking small meals so as not to make himself sick. No wonder the gospels are full of Jesus taking naps, dodging crowds, sneaking away to pray. No wonder, too, that the gospel contains so many quotidian pleasures: wine at weddings, dinner with friends, mountain vistas and grilled fish on the beach.

I, MaryAnn, fresh off sabbatical, am poor in spirit.
I am empty.

But being empty turns out to be a tremendous paradoxical gift, the realization of which makes me almost giddy with disarming joy. Empty is so much better than being restored. Why would I want to be “restored”? For what? The constant activity? The fretting over Twitter? The pull toward competitive parenting? The sad service to ego and empire?

I should have predicted this. After Sabbath in the Suburbs came out, while leading sabbath retreats and such, I would often talk about how sabbath was born out of liberation: former slaves to Pharaoh could proclaim to the world, one day each week, We are not captives in Egypt anymore! We are free people!

But sabbath isn’t–and sabbatical isn’t–the pause so you can go back to empire’s job site.
Sabbath is, sabbatical is, what helps you realize you don’t want to make Pharaoh’s bricks any more.

I don’t know what all this means for me. Maybe it won’t appear very different from the outside. Right now it means only saying yes when it's a Hell Yes. And as I told a friend, my post-sabbatical question is, how much DGAF can I get away with, and where do I deploy it most strategically in the service of life abundant?

But I’m excited to see what starting from empty and building from scratch looks and feels like.

How was sabbatical?
Ask me in a year.