The Holiness in Rest: A Sacred Pause

By Fr. Conor Donnelly

(Proofread)

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

“The apostles rejoined Jesus and told him all that they had done and taught. And he said to them, ‘Come away to some lonely place all by yourselves and rest for a while.’ For there were so many coming and going that there was no time for them even to eat. So they went off in the boat to a lonely place where they could be by themselves” (Mark 6:30-32).

The Apostles come back to Our Lord. They have been out preaching and doing things. It's a moment when they tell Him about the success of all the things they've been doing. They're a little bit on the crest of a wave.

Our Lord could have told them: Out you go again and make full use of this opportunity. Let's make good use of our time. Let's really push to the limit.

But Our Lord doesn't tell them that. He said to them, “Come away by yourselves to a lonely place and rest a while.”

Our Lord was very convinced of the importance of rest, of what St. John Paul II has called “the sacredness of rest” (John Paul II, cf. Apostolic Letter, Dies Domini, May 31, 1998).

Jesus is playing for the long term. He's not just interested in momentary or temporary success. He wants them to rest well so that they can regather their strength and their forces.

Also, they can rest in Him with a new spirit of contemplation, which is the basis of their strength and of their future.

These words, taken from the Gospel, also show Our Lord's concern for His friends—His concern for their rest.

Rest is something important. It's not just a luxury. It's an obligation. Sometimes in our life, we need to rest. We need to rest, to recuperate.

We rest in order to be able to work more and to work better, to work more effectively, or to gather our thoughts or think things through, or to cast a contemplative gaze over the things we have done and discern what has been done well, what not so well, what could be done better the next time.

After their intense apostolic mission, the apostles feel a natural tiredness and lack of strength.

It's a normal human thing to get tired. It's a very good thing that we're tired after our day's work.

Let it be that it's really after a day's work that we're tired—not tired from not doing anything very constructive.

Tiredness is not necessarily a bad thing. Also, when we're tired we don't have to go around the place telling everybody how tired we are.

But when they come back and tell Our Lord everything they've done and taught, Our Lord realizes immediately that they're tired and that they need rest.

He shows concern for them. “They went away in the boat to a lonely place by themselves.”

Each of us has to try and be aware of the need of the people around us for rest, be able to discern when somebody is tired, and create that opportunity or the environment or the things that will help that person to rest. It's a very normal thing in the family. Everybody needs rest.

Our Lord has made us in such a way that we need seven or seven and a half to eight hours of sleep every night. Maybe children might need a little more.

We come to realize that we need seven and a half hours of rest—as much as that can be sleep, if possible, but there comes a moment in our life when we realize that sleep is a gift. But still, we need to rest.

On other occasions, it's Our Lord Himself who needs to rest. He's wearied out from His journey, and so He sits down beside the well (cf. John 4:6).

One commentator has mentioned how interesting it is that St. John gives us a picture of the Messiah worn out from His labors. He sits down beside the well because He cannot take another step.

If Our Lord in His sacred humanity, “like us in all things but sin” (Heb. 4:15), felt the need for a justified rest, so also we have to rest.

There might come a moment in our life when we're told by a doctor, by a sibling, or by a parent, or by somebody who has charge of us around us that we need to take a break, we need to rest.

We may not be told that very often in our life but if we're ever told that, we should pay a lot of attention and be very obedient, realizing that the people around us very often know us much better than we know ourselves. They can sense when we need to take a break.

Our Lord has experienced something that's very consonant with human nature: fatigue. He had experienced it at His work during the thirty years of His hidden life, just as we do each day at our own work.

It's very logical that after a day's work, we would need to rest, or at the end of the week. Often at the end of Our Lord's day, He was exhausted.

The evangelists also tell us that during a storm on the lake, Our Lord fell asleep in the stern of the boat (Matt. 8:24; Mark 4:38; Luke 8:23). He must have been worn out.

We get the impression that He did not suffer from insomnia. He was able to fall asleep in a very unusual place at a very unusual time, with a raging storm all around Him. He'd spent the whole day preaching and He just needed to lie down and be quiet for a while.

He was so tired that He didn't wake up in spite of the waves. The apostles have to come and say, “Master, does it not concern you that we are perishing?” (Mark 4:38).

Our Lord wasn't pretending to be asleep in order to put His disciples to the test; He was really physically worn out.

There may be times of real bodily weariness. At these times, Our Lord is also redeeming mankind. His weakness and His tiredness can help us to bear our own weakness and our own tiredness, to co-redeem with Him.

