Mudhouse Sabbath

Earlier this week, I read Mudhouse Sabbath by Lauren Winner. I was introduced to Winner through a Christianity Today review of her first book, Girl Meets God, which I read and enjoyed immensely. Girl Meets God recounts Winner’s conversion from Orthodox Judaism to Christianity, and Mudhouse Sabbath continues her reflections by examining how Jewish rituals inform and enrich her Christian experience.

She says in the introduction:
…I miss Jewish ways. I miss the rhythms and routines that drew the sacred down into the everyday. I miss the Sabbaths on which I actually rested. I have even found that I miss the drudgery of keeping kosher. I miss the work these practices effected between me and God. … Jews do these things with more attention and wisdom not because they are more righteous nor because God likes them better, but rather because doing, because action, sits at the center of Judaism. Practice is to Judaism what belief is to Christianity. This is not to say that Judaism doesn’t have dogma or doctrine, It is rather to say that for Jews, the essence of the thing is a doing, an action. Your faith might come and go, but your practice ought not waver. (Indeed, Judaism suggestions that the repeating of the practice is the best way to ensure that a doubter’s faith will return.)

This reminded me of what I love about liturgical worship. To me, saying the Lord’s Prayer, Apostle’s Creed, corporate prayer of confession and other regular aspects of a liturgical service, better enable me to focus on God, and they are especially beneficial on the increasingly rare days when my heart’s not really in what I’m doing. It has been almost eight years since I’ve worshipped regularly in this manner, but I still miss it. Reading Winner’s thoughts on “practice” enabled me to better articulate what I appreciate about this type of worship.

Here are some of Winner’s thoughts on the Sabbath:
…my Sunday was more an afternoon off than a Sabbath. It was an add-on to a busy week, not the fundamental unit around which I organized my life. The Hebrew work for holy means, literally, “set apart.” In failing to live a Sabbath truly distinct from weekly time, I had violated a most basic command: to keep the Sabbath holy. … In observing the Sabbath, one is both giving a gift to God and imitating Him. Exodus and Deuteronomy make this clear when they say, “Six days shall you labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God.” To the Lord your God.

On hospitality:
To invite people into our homes is to respond with gratitude to the God who made a home for us. … We are not meant simply to invite people into our homes, but also to invite them into our lives. Having guests and visitors, if we do it right is not an imposition, because we are not meant to rearrange our lives for our guests—we are meant to invite our guests to enter into our lives as they are.

On fasting, a former rabbi once told her, “When you are fasting and you feel hungry, you are to remember that you are really hungry for God.” She later adds, “When I am sated, it is easy to feel independent. When I am hungry, it is possible to remember where my dependence lies.”

Unfortunately, one practice that Winner does not write about in Mudhouse Sabbath is studying the Word. However, her discussion of her studies of the Torah and the Talmud in Girl Meets God is fascinating. I highly recommend both books. Check the library.