I love computer programmer Derek Sivers’ idea for hacking the consumer system. He writes, “I’d like to get 100 parrots and teach them to say, “It won’t make you happy!” – then let them loose in shopping malls, big electronics stores, and car lots. Then, when people are considering spending thousands of dollars on a giant TV, or going deeply in debt with a new car, a surprising squawk might shock them back to their senses.” Leave it to a computer programmer to think up a virus like this. I might also teach the parrots to give shoppers in the mall a more positive message: “You have enough. You are enough. You have enough. You are enough.” Maybe a project for another time.
So here we are on the seventh and final day of the creation story. The “seventh day of creation” is kind of a paradox because in the story on the seventh day nothing is actually created. On each other day, some new aspect of reality is spoken into being. On the first day, it’s light, and the regularity of time, out of a watery chaotic mess. On the second day, space is created with a delicate, porous boundary separating it from the waters. On the third day, land shows up with plants that carry their seeds within them. On the fourth day, the sun and moon and stars appear, shining in the sky. On the fifth day, it’s birds and fish. On the sixth day, land animals and humans, in a spectacular explosion of diversity.
But the seventh day starts out, “The heavens and the earth were finished, in all their array.” God doesn’t speak anything into existence; in fact, God does not speak at all. And the rest of the description of the day is just that God had finished the work and ceased or rested from the work. And then God blessed the day and made it holy because on that day God had ceased from the creative work that God had done. There’s all this redundancy and overlap between ceasing and finishing and resting and blessing and stopping and making holy. But nothing actually happens.
So why even have a “7th day of creation” if creation was done after six? Why not just have a six day week? And if any day was going to get a special blessing from God, if any day was going to be declared holy, wouldn’t you think it should be a day when something really important happened, like maybe the first day when God makes the first metaphysical incision into the void? Or maybe the sixth day, when humans appear? Shouldn’t that be a big deal? But no. The day that is declared most special is the one day on which nothing happens at all.
It might be useful to look at what happens next in the story. The very next event in Genesis after that seventh day when God rests is God making the world over again in an entirely different way. It’s like someone hit a cosmic reset button and God starts from scratch. This time God makes the sky and the earth first, but there are no plants yet and no rain yet. God takes some of the earth and breathes into it to create the first earthling. God plants the Garden of Eden – a garden of pleasure – with all kinds of fabulous fruit trees and four rivers to water the garden, and puts the earthling in the garden. It’s a very different tone from the first creation story –more relational, more sensual.
So after those first six days, turns out God wasn’t actually finished at all. It says, “The heavens and the earth were finished, in all their array,” but the entire rest of the Torah belies that! Everything we’ve been reading about all these months, all this deep and rich myth about the creation of the universe, amounts to just a first draft. The first draft is what’s finished. God decides the draft is complete, good enough for now, takes a break, takes a breath, takes a step back, looks at it all, and then steps right back in and constructs reality differently.
In this story, humans are created in the image of God. And in many ways, we are like the God of this story – creative, procreative, active. We continually build on the foundations we have laid the day before. We’re good at doing stuff – altering the world through building and writing and speaking and cleaning and fighting and shopping and tweeting and re-tweeting. But later in the Torah, humans are taught to mirror God, not only in creative work, but in the rhythm of work and rest as well. The work part of life we have down. The rest part is a little more elusive. The whole of American culture and certainly the American economy is built on the idea that you always have to keep working or consuming. You have to keep improving yourself in one way or another. You’ve got to advance your career, you’ve got to get your kids ahead, you’ve got to look better, work out more, get a new widget for the kitchen, build a better mousetrap. There’s an urgency – a feeling that there’s never enough time and you can never do enough. We all feel it.
The Creation story is a powerful antidote to this culture of more. It unequivocally celebrates the six days of creative work. The work product is declared good. And then in that space of that one in-between day, in the absence of activity, in the stillness and the quiet of the ceasing, the universe is allowed to simply be. The world can breathe. Dream. Cry. The heart can simply beat. No expectations; no blame, no striving, no improvements need to be made. That can all come later. For that moment, existence itself is enough. And that “enoughness,” that expansive, welcoming silence, God declares “holy.” You have enough; you are enough. You have enough; you are enough.
This is not to say that our work is ever really done. It’s never complete; it’s certainly never perfect. In the Creation story even God’s work isn’t done after the six days. God starts all over again the next week with a whole new paradigm. The first six days were basically a decent first pass. At the end of each day, looking at each new creation, the text says, “… and God saw that it was good.” It doesn’t say it was perfect! It wasn’t perfect; it was good. The closest it gets is “very good” on the sixth day. I don’t think this is just semantics. I think there really is a powerful teaching in here that even though everything we do in a week is imperfect and unfinished, we, like God, get to declare the work done and cease. Our life is a draft. And once a week, we can decide it’s a finished draft. It’s a real gift when we can let go of attachments to how things aren’t matching up to some ideal of how they should be. Whatever we did last week, next week is another ground-floor opportunity to try again. We can keep working on our life soon.
When we experience it this way, the Sabbath has a kind of has a Buddhist sensibility to it. In Buddhism, you practice and meditate, trying to get to a place of no trying. There’s a stillness in the center, when you can shed all your striving, all your identities. You get to return to a place where everything is okay just the way it is. I remember hearing a story of a group of elite Buddhist monks who lived in a monastery high in the mountains. They were known to be high-level practitioners, even bodhisattvas, people on the road to enlightenment. When a visitor came to learn their practices, she asked, “What do you do? Do you chant? Do you meditate? Do you fast? Do you make mandalas? What?” The monks just laughed and said, “Oh, we used to. But we gave that stuff up a long time ago. Now we just sit around and let God love us.”
How delicious to have one day a week to just sit around and let God love us. Or if God isn’t your language for it, one day a week when we can just let all the goodness of our lives soak in. Enjoy all the simple gifts with which the universe has already showered us. One day a week for gratitude for all that we already are. Most importantly, one day a week to bask in the light of whatever glows with unconditional, maternal love. For some maybe it’s a biological mother or a father or the memory of them. Maybe it’s a teacher or a relative or a community like this one. For some, maybe it’s God or Goddess or an angel. Whatever represents for you the maternal, nurturing energy of life, go there and hear the voice that says, “Whatever you’ve done or haven’t done this week, I still love you.” When Mother’s Day is at its best, it’s this love that we celebrate.
You may have heard the story of the authors Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut talking together at the lavish party of some rich hedge fund manager. Kurt Vonnegut says, “You know, this guy who owns this mansion probably made more money this week than you’ve ever made from your sales of Catch-22.” Joseph Heller replies, “Ah, but I have something that he will never have.” “What’s that?” asked Vonnegut. “Enough,” said Heller.
So here we are at the end of this jazz- and art- and dance-infused journey through the seven days of creation, landing on Mother’s Day, and we’ve discovered that sadly, humans are not the climax of creation. (Apologies to those of you whose mothers told you that you personally were the climax of creation.) The denouement happens on the seventh day, when nothing happens and yet something is created after all: enough. That feeling of enough is truly the holiest, most sacred, most delicious thing whenever we encounter it. It’s the holiest thing to say, “I’ve done the best I can this week,” and let it go. It’s the holiest thing when we can step far enough outside of our lives to be able to take a breath, get a fresh look, and, like God making the world for the second time in the story, come back and construct our reality in a different way. It’s the holiest thing when we’re blessed with a parrot on our shoulder, forever saying to us, “You have enough, you are enough. You have enough, you are enough.”