My human attempt to live the gentle life is my promise of cooperation with the grace of gentility once it touches my lífe. My attempt to grow in gentility may tempt me to forget that its outcome is only provisional, a shadow of thíngs to come — the real thing being the divine gentleness of soul that is a pure gift of the Holy.
~ from SPIRITUALITY AND THE GENTLE LIFE by Adrian Van Kaam
Most people mistakenly believe that all you have to do to stop working is not work. The inventors of the Sabbath understood that it was a much more complicated undertaking. You cannot downshift casually and easily. This is why the Puritan and Jewish Sabbaths were so exactingly intentional. The rules did not exist to torture the faithful. They were meant to communicate the insight that interrupting the ceaseless round of striving requires a surprisingly strenuous act of will, one that has to be bolstered by habit as well as by social sanction.
