Emmaus walks
Editor’s note: In The Pastor: A Mem- oir, Eugene H. Peterson reflects on the importance of sabbath to renew himself; his wife, Jan; and their fam- ily. As a family, they made an annual pilgrimage to Montana to refresh and restore themselves for ministry. But he and Jan also recognized the need for a weekly sabbath, and were encour- aged by a retreat leader to let Abraham Joshua Heschel’s book, The Sabbath, be their guide and to go beyond an intentional day off—a day of not- doing, a day of not-working:
“ O
ur children were all in school by now. We decided that each Mon-
day, after getting them ready and sending them off to get the school bus, we would familiarize ourselves with this earth, spend the day immersing ourselves in what we had for too long ignored ....
“After doing this for several months, we drove north 200 miles to be on a three-day retreat at Kirkridge Retreat Center in the Pennsylvania Pocono Mountains with Douglas Steere (a Quaker and philosophy pro- fessor at Swarthmore [Pa.] College). ... What we didn’t know was that this was a silent retreat. We hadn’t read the fine print: silence for three days. Silence in our rooms. Silence at meals. About 20 of us in silence for three days ....
“Professor Steere told us ... [that] following his morning and afternoon lectures we would take an Emmaus walk. Otherwise, silence. Silence, he told us, was hugely undervalued in our American way of life as a way of being in communion with one another and with God. American Christians were conspicuously deficient. ‘Think of it as remedial silence.’ This would be three days for practicing silence.
‘These might be the quietest three days you will ever spend. Don’t waste them.’ “.... We quit taking a ‘day off’ and began keeping a ‘sabbath,’ a day in which we deliberately separated our- selves from the workweek—in our case being pastor and pastor’s wife— and gave ourselves to being present to what God has done and is doing, this creation in which we have been set down and this salvation in which we have been invited to be participants in a God-revealed life of resurrection. ... “Our sabbath-keeping became ritu-
alized. After getting the children off to school, I prepared a simple lunch of sandwiches and fruit. We took our day-pack, walking sticks, binoculars and appropriate clothing for whatever weather faced us—rain, snow, sun- shine. We drove to a trailhead, usually not more than 30 or 40 minutes away. “Jan read a psalm and prayed. ...
We entered a morning of silence, an Emmaus-walk silence in which we listened to Jesus. After three hours or so we found a rock alongside the river
or a fallen tree in the woods, broke the silence with a spoken prayer, and ate our lunch. And then we talked: obser- vations of the kingfisher and wood thrush, red fox and beaver, bloodroot and trailing arbutus; conversations of the past week; reflections on Sunday’s worship. Old memories jogged out of the silence. We paid attention to the creation week that we had just lived through. We paid attention to the holy week we had just lived through. It always turned out that we had missed a lot. Each sabbath became a day of remembering, becoming aware of where we were, who we were—the gifts of God for the people of God.”
Peterson, a Presbyterian
pastor, is the author of more than 30 books, including the contemporary translation of the Bible, The Message. This except from The Pastor: A Memoir, 2011 by Eugene Peterson, is reprinted with permission from HarperOne, a division of HarperCollinsPublishers.
August 2011 25
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