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- by Mark Greene

Mark Greene explores how Britain's long hours culture is killing us and offers the Sabbath rest principle as a way back to reflection, refreshment and more fulfilling relationships.

It was a very bad month for culture.

At least it was for me. Unlike your average arts or culture critic, I don't have a license to write about whatever's out there - good, bad or ugly. No, despite the fact that the editor stopped me writing about Calendar Girls, standards at C & R are usually high, and I have to cover something with more substance than the froth on a cappuccino. This month, I certainly tried.

I read Pullman's new short story Lyra's Oxford and wondered whether anyone would have stooped to publish it if Pullman were not so famous and the Dark Materials trilogy hadn't been so successful. The plot is tissue-thin and crumbles to dust under the portentousness ascribed to its very simple message. At least it was short - 49 small pages of large print and wide margins. Still, the story's brevity didn't prevent the publishers charging £9.99 for it. Shame on you Philip! It's enough to give atheists a bad name - exploiting children in that way.

Then I picked up the Booker winner Vernon God Little only to find myself doused in a stream of prurient, adolescent ramblings spewing out of the mouth of a prurient adolescent, trapped in an incredible and incoherent plot. Ah, but yes, the Booker judges told us, look at how well the non-American novelist DBC Pierre made you believe the character was really American! Yup, great American, ghastly novel.

So, could the final part of The Matrix save the month?

The omens were not good: Matrix Revolution announced itself with all the pretentiousness and faux-significance that we have come to expect: "Everything that has a beginning must have an end." By the end of the film, most people who saw it were intensely grateful for the opportunity to experience that simple truth. Ah yes, the first Matrix told us, we're all caught in a system that anaesthetises us from realising what's really happening. We need to break out and live, really live. Yup, hold that thought and develop it into something interesting. Alas, for all the Wachowski brothers' delvings into questions of cause and effect, destiny and determinism, the only law of cause and effect that they have successfully demonstrated is this: "If you make a very successful film for very little money, someone will give you a lot of money to make a sequel - regardless of whether the script is worth the paper it's word-processed on."

Still, lest tears of disappointment blind us, the first Matrix did have a point: systems, cultures, societies are constructed around someone's interests - and it may not be ours. Furthermore, lots of people may indeed be blinded from seeing the reality of what is happening to them. Cultures do that to you - make you think that what is happening is normal, is inevitable and that, if you don't like it, there's nothing much that can be done about it - so grin and bear it.

Which got me thinking.

Half of Britain is exhausted. Bone-tired. Wearied by longer and longer hours, by all the paper in the paperless office, by all the time spent answering those time-saving e-mails, by the fear of redundancy, by long commutes, by the drive to try and get a mortgage before you're forty, by the debilitating lack of purposelessness… We are weary, weary, weary to the point of national depression - prescriptions for anti-depressants rose from 12 million in 1991 to 24 million in 2001. Meanwhile, books on stress proliferate whilst vitamin supplements, energy supplements and high-caffeine drinks come storming onto to our supermarket shelves to jolt our weary frames into one more day's productivity.

Does it really have to be this way? Well, apparently not. The French have taken the standard working week down to 35 hours and seen unemployment fall and productivity rise. Still, by the time a British government - whether avowedly worker-friendly like the Labour Party or avowedly family-friendly like the Conservatives - actually gets round to addressing the worker-hostile and family-hostile way we work in the UK, most of us will either be redundant, pensioned off on an inadequate pension, or lying on a trolley in a tent outside an NHS hospital (I jest not - plans are afoot) waiting for a knackered, red-eyed, caffeine-resuscitated doctor to address the minor question of the heart attack we just had.

It's surely time to live differently.

But in what way is the community of Christ a sign to this culture of a different and better way? Are our leaders less stressed? Less workaholic? Are we? Or have we actually become conformed to our culture, accepted its view of time with a stoical shrug? Is this just the way that it has to be if you want to stay employed, stay housed, stay fed? Is it really?

God created the world as a context for human flourishing. He didn't put us on the earth without air to breathe - it was already there. He didn't put us on earth without food to eat. Or the capacity to grow and harvest it. It was there. God didn't create humankind on the first day or on the second day. He created us on the sixth day, when he had created a context in which we could flourish. "Go produce and reproduce," he then said, "Work and multiply." Go release the potential in earth and release the potential in humans. Does the way we are leading our lives in Britain really contribute substantively to human flourishing?

