"A Parenthesis in Eternity" by Joel S. Goldsmith

"A Parenthesis in Eternity" pdf file

Chapter 31 - "There Remaineth a Rest"

Of old it was taught that there should be one day of Sabbath each week, a day devoted to worshiping God and living in His word. In order to be immersed in the Spirit, this Sabbath was to be kept entirely free of all worldly cares and worries.

The mystical meaning of Sabbath is a resting from power. All through the year and throughout our entire life, we resort to material and mental forces and powers, and the period in which we rest from the use of these forces, thereby experiencing the spiritual Presence, is in reality the only Sabbath there is.

Ideally, there should be at least one entire day in the week set aside for such rest, but because of family duties and professional responsibilities that is often well-nigh impossible. Everyone can have a Sabbath during the day or night, however, even if it is only in ten-, fifteen-, or twentv-minute periods. Then, when an occasional day comes along completely free, there is the opportunity of living with the Bible and other spiritual writings, living in meditation, and thus experiencing a full and complete day of spiritual refreshment.

A Sabbath is only truly a Sabbath if we do not permit the human world to come into that period. We must have one purpose alone: to seek the realization of His presence, His power, and His grace. When we emerge from these periods, usually we find that the "things" are added unto us: whatever knowledge we need to cany on our business, whatever physical strength or moral support.

In The Infinite Way no provision is made for specific Sabbath periods such as any one day of the week or any one hour of the day, nor for rest homes, churches, monasteries, or retreats. In the light of spiritual revelation the Sabbath is not so much a specific day of the week as it is a specific state of consciousness. Any day of the week — Saturday, Sunday, Monday — any day can be a Sabbath. This very hour can be our spiritual Sabbath, and again tomorrow morning at six o'clock, if we understand that the Sabbath means a period of rest from our physical labors, material resources, human faith, and more especially a rest from temporal power.

The true Sabbath is a resting from any power which we know or can understand, and in that resting period something takes possession of us and renews us. There is no indication anywhere in Scripture that on this Sabbath we must sacrifice our thinking capacity, our thoughts, or our actions. It is not said that we shall not think thoughts, only that we shall not "take thought" for what we shall eat, or what we shall drink, or wherewithal we shall be clothed: it is pointed out only that there should be spiritual renewal.

As a matter of fact, even to fast from food for a period makes of our particular Sabbath a period of renewal. The holiest Sabbath periods are the days of fasting: fasting from the pleasures of the senses, even fasting from the necessities such as eating and sleeping, and from those things upon which normally we place reliance. "In quietness and in confidence shall be your strength"—in quietness and in confidence is the source of strength, in quietness and in confidence is the period of spiritual renewal because it is a denial of sense.

Jesus did not teach that we should not eat bread: he said that we should not live by bread alone. Jesus did not deny to anyone the eating of meat: he said, "I have meat to eat that ye know not of." He did not deny to anyone the partaking of bread, water, or wine: he said, "I am the bread of life."

Those on the mystical path do not deny the human body: they bring spiritual refreshment to it. They bring a food to the body which is not a material food, but a spiritual food which produces spiritual energy. That spiritual food is obtained through fasting from material food and physical activity, even from mental food and mental activity, during which period the transcendental Presence permeates mind and body, renewing them, so that a person then finds himself with greater mental capacities and greater physical capacities than he has heretofore known.

In The Infinite Way there is no denial of the mind or of the body. Rather do we let the mind and the body become imbued with the Spirit; we let the mind and the body be fed, clothed, and housed by the Spirit; we let the Spirit be the resurrection to both mind and body; we let the lost years of the locust be restored to us—those years of our spiritual barrenness, years in which we were only physical and mental beings—in order that our ancient, true Selfhood may be revealed. This can be done only through the Spirit, and the Spirit can be entertained only through silence, in quietness, confidence, and assurance, and in a resting from the physical and the mental activities of daily experience.

Resting from worry and fear; resting from knowing, doing, thinking, and taking thought; resting in stillness, peacefulness, assurance, and confidence does not mean that we have to play God. Our only function is to be still, to be quiet and at peace. Nothing is expected of us, for I, the Spirit of God in us, will perform that which is given us to do.

