I was sitting with my eyes closed alongside my friends in our Meditation Group, trying to move into a peaceful meditative state. However, my mind was full of worries about all that lay ahead for me to do in the next few days – going over and over things as though that would help me cope.
Then an inner voice said, “Come to me and I will give you rest”. Of course, as a Christian, those words were familiar to me – the expressing of the balances of life which we are offered whether we are people of faith, or not. I reflected on the nature of fullness of life, that which engages with us deeply, body, mind, heart and soul.
As a young girl with a Methodist Minister father, I remembered how hard it was to move away from feeling that my calling was to endlessly work for good and justice and with compassion for others. The idea of making sure that I had enough time for rest and relaxation didn’t occur to me. Later on, when I joined many movements for change, I could see that many non-religious people also lived with that sort of zeal. It is as though our lives become consumed by our care for others.
Some people may see this as a sign of great virtue. Maybe, in some ways, it is. However, if you are religious, it can also portray an image of the God you serve as relentless and separating you from so many things which recreate your life and invite humility as one who is not God and cannot really take on the whole world. It can separate you from many of the gifts of life which lie around you and can restore health and well-being – like music and art, and creativity in writing or reading. It can make you into someone who chooses to have no time to share life with friends, to laugh and play and restore your energy.
None of this means that it is not important to have goals and commitments in one’s life – the resolve to bring in good changes and to take our stands for the well-being of others. The reality is that we will find that we can actually carry out these hopes better if we will accept our need to rest and relax. Our imagination and dreams will be restored in ways which we may never have expected. We will genuinely give what we have because we long to do that, rather than because we feel that we ought to be doing it. That means that the way we relate to others will be more humble and perceptive, rather than driven and often with excess ego.
I knew from my more recent path in life that you can say “No”, even when the request is to take on a worthy project. Some of us find that hard to do, partly because we feel honoured to be asked and partly because deep within us there is some relentless God of our own making who demands more than we can actually give.
I sat there with my friends in the silence and found that my inner life could be restored if I would allow the divine gift of rest to be given and to restore my fullness of life and my energy.
