“Eternity utters a day”
Abraham Joshua Heschel from “The Sabbath”
A blog about celebrating Sabbath in the wilderness can’t go very far without discussing… well, Sabbath. I’ve logged dozens of hiking miles trying to figure out just how to begin this discussion. The thing is, the more I read and study, the deeper this subject gets. The scholars and theologians with whom I have kept literary company are far more insightful and intellectually talented than I hope ever to be and certainly, their wisdom will find passage into this commentary but my role is to somehow boil it all down into something simple and elegant. Einstein’s theory of special relativity was expressed in 5 simple characters; three letters a number and a math symbol. This simple equation defines one of the basic stones in the foundation of our universe, the connection between matter and energy. It explains how the Sun works and how a city can be erased from the planet by a lump of Uranium the size of your fist.
I don’t presume to have the brilliance of Einstein, and perhaps a concept as complex as Sabbath cannot be expressed so elegantly, and yet perhaps it can. And really, it’s the journey toward this particular goal that is the whole point of this effort. Maybe we’ll get there, maybe we’ll get lost in the wilderness, but John Muir thought getting lost in the wilderness was not such a bad way to go.
My day job involves helping entrepreneurs figure out if their ideas have any potential for commercial success. An idea that only benefits the one who conceives it is what we call a hobby. And idea that provides a benefit to a lot of people who are willing to pay money for it is a potential business. The process we use for this is called Customer Discovery and it borrows heavily from the scientific method we all learned in middle school. A scientist looks at the world with natural curiosity and comes up with a question: “I wonder if…”, “What happens if you…” That question forms a hypothesis, which is a concise statement about a yet-to-be proven truth, and this forms the starting point for further research. The scientist then sets about designing experiments to test the hypothesis. The results of these experiments are analyzed, conclusions are drawn and the results are shared. Whether the hypothesis is proven true or false is only part of process. The gold is in the learning that takes place, which always leads to what’s next. This process can take weeks, years, or a lifetime.
So it is with this project. I figure the best way to get this started is to offer an hypothesis and see where that takes us. As I have thought about it, my mind comes back to a simple, elegant idea distilled from the writings of Abraham Heschel:
Sabbath is the sanctification of time.
That’s it!
Six words. Simple and elegant.
Let’s see where this goes!
Shalom!
Copyright 2019 Shawn A. Carson
wildsabbath.com 