Children’s Story:
The Man who was afraid of his Shadow (Taoist)
There was once a man who was so afraid of his shadow and so disliked his own footsteps that he determined to run away from them. But the oftener he raised his feet the more footsteps he made, and though he ran very hard, his shadow never left him. From this he inferred that he went too slowly, and ran as hard as he could without resting, the consequence being that his strength broke down and he died. He was not aware that by going into the shade he would have got rid of his shadow, and that by keeping still he would have put an end to his footsteps. Fool that he was!

Readings
Mark 2:23-28
This world is a place of business. What an infinite bustle! I am awaked almost every night by the panting of the locomotive. It interrupts my dreams. There is no sabbath. It would be glorious to see mankind at leisure for once. It is nothing but work, work, work. I cannot easily buy a blank book to write thoughts in; they are commonly ruled for dollars and cents. An Irishman, seeing me making a minute in the fields, took it for granted that I was calculating my wages. If a man was tossed out of a window when an infant, and so made a cripple for life, or scared out of his wits by the Indians, it is regretted chiefly because he was thus incapacitated for – business! I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself, than this incessant business.
(Thoreau, Life Without Principle)

First let me apologise to those of you who might have come along this morning expecting me to speak about angels. There has been no misprint. The topic is the Angelus, that minute of pause before the six o’clock news on RTE 1 in which, to the tolling of a bell, people are shown momentarily stopping what they are doing in order to engage in quiet reflection.
The Angelus has a very long history. According to the Catholic Encyclopaedia, it can be traced back to the 13th century, and gradually came to