Periods of tiredness can be a time of spiritual bonanza, when we may have to go a bit slower, or we may have to rest a bit more, or go to a different place, or take part in some pastime, or even do something that we find a bit difficult to do because we love to be doing our work.

Sometimes we just have to get away from things and offer up that tiredness that might be physical, but it might also be mental or emotional or nervous or some other type of tiredness that might not be particularly apparent. We might need to rely on the advice of other people.

It's very consoling to see Our Lord exhausted and to imagine how, in times when we're feeling low or tired or worn out, Our Lord must be very close to us in those moments.

As we carry out our duties, as we generously go about our professional work, or as we unstintingly use up so much of our energy in apostolic initiatives and undertakings of service to others, it is natural that fatigue appears as an almost inseparable companion.

Far from complaining about this inescapable reality, a reality that is common to all of us, we have to learn to rest close to God and to exercise ourselves constantly in that way of thinking.

“Oh, Jesus! I rest in you” (Josemaría Escrivá, The Way, Point 732). We could often say those words inwardly as we seek support in Him.

Ultimately, we rest in Christ. We rest with the Blessed Sacrament. We rest in our prayer. We rest by living in the presence of God. We rest by living well our Christian vocation.

We don't take vacations from our vocation. We try to fulfill all the spiritual norms of our plan of life, so that we truly rest in the arms of the Master.

This is the authentic rest that God wants for us, abandoned into the arms of Our Father God, finding a great peace in the knowledge that Christ is looking after everything. We are carried in the palm of the hand of a God who loves us.

These may be moments of greater trust, greater hope, greater peace, and abandonment. No one knows our tiredness better than Our Lord does, because He Himself was constantly in situations similar to our own.

We don't need to make a great deal of noise about what we're going through, or let everybody know what we feel like.

These can be moments when we just try and have to pass unnoticed—to do what we're told and savor all the great spiritual opportunities that this situation gives us.

We have to try and learn to recover our strength close to Him. Our Lord says, “Come to me, all you who labor and are heavy burdened, and I will give you rest” (Matt. 11:28).

Rest is a gift of God, just like sleep. He gives us moments of solitude or peace. Maybe He gives us a good book that distracts us or a good movie or good music or some of those things that have been created for us to rest ourselves for a while.

God gives us those things so that in Him we can find our joy. We can find that it will help us if we live charity in a purposefully pleasant way towards those around us, even if at times we might find it a little bit more difficult to do so.

We might be on a short fuse; we might be a little bit irritable. It's a time for greater patience with those around us, a deeper smile, a kind word, offering up the little crosses that may come.

We also have to remember that the use of leisure is an activity that we're called to sanctify. We find God in the ordinary things of every day.

Sometimes those ordinary things just involve being together with other people that make us relax, or looking at the sea, or listening to some music, or reading a good book—but all the time in the presence of God or in the presence of the angels.

The first line of the Mass of the Angels says: “In the presence of the angels, I will sing your praises, my God” (Ps. 138:1). That includes moments of tiredness.

Those periods of distraction shouldn't be isolated inertial gaps in our lives, or seen as the chance to allow ourselves to indulge in some purely selfish compensation.

When Our Lord sat down by the well, He was also attentive to the apostolic moment. He saw an opportunity when the woman comes to the well. He didn't say, ‘I'm a bit too tired to talk to this lady’ or ‘Why did she come at this particular moment?’

The apostolic vocation that was part of Christ's vocation was a constant in His life. It was expressed in all moments.

Likewise, love does not take holidays. In our moments of tiredness, we can also look for apostolic opportunities.

We should realize also that our tiredness is never useless. Our Lord makes use of the periods when He's recuperating His energies in order to influence souls.

“Come apart by yourselves to a lonely place and rest for a while.”

‘Listen to me talking to you.’ Days and hours of retreat or of other forms of activities can be special moments when we're recuperating our energies in order to influence other souls.

Our Lord seized upon the opportunity to move that Samaritan woman to a radical change in her life (John 4:7-29).

So the times of tiredness, which can be demanding, can be a cross that we offer to Our Lord for apostolic purposes. Maybe, in more intense periods of tiredness, we could offer each hour of the day—put a name or an intention on every hour, write it down—so that it’s a very intense period of offering up those sacrifices and that prayer.

We make sure that our moments of weariness are not useless but fired with great apostolic zeal.

