I’m reading the much awarded “Underworld” by Dom DeLillo. I can’t help  writing like him, his style right now. But I will be myself by the end.

It’s one of those books with multiple story lines that loop through time and space, history and geography, disconnected  from linear time. The characters seem unhinged,too, the plot a seeming afterthought after the first chapter. The whole thing seems written for the handful of midtown literary suits who think all that matters is that they get it.

Meaning: It’s the kind of book I think I’ve wanted to write forever, but haven’t had the guts.

I took it out of the library two months ago and put it down in a week after the first hundred or so of the 800 plus pages. But in the last week I’m almost 400 pages in, the zone, the “100 Years of Solitude” place where you have to keep reading though you’ve given up keeping track of the names forever.

I’m not reading because I need to keep up with what serious writers write, though I do.  The only reason I’m reading it is the Lent Sabbath project. To be honest, the other reason I’m reading it is I’m broke, I mean squeezing every dollar “ ‘till the eagle grins” until payday. I should do a whole entry soon on what paycheck-to-paycheck poverty, no matter your salary, can do for spiritual discipline, if you will let it humble you into Christ-likeness and shun self-pity.

I got up at eight last Saturday morning just to get ready. No self-pity, praise God, but with great expectation. I put the aroma of  Saturday NPR into every room, and began to do the things I needed and wanted to do, the way I wanted to do them, unhurried, unburdened, Sabbath like.

I arranged and re-arranged the futon in the living room to catch the light of the two large untreated south facing windows, and brought the book in with my coffee. It was more storm than sun light, but there was peace in it, and out of it came a little idea that became bigger as the day went on. It came from something in the insane gush quoted words, people sharing the same space in conversation that wasn’t dialog because the words didn’t really connect them. It was one guy’s apple thoughts and then the other guy’s orange thoughts. Internal narratives going in and out loud, about nothing made to seem like everything, at least to them.

Life With An Eternal Quality

One day I will write a big idea book where the backdrop is as finite and banal as what we Christians call “the world,” but the characters spend all their time grappling with the infinite, as best they can. But right now my little idea is this: The Sabbath was made for man not just to free him from care and toil, but from time itself.

Please believe me: I began this piece the night BEFORE Pastor Pete ‘s sermon comparing the Sabbath to a taste of eternity. But, as it so often happens, the acorns that land in my mind after God shakes His Oak in me always find their way into Pete Scazzero’s sermons before I can ever get them into print. But I love it, because I love how scripture is not only confirmed in scripture, but in the words of anointed mentors I been blessed to know in my walk. Before I knew Pastor Pete, my friend Pastor Keith Welch planted a nut in my head about how God not only promises eternal life, but, through identification with the Risen Lord, offers us life with an eternal quality.

Eternity, as Pastor Pete pointed out, is timeless. So it’s really not such a big leap to say that when we stop for  time with God, He returns the favor by stopping time for us. I don’t want to get Einstein about it, but what I love most about my Sabbaths is how they take me out of time, like the twin in the rocket ship nearing warp speed. And the coolest thing: I don’t feel a thing but joy.

No acceleration, no drag of inertia from the preceding week, or from a lifetime of sin for that matter. No friction, except when a few stray molecules of doubt, care or fear leak out into the time free space around me. I don’t call it a void, because wherever I am God’s love surrounds me, makes existence so the opposite of void as to stand the concept on its head.

Look Ma, No Brakes

“In repentance and rest is your salvation. In quietness and trust is your strength…..”—Isaiah 30: 15

Sometimes I can feel that God pulls us toward himself like he was a black hole, not far off in space but down deep inside us. When we accept the Lord we take one irrevocable step inside the event horizon. It’s actually the last step we ever really need to take.

Except perhaps to take our foot off the brake.

In that zone I feel Jen Swinton walking in a cleansing rain, no strain, moving from pressure to pleasure. No brakes. And I feel Julie’s cathartic, floodgate destroying tears, “unstuck in time,” like a character from another book I didn’t write. Beautiful, weightless, standing still in a timeless pool before God because what she felt came from forever on its way back to forever. How blessed to taste of eternity in love restored.

When I write my book, at least one character will stand out of time not because they were pushed out by loss, regret, shame and failure in this world. My character will be pulled out, one Sabbath day at a time, stripping himself of mass and momentum, heart set on eternity and all its charms. Brakes will be the first thing to go.

Advertisement