1907
From Abraham Joshua Heschel, Sabbath (July 28, 2005) at page 20.
In the tempestuous ocean of time and toil there are islands of stillness where man may enter harbor and reclaim his dignity.
From Genesis 1:1-5; 2:1-3:
1:1 In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, 2 the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.
3 Then God said, Let there be light”; and there was light.
4 And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness.
5 God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.
2004
From Gregg Easterbrook, The Progress Paradox, Nov 9, 2004:
As Americans we assume that more choice means better options and greater satisfaction. But beware of excessive choice: choice overload can make you question the decisions you make before you even make them, it can set you up for unrealistically high expectations, and it can make you blame yourself for any and all failures. In the long run this can make to decision making paralysis, anxiety and perpetual stress. And, in a culture that tells us that there is no excuse for falling short of perfection when your options are limitless, too much choice can lead to clinical depression.
From Matthew 11:28-30:
28 Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.
29 Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls.
30 For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.
1996
From Thomas Kelly, Testament to Devotion (Sep 6, 1996) at p. 47:
Now is not time to say, Lo, here. Lo, there.” Now is the time to say, “Thou art the man.” To this extraordinary life I call you – or he calls you through me – not as a lovely ideal, a charming pattern to aim at hopefully, but as a serious, concrete program of life, to be lived here and now, in industrial America, by you and by me. This is something wholly different from mild, conventional religion which, with respectable skirts held back by dainty fingers, anxiously tries to fish the world of the mudhole of its own selfishness. Our churches, our meeting houses are full of such respectable amiable people. We have plenty of Quakers to follow God the first half of the way. Many of have become as mildly and as conventionally religious as were the church folk of three centuries ago, against whose mildness and mediocrity and passionlessness George Fox and his followers flung themselves with all the energy of dedicated lives. In some, says William James, religion exists as a dull habit, in others as an acute fever. Religion as a dull habit is not that for which Christ lived and died. There is a degree of holy and complete obedience and of joyful self-renunciation and of sensitive listening that is breathtaking. Difference of degrees passes over into utter difference of kind, when one tries to follow him the second half. Jesus put this pointedly when He said, “Ye must be born again” (John 3:3), and Paul knew it: “If any man is in Christ, he is a new Creature.” (2 Cor.
5:17) RefMgr field[18]: Divinely Simple
From Acts 2:43-47:
43 Awe came upon everyone, because many wonders and signs were being done by the apostles.
44 All who believed were together and had all things in common; 45 they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds* to all, as any had need.
46 Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home* and ate their food with glad and generous* hearts, 47 praising God and having the goodwill of all the people. And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.
From Deuteronomy 6:1-14:
Now this is the commandment–the statutes and the ordinances–that the LORD your God charged me to teach you to observe in the land that you are about to cross into and occupy, 2 so that you and your children and your children’s children, may fear the LORD your God all the days of your life, and keep all his decrees and his commandments that I am commanding you, so that your days may be long.
3 Hear therefore, O Israel, and observe them diligently, so that it may go well with you, and so that you may multiply greatly in a land flowing with milk and honey, as the LORD, the God of your ancestors, has promised you.
4 Hear, O Israel: The LORD is our God, the LORD alone.
5 You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.
6 Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart.
7 Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise.
8 Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, 9 and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.
10 When the LORD your God has brought you into the land that he swore to your ancestors, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give you a land with fine, large cities that you did not build, 11 houses filled with all sorts of goods that you did not fill, hewn cisterns that you did not hew, vineyards and olive groves that you did not plant, and when you have eaten your fill, 12 take care that you do not forget the LORD, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.
13 The LORD your God you shall fear; him you shall serve, and by his name alone you shall swear.
14 Do not follow other gods, any of the gods of the peoples who are all around you, 15 because the LORD your God, who is present with you, is a jealous God. The anger of the LORD your God would be kindled against you and he would destroy you from the face of the earth.
From Matthew 6:19-21:
19 Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; 20 but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal.
21 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
From Psalm 127:1-2:
1 Unless the LORD builds the house, those who build it labor in vain. Unless the LORD guards the city, the guard keeps watch in vain.
2 It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil; for he gives sleep to his beloved.
2004
From Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, Vol. IV, Part 2, Section 65: The Sloth and Misery of Man" (March 2004) at pages 468-471:
We fret at the inevitable realization that our existence is limited. We would rather things were different. . . . And because we know that we cannot change things, that we cannot cease to move remorselessly towards this place, we look frantically around for assurances on this side of the moment when they will all be stripped away, anxiously busying ourselves to snatch at life before we die…
All evil beings with the fact that we will not thankfully accept the limitation of our existence where we should hope in the light of it, and be certain, joyously certain, of the fulfillment of our life in the expectation of its’ end. The root of all evil is simply, and powerfully, our human care. We must begin, as before, by asserting its emptiness. It is quite futile. Why? because of the inexorable nature of the destiny, the natural order, in virtue of which we and all things are corruptible and will perish?