It's time for a change - or it would be, if we had time to think about how to do it. This system is killing us, killing relationships, cracking marriages, alienating children, and sucking the joy out of even very good jobs. And in whose interest? It is a fine and good thing to engage with culture but sometimes it's a far, far better thing to disengage from it.

In a work-crazed, acquisitive, anxiety-bound, stressed-out culture
what more potent testimony could there be than a community marked by the capacity to stop work, by a community that knows how to rest and be refreshed, by a community with time for relationships, by a community with a purpose beyond the acquisition of goods? Are we anywhere near creating such communities?

And is there anything in the Bible to help us? And not just high-capacity middle-class people with the talent, opportunity and pay structure to downshift to a four day week, move to Warminster or change trades.

In the beginning, the Bible tells us, God rested on the seventh day - not, of course, because he was tired. Later God told Moses and the whole people of Israel to do exactly the same thing - to stop work on the seventh day. To stop work. That is stop. Not, do just a couple of hours; not, catch up on one or two e-mails; not, just finish the ironing; not, get the kids' bags ready for tomorrow; not, do all those things we don't call work because we don't get paid to do them but are work and certainly not play. No, the commandment says stop.

But does the fourth commandment apply after Jesus has come and fulfilled the law? Nine out of the ten still do but as for Number 4, its time is up. The Bible is clear that we are no longer commanded to observe a work-free day. In Romans 14:1-8 and in Colossians 2:16 Paul states that keeping the Sabbath is not one of the rules that still has to be obeyed:

"Therefore do not let anyone judge you by what you eat or drink, or with regard to a religious festival, or a new moon, or a Sabbath day. These are a shadow of the things that were to come; the reality, however, is found in Christ."

The Sabbath was understood to be a foreshadowing of the eternal rest that believers in Christ would find when they trust in what he as done for them, rather that in their own works. Indeed, when the early church chose Sunday as its day for communal worship there is no evidence that this was also a work-free day.

Still, if we are not commanded to keep the Sabbath, is there perhaps not a principle of a day of rest embedded in the Genesis account, a principle of a work-free day that we would be well advised to observe? And if not, has anyone got a better way for most people to create some regular time for focusing on God, for rest, refreshment and renewal?

The reality is that a work-free day tends to work wonders. My family does indeed try to get all the homework, the schoolbags, the shoes and the briefcases ready by Saturday night. I do try not to iron and not to buy much more than a newspaper on a Sunday so that there is a day with a difference, a day without work and without chores, a day to relax and relate in. A day for God and for people. And if I watch TV I now try not to watch any programmes that focus on crime or violence - I am trying to create a space not only for rest and refreshment but for some kind of mental and spiritual detoxification. In the week, I can't avoid it - on the news, in the papers - but I can avoid it on Sunday. It's a rhythm I treasure. And when it's broken, even for reasons that relate very much to Jesus' statement that "the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.," then I notice it.

Of course, mine is the most rudimentary of Sunday regimes but as I've talked to friends and begun to read more widely, it's been encouraging to see that ideas abound. One family apply "Jewish time" - the day begins at sunset on Saturday and ends at sunset on Sunday. This has the advantage of freeing everyone to pack their bags, iron their ironing and write their articles on Sunday night at a time when even the strongest Sunday observer is beginning to think about the following day's work. It works for them.

As you might expect there are a number of US books brimming with positive ways to ensure that the Lord's day doesn't turn into the bored's day. Marva Dawn's Keeping Sabbath Wholly (Eerdmans,1989) is one of them and is also replete with the impact that her Sabbath-keeping discipline has had on her whole way of viewing the world and her place in it under God:

"Sabbath keeping is not a dry duty or an oppressive obligation. It is a delight, a feasting on that which is eternal rather than a scrambling after the ephemeral success, the amassed wealth, the ceaseless activities, the elegant refinement that Americans think will grant them permanent happiness. Instead of trying to create our own security, we worship the one who is our security. The presence of God in our worship, in his Word, and in our customs for keeping the day transforms us for the entire week into persons whose values are not transient, into Sabbath people who carry the kingdom of God within them wherever they go."

Of course, Sabbath-keeping may not work for you. Perhaps it isn't working right already. Perhaps Sunday has become a work-free day but is so full of activities, church or other, that you feel thoroughly drained. So, what would help you? How will you and yours really rest? How will you really connect to God? How will you have time to reflect on Him?

And how will we show our weary nation that there is indeed a better way, that his yoke is easy and his burden light?

Ideas please. Ideas please.

Mark Greene

This article also appeared in the January 2004 issue of Christianity & Renewal.