Rest Is Resistance

Rec. Douglas Taylor

2-11-2024

Sermon video: https://youtu.be/yh3LKDd51wQ

In 2022, Tricia Hersey, the Nap Bishop, published her book Rest Is Resistance. In part, the book calls on us to take more naps. As part of my research for this morning’s sermon, I will share that I have been napping quite a bit lately.

Is it weird that I feel a little guilty telling you all that I take naps; as if that is a mark against my character? But there it is; it’s true. I take naps.

For a long time, my napping habit was sporadic, occasional. But during my recovery from Covid-19 a few years back I began napping regularly. For a few months I was napping nearly every day. Covid will do that to you. With time, my penchant for naps settled into a reasonable few-times-a-week; not every day, but certainly a still a common event.

But napping is an odd thing to talk about in our culture, as if it is a weakness or an indulgence. And while I will occasionally just say, “I’m going to take a nap,” I am more likely use one of the euphemizes we have, like, “I’m going to just sit here for a minute” or “I’m just resting my eyes,” or “I was meditating.” My favorite one is a line I picked up from my mother: “I’m going to lie flat for a bit.”

Maybe napping is becoming more acceptable in society since the pandemic. I’m not sure. We’ve certainly developed a strong market for Self-Care in our society in recent years, although it has a tendency to slip into pampering – which is not exactly the same thing. Naps, of course, are not marketable – there’s no money changing hands for a chance to nap. So, our society has focused on defining Self-Care as the massage and spa treatment instead.

But napping is equitable! Because it doesn’t cost anything, everybody has access to napping! Of course we’ve built up expectations and rules about who deserves naps and who does not. And we heap praise upon exhaustion and busyness and burn-out as marks of success and high status. Rest has been relegated to the level of a luxury only the privileged can enjoy. We’ve created a society in which we glorify exhaustion and some people can’t afford to rest.

An old Taoist story tells of a master walking along the banks of a river with a young disciple. At one point the master stopped and looked up at a gnarled, old tree. The disciple waited politely, having glanced at the tree for a few moments and seen nothing remarkable. Still the master continued to stare at this tree.

Finally, the master said “Tell me about this tree.”

“It is an old and gnarled tree.”

“Indeed,” the master agreed. “And what can we learn from this tree.”

“I do not know, Master.” 

“This tree has grown crooked. It is not useful to the carpenter who would have long ago cut it down for boards if it had not been so crooked. Because it was useless to people, it has been left to grow tall and old.”

With a twinkle in her eye, the master turned to the disciple, “We should be more useless as well.”

This is certainly not a message we hear a lot in our society – ‘be more useless.’ If anything, we are encouraged to be of use! I have included Marge Piercy’s excellent poem “To Be of Use” more than once in worship over the years. This would seem to be a contraction on my part. Piercy says, “The people I love the best jump into work head first …” And yet this small Taoist story about the gnarled tree cautions against that.

I want to be with people who submerge

in the task, who go into the fields to harvest

and work in a row and pass the bags along,

who are not parlor generals and field deserters

but move in a common rhythm

when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

But the master in our small story wants to be with people who have been left alone by the machinations of humanity, left alone to grow free even if it means growing twisted and unattractive, to be useless rather than useful. Perhaps the two perspectives are not opposites, perhaps it is a matter of agency.

I suspect the distinction is this: being useful is not the same as being used.

I need to give a little extra shout out to Tricia Hersey, the Nap Bishop. Hersey has been advocating for “the importance of rest as a racial and social justice issue” since 2016 when she formed the Nap Ministry. She is talking about rest – certainly as a spiritual practice – but also as an act of resistance; as a refusal to be used by the systems that continue to exploit people, particularly people of color.

Hersey wrote: “I don’t want a seat at the table of the oppressor. I want a blanket and pillow down by the ocean. I want to rest.” There is a photo I found of Hersey sleeping on a bench in a garden. It is quite striking. Part of Hersey’s focus is to recognize and honor the way sleep deprivation was a regular tool the slavers used to abuse black people. “[I refuse] to donate my body to a system that still owes a debt to my ancestors,” She wrote.

For people who work three jobs to keep afloat, who are on the edge of homelessness, or who live in fear of punishment if they do not produce enough; rest is too risky. And there are people for whom chronic illnesses causes rest to be just out of reach.

This is not simply a conversation about how we should take better care of ourselves. Self-help culture is not enough when the system is trying to destroy you. When you consider it from the perspective on the vulnerable, a conversation about resting shifts from an indulgency to an act of power.