If we give the first fruits of our time, the first few minutes of every hour, to God, sooner or later we shall learn that we can earn our living in a shorter number of working hours than heretofore seemed necessary. So it is that we do not need to use sixty minutes of every hour: we can accomplish more work in fifty-four, -five, -six, or -seven minutes than we ever did before in the full sixty minutes, if those other minutes are reserved for quiet and spiritual renewal. Everyone who has ever lived the spiritual life has discovered that when he has given himself wholly to God and dedicated his work to God, the quantity of his work is greater and the quality better.

The bibles of the world are replete with accounts of religious men and women who have at some time or other laid down their personal sense of life and dedicated themselves to God. They have not gone hungry, homeless, or friendless, but rather have they prospered.

The Old Testament prophets experienced intervals of spiritual refreshment for as long as forty days and forty nights. It was also the custom of the Master to go apart for many hours and have a Sabbath, a freedom even from ministering to his disciples, and spend them in an inner contemplation of the spiritual universe. There were times when he went apart for days and fasted from his labors, fasted even from acts of benevolence, and lived wholly and completely in the Spirit.

In monasteries and wisdom schools the idea of the Sabbath reached a high point of development. Those entering such schools or monasteries were required to give up all their worldly interests, desires, and possessions in order to devote themselves to a lifetime of resting in the atmosphere of God and making themselves subject unto God.

Living in and through God is what we are all striving for, but the one great fault to be found with a complete withdrawal from the world is that once the normal, human activities of life are separated from the spiritual life we are likely to think that the world of the Spirit has no relationship whatsoever to daily life. Under such a system the spiritual life is set apart, and in the end rendered valueless because unless the Word becomes flesh, that is, unless the atmosphere of God can be made a part of daily living — not something set apart for those people who desire to retire from human life — unless the atmosphere of God can really come to embrace the human universe and have a part in its functioning, It does not fulfill Itself. All periods of turning from our customary reliances and hopes, from our recurring fears and doubts, to an inner stillness in which there is no power—no power that we know, no power that we can understand, and no power that we can use — are Sabbaths.

For the laborer in the field, the worker in the factory, or the office worker, the Sabbath may be the one day in the week which he can dedicate to God, but eventually all of us must leam to seize upon short periods of stillness and quietness while about out labors, so that out of every block of time there will be one, two, or three minutes for inner devotion, a time set aside for the eating of spiritual bread and spiritual meat. "Labor not for the meat which perisheth" is only another way of saying, "Rest and relax from your labors for this brief moment."

Spiritual work, or laboring "not for the meat which perisheth," is a resting from mental activities as well as a resting from physical activities because spiritual power is not generated by what we know with our minds. What we know intellectually leads us to the place where we are released from doing and from knowing into that moment of listening, and then being filled from within.

If we have such Sabbath periods and are able to abide in the presence of the Lord and be absent from the body, the body of our home or the body of our work, be absent from this world and be present in the consciousness and Spirit of God, we shall discover that when we return to our labors, we carry with us the atmosphere of God. By casting our burdens upon the Lord, our labors become lighter and our burdens less. His yoke is easy, and when we take upon ourselves this yoke of God, it carries the weight of the labor and frees us to perform whatever we have to do without wony, without fear, and without any feeling of heaviness, any drag, or any weariness.

Our periods of meditation are really our Sabbath periods of inner spiritual refreshment and renewal. When they are observed regularly, there is no need to set aside one whole day in a week because our Sabbath is being observed throughout every day of every week. Usually, when we begin with one period of ten or fifteen minutes of Sabbath each day or night, that time becomes so important that we find it necessary to have three or four such periods. We feel a greater hunger for these ten- or fifteen-minute intervals of Sabbath than we will ever feel for food.

The possibility of having a whole day or a weekend once in a while, in addition to those periods of meditation, is really worth thinking about because only those who have had the experience of living for an entire twenty-four hours in nothing but spiritual literature, meditation, and Scripture can appreciate what a difference this Sabbath can make in one's experience. Being able to live in a piece of beautiful poetry, more especially of a spiritual nature, or in some thought-provoking bit of prose brings us into that same holy atmosphere in which these writers were living when those gems came through.

All mystics and the founders of the great world religions have had periods when they were completely in the Spirit, and in those moments they received the highest and most spiritual impartations, many of which comprise a great part of the scriptures of the world, whether Hebrew, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, or Moslem.

