I’m on sabbatical this summer.
Clergy in my tradition are offered three-month sabbaticals after every five years of service: seasons when we can step away from the day-to-day work of pastoral ministry, focus on things that we cannot focus on when we are wrapped up in that work, and take intentional time for rest and renewal. I am focusing mostly on a project centered around communion and community: baking bread, trying wines, reading theology and culinary history, visiting other churches, and so on. But I am also taking some time to relax, visit family, and do some other random things.
So posting here will probably get a little sporadic and a little strange.
But I want to take just a minute to talk about the first thing that I noticed about being on sabbatical, on the very first full day of this season of rest and renewal, before I started doing official sabbatical things. I want to take just a minute to talk about a weight—a weight that I didn’t know I was carrying—that was suddenly lifted.
A while ago, I wrote about how easy it is for pastoral ministry to become an all-the-time thing: a job that becomes—that even consumes—a person’s identity. It is easy for our work to take over our life.
It’s easy to think about that sermon, or that intracongregational conflict, that wider church meeting, or whatever, when we’re having dinner with our spouse, or when we’re walking the dog, or when it’s our day off, or when we’re on vacation. And that is definitely something that I do. As hard as I try to set work aside and be present to other parts of my life, the work of ministry creeps in. Sometimes, I’m conscious of that. Sometimes, I’m not.
And, sometimes, things run in the background.
I am a firm believer that my mind works on things when I’m not paying attention: some little corner of my mind is working on that sermon, or thinking about that newsletter article, or that committee meeting. And that’s important. Putting things aside so that our subconsciouses can work on them without our consciousnesses getting in the way is part of the creative process.
And some time on the first day of my sabbatical, I noticed that those little corners of my mind were empty. There was no sermon to work on, there were no newsletter articles to write, there were no meetings to prepare for. Even in the background. Things were quiet in a way that things had never been quiet before.
A noise had been stopped. A weight had been lifted. A container had been emptied.
It’s easy to not notice the background processes that run in our minds. And it’s easy to not notice that they run after hours, or on our days off, or on our vacations. But they do. We all know that there are things waiting for us when we are back to business hours, or on Monday, or after our vacation, and our minds do the things that they need to do in order to prepare us for the things that are waiting.
One of the joys of sabbatical—a joy that I wasn’t even expecting!—is that the things that are waiting are a long way off. My mind doesn’t have those things to work on in the background. And the silence is refreshing.
Which, I suppose, leads me to my main thought: everyone should be given the opportunity to take an extended time away, to quiet the background processes, and to enjoy the silence that comes from the background noises—the noises we’ve all learned to stop hearing—going silent.