It may be that “only after our death will we know how many sinners we have helped to save by offering up our tiredness. Only then we will understand that periods of forced inactivity and our sufferings can be of more use to our neighbor than what might seem to be our most effective deeds of service” (George Chevrot, The Well of Life).

Our Lord makes use of our sacrifice. We should never fail to offer up those times when exhaustion or illness might make us feel useless.

‘Here I am, I can't do anything. I'm confined to this bed or to this chair. I can't move or don't have the energy to move.’ Well, never mind.

It can be a powerhouse of apostolic fervor. Those circumstances should not stop us from helping other people.

Tiredness also teaches us to be humble; to accept our limitations. Our pride and our vanity might not be very happy in leading us to realize that we have limitations.

These periods can teach us to be more humble, to live charity better, and to realize at those times that we can't do everything. We are not the great person that we think we are.

Our Lord allows us to go through those periods sometimes, to let us see the need we have for other people, and how much we depend on other people, and how all the people that God has placed around us are souls that we need very much.

Allowing ourselves to be helped can be a wonderful way of practicing humility. “Here I am, Lord, because you have called me” (1 Sam. 3:5,6,8). You've placed me in this situation.

At the same time, since we all become more or less tired, we're able to understand the words of St. Paul a little better when he says, “Bear one another's burdens” (Gal. 6:2).

It's a time to forget about ourselves and think more about other people, of their crosses, of their difficulties.

We can understand that any help that we give to those that we see as overworked is always a great sign of charity.

Weariness can help us to live a greater detachment from the many things that we would like to do, but which we just don't manage to reach because of the limitations to our strength.

This is the time to turn to Our Lord and say, ‘Lord, you have to take over. You have to finish this. You've got to put the icing on the cake. On my own, I can't manage it. I'm useless. I'm just a useless servant.’

It can also help us to grow in the virtue of fortitude and in the corresponding virtue of resilience—to hang in there, finish things well when we don't feel like it, when we feel like giving up, to realize that we don't always find ourselves at the peak of our strength or the very best of health when we have to work, or study, or when we have to see a difficult undertaking through to the end.

In all those tasks, we find highs and lows, energy and lack of energy; that's all par for the course. It's a given. But we have to try and go forward in the easy moments and the difficult moments, and we can learn a lot about human work in those moments.

A big part of the virtues we need to put into practice every day involves going on working when we're tired, not being surprised or scandalized by the fact that we get tired. Often we don't feel as physically well as we would like to in order to get on with those tasks.

That might be on a daily basis. There might be a lot of tasks we have to do that we just don't feel like doing. But yet, justice may demand that we get those jobs done.

If we carry out those tasks with that spirit of unity to the cross, Our Lord will bless us in a special way.

The Christian considers life to be an immensely beneficial gift which doesn't belong to any one of us, but which we have to look after and be responsible for.

Every day we have to try and earn our invitation to the eternal wedding feast. We have to live the years that God wants us to live and go on to complete the task that He has entrusted us with—in principle, a long stretch of life.

As a consequence, for God's sake and the sake of other people, we must observe the norms of prudence in caring for our health and that of the people who in any way depend upon us.

The Second Vatican Council in Gaudium et Spes says among these norms is the one “that leisure be properly employed to refresh the spirit and strengthen the health of mind and body.”

We have a duty to try and keep ourselves as healthy as possible, subjecting ourselves to a schedule, dedicating sufficient hours to sleep.

We can't expect Our Lord to work miracles of energy with us when we haven't used the human means. Occasionally, we have to stop what we're doing and go for a walk or an excursion, change our environment a little bit, so that we put order into our activity.

If we were to function in any other way, so long as we're not prevented by some pressing obligation, that might reveal a certain thoughtlessness or laziness.

That could be very harmful. It could lead us to harm our interior life or slip into an activistic state, be more liable to lose our serenity.

Anyone who is even moderately ordered in the organization of their day will habitually find a few periods of prudently relaxing in the midst of the most demanding and self-sacrificing of activities.

We have a duty to rest, resting in order to serve God and to serve other people.

Sometimes you have to learn to rest. It's not something we are born knowing. There are ways of resting.

If we can avoid becoming totally exhausted, then we shouldn't fail to do so. If through some lack of planning or order, we were to come into an excessively tired state, that wouldn't be a good thing.

God wants us to look after our health, and to know how to recover our strength. It's part of the Fifth Commandment. We need to rest in order to be fit, to restore lost energy, so that all our work can be all the more effective. We need it also to serve God and other people better.