There are degrees of awareness of spiritual consciousness. Consciousness Itself is always at the standpoint of absolute perfect Being, but we are not always in a state of absolute awareness. When we are abiding in the impartations of truth which have come through the great spiritual lights of the world, however, and particularly in those hours when we have gone apart from the world, we are living in the consciousness of those who brought them forth, and then we actually feel ourselves in the very presence of God just as those great seers did when they were receiving these impartations.

The object of a Sabbath is to lay aside the world, that world which Jesus said he had overcome. We, too, are to overcome it, even if we overcome it for but fifteen minutes or an hour. Whether we give one hour a day, fifteen minutes, or whether we take a full Sabbatical day or occasionally a full Sabbatical weekend, we become so filled with the Spirit that like spring, it is bursting out all over. Then we come down from the mountain into the valley, as Jesus did, and heal the sick, comfort the comfortless, feed the hungry, and help to lighten the burdens of the world, sharing with others some of the Spirit that has been given to us in our Sabbatical period.

The day will come when every person will have free access to the Spirit and the presence of God, and every person will be able to walk into that holy sanctuary, the Shekinah, and there tabernacle with God in meditation and contemplation.

Father, I am here with Thee for only one purpose: I must know what Thou art, who Thou art, where Thou art, and why Thou art. I must even find out if Thou art, attain some awareness, some consciousness, that Thou dost exist, and that Thou dost really exist within me. I must find some way of linking up Thy Spirit with my individual life.

I hunger and thirst to know Thee. I must tabernacle with Thee, commune with something within myself that is greater than my human self, something greater than my human capacity or my human goodness or human evil, tabernacle with something in me that is divine. If there were not something divine in me, or about me, I could not be alive and I must know what this something is.

0 Lord, how long can I go on living without knowing Thy presence within me? How long can this go on? Am I to live here threescore years and ten, twenty, or thirty, and at the end feel that I have contributed nothing to this world, nothing to Thy kingdom, nothing to Thy people? Why am 1 on earth? Am I to live a wasted life with nothing to show for it at the end but just a living?

I would do Thy will if I but knew Thy will; I would live the spiritual life if I knew how to live it. Now, here in the inner sanctuary of my own being, cut off from the world, Father, reveal Thyself. Reveal Thy will, Thy way, Thy kingdom; reveal Thy purpose to me.

As we continue with this kind of meditation, eventually an answer will come from within. There will be a period of release, and we will feel a quietness and confidence and a complete freedom from this world. Then we can go back to our life again because we have had our interval of spiritual renewal and peace.

One day we come to what is the grandest experience that can take place in a human life: we lose all desire except the one desireconsciously to know God. Now as we go into our meditation, we have overcome the world. It is almost like feeling a hand on top of our head in a benediction as we pray:

Let Thy grace be my sufficiency. I ask not for persons, things, or conditions: I ask only that I may honestly be able to say that Thy grace is my sufficiency, whatever form it may take, fust let me know Tliy grace, know and fulfill Thy will, sit at Thy feet, tabernacle with Thee, and feel that Thy life is my life. Let me only know that wherever I am, Thou art; and that wherever Thou art, I am.

I am at the state of unknowing. Let Thy wisdom be expressed through me; let Thy wisdom be my wisdom. Supply the wisdom, the energy, and the Grace that I may always feel my own nothingness, and yet feel an eternal and ever-present perfection and completeness through Thy grace and Thy wisdom. I have no work to do but that which Thou givest me, and I have no wisdom with which to do it but Thy wisdom, and no power with which to perform if but Thy power. Let me always abide in Thee.

We are not surrendering ourselves to God's will unless we make a conscious surrender of ourselves to that Will by disclaiming any will of our own:

I have no will and no desire of my own. Fill me with all that Thou art. Fill me with Thy wisdom, Thy might, Thy justice, that I may have nothing of myself and be nothing of myself, but be the All that Thou art.

What a Sabbath that is! What a fasting that is from the world, the things of the world and the people of the world, and how it spiritually fills, renews, and rejuvenates us! After that we can come down from the mountain into the valley, mingle with and help meet the needs of those who are drawn to us, not because of any virtue in us but by virtue of the grace of God which now fills us.

We are in the presence of God any time that we can close our eyes to this world and retire into our inner sanctuary. If we have these periods of Sabbath, we shall find that as we go out into this world we will be a light unto those who are still in the darkness, worrying only about this world, a light to those who have not learned to tabernacle with God.

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