A part of Hersey’s nap ministry is to host nap experiences. She hosts public, collective encounters where people nap together for 30-40 minutes. The news will show you protests and marches, rallies and riots. But a park full of people napping seems a little decadent, indulgent, lazy even. Angela Davies once said:

“When you talk about a revolution, most people think violence, without realizing that the real content of any kind of revolutionary thrust lies in the principles and the goals that you’re striving for – not in the way you reach them.”

The goal the Nap Bishop is striving toward seems to me to be one of agency, to be in control of our own healing and wholeness. Rest is how we access all our other power. When we are denied rest, we begin to lose something basic to our humanity.

Our own Henry David Thoreau with his Unitarian connections similarly suggests that rest is the occupation of the wise. I have regularly cited Thoreau with that time he talked about two types of hikers. There are those who climb to the top of the summit and once arrived they sit and rest and enjoy the spectacular view. And then there are those who rest in every step. This weekend I went looking for the exact quote from Thoreau on the internet because for years I have just had this idea in my head that he said this. I found the source in his journals – 1839, the same journals with that beautiful line “There is no remedy for love but to love more.”

I was close, the exact quote does not talk about climbing mountains or stopping for beautiful views. The actual quote is far more in line with what Tricia Hersey is talking about with the importance of rest and reasonable pacing. Thoreau wrote,

“Nature never makes haste; her systems revolve at an even pace. The buds swell imperceptibly, without hurry or confusion, as though the short spring days were an eternity. Why, then, should man hasten as if anything less than eternity were allotted for the least deed?  The wise man is restful, never restless or impatient. He each moment abides there where he is, as some walkers actually rest the whole body at each step, while others never relax the muscles of the leg till the accumulated fatigue obliges them to stop short.” (Thoreau’s Journals 1839, Sept 17)

Thoreau argues the same point as Hersey. Don’t wait for exhaustion to stop you. Be wise and take your rest regularly, with each step! Be more like the natural world, do not make haste! Instead, take your rest like breathing: in and out, like the cycles of night and day, of rest and activity. The resting part is deeply important, not a neglectable bug we can work around. Ignore your exhaustion at your own peril.

“We want more than a life lived exhausted,” (p158) opens the prayer we had this morning. The prayer is from a collection of poems, reflections, and prayers by Cole Arthor Riley in her new book Black Liturgies. One of her reflections, on ‘rest’ includes this passage:

Rest will never feel urgent to those who don’t understand the violence of exhaustion. In a world that uses the body as currency, rest is a sacred defiance. A reminder that we will not be owned.”

Resting is healthy. It is interesting to think of resting also as a spiritual practice and even as a form of resistance. When we rest, we begin to reclaim our power. We set a firm boundary – a vibrant “no” to the violence of exhaustion. Rest is a form of empowerment. We protect our bodies from the harm and we begin to heal. Hersey says it more potently:

“To not rest is really being violent toward your body, to align yourself with a system that says your body doesn’t belong to you, keep working, you are simply a tool for our production.”

No one else is going to honor your need to rest. There will be no praise for you when you rest. The riches of the world will not be poured out upon you. And yet, the violence we do to our bodies, the way we push ourselves to produce for a toxic system that does not care – that will get praise, that will be celebrated. But to learn the true strength of resting is to tap into your full humanity and power.

We need to unlearn that which leads us to the brink of exhaustion. We need to honor the cycles of rest so that we can rise. The way to build our energy and to accomplish good things is through the dynamic back and forth or rest and rising – not through constantly pushing and pushing and pushing. We must regularly step back so that we may thrive.

There is no shame if rest does not come easily to you. Our society has concocted ways to keep you from rest. And if rest does come easy for you, consider its power for those more vulnerable than you. They need this message from you in word and deed.

Draw your attention to this next time you lay down to sleep: Your rest is holy act. Resting is like meditating or practicing yoga or zen sitting – a practice that can lead you deeper into yourself and your relationship with the holy.

Draw your attention to this next time you lay down to sleep: Your rest is an act of resistance. Even if you are not vulnerable or exhausted – we participate in a society that uses people up. When more people rest and are rejuvenated, the world will be more whole because we as individuals will be more whole.

Draw your attention to this next time you lay down to sleep: we are inexorably part of the natural world. Let us learn to follow nature’s lead, and take the time we need to rest and heal and live.

In a world without end,

May it be so.