In Friends of God, we’re told, “Remember that God loves his creatures to distraction. How can a donkey work if it's not fed or given enough rest, or if its spirit is broken by too many beatings? Well, your body is like a little donkey, and it was a donkey that was God's chosen throne in Jerusalem, and this little donkey carries you along the divine pathways of this earth of ours.

“But it has to be controlled so that it doesn't stray from God's paths. And it has to be encouraged so that it can trot along with all the briskness and cheerfulness that you would expect from a poor beast of burden” (J. Escrivá, Friends of God, Point 137).

When Blessed Álvaro del Portillo was leaving Rome every summer for a few months for a change of environment, he used to tell people: “I'm going to rest the donkey. I'm going to rest the body so that the body can keep going a little bit longer.”

When we're tired, it can be all the more difficult to do things well, or to do them the way that God wants us to do them. At such times we might be more liable to faults against charity, or faults at least of omission.

When we come back from resting a little bit, usually we look happier, more cheerful, more sprightly. We bring a joy into the lives of other people around us. That's charity.

St. Jerome says in an amusing manner: “Experience shows me that when a donkey is tired it sits down at every corner.”

St. Josemaría in The Way says: “To rest is not to do nothing: it is to relax in activities which demand less effort” (J. Escrivá, The Way, Point 357).

Often our leisure time can provide an opportunity for interior enrichment, to learn something new, or to read something new. It can present an occasion for doing more apostolate, for fostering a friendship. We shouldn't confuse rest with laziness.

Our Mother the Church has always taken an interest in the physical well-being of her children.

We're told in the Gospel how occasionally Our Lord stayed and rested in the house of Martha and Mary (Luke 10:38-42).

St. John Paul II pointed out that “rest means leaving one's everyday occupation, detaching oneself from the normal toil of the day, the week, and the year” (John Paul II, Angelus, July 20, 1980).

We mustn't wander around aimlessly. Our time off mustn't just be empty time. It's very good to have a plan, to plan family fun, to plan family rest, or to plan holiday time.

“Sometimes,” said St. John Paul II, “it would be good to go and enjoy nature—the mountains, the sea, the forest.”

And of course, it should always be desirable for one's leisure time “to be filled with something different, a new content that nevertheless still leads to an encounter with God. We should open up the inward eyes of the soul to His presence in the world and incline our inward ear to His Word of truth” (Ibid.).

We are very well aware that many nowadays will dedicate their leisure to pastimes and activities which don't facilitate, and even on certain occasions obstruct, that encounter with Christ.

Far from letting ourselves be influenced by what may be considered fashionable, we should be attentive to this consideration: the same norm should guide our leisure as guides our work.

In those moments we should be able to show our love for God and for our neighbor, doing good things.

It's never right to do things that are wrong, no matter how tired we are, or how sick we are, or what situation we may be in.

That may mean we choose a suitable place to go on vacation, or we choose well how to plan a journey, or how to profitably arrange a weekend activity away from work.

We should avoid thinking of nobody but ourselves, seeking union with Christ. We rest well by forgetting about ourselves, thinking a little more, and concerning ourselves a little more with other people.

Any time is good for thinking about other people, for looking after them, for helping them, for taking an interest in their hobbies.

Any time is a good time for showing our love. Love doesn't allow any blank gaps.

Jesus rested out of obedience to the law of Moses. He rested as a result of the demands made on Him by family and friends, or because of weariness, like anybody else.

He never rested because He was tired of serving others. He never isolated Himself, never made Himself unavailable to people, as if to say, ‘Now it's my turn.’

We should never act from selfish motives, not even when we stop to get our breath back. At those moments too, we should make sure that we're close to God. Our leisure time is not a pagan time, to be distinct and separated from our interior life.

In the Gospel, Our Lord leaves us with a very special sign of His love: we should be concerned about the weariness and the health of those who live close to us.

We see how, when He sat down exhausted beside the well of Sychar, Our Lord gave us a powerful example. He didn't let slip the opportunity of doing apostolate, of converting the Samaritan woman.

He did all this even though “Jews have no dealings with Samaritans” (John 4:9). When there is love, not even exhaustion can be an excuse for not doing apostolate.

We also have the example of Our Lady, who went and spent three months with her cousin Elizabeth (Luke 1:56)—a great gesture of friendship. She spent time there. She was open to that change.

Mary, may you help us to make very good use of our rest times, to plan it well—that of the family, that of our friends, our neighbors—to make it very apostolic.

Through that time, we can recover our strength and bring joy to many other people around us.

I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations that you have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask your help to put them into practice. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

VA