photo from book cover, Sabbath by Wayne Muller
Written by Jillian Shannon, TCL pastoral assistant
Last year, I was facilitating an event for the H-E-B Foundation. Many people recognize the name because of the grocery store chain, but behind it is a family foundation that has quietly supported San Antonio nonprofit leaders on their journey toward capacity building and long-term sustainability.
For months, we had been planning a seminar for their cohort members on soul care and rest. Then reality intervened.
Earlier that year, a number of nonprofits—including the Foundation itself—were hit by government disruptions that forced them into survival mode. Carefully laid plans were shelved. Energy was spent simply staying afloat. When they finally resurfaced, they came back to me and said:
“Forget the seminar. Our people are tired. Let’s give them a dinner.”
There is something quietly radical about that decision. Something restorative about gathering around a table in community with no purpose other than to eat, be present, and remember that we are human, with human needs, before we are useful.
Each cohort member received a copy of Wayne Muller’s book Sabbath—a book that feels like a deep exhale all by itself—and the evening was shaped as a kind of Sabbath experience: candlelight, shared food, unhurried conversation.
It feels like exactly what this moment requires.
Because our people are tired.
Since 2022, surveys show that roughly 75% of nonprofit employees report burnout, isolation, and chronic overextension. More than 40% of clergy and ministry workers have considered leaving their work altogether due to emotional exhaustion and political division. Educators and healthcare workers report similar levels of fatigue, anxiety, and trauma.
The irony is striking: those who work the hardest to create healing, justice, and rest for others are often the least likely to find rest themselves.
Across traditions and movements, urgency has become a moral virtue. There is always more to do. More to fix. More to respond to. Rest can feel irresponsible, indulgent, even disloyal to the suffering of others.
But the wisdom traditions tell a more complex story about urgency and rest.
In one ancient account, Jesus is traveling with a singular focus. He has set his face toward Jerusalem where his mission will ultimately be fulfilled. Along the way, he passes through Samaria and expects that the people there might prepare a place for him to rest.
They refuse.
Not because rest is unimportant, but because political, religious, and historical divisions have hardened their hearts. Hospitality has become impossible.
Jesus responds: “Foxes have holes, the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.”
He is unable to rest––not because he rejects rest—but because a divided world cannot make room for it.
The story is not primarily about geography or theology. It is about what happens when identity battles and long-standing grievances consume so much of our attention that there is no space left for shared humanity. When everything is framed as “for us” or “against us,” even rest becomes suspect.
The disciples’ response to the rejection reveals how quickly urgency can turn combative. They suggest retaliation. Destruction. More force. And Jesus rebukes them with a haunting clarity: You do not know what spirit you are of.
In other words: the problem is not whether the work matters. The problem is what animates it.
This is a question activists, organizers, caregivers, and leaders across traditions must continually ask themselves. Not just what are we doing—but from what spirit are we doing it?
Sabbath, in its oldest sense, simply means rest. But this kind of rest is not passive or lazy. It is bold. It requires leaving things undone. It asks us to release the illusion of control and to confront our fear that nothing good can happen without our constant intervention.
Wayne Muller writes, “Our willingness to rest depends on what we believe we will find there. At rest, we come face to face with the essence of life.” If we believe life is fundamentally good, we will seek out rest as a taste of that goodness. If we believe life is fundamentally broken, we will avoid rest—afraid of what might surface when the noise stops.
Sabbath, then, is not a retreat from responsibility, but a refusal to be consumed by it.
Muller suggests that Sabbath can take many forms: a shared meal where presence is the only expectation; a ritual of setting aside unfinished tasks; a pause woven into an ordinary moment. Even an appliance that does not work one day a week.
Each of these practices pushes back against a world that equates worth with productivity and urgency with virtue.
Thomas Merton once warned that “the frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace.” When exhaustion hardens us, we lose imagination. We lose generosity. We lose the ability to see one another clearly.
The problems we face today are real. They were real in ancient times, and they are real now. Deep divisions, historical wounds, and urgent crises cannot be wished away. But when urgency becomes the only value, we become inhospitable—to one another, and to the wisdom that sustains life.
Rest does not solve our problems. But it changes the spirit from which we engage them.
Across traditions, Sabbath has functioned not as escape, but as resistance: resistance to the lie that our value lies solely in what we produce or fix.
Perhaps this is why gathering around a table still matters. Why candles still matter. Why silence still matters. These practices remind us that even in a fractured world, there is a deeper rhythm beneath the noise.
What if rest is not the reward for finishing the work—but the condition that makes the work humane?
And what if peacebuilding begins, not with doing more, but with learning how to stop—together?