It is futile because our perishing, the terminating of our existence, which we think we should oppose without anxious striving, is the good order of God, one of the tokens of His gracious and merciful and invincible will as Creator. We do not choose something better but something worse, a definite evil, our own rejection and compact with chaos, if we oppose this order when we ought thankfully and joyfully accept it. Chaos is what God did not will, and will never do so…
This invasion and destruction of the object of all care (even in its form as destiny and the natural order) has taken place and cannot affect the force and validity of the veto which He has laid upon it, not only by His words, but by the act of His life as He sacrificed and fulfilled it on the cross.
We act as though the work and Word of God were nothing; as though Jesus were not risen. We make no use of the freedom which we are granted in Him…The life of man becomes an unbroken chain of movements dictated by his anxious desire for assurances…in relation to possibilites whichhe desires because he expects from them fulfillments which for a time at least conceal his certain end, allowing him temporarily to forget that which is before him. Care is the remarkable alternation and mixture of this fear and desire against the background of what we think we must regard as a threat rather than our hope. From this angle, the disobedience and unbelief and ungratitude of man consist in this tragic persistence in this opinion, and the evil will which permits it. This opinion is the inexhaustible source of care, both as fear and desire, in all its great and little, all its more or less exciting or apparently only incidental and superficial forms. On the basis of this opinion man is always one who is anxious in some way, although he is the one who ought to be without care, the one from whom all care is removed at the very point where he thinks that he is threatened, at his issue and end which is his appointed future. Because his care has its basis in this opinion, however, it cannot be overcome by a frontal attack. No other man, not even an angel from heaven, can successfully summon me–and I certanily cannot summon myself–to abandon these fears and desires and therefore to be be anxious.
If we ever take the risk (and it is a risk) of preaching on Mt.
625-34, we at once meet with all kinhds of sullen or dispirited or unwilling reprimands (expressed or unexpressed), and most of all, if we are honest, from our own hearts and minds. For how can we help taking care for our life? How can we model ourselves on the fowls of the air and the lilies of the field? How can we seek first The Kingdom of God and His righteousness in the assurance that food and drink and the clothes will be added to us? How can we leave the morrow and its anxieties–the storm which may mount and break, or the sun which may shine through–and confine ourselves to the troubles (and perhaps the joys) of to-day? How is all this possible?
How can man let go his care when he is of this opinion? We may remove all the things that he fears, or give him all that he desires, but new fears and desires will rise up at once from the inexhaustible source of this opinion and new cares will be his portion. For one day he will inevitably reach his end. If he has no positive joy and comfort, but only anxiety, in relation to this fatal point, if in his approach to this point, this far side of all his fears and desires, he does not see Godd but nothingness awaiting him, He can only be filled with care. He is a prisoner of the ceaseless movements of care which he himself has to make and has automatically made. We have to see this if we are to realise the power of man’s sloth; his culpable negligence, even in this respect; a power which is very real even though the opinion in which this negligence originally consists, and the whole tormented existence to which it gives rise, are quite pointless and therefore empty and futile. Just as inexplicably but in fact man is first a practical atheist, inhuman and a vagabond, and then can only think and speak and act accordingly, so first–how shall we describe him from this final standpoint?–he is the dissatisfied man who necessarily becomes his own slave, and lives in the bondage of his need of security. We have to grasp this if we are to be more than indolently surprised at the sea of individual and racial care in which we are all almost submerged…The distinctive feature of care is that it derives its power from its opponent, from that which causes it and agaisnt which man tries to secure himself…
He turns to his own grief, constituting it a gracelss determination of his existence, that which is full of grace but which he fears as his distant end, the coming of which he tries to avoid, and from which he tries to conceal himself in all kinds of fulfilments. And he is now marked by this phantasy which he has conjured up. He falls victim to it in the present in which he is concerned to seure his future. From this standpoint, too, he is engaged in that frantic hunt in which he himself is really the hunted. This is the curious power of of care. It is only pseudo-creative. But all the same it is a real power even in its impotence. And there can be no escaping its effectiveness. For as man conceives and nourishes that view of his end, the end as he views and empowers it necessarily thrusts itself into his present. We must also mention the fact that it, too, has great powers of expansion and infection. We push one another into these anzious fears and desires and the corresponding joyless present.