We must believe we are worthy of rest. We don’t have to earn it. It is our birthright. It is one of our most ancient and primal needs.
~ Tricia Hersey, Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto

Each year, I reach this point in time with one most significant thing on top of my mind: rest. I need rest from this vineyard I enjoy laboring in, rest from this work of my heart and soul, rest from this calling that I awaken to each morning with gratitude that I get to respond.

How can that be when I love it so much?

As if it were a blinking caution sign, while in seminary I’d read in the book Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less that the term workaholic (which I confess to having been from way back) was first coined in a study of ministers. Aha! I thought. I must be on the right path!

However, now that I am indeed a minister, year after year, again and again, the great lesson I keep learning is that to be present for and to do what I love so much, I must rest to be fortified, to continue the journey, to love and to serve well.

This year has been a bit different though. We on ERUUF’s senior staff team began our work quite conscious of a strategic plan to get started on and, imaginative, caring lot that we are, we each had a bunch of goals we had heaped upon ourselves. Something about that needed to change.

We were all quite gratified to learn that Saundra Dalton-Smith, MD had declared a need for rest to be a sacred thing in her book of the same name, Sacred Rest. While Dr. Dalton’s theology differs from mine, and I had to wade through it a bit, I had no argument with her underlying recommendations for the types of rest we each need: physical rest, mental rest, emotional rest, spiritual rest, social rest, sensory rest, and creative rest. Try as we might, we had to keep reminding ourselves to make it real. To make space for it.

This year I also learned from Polish activists about the important practice of community care when setting intentions for self-care and rest. That we take it on both for ourselves and also for one another.

Finally, an amazing mentor who noted my fatigue challenged me to declare clear boundaries of rest for myself and perhaps even consider such boundaries a sacred practice for all of staff and all of our congregation. A daring possibility, but perhaps, community care at its finest?

It has been admittedly difficult to put all of this into practice in the midst of our busy year. But as I now leave for a well-needed summer break, it is the cultivation of sacred rest that will be very much on top of my mind and in my actions. My sacred rest on behalf of self and community care.

And here’s what else:

I’ve let staff know that we will start a practice for our new program year, which begins July 1, of having minimal meetings each 4th week of the month. We’ll meet with one another for our monthly staff chapel, we’ll co-create worship together. But rather than a profusion of meetings, we’ll use that fourth week as a time to quiet our minds, and perhaps go deeper as we bring focus to what we need to take care of.

Maybe even take thoughtful walks around our beautiful campus to nourish our hearts and minds as we go about what we do in a deeply centered way, saying no to the back-to-back meetings and all the rushing about.

I’m extending this invitation to each of you as well. What would you do with a week of no or minimal meetings at ERUUF? How might you tend to your life? Who might we become in Beloved Community as we set 12 weeks aside during our year, to establish our collective sacred rest?

My thanks to each of you who hold me accountable for attending to my rest. I promise to do the same for you.

May we all cultivate moments that are restorative and meaningful during this summer.

See you when I return!

Palms together,
Rev. Jacqueline

My Summer Book List

Consider this a list of what interests me. I always have a pile of books I hope to read over the summer for pleasure and study. Though I explore each, and sometimes listen to some via audiobook during long road trips, I rarely get through them all! They become part of the pile for the rest of the year, and I’m okay with that.

• Younger Next Year for Women, Chris Crowley & Henry S. Lodge, MD
  (2 different people gifted me this book, so I’m taking the hint!)
• A Darker Wilderness: Black Nature Writing From Soil to Stars, Erin Sharkey, ed.
• Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World, Linda Hogan
• Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity, and the Natural World, Alison H. Deming and Lauret E. Savoy, eds.
• Being here: Prayers for Curiosity, Justice, and Love, Pádraig Ó Tuama
• Silt: Prose Poems, Aurora Levins Morales
• Poetry As Spellcasting, Tamiko Beyer, Destiny Hemphill, Lisbeth White
• Medicine Stories: Essays for Radicals, Aurora Levins Morales
• To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul, Tracy K. Smith
• On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in An Unapologetic World, Danya Ruttenberg.
• Decolonizing Wealth: Indigenous Wisdom to Heal Divides and Restore Balance, Edgar Villanueva
• The Book of (More) Delights, Ross Gay
• This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us, Cole Arthur Riley
• Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto, Tricia Hersey
• Love At the Center: Unitarian Universalist Theologies, Sofia Betancourt, ed.
• Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future, Patty Krawec
• How Long ‘Til Black Future Month?, N.K. Jemisin
• Healing Our Way Home: Black Buddhist Teachings on Ancestors, Joy, and Liberation, Valerie Brown, Marisela B. Gomez, MD, Kaira Jewel Lingo
• Dancing In the Darkness: Spiritual Lessons for Thriving in Turbulent Times, Otis Moss, III
• Finding Refuge: Heart Work for Healing Collective Grief, Michelle Cassandra Johnson
• Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things, Adam Grant
• Preaching the Uncontrolling Love of God: Sermons, Essays, and Worship Elements from the Perspective of Open, Relational, and Process Theology, Jeffry Wells
• Seeds of a New Way: Nurturing Authentic & Diverse Religious Leadership, Manish Mishra-Marzetti and Nancy McDonald Ladd
• A Promised Land, Barack Obama