shouldless spaces
Playing homage to peace, I begin to clean off the walls in the upstairs room that now serves as our office. Beneath an array of haphazard frames, some meaningful, some not, I uncover at least ten years of nail marks and places small hands ripped something clean away. I remember now why we had hung these pictures so haphazardly; some really only covered over the cracks of living, the signs of what the room used to be, the places little girl fingers had stained and bruised accidentally. We believed the hangings–so many small frames, among them kid-made art and family photographs and my own amateur paintings—would give us permission not to see the things we need to repair. Why is it our nature to cover over with appearances?
Love covers over a multitude of sins. So above all, love each other deeply (1 Peter 4:8). I mull this truth as I unburden the wall.
I read somewhere that after a while we stop seeing the things we hang on our walls. I think of that now, a wise slice of a line from a novel, as I lean one frame against another and turn to run my fingers over the bare expanse, my fingertips lingering over the empty holes and the scars in the paint. We stop seeing the things we hang and we stop seeing the scars underneath, and the truth is we’ve layered on far too much to attend to. Clutter of every kind, even the clutter of the soul, consumes energy without creating meaning. I look at the open stretch of wall in front of me–wide like a wind-blown plain; quiet, like placid miles of clear sea, and I breathe a little more deeply. In view of margin, I rest my eyes, and the relief surprises me. What truth have I uncovered? Especially now, when necessity has finally taken down what really had been too much.
Recently, I read something in a design book about the importance of uncluttered walls. The author described blank space as a significant choice, calling visually open places like the one now in front of me wall sabbaths. She encouraged her readers to “aim for having some empty wall space in every room.” And in every day, I murmur now, recalling this, my hand flat pressed against the wall.
In life, we need margin so we can take a breath, rest, and focus on what’s most important. In our home, we need white space for the same reasons.
Myquillyn Smith, Cozy Minimalist Home, 155
I’ve been asking God what I can learn from this quarantine, this time at home, during the history–HIS story; it’s always His–we’re living. And right now, standing in front of this blank wall, I think of that term, wall sabbath, and the Spirit sews a seam. I’ve always loved blank spaces, but I’ve not known why, and now, I think I finally see: In clearing space, God creates Sabbath.
If you read the gospels, it might not be readily obvious that Jesus himself loved Sabbath. Hebrew religious leaders often criticized Him on that point, because he refused to observe the practice in the ways they thought he should. The place of sabbath is a shouldless space, built as it is on love, commanded as it was by love. God’s Sabbath laws could be restated in a lover’s tongue: Come, be with me.
Sabbath, the word in it’s barest Hebrew root meaning to cease, to rest, was a deliberate, commanded exercise in trust, which began in earliest times among the people of Israel. God specifically told His people to leave one marginal day for reliant rest, and scripture reveals pretty clearly that many neither understood this distribution of grace nor carefully participated in the practice. Like us, they were too busy. But after the destruction of and eventual rebuilding of Jerusalem, zealots newly returned from exile built extensive legalistic traditions around keeping Sabbath. What God meant to draw them into abundant intimacy, they turned into volumes of rules. Self-righteousness rampantly destroyed their hearts and publicly covered over their brokenness.
But Jesus. Oh, the difference in life summed by those two words! I trace his name in nail marks. Turning all of this emptiness inside-out, Jesus consistently inflamed “the powers that be” by bucking their system (even now, the legalistic ones among us squirm), doing things on the Sabbath day that leaders thought he should not: He healed; He allowed His disciples to break off grain in the fields and eat. Religious leaders interpreted Jesus’ behavior as deliberate immorality. They muttered over his reckless disregard for appearances. But often–not just on that one designated day of the week–Jesus went out early in the morning to isolated places to pray (Luke 4:42). Luke reiterates this multiple times: Jesus withdrew to deserted places for prayer (Luke 5:16). The casual clauses thrum like low drum beats in the background of the gospel record. The rebel against Sabbath kept private sabbaths of his own, regularly observing secluded moments–even secret hours–of complete reliance on God.
We must look closely, you and I. I bend toward the wall to get a clearer view of the work required to repair things. Healing can be a lengthy process, and it’s true that without sabbath we stop seeing completely, that clutter obscures our view. The fuller the walls, the calendar, the lists, the more that’s true. Bare vulnerability always precedes healing. Jesus peels away false piety to expose the truth that Sabbath means falling baldly into God’s embrace, that we must go naked of pretense. That sort of raw intimacy–these bare, pierced walls–could never be for show.
