A Skylark Sabbatical

Happy, happy Liver!

With a soul as strong as a mountain River,

Pouring out praise to the Almighty Giver,

Joy and jollity be with us both!

(William Wordsworth, 1815)

I’ve been flapping for nine years, and this summer I’m parachuting back down to earth.

I’ll explain myself momentarily, but first I need to describe a bird.

I met my first Eurasian Skylark last week in the open English pastures of Northumberland. Like many, I heard it well before I saw it; the fellow birders in my group, all British, pointed out to me the frenetic flutelike song they were already well familiar with. On the ground, a skylark is just a smallish brown-streaked bird — nothing particularly noteworthy in its appearance, except maybe for that slight punkish crest that gives it a bit of a Sixties-tough-guy hairdo, like a character from The Outsiders or Grease.

But even if the bird is nondescript on the ground, in the air the skylark is the stuff of legend — an inspiration for the best of poets, authors, and composers. As swallows strafe the ground and pipits flit about the fenceposts, the lark ascends, launching straight upwards from the ground in a burst of vertical nonstop song. It’s an excited union of beating wings and rapid-fire notes, slowly gaining elevation as if the song itself is holding it aloft. It truly doesn’t let up. And there’s such a joy in the song that you don’t want it to let up. W.H. Hudson called the skylark song “sunshine translated into sound.”

Author Alex Preston calls the skylark “one of the pillars of literary ornithology” and the dominant feature in bird-related poetry since at least the late-Victorian era. One of the more familiar examples is George Meredith’s 1881 poem The Lark Ascending, which includes these words:

He rises and begins to round,

He drops the silver chain of sound

Of many links without a break,

In chirrup, whistle, slur and shake…

A press of hurried notes that run

So fleet they scarce are more than one…

For singing till his heaven fills,

‘Tis love of earth that he instils,

And ever winging up and up,

Our valley is his golden cup,

And he the wine which overflows

To lift us with him as he goes.

Meredith’s poem inspired composer Vaughan Williams to write a famous piece by the same name, which continues to be one of the most beloved pieces of classical music in England, featuring a solo violin to capture that joyous “chain of sound.”

The skylark’s song keeps going as it hoists itself skyward, until the bird is just a distant speck in the sky. The skylark is still audible long after it ceases to be visible, its song emanating seemingly from nowhere, like a waterfall of sound pouring from the sky; Shelley wrote of it: “Singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.” My trip guide Mark Winter has often challenged birdwatchers to simply sit and listen to the skylark until it completes its song. He says many people can't — or won't — do it; the song simply outlasts their capacity to listen. Its vertical performance can last fifteen minutes or longer, a tune beautifully relentless. Watching them, I found myself humming the opening lines of Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road: “When are ya gonna come down? When are ya going to land?”

But eventually (and this might be my favorite part) even a skylark needs to take a break. And so it pauses its song, ceases its flapping, and gracefully floats back to earth, its wings outstretched in a controlled descent reminiscent of a paratrooper. So as not to oversimplify the pattern, I have to note that sometimes the bird pulls up just before landing and goes straight up again for an encore. And sometimes it still sings from the ground. Praise never truly rests, after all. But often, the skylark takes a moment on the ground to collect itself silently and rest up for the next flight.

And this is what made me realize that I was seeing my summer aspirations personified — that the skylark would be fitting as my summer mascot.

The Long Fall Back to Earth

This summer my church graciously granted me a three-month sabbatical. Although I’ve been an ordained pastor for twenty-eight years, I’ve only experienced one prior sabbatical, a two-month term back in 2016. Pastoral ministry doesn’t allow for the traditional weekend cadences of many other occupations, and the sometimes 24/7 “on-call” nature of ministry can lead many well-intentioned pastors to spiritual dryness, burnout, and compassion fatigue. A sabbatical is an investment in long-term ministry sustainability, and if your church isn’t having a conversation about your pastor’s need for seasons of rest, I hope you’ll consider leading the charge.

For those in full-time vocational ministry, let me offer words of experience from my prior sabbatical. Here's the deal: when the Lord takes away our idols, we’re really good at making new ones. If your idol is work productivity (as mine has been), it’s amazing how quickly you can turn your sabbatical into some sort of quest for quantifiable output that justifies to your church that the inconveniences to them were worth it. In my prior sabbatical, I had grand designs of writing the great American novel, becoming a woodworking or origami master, or fast-tracking an advanced degree. Then I actually talked to pastors who had taken sabbaticals and heard their cautionary tales. Swapping one form of productivity for another sabotages what the church is granting — the gift of time for the purpose of renewal. So I tried to lean into the goals of rest, spiritual growth, family time, and life balance. Four weeks in, I realized that I had still managed to reduce the whole thing to productivity. I said, “I will seek the Lord,” but what I meant was, “I will do so by reading these eighteen books.” I judged the success of a given day by my page count. It wasn’t until I threw out the spreadsheet and just went camping in the woods that I truly started to let my soul rest in the Lord.

So here I am, nine years later (and ministry-wise I think 2020 should count for about three years, right?), again bestowed with the gift of time, inaugurated last week with a uniquely epic spiritual retreat in England (which I’ll write more about in an upcoming post). But watching skylarks in action last week, I didn’t feel the obvious analogy of joy that’s been the theme of poets and concertos — a picture of spiritually soaring to higher heights. Instead, the vertical ascent felt a bit like the last nine years, the wing-beating action of ministry in a busy church, complete with the loquacious chatter of preaching and teaching and shepherding and pastoral leadership. I love all these things, and I love the flock I get to do them with, but after a while you begin to feel like a small distant speck against the sky, audible but aimless. All that flapping and chattering takes a toll, and sometimes you just need to be still and catch your breath.

So this summer I get to stop flapping, parachute back to earth, and be still. No one is asking me to self-justify the time with actionable outcomes or a completed reading list; the only voice suggesting that is my own, and I’m regularly aiming to die to that voice. Instead it’s my hope to come away more spiritually healthy, more invested in my family, more in love with Jesus, and excitedly recharged for the next season of ministry, ready to take to the skies again and keep singing the glories of our great God.

Give It a Rest

If you’re a pastor, I hope those words offer a cautionary tale and a better aspiration. But what I’ve just described is a cadence we all need to embrace in different ways. Let me explain.

Psalm 46 ends with verses 10 and 11:

10 “Be still, and know that I am God.

                            I will be exalted among the nations,

                            I will be exalted in the earth!”

11          The LORD of hosts is with us;

                            the God of Jacob is our fortress. Selah

I think that if there were a verse 12 to this psalm, it would say,

12 “Seriously, be still. For real, people. I mean it.”

It's built in; the very word selah is a Hebrew exhortation to pause and reflect — a vocal and musical time-out. Pascal famously said, “All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone." We’re surrounded by distraction, and even when we’re not, we import our own — a cluttered head of anemic attention. But God gave us a cadence of rest, built into the fabric of creation, demonstrating it with his own seventh-day inaction. Sabbath (a root of the word sabbatical) isn’t just a nice suggestion; it’s one of the Big Ten — the gift of time from a God who knows how we function best. In those uncluttered moments, the still-small voice shines through.

It should be a convicting truth to us that a lot of what passes for "rest" in our lives is anything but. Rest is not binging Netflix or playing X-box. Rest is not scrolling your newsfeed for a couple of hours. Rest is not non-work time for alternate productivities. Your typical go-tos for rest might be good for distracting, diverting, or numbing, but end up providing nothing but a counterfeit to true rest. Instead, consider the rest of true stillness, intentional refreshment (not just relief), and a settled presence with God and others. These are the ways we rest our way into becoming the people we’re meant to be, better equipped for the work that comes after.

It happens in the little places and the big ones. Daily, there are moments that grant you a breathe-deep rest in God’s presence. Weekly, a day in seven is meant to create a greater space for these practices. In the course of a month or year, we may benefit from longer reflection-minded moments, like a vision weekend or a prayer retreat. I know we don’t all get a sabbatical (though many of you certainly deserve one), but we need to be intentional with the moments we’re given, learning to still our twittering, stop our flapping, and mercifully float to the ground.

I do have good news for your rest-minded hopes, sabbatical or not. The author of Hebrews writes, “There remains, then, a Sabbath-rest for the people of God; for anyone who enters God’s rest also rests from their works, just as God did from his” (Hebrews 4:9-10). There’s a true rest that awaits God’s people, a rejuvenation and restoration that fully disarms us of our idols of productivity and restlessness. One day we will cash in on the perfect rest that the best retirement plans can’t even hint at.

We can experience that one-day rest today, in part. The gospel gifts us with the freedom to rest from our efforts to earn points with God, or our drive to impress others to create a persona of worthiness. The gospel calls you worthy by faith, not performance, and allows you to rest in the completed work of Jesus:

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light” (Matthew 11:28-30).

May your restless heart, to paraphrase Augustine, find its glorious rest in him.

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