Learning Rest
Like a weaned child is my soul within me.
– Psalm 131
Today during piano lesson, I taught our five-year-old about rests. You probably haven’t noticed this, I told her, but up until now, your music has been written incorrectly. When you weren’t supposed to play a note, the staff was just empty. But a real song is never like that. The composer always tells you exactly what to do: exactly how long to hold a sound, but also, exactly how long to hold the silence. Rests are what tell us how long to hold our silences. Playing the rests in a piece are just as important as playing the notes.
The same, of course, is true for life: we must be as purposeful about the spaces, margins, and silences in our lives as we are about the noise, in order for our songs to ring true. But we rarely give rest the same attention we give our work—and it does require attention. It doesn’t happen by default; it has to be learned. Rest is not simply the absence of work—that is part of it, but anyone who has simply tried to stop their work to feel rested knows there’s quite a difference. Lots of other things can rush in to fill that space, not all of them restorative: mindless leisure, for example, or addictive and numbing escapes.
What is rest? Rest begins with ceasing, not only from the act of work, but from all you have allowed your work to become to you. Maybe work has become your identity, the main thing that distinguishes who you are. Maybe work is the primary source of your value, what tells you whether you’re worthwhile or smart or useful. Maybe work is how you control your anxieties or optimize your future. Maybe work is what masks your hurt, fatigue, fears, or feelings.
If rest is ceasing from allowing work to be whatever it may have become, then the first thing it does is uncover things like fatigue, fear, emotions, anxiety, and insecurity. Part of resting is allowing those things to rise to the surface. I remember in medical training, people would talk about “detoxing” after they came off the wards. After weeks of working in a demanding environment with little sleep, no time to emotionally process the suffering around you, and at the mercy of your superiors or the culture of that world, it took actual time to go back to being a semi-normal person, and that process wasn’t always easy. We expect rest to feel good, but sometimes it has to get worse before it gets better. We expect rest to be easy, but sometimes it begins with allowing difficult things to surface.
Rest is also restorative. Functionally speaking, rest should leave me with more energy than I had before. This happens through restorative activities and restorative postures. Restorative activities are those that are life-giving. This is what most distinguishes rest from leisure or entertainment: restful activities are life-giving, whereas leisure or entertainment may not be.
Figuring out what is life-giving for you is very simple: what activity leaves you feeling more energetic and full of life than you did before? Maybe it’s reading a good book, going for a walk, journaling, calling a friend, taking a nap, playing a game or sport. Things that are not life-giving may be appealing, but leave you feeling more tired and drained than before.
But rest must also address the fears, emotions, anxieties, and insecurities that ceasing from our work uncovers. Whatever life-giving activity we are doing, there must also be a posture that brings us closer to a place of true, inner restoration—a turning towards a space where we can recover our identity and value, where we are safe to feel our feelings, where we can find true rest from inner toil.
The picture I have of this posture is from Psalm 131:
O Lord, my heart is not lifted up;
my eyes are not raised too high;
I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me.
But I have calmed and quieted my soul,
like a weaned child with its mother;
like a weaned child is my soul within me.
O [insert your name here], hope in the Lord
from this time forth and forevermore.
“Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.”
A weaned child is not coming to its mother with fretful demands for milk, but is simply content to be with her. That child knows who they are, knows they are loved, doesn’t have to understand or worry or earn or achieve. There is a ceasing of doing and a simple being. More precisely, it’s a being with. True rest, as St. Augustine famously puts it, is found in God himself.
The tone here implies perhaps that this does not happen naturally, but that the author has chosen to find this posture of the soul. He has learned to find rest. He has written into the score of his life the spaces of silence that restore his hope. It can be like that for us, as we learn to cease from our workings, create space for what is life-giving, and turn our souls towards that place of true rest with God.
