Many people incorporate a meal into their Sabbath – but preparation is important: Any Sabbath keeper interviewed for this story prepares and values the day for the whole week. Dickstein would certainly end our conversation on Friday morning in time to get the fresh vegetables from the farmers’ market that she needed for her Sabbath meal.

The social scientist Rae Jean Proeschold-Bell, Ph.D. of Duke University, isn’t surprised that keeping the Sabbath takes so much intent: the less common a practice is in mainstream culture, the harder it is to keep up.

Therein lies another, often overlooked, obstacle to beginning or maintaining a Sabbath: telling other people about it. Sabbath is so counter-cultural that Speedling says many of the women she interviewed feel strange explaining it to their friends and community.

But if you keep your Sabbath to yourself, it may become more difficult to keep it up in the long run. In a 2019 retrospective study of clergymen, Proeschold-Bell and other Duke researchers were surprised to see that while the Sabbath improved their quality of life, it had little or no impact on key health outcomes.

Proeschold-Bell suspects that this was at least partly due to struggles to observe the Sabbath: clergymen did not always inform parishioners about their planned rest time, and so they were often interrupted on the Sabbath day. To avoid such an interruption, Tyner and Dickstein both practice the Sabbath as part of a larger community. It is helpful to resist the “hectic pace of the world” together, says Tyner.

Some clergy in the Duke study also misunderstood silence as meaning that they had to force silence and do nothing. However, an upcoming study currently awaiting publication found that a small guide to the Good Sabbath could help clergy keep the practice going. After attending a short workshop on the Sabbath, 25% started weekly practice within four weeks and 46% took it up within nine months. The interest and motivation were there, says Proeschold-Bell, and the workshop seemed to help with the implementation.

Perhaps the most important thing about the Sabbath is that it does not require total militant silence. Instead, it is a day where you do different activities than the other six days of the week, adding in what brings you joy and energy and moving away from the things you think you can ” must meet “.

Sleeth, Speedling, Tyner, and Dickstein all use their Sabbaths to focus on the bigger picture: it is a time to reflect on your calling, connect with God or a higher power, and enjoy the outdoors.

“I’ve met people over 50 who aren’t sure what their goal is – they just do the moves,” says Speedling, concluding that if we don’t take the time to rest, reconnect and To think about our purpose, it’s too easy to postpone.

Source link