Sabbath

SABBATH Tradition has the Sabbath as a day of rest and contemplation, a day of thoughtful appreciation of what manifestly belongs to the Lord Tradition says the Sabbath should be the studious realm of sura and testament, chapter and verse, call and response across awesome scales that are universal and eternal On this cool Sabbath morning the October sun explodes through a gap between the houses nearby, through the gold-orange leaves of the shedding oak trees and the red leaves and berries of the burning bush hedge and conspires with the wind to animate the shadows on the breakfast room table, the Sunday morning papers, my wife’s red sweater, the lenses of her glasses, the color on her lips, as if breakfast at our home is in the middle of a fire that I ought to be tending lest it get out of hand “Look at me!” she says, in a voice that reminds me of a nature documentary in which a lioness in heat is shown smacking the snout of an oblivious male then stepping deftly away from his toothy response, a prurient voice reminding us both that our Sabbath agenda is not about worship and sermon and hymn, is not about prophesy, the anointment of kings or arks and their covenants, the miraculous adultery of immaculate conception or some good son of man who escapes from the grave, promising to return in apocalyptic glory We are more about song, the tambourine and the harp, the passionate poetry of the singer of psalms, David and Bathsheba, Solomon and Sheba, and Solomon’s Song, more about love in the firelight of lust, about naked desire and quivering embrace in the gardens of delight by the murmuring waters of the rivers of life on the Lord’s good earth, where we are bathed in the sun that makes shadows and flames that sear and ignite, illuminate and burn, but never destroy and never consume Emanuel Carter