Into Great Silence

Sunday at the Duke Youth Academy presents an opportunity to teach our kids something about the importance of Sabbath in the Christian life.

I admit that it is a lesson I find hard to practice myself. But it is a precious gift from God - one that Jesus cared enough about to argue over repeatedly with his opponents. God the Father's desire for his creation to enjoy rest is the very reason Jesus found it acceptable to heal on the Sabbath. And it's the reason he let his disciples pluck those heads of grain.

We can only really have rest when we are whole, whether that means being healed of disease, healed of hunger, or healed of sin. And the Sabbath was made for humankind, not humankind for the Sabbath.

My own contribution to DYA's practice of Sabbath over the past two years has been to organize a showing of the 2006 documentary, Into Great Silence. Produced by German filmmaker Philip Groning, Into Great Silence is a 2 hour and 40 minute foray into the life of the Carthusian monks at the Monastery of the Grande Chartreuse in southeastern France. And it is a remarkable thing - both for the insight it offers into a rare and austere form of monasticism, and for the ways in which it can help us think about Sabbath.

Check this film out if you get a chance. It's not even that expensive to purchase. Over two-and-a-half hours of watching monks at work and prayer might not seem like you're idea of a good time. But the experience is riveting. And restful.

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Our Sabbath ended with Vespers, and the closing Scripture passage was one of my favorites:

"The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy.

"For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.

"Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior. But now he has reconciled you by Christ's physical body through death to present you holy in his sight, without blemish and free from accusation - if you continue in your faith, established and firm, and do not move from the hope held out in the gospel.

"This is the gospel that you heard and that has been proclaimed to every creature under heaven, and of which I, Paul, have become a servant" (Colossians 1:15-23).