Off Sabbatical
Baptist ministers are able to take a three month sabbatical every seven years. This is intended as an extended period of rest and reflection, to allow ministers to be refreshed and reinspired. Our minister just took her first sabbatical, and here she shares a little about it.
The rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel describes the sabbath as a cathedral in time, a sanctuary carved out within our days for resting in the divine, and that pretty well sums up my experience of sabbatical. There was a graciousness and a spaciousness to these past three months, time to read and write and create and play.
I spent some time away by myself, starting my sabbatical on a silent retreat at St Beuno's in North Wales, and ending it on an informal retreat at Launde Abbey. I feared the silence would drive me mad by day two, but in the end I slipped into it like a warm bath. It was so much easier to simply be when there was little to do, and it felt like my internal volume dialled down to match the external quiet. I walked and prayed and painted and laid under a tree watching the branches sway for two hours. It was glorious!
I also spent some time away with family, most memorably two days in London and two days at Disneyland Paris. And I spent some time away with just my husband, exploring Mull and Iona while the kids had fun with their grandparents.
But it wasn't all holiday. I did lots of sorting at time, finally getting to the bottom of some very old to do lists. Not terribly exciting perhaps, but very restorative for someone who likes everything to have its place. I also read more than I have in years, returning to some favourite novels as well as discovering some new ones, and reading deeper into an eclectic range of topics, from neurodiversity to sabbath and from utopia to universalism.
I started writing too, a collection of Bible stories which seek to encourage the reader to be curious and critical about scripture, acknowledging that not all of the stories are literally true while digging into the deep truths that they do hold. And I had a lot of fun experimenting with different creative endeavours. I felted and sketched and painted. I made cyanotypes and played with clay. It was wonderful to simply enjoy the process, and as an added bonus, I was rather pleased with some of the results.
The word of my sabbatical was 'delight'. It was the word which came to me most strongly during my first retreat, and it has stayed with me ever since. And I don't think it is a word for me alone, but a word I am meant to bring back to ministry, so that I can encourage others to find the same delight I have found.
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