Sabbath as Focal Practice

Meditations on the 4th Commandment, Pt. 1

What Lies Beyond The Idols

Thus far, we have traveled through the first three commandments, as a complex process of idolatry. The God above which there is none other (1), commands us to reject the taking up other gods (2), lest we ourselves become their representation in the world (3).

This story of struggle between God and the gods is not only an ancient one: it is one which takes place now amidst the powers and principalities of the world, named as vices, structures, polities. The movement of the world away from God is the same: the particulars change.

In our own day, we saw how bureaucracy structures the world as mute fragments, divided pieces which can only communicate with one another through an alien structure: the clarity of a bureaucratic form displaces the precarity of divine provision. Algorithms build out of our desires, good or bad, giving us predictably more of what we wish. And so, forms of organization (bureaucracy) and means of distribution (algorithms) takes its place as one of the key ways idolatry becomes organized, multiplied, amplified in the world. Graven images, I argued, cashes out in the people of Israel taking the flesh of the idols into their own bodies, of becoming a perverse kind of living sacrifice.

As we approach the fourth commandment—the Sabbath—is to approach the heart of what stands over against the gods, of how God appears. To look from this complex movement of idolatry to the Sabbath is to ask what God has to do with this conflict with death.

In some ways, by beginning with idolatry, we are tempted to treat God’s appearance as the solution to a problem which we already understand. But this is to get things backward: the problem of idolatry is a response to God, not God’s appearance a reaction to the idols. And so, Sabbath is not a solution to idolatry, but that which the idols have sought to undermine.

And so, with Sabbath, it is not enough to simply identify that which is killing us if we have nothing to bring us life, for Sabbath is not a cure so much as an alternative which idolatry has been playing with. Sabbath becomes what we will call a focal practice from which we begin to see what lies beyond simple avoidance of idolatry, of what God offers to us beyond leeks of Egypt, in and through the provision of the desert.

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

Focal Practices as The Way and the Truth

Albert Borgmann piloted the term “focal practices” as a way of describing those centering practices, which drew up the warmth of the house, and which offer a deliberate practice which constrains, orders, and draws up our relationships into a constructive vision¹. To embrace these kinds of practices, which call us to a more modest way of life—attending to things in the world—is not to reject ways of life (like technologies) which draw us away from real things, but to have a way to engage them well.

These focal practices—means of attending to the world—invite us to not just pay attention in a scattered, distracted world, but invite us into a different world:

We might in a tentative way be able to see these things as focal; what we see more clearly and readily is how inconspicuous, homely and dispersed they are. This is in stark contrast to the focal things of pre-technological times, the Greek temple or the medieval cathedral that we have mentioned before. Martin Heidegger was deeply impressed by the orienting force of the Greek temple. For him, the temple not only gave a center of meaning to its world but had orienting power in the strong sense of first originating or establishing the world, of disclosing the world's essential dimensions and criteria.

The focal practices, in other words, are revelatory, for in calling us to attend to some things, they take us away from other things. In doing so, they re-found our living around realities which are themselves directing our attention to Reality-Claiming Events. For a focal practice does not just give us relief from the fragmentation of the world: they give us a different world. They are not just the way out of the fragmentation of the idols, but the thing we attend to, the sign of something other than a fragmented and dizzy existence.

But Borgmann sees a connection between how a focal practice develops, and where they develop. If a focal practice means to offer a different world than the one characterized by the fragments of idolatry, then the focal practices develop not in places of abundance, but near the worst offenders:

The consideration of the wilderness has disclosed a center that stands in fruitful counter-position to technology. The wilderness is beyond the procurement of technology, and our response to it takes us past consumption. But it also teaches us to accept and to appropriate technology. We must now try to discover if such centers of orientation can be found in greater proximity and intimacy to the technological everyday life.

Borgmann’s account of learning to develop a counter vision to a dominating technology in proximity to technologies which distort us is just right: there is no outside to the world shaped by the idols, even if we might carve out spaces of freedom from them. Such was true with Israel; such remains true for the church. It is what has always been true, it seems: God providing food in the presence of our enemies, or in the case of Israel, the tablets of the Decalogue while the ashes of the golden calf are still passing through Israel’s bellies.

And so, the call to the focal practice takes place alongside the idols, if only that by their proximity we might see the difference.

Sabbath as New Beginning

The whatness of the Sabbath is summed up well by the Catholic Catechism, which treats the Sabbath as the focal practice of creation itself². The Sabbath, originating in the 7th day of creation—the day when God rested from creation—is tied together with Israel’s liberation from Egypt on the one hand, and with Christ’s resurrection on the other. The Sabbath speaks to us, in one moment, of the rest needed for creation, the rescue of Israel from eternal labor, and Christ’s renewal of the world in the resurrection.

Our own worship on the Sabbath, then, reflects and participates in this complex reality, entering into the worship of the God who has ordered the world, revealed Himself, and restored it from death. For it is death which ultimately fragments and disintegrates, and only God who can give a center to living. The idols keep us in routine sloth, as disolute fragments over-managed and under-fed. Sabbath is the world pulled into focus, front to back and top to bottom.

To call Sabbath a practice, then, depends on Sabbath being this kind of reality-generating-event: it is the world which calls us to live inside it. It is the act of God which we receive as the basis for all of our future actions, which makes possible even our reception. We practice that which God has given, for what God has given is united to who God is. In this focal practice, all of what we are finds a new starting point, in a converse from the idols: the idols would have us work our way into meaning, whereas God gives meaning before we think to ask for it.

What belongs to that day—and thus, at the headwaters of a world beyond idolatry—will wait for us next.

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1. See Borgmann, from his Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life, here.

2. What follows here is drawn from Catechism of the Catholic Church (1995), p. 580ff.