One of my earliest childhood memories is of my mother taking a nap. I was in a crib. This is how early I remember. My mother would do this very often. In my mind, it seems like it was daily. And perhaps it was. She would have the door open a crack, and sometimes I could see her, and sometimes she could see me. But I wasn't really sure what happened when she put me down for my nap, until I started climbing out of the crib and discovered is that she was napping.
I wondered why on earth she'd want to do that, because it was the most exciting part of the day. Some of you might have guessed this matches some of my personality, but I did learn later in life the power of naps. As of rest. And my mother would always say, I just need to sit down. I just need to rest my eyes. I need to just have a moment to myself to rest, because rest made it possible for her to keep going.
Now, I hadn't thought about my mom's naps in a long time until I read Tricia Hirsch's book, Rest Is Resistance a manifesto. I love that title for her. See, rest is More Than Sleep. It's a liberatory spiritual practice that seeks to combat what she calls grind culture, which is a deadly combination of capitalism and white supremacy culture.
She tells us that Read the Rest movement is not some cute, frivolous idea, but instead an intentional disruption against a very violent systems that want to grind us down. Rest is not about avoidance or laziness. It's about keeping our human city whole. But do we even know what rest is? Does it simply mean to sleep more? Is it sitting in our cars and taking a few deep breaths before we pick up the groceries, the kids, or run more errands? Is race taking a walk? Going to the spa?
Getting a massage? It's avoiding social media. Is rest about napping or something greater? Or is rest just another way of talking about an individualistic form of self-care that involves spending money that you may or may not have? However, you may define rest. Many of us have told ourselves, I will rest when. This day is over. If it's been a difficult day. When the week is over. If it's been a challenging week when the loved one is out of the hospital, all or the paperwork is complete.
When my taxes are done, that's when I'll rest. When I finish this project, when my kids soccer season, balance season, basketball season, school play is finished. When my loved one gets better, then I'll rest. This definition of rest can only come for some of us when all the busyness is over. But is it really ever over? Or do we find ourselves tumbling into the next thing and the next thing in the next thing? And we never really get to ever rest.
And there are those of us, myself included, who find rest only when sometimes we can go no further. When I'm not practicing what I aspire to teach all of us, when I put aside my spiritual practices, when I'm not taking care of myself, when I go, go, go, push, push, push. When our bodies break down. When we are forced to rest. And we take to our beds with the flu, a cold, a sinking depression, a flare up of a chronic illness or something bigger that takes all the air out of the room.
And our lives. Yesterday, a group of women gathered for a day of rest here at All Souls, rooted in the work of Krishna. Here. See, here's his book. Is No Ordinary Cold, a slow down. It is a manifesto. Because as a black woman, she learned the wisdom of rest from her mother, her grandmother, her ancestors and those who were enslaved.
She first came to the idea of rest as she was being ground down when she was seeking a master's degree, and at the same time, part of her scholarship was around enslaved people's narratives. And even in those tales, she found places of art and beauty and rest that people carved out for their self preservation. She realized in that moment, grind culture, white supremacy and capitalism does not care about your humanity.
It will use you up to grind you down, whether you're working for justice or just trying to live your life. Brian, culture has taught us to equate being the best kind of human being by how productive you are. Did you bring her to do list? Shall we compare how far we got down them? How are we doing at work? What metrics are we meeting? It's as if we are machines. She argues, and that way? That way of thinking only grinds us down further. Now, is rest the same for all of us now?
Some of us need more rest. In this time, it's not a moment of minimization. That rest is the same for everyone. For those with marginalized identities, rest is needed more than ever because the grind is harder and heavier and more constant rest for our trans and non-binary friends and loved ones. For our black indigenous Pacific Islander friends. Those who have a disability, those who are struggling to make ends meet, who don't know about the light bill, let alone dinner tonight. They need rest.
Most of all. And here, she says, it can be possible for even those in the worst situations. When she found herself in a similar place, she began taking naps wherever she could. In fact, she developed a program called the Nap Ministry. Sounds amazing. She's in fact the Nap bishop.
I know we don't usually use that language in this service, but she is the Nap bishop and I would say that's a really good title to have where she encourages people not only through her writing, but through, she calls it a ministry on Instagram, showing people sleeping in different spaces and actually focuses a lot on black and brown people napping in beautiful spaces. Because so much of our media shows broken black and brown bodies not at rest, but the victims of violence.
And she wants to show beauty and rest and resilience in those images. Rest is a form of resistance, she argues, that helps us keep going. That is a part a spiritual practice and a liberatory tool for our social justice actions. I don't even want to call it work in this moment. We must have action, yes, but we must have rest to keep our wholeness. And for some of us, it may be more action.
So our siblings that need more rest may take it to keep their wholeness, to keep their humanity, to keep them thriving. Here's this work was a big part of our women's retreat, and we heard a reading from our wonderful Catherine this morning, sharing from the book, Holding Ourselves, making that space. It is such a joy to think about rest, because how often do we really do it
now? Here, she says, there are four major tenants, and I'm not going to be able to go into it in this small message this morning. I do encourage you to find the book at your local library or buy a copy. She talks about how rest is a form of resistance to growing culture. She talks about our bodies as a site of liberation, that liberation is not just out there, but in our bodies that rest. The heart provides a portal to imagine, to invent and to heal, she writes.
She reminds us, if you haven't noticed, that our dream space has been stolen and we want it back. One of the wonderful parts of our retreat was our keynote speaker, Denny Roseboro, a two, who asked the women gathered and I'm going to share her question with you, which is, when's the last time you allow yourself to dream without boundaries or limitations? Some of the answers were startling. There was a few of us that had been a few days, a few weeks. Am I talking about dreaming?
It's not just sleep dreaming. It's that daydreaming. Daydreaming. Maybe with a cup of hot tea in our hands, or you get to service early and imagining the flame. Once the chalice is lit, or watching the beautiful tree behind us. I see some of you out in the memorial garden on some Sunday mornings. Is that a place for daydreaming for you? But some of the women in our group also talked about that had been months, years, and even decades. Oh my people, we need rest. We need dreaming.
So many of our social justice leaders in the past have reminded us the importance of the dream. And now that dreaming helps us aim or have a place to go so that we know we have a glimpse, we have a taste. We have a feel of what that world that we want looks like and feels like, not only for us, but for our children and our friends, children and the generations that come after us. We need that space to dream, and we need that space to breathe. We need that space to hope.
And as Denny reminded us, Octavia Butler speaks about that imagination. Imagination is an act of hope. And so if we don't have space for it, if we're too tired for it, then we have a problem. Dreaming is resistance. Rest allows for discovery of joy. Think about even how you listen to a loved one when you're super tired. And that might be this morning. That you have trouble listening. Or the sound distracts you or the the the noise in the room can bother you more than usual.
Maybe it bothers you all the time, but you're having a hard time concentrating. Rest helps us ground ourselves, and it can be through meditation, and it can be through a nap. And it can be sitting on the bench out in the garden, in the sun, daydreaming for a minute or 2 or 30 minutes or more. A place for hope. A place for dreaming. A place of resistance. A place where you can ground yourself not only for yourself, but others.
It's not a heady intellectual conceptualization of rest that Hersey offers us. It's an embodied form, and sometimes we get a little uncomfortable with that. We'd rather think about it, reason about it, maybe reject it, hold it out in the light. Bring it in. But it's an embodiments of rest that is the most important. I've been thinking about. Here's this book these last few weeks, as many of us on staff have been reading it and absorbing the words and we were planning this retreat.
We have a women's retreat every fall and spring. Is that. That's right. And it's I've been to two now and it's it's a marvelous experience for women and those who identify as women in this congregation. And as we were reflecting on the power of rest and where it may or may not be in our lives, and why we need to add it back to be our best human selves, to work for a better world and for justice. I thought back on a story that I read in the magazine. It was my doctor, Rachel Naomi Raymond.
Many of us know her from her book, Kitchen Table Wisdom. It's years ago now, and if you've never read Kitchen Table Wisdom, that is a great book. Very, very moving. But this is a story that's not in that book. This is back when she was serving as a clinical professor of family and community medicine at the University of California. And she describes in an interview the meeting of a group of doctors, as she describes it, who are recovering from their training as doctors.
They need to recover from that training because it's so hyper scientific that they have trouble connecting with their patients. So using a discovery model, Raymond invited doctors to drop in an evening group to talk about the practice of medicine and topics like compassion or suffering or listening. She was inviting, inviting them into a space of rest. And that's one important part of rest, is it doesn't always have to be by yourself.
I think for some of us, perhaps this moment on a Sunday is a place of rest, a moment where you can put things down and be in another room with a community with similar values, similar concerns. To hear the breath of others. What a gift. What a gift in this world. So Raymond invites these doctors to do a similar thing to come, but they also had an assignment for their rest, which sounds counterintuitive, but keep with me.
The doctors were asked to bring a story, a personal story, a bit of poetry, a story from the world, literature or an exercise. An exercise to help people be present, to connect, to rest more deeply. Now, during a session on listening, an oncologist brought a shopping bag with her, and in the shopping bag were 12 stethoscopes. She had borrowed for the evening. And she gave everyone a stethoscope. And she said, let's listen to our hearts for about nine minutes. Nine minutes is a long time.
Have you ever had to do the silent thing for two minutes? Nine minutes. Listening to your own heart in a stethoscope is a long time. And Raymond describes the scene. So we started listening to our hearts. We were middle aged doctors. And for the first few minutes, you could see that everyone was diagnosing themselves. Did I hear a weak valve? Was the rhythm right?
But because nine minutes is an extended period of time, people started to move beyond the self diagnosing and they found something mysterious and quite profound. There were two cardiologists in that room, and both of them were blown away. She recalls, we all were moved. She remembers that she realized, this is Raymond. She realized she had never heard a heart before, or even as a seasoned doctor, because she had never really listened. I had also collated thousands of hearts, she says.
But I have never heard a heart before. It's very, very moving, she says. Talk about an experience of reverence and awe. I've always loved that story that Raymond shared in that interview. Doctors listening to their own hearts as a last lesson of compassion and listening. But I also like the symbolism to it, because there's this action moment in the heart and almost this rest. This back and forth thinking about in social justice work where we need action.
We need to show up with one another, and then we need to rest. To keep ourselves not just alive, but thriving. To help others find that way, to give them the support they need. And I've also always wondered what if, in Raymond's story, the doctors had done something else? In that moment of awe and reverence to listening to their own hearts with that new listening. Similar to what the children's story at the time for all ages. Bird bailer. Hearing the stars.
Hearing the coyote's hearing the blooms of flowers on a cactus with that new hearing. If they had taken the stethoscopes, and they, with awe and reverence and with love, listened to the hearts of others in the room, perhaps choosing people who looked and spoke the least like themselves, and then brought in that circle and then broadened it again to hear the heart, a moment of action, a moment of rest, the symbol of love beating in the chest of an entire community. Let's find rest.
Let us thrive and let us act. Blessed be an amen. Thank you for.