On Mutant Academic Ideals and Resting on Sabbath/ Sabbatical

Even though I am someone who teaches about biblical texts, I'm not a person whose thinks about how my personal life is, should be or has been shaped by the biblical texts. I've resisted the idea that the Bible is somehow a road-map for living, a compass or a guideline. This resistance comes from my gradual migration out of an evangelical Christian context, a context familiar to so many other biblical studies folk. However, over the past few years, I've thought more and more about these texts as conversation partners and as points of conversation between myself and others from the past, present and future. My work on conceptual metaphor, in particular, prompts me to think about the ways that images from these ancient writings have shaped me and my context and the ways I might be more intentional vis-a-vis that shaping. Now that I'm on sabbatical, I've entered a period of time that explicitly draws upon a biblical tradition and image--sabbath. However, as I thought about this time I never really put much thought into biblical ideas about sabbath . . .

Instead, my thinking about sabbatical centered around 1) when I could get one and 2) all the stuff I might accomplish during the sabbatical. In fact, my thinking about this period in my career was shaped by some image I have of an ideal academic who goes on sabbatical to an exotic academic locale, does a lot of heavy reading, rubs shoulders with the popular thinkers of the day, sips cocktails in the afternoon and, presto, has some product at the end of it all. This image is a very "Protestant-work-ethic-modern-multi-tasking-sexy-book-writer-theory-loving-text-geek" mash-up. I'm really not sure when this mutant creature took over my life, but now she wants to call the shots on my sabbatical and, I fear, my academic life as a whole. Blargh.

So, back to the text, as I often say in my classes. Looking at Genesis, first of all, I'm surprised that the seventh day is one of the two times that at the end of a "day" God does not see and pronounce things as good. On the other days, except for the second, the author recounts God's creation and then reports: "God saw that it was good." God does not take the time on the seventh day to look back at the creation, to muse about whether the dome in the sky looks a little wonky, to fuss over whether or not sea monsters were a good idea or not. God's not looking back seems particularly important to me now, since one of the things I'm struggling with on sabbatical is looking backwards. As I mentioned before, the luxury of time on my hands creates an opportunity to re-look at past writing and to focus on (i.e. literally obsess about) shortcomings. Double blargh.

While God leaves the past to be the past, God also does not, according to the text, dwell on the future either. There is no suggestion that on the eighth day God might re-do some part of creation, make it better or more consistent or more witty. Neither does the text suggest that God is sitting around writing up action plans or research agendas. The day, instead, is about rest. Rest. And the day is made sacred by God. Sacred rest.

The notion that a sabbatical might be some sort of "sacred rest" is a little scary to me. It sounds a little more slacker-ish and spiritual-ish than I tend to be. However, it also makes me wonder what might come out of a sabbatical that is treated as a time to take a break from what one has done in the past, a time to think about and within the present without fear for the future. Maybe it's time for me to think about what kind of professor, scholar, person I am right now: What are my current questions, my current scholarly motivations and interests? Hmmm . . .