Please click the link to watch Rev. Cynthia Snavely’s video recording of this sermon.

In my blurb for this sermon, I noted that what each of my parents considered rest or relaxation was very different. My father loved his garden and his fruit trees. In my young childhood, his workday was Monday through Saturday, 6 to 6, but evenings were his, and he spent them in his garden. The garden, however, was not my mother’s place of rest. She dreaded strawberry season when the whole family would be called upon to pick every other night. I think the most we ever picked was 60 quarts in one night. My father would have called that joy; my mother, exhaustion.

On the other hand, my mother read novels and women’s magazines for her rest and relaxation. But my father would not have considered reading rest. My mother said if my father had gone to school a generation later than he did, he would have been diagnosed with dyslexia. Reading was a struggle for Dad. He did not read for pleasure. Reading did not bring him joy.

As I prepared for this sermon I read Tricia Hersey’s book Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto. She speaks of working, being in graduate school, and raising a son. What did she do at that time to rest and feed her soul? She signed up for one more class, a dance class. Her body in motion brought her rest and joy.

This is not a sermon about how to rest. We each do it differently. Hersey says, “Rest is anything that slows you down enough to allow your body and mind to connect in the deepest way.” We all need rest and have a right to it. We do not need to do anything to deserve it. She emphasizes that rest is a right, not a privilege.

Hersey says in the preface to the book: “Our collective rest will not be easy. All of culture is collaborating for us not to rest. I understand this deeply. We are sleep-deprived because the systems view us as machines, but bodies are not machines. Our bodies are a site of liberation. We are divine and our rest is divine. There is synergy, interconnectedness, and deep communal healing within our rest movement. I believe rest, sleep, naps, daydreaming, and slowing down can help us all wake up to see the truth of ourselves. Rest is a healing portal to our deepest selves. Rest is care. Rest is radical.”

Following the preface to the book is an introduction. Hersey runs a nap ministry. She says these are the tenets of that ministry. 1. Rest is a form of resistance because it disrupts and pushes back against capitalism and white supremacy. 2. Our bodies are a site of liberation. 3. Naps provide a portal to imagine, invent, and heal. 4. Our DreamSpace has been stolen and we want it back. We will reclaim it via rest,” (from Hersey, Tricia, Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto.)

“Rest is a form of resistance because it disrupts and pushes back against capitalism and white supremacy.”

Hersey says rest is for all, but because of the unique history of the forced, unpaid and underpaid labor of blacks, rest as resistance must remain grounded in the Black liberation movement. Hersey is a black woman and speaks often of her connection to her ancestors and what they have taught and are teaching her. She writes, “Black liberation is a balm for all humanity and this message is for all those suffering from the ways of white supremacy and capitalism. Everyone on the planet, including the planet itself, is indeed suffering from these two systems.”

She says, “In the case of white supremacy and capitalism, those who created and experimented with these violent systems found a way to hold firm to the toxic belief of profit over people. They found sinister ways to subjugate and commodify human beings that would lead to their power and wealth.”

Matthew Desmond, in his essay “Capitalism” in The 1619 Project, writes, “Capitalism depends on private property, and private property depends on the law. When private property extends to human beings, however, a particularly strong and expansive set of protections is required. Human beings, after all, can run away or revolt. The founders (of our nation) recognized this, and in the Constitution, they safeguarded the human property of those who owned enslaved people through a number of provisions…. The framers helped create a doctrine of private property strong enough to justify and enforce human trafficking, so much so, that abolitionists publicly burned copies of the Constitution.”

Hersey warns us that we ourselves have been co-opted by these systems. She says, “We internalize the toxic messages received from the culture and begin to hate ourselves unless we are accomplishing a task. We seek external validation from a violent system void of love. Dreaming and creating the space to dream is the remedy and the cure.”

And not just the remedy for us individually. but for us in community. In Hersey’s nap ministry. people nap together. She says, “My freedom from grind culture is intimately tied up in the healing and liberation of all those around me. Community care and a full communal unraveling is the ultimate goal of any justice work, because without this we will be left vulnerable to the lie of toxic individualism residing in an exhausted, brain-washed mind, continuing to ignore this life-giving wisdom.”

What life-giving wisdom? That we all have a right to rest, a right to dream. That resting and dreaming are human needs and human rights. We don’t need to have accomplished some goal before we can rest. We don’t have to ask permission of someone before we can rest. We don’t have to be in some approved place or at some approved time. We can rest. It is our right simply because we are human. And when we rest, we can dream. Daydreaming or sleep dreaming, our dreams can guide us to new insights, new ideas, new ways of creating justice for ourselves, for the wider community and for the planet.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, in his book Sabbath, says something very similar to what Hersey says. He says, “There is a realm of time where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to control but to share, not to subdue but to be in accord. Life goes wrong when the control of space, the acquisition of things of space, becomes our sole concern.”

Hersey says, “We have to make space for daydreaming, sky gazing for our bodies to come back to their natural states.”

What is our “natural state?” Hersey claims it is divine, and that we need to know that to truly rest.

This week I happened to read an article in an old copy of the Buddhist magazine Lion’s Roar. It was a conversation between the Buddhist nun and writer Pema Chödrön and Father Greg Boyle, a Catholic Jesuit priest who founded Homeboy Industries, which serves former gang members in Los Angeles. Father Boyle notes that many Buddhist texts start with these words, “Oh, nobly born, remember who you really are,” (from “Modern-Day Bodhisattvas: Pema Chödrön and Father Greg Boyle on the Joy of Helping Others,” Lion’s Roar, November 2018).

“Oh, nobly born, remember who you really are.”

Our closing hymn today will be Rose Sanders’s hymn “There’s a River Flowin’ in My Soul.”

“There’s a river flowin’ in my soul.
There’s a river flowin’ in my soul.
And it’s tellin’ me that I’m somebody.
There’s a river flowin’ in my soul.”

In another congregation someone told me they didn’t like the song, because it was too self-centered. But if you don’t need to be reminded that you are divine, that you are nobly born, that you are somebody, then you are a very blessed person. Most of us need to be reminded and to be reminded over and over again.

Unitarian Universalist minister Dick Gilbert, in his curriculum “Building Your Own Theology, volume 1,” writes this in the reading for the session on human nature: “Psychologist Carl Rogers once compared his understanding of human nature with that of theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. Niebuhr spoke of ‘original sin’ as a function of self-love, claiming too much, grasping after self-fulfillment, thinking of oneself more highly than one ought to think. Rogers looked at his years of practice and concluded that it is not self-love that is at the heart of the human predicament, but self-hate. Only as a person comes to love the self can love for the other unfold.”

You are divine, nobly born, somebody.

But society tells us who we “should” be and does not permit us to just be. We learn we need to be something other than what we are, that we are not divine, nobly born, somebody as is.

When one of my grandchildren was in late elementary or early middle school, he came home one day and told his mom, my daughter, that he knew how to be Black and he knew how to be dark white. At ten or eleven he didn’t know the word code-switching, but he had obviously learned that it was a necessary life skill and that he knew how to do it.

I have been told that it would be nice if we had some Black UU congregations, because in our society white is the default, and all week long people of color are working hard at being dark white. Black church is where Black folk get to just be themselves, not what society tells them to be.

There are all too many ways that society insists all of us should be something different from what we are. Remember that you are fine just as you are. Remember you are divine. Remember you are nobly born. Remember you are somebody. Remember that joyful rest, dreaming rest is your right, not because you have done something to deserve it, but simply because you are human.

Tricia Hersey says rest can heal us, each other, and the world. Rest and meditation are not the same thing, but both involve not doing and just being.

Sometimes I join the morning meditation of the Florida Community of Mindfulness online. Always they end with three bows; bowing to the Buddha nature in all of us, bowing to each other as a thank you for practicing together, and then a third bow with these words: “May we share any merit or benefit that arises from our practice. May the effects ripple continuously to aid in the healing and transformation of the world.”

May rest heal us and the whole. In rest, may we find joy.

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