Instead of Checking E-mail During Worship…

Setting aside time where we are separate from the routines of daily life is an ancient tradition, captured in the idea of a Sabbath. This tradition can also be adapted for the modern day.

A friend of mine in divinity school wrote her masters thesis on taking a Sabbath. She not only read about the tradition of Sabbath, but also committed to her own Sabbath practice, taking a full day for rest and rejuvenation each week. As I remember, she had a detailed list of what she would and would not do on such a day, avoiding any activity that might be construed as work.

Rev. Bret Lortie’s post “Defining Sabbath” explains how he takes an unstructured day of recreation each Monday:

There are many ways to differentiate a sabbath from other days. Mine is “a day without a schedule.” I get out and do things, but each activity doesn’t begin or end at any specific time. It begins when it begins; it ends when it ends. For someone like me who schedules every activity morning until night, this is a liberating way of being for a day.

There are other goals for my sabbath. I read, do my spiritual practice, and have some kind of outing that will be refreshing in some way.

The broader idea of Sabbath is “to differentiate” that time, sacred time, as apart from regular time, the time we spend working, meeting material obligations, running errands, etc.

To take such time apart is a counter-cultural activity. Ethics Daily reports that an astonishing number of people are now checking their e-mail during worship:

…Atlanta led the way in checking e-mail in church, with 22 percent confessing to peeking at their portable device during services, according to the survey…

…Houston and Denver tied for second in the checking-e-mail-in-church category, with 19 percent in both cities confessing to the deed. Washington placed third with 18 percent, followed closely by Los Angeles (17 percent), Sacramento and Phoenix (15 percent) and Tampa (13 percent)…

We miss out on the benefits of worship when we cannot even commit this precious hour or two to being fully present. To go deeply into worship, one has to shut off the gadgets.

Sometimes this means a few minutes of boredom. In most congregations, there is at least one part of the service that some participants find less than riveting. But this doesn’t mean it’s Blackberry time! I used to get incredibly restless if I found the sermon boring.

One thing that has helped me a bit is to think of the worship as my time for meditation and prayer. If a sermon doesn’t hold my interest, I focus on my breathing, or pray silently about the things that are occupying my mind. I’ve never been a fan of “responsive readings” used in many Unitarian Universalist congregations, so instead I use that time to listen silently to the reading. At first this felt a bit odd, but it’s really changed my worship experience for the better. It’s been a way of taking ownership of my worship time, of saying, “I’ve got an hour free here, special from the rest of the week, and I better take advantage of it.”

This has really helped me to enjoy worship more consistently, rather than to have my enjoyment hinge on whether the minister preached a good sermon, or whether the music moved me, or whether the spoken prayer included my concerns. I’m not saying these things aren’t important to the worship experience; they are. But in any situation where one worships with the same congregation for years, there are going to be ups and downs. For this reason, worship has to mean something to each of us who participate, something more than the sum of its parts. In order to get to this place, where our worship experience transcends some of the details, I believe a good first step is to see this as sacred time, as time that we are grateful to have apart from the routines of daily life, and treat it accordingly.