The Culture Beat

It’s summer, which means vacations and thinking about vacations – and thinking about needing vacations from all the hours we work.

And we do work a lot of hours – almost 44 per week on average, a number that has only grown for the last 30 years. We spend more time on the job than almost any other nation – 25 percent more hours than the Dutch or Norwegians, for example.

Depending on whom you consult, all this work-work-work means either we’re a nation of robotic drones being systematically drained of our humanity, or we’re the engine of an economic juggernaut and even, according to financial historian Niall Ferguson, the last bastion of the Protestant work ethic. (It’s not just good business, he suggests; it’s also good religion.)

Arthur Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute wrote in the Wall Street Journal last month that “most Americans don’t feel particularly shackled … an amazingly high percentage of us like our jobs. Among adults who worked 10 hours a week or more in 2002, the General Social Survey found that 89% said they were very satisfied or somewhat satisfied with their jobs.” A valid point, but it makes me wonder whether we’re so happy because we define ourselves so much by how we earn a living.

In contrast, editor Mark Ames wrote in Alternet that average American reaction to our relatively long hours is “a kind of sick pride in their own wretchedness.”

Work is good, but there are limits. Overwork can be hazardous, literally. Research published last August by the Journal of the American Heart Association found that long work hours correlate with higher blood pressure, just as earlier studies linked long hours with other ailments. Even Forbes magazine – no slouch in pumping corporate interests – noted this year that the 70-hour work week is “in danger” of becoming the new standard for ambitious professionals.

That might help explain why several recent books have tackled the subject of Sabbath, of all things. The word, familiar from the Ten Commandments, has often been redefined as – or reduced to – some blend of church-going, boredom and wasted time. But those misconceptions don’t capture its real meaning. This is an issue, these authors say, more profound than whether it’s OK to toss a football on Sunday or whether Sunday should even be called a Sabbath. (The Jewish Sabbath is the last day of the week, Saturday.)

Among the more thoughtful and wide-ranging books is Norman Wirzba’s “Living the Sabbath” (Brazos Press, 2006). Wirzba, a professor of philosophy at Georgetown College in Kentucky, makes a case for viewing the Sabbath a central concern rather than a marginal afterthought. The biblically prescribed cycle of work and rest, he argues, expresses real life, and it’s an integral pattern we ignore at our peril.

By making us pause in our routines, the Sabbath puts us in our place, to remind us we’re not independent beings, but that we rely on a creator God (who himself took a day to rest in the creation story). We’re also part of a natural order intended to work with harmony and gratitude every day of the week. For example, Wirzba recalls his childhood on a farm, watching his father care for their chickens, regarding them as “gifts” to be treated with kindness and mercy, even when it was time to fix a chicken dinner.

That scene might sound quaint, but Wirzba presents it in condemning contrast to today’s efficiently sterile and inhumane methods of food production, one byproduct of a society out of balance, sans Sabbath. Food production is just one of several social issues – environmentalism, economics, family stability and education among them – that Wirzba links to the Sabbath, or rather to attitudes that the Sabbath can foster.

Wirzba isn’t an idealist. He knows we all can’t raise chickens. But we can do more, he says, in a quest to live in greater harmony with the world, whether it’s in how we treat our neighbors or the environment, or in how we spend our time.

That agenda doesn’t make the Sabbath doesn’t sound boring or marginal at all. It could even sound radical in a land of workaholics.

First published in the Johnson City (Tenn.) Press, 7 July 2007.
Sabbath banner by Wayne Forte.