Creating a Sanctuary in Time

Abraham Joshual Heschel, author of The Sabbath, called the Shabbat a sanctuary in time. 

In biblical times, just as in modern times, it was easy to get caught up in the day to day activities of survival and forget about God or the part the Divine Presence plays in every moment of our lives.  Shabbat provided – and still does -- a time to remember. It matters not if you are Jewish, Christian, Muslim or Buddhist, if you want to maintain your relationship with God, you must make time and effort to do so.  If you can’t do so on a day-to-day basis, observing the Sabbath offers one day a week to remember and to renew your relationship with God and to strengthen it.

There is a rabbinic caution that says “If God is everywhere, God is nowhere.  If God is in everything, God is in nothing.” Most people who here this caution object to it’s premise. So, why if God is in everything is God in nothing?  Why if God is everywhere is God nowhere?  Because if we see everything as the same and nothing as set apart or different, then we cannot tell the difference between that which is sacred and that which is profane.  We go along, day to day, and nothing seems special, nothing seems set apart and, therefore, nothing is different.  We cannot distinguish between ordinary and extraordinary not because nothing is sacred but because we forget that anything is sacred. We don’t see the special-ness in all things only the ordinary-ness.  By setting aside one day – or any increment of time in our day or our week – as holy, we make a distinction we can then use as a measure or as a base point for comparison. 

The observance of the Sabbath as a distinction between sacred and profane can be seen as the beginning of mindfulness practice.  The Buddhists try to be mindful – conscious, aware – of all that is around them and going on inside them at any given time.  They try to be “in the moment” – not in the past or in the future but in the present – and highly aware of their senses.  In the process, they develop a heightened sense of the sacredness of all life and all experiences, an ability to observe from outside themselves what is real and true. 

By once a week setting aside 24 (25 by Jewish law) hours as sacred time, and experiencing it as such, we begin to be mindful of what sacredness is all about.  We allow ourselves to feel the holiness of that time, to feel spiritual in our observance of the Sabbath.  Then, when the sun sets on Saturday or Sunday evening (depending upon our religious tradition), we can experience the ordinariness of the time that follows.  We become conscious of the difference between the sacred and the profane. 

With that distinction we open ourselves to seeing the distinction in other things.  Maybe at first we just feel and see the difference between the Sabbath and the other days of the week.  Then we feel the difference in the time we spend saying evening prayers with our children or the time we spend meditating in the morning.  The next thing we know, we feel something sacred about walking in our garden, because the flowers and trees and grass growing there remind us of God’s creation.  And maybe that memory resonates with our belief that God is in all of nature, thus all of nature becomes sacred and our time in nature holy or spiritual.  And our awareness, our mindfulness, our consciousness of what is truly sacred continues to expand until, lo and behold, we find that, indeed, everything is sacred.  God is in everything.  As Jacob so aptly put it, “God was in this place, and I did not know it.” We could say the same – at least until we become mindful and feel the presence of God in our daily lives.

Even when we experience this level of spirituality, however, we run the risk of becoming immune or numb even to this experience and once again seeing everything as ordinary.  Even the extraordinary becomes ordinary if taken for granted.  Thus, the weekly reminder called the Sabbath helps us continue to be mindful of the distinction between ordinary and sacred and of the sacredness of everything, of the presence of God everywhere and in everything.

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