Three months into their desert odyssey, the Israelites arrive at the foot of Mt. Sinai. On the mountain, the earth and the heavens touch. God and humankind meet in the clouds. But some restrictions apply. Some may travel high up the mountain, while others must remain low. Only Moses makes it to the top. All alike, though, shall be consecrated. They have to wash up, look their best, abstain from sex for three days. They must take care not to tread too near holiness. Last, the Israelites must make a pledge to obey all that God will command. Only then will there be a theophany. Only then will God appear. On the third day, fire and smoke envelop the mountain. Lightning flashes, thunder clashes. A trumpet blast sounds so loudly it causes the people to tremble. They grow fearful and contemplate a hasty retreat. “Moses, take it from here!” they cry. “Later on you can tell us how all it came out.” But God has other plans. “Come up to the Lord,” God says. God has in mind not only Moses, but 73 elders of Israel. As representatives of the people, they, too, will climb into the presence of God. More rituals follow: burnt offerings, sacrificed bulls, blood spattered about. Then, the elders ascend. They go up and sit down on the side of a mountain. There, while eating and drinking their fill, beneath a pavement of sapphire, clear as the sky itself, the Israelites gaze upon God. (Exod. 24:9-11) It is an experience of Sabbath never to be repeated in Israel.

The practice of Sabbath assumes many forms. Some of us attend public worship, eager to share with others a message of grace that never grows tiresome; others kneel in prayer right where they are; still others simply assume a posture of rest that invites thanksgiving for the gifts of a day, or a week, or a lifetime. Tying all these activities together is a spirit of gratitude that opens like a window to the awesome presence of God. Sabbath is finally a formative expression of love for God and for neighbor. It is a practiced belief in God’s goodness, a willingness to stop our busy acquisition of personal well being in order to receive it from the Source.

Each mornings in my library, my children and I are discovering our own forms of Sabbath keeping. On the first day of our new Sabbath observance, we play the dead weight game. In the middle of lessons, I suddenly stop what we have been doing and invite each child to put the instrument away for the day. Each one complies gladly.

“Now, let your arms rest at your sides,” I instruct. “I’m going to raise your arm by the hand. Remain limp. I’ll do the lifting. When I release your arm, let it drop in a free fall!” For my girls, this is a cinch. They let out a giggle as their arms swing like ropes before coming to rest. But my son Seth cannot do it. When I lift his arm, he lifts with me. When I let go, his arm remains in mid-air, flexed and tight. “Relax this time!” I command. But he cannot. I push his arm down, massage his muscle, invite him to perform the procedure on me. He crows with delight as he drops my arm like a dead body. But still he cannot manage it himself. “My son, the control freak,” I think.

Yet there is more, something behind his rigidness. Fear, I decide. It is as if he believes that, letting go, his own arm will rip from its socket and spill to the floor. Seth dreads the surrender of control the way adults fear death.

Here it dawns on me. Rest, relaxation, release: these are not the natural acts we sometimes take them to be. From the moment of birth, we are scrappers, programmed to compete and prevail. We are not by nature Sabbatarians, keepers of Sabbath. The instinct of ceaseless hunting and gathering is imbedded in our genes. Laziness and sloth exist in the world, to be sure, but these do not answer to Sabbath. They are merely alternative forms of striving, energy wasted on the avoidance of risk, pain, and failure. Even our sincere efforts not to strive are revealed as more striving. “I will strive hard to relax!” we can say, but not with a straight face. This is part of our dilemma.

There is more than genetics at work. Increasingly, young people are being subjected to what one sociologist describes as a “hurried childhood.” (David Elkind, The Hurried Child: Growing Up Too Fast Too Soon (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1981) In the so-called “curriculum of modern life,” we are forcing on our children cognitive demands that they are unable to comply with. I reflect on my own childhood in the sixties. Whole summers were spent out-of-doors, barely supervised. My only teachers were kids, barely my senior, whose simple expectations were that I hit the ball and throw the other team out. My own children, by contrast, have been in some form of structured day care or summer program since before they learned to walk. Typically, today’s young people parade from place to place, event to event, as if the journey from youth to adulthood were a constant stream of obligations and destinations. Since my childhood the lives of American middle class children, from toddlers to teenagers, have become enormously complicated. Meanwhile, those same lives seem increasingly void of that vital sense of grace and assurance so closely associated with spiritual well-being.

Back in our library, my Seth and I are scratching our heads. How will we convince his brain to set the muscles of his arm free? Then I remember the quintessential exercise in trust from my church youth group days—the faith fall. With feet together and eyes tightly shut, we fell back into the arms of a friend. If we hedged by thrusting one foot back to catch ourselves, then we had to begin again. At first, we would catch each other early in a fall. Eventually, though, we would wait until the last minute to cushion the falling body in our outstretched arms. By then, we had each grown confident of a timely rescue.

I explain the faith fall to Seth and we begin to practice it. He is petrified. In stages, though, he learns to let go. He comes to trust in his father’s trustworthiness. Finally, it becomes great fun and attracts the other children, who soon join in. Once, I even fall back myself as eight skinny arms collude to catch me. We all end up on the floor, laughing to the point of tears.

“Now, Seth,” I begin again. “Let your arms drop to your sides like dead weight!” And this time around, Seth does so with the limber ease of true belief.

To keep Sabbath is, in a sense, to surrender, to fall back into loving arms, assured of their will to embrace you. And ultimately, keeping Sabbath is to acknowledge that those loving arms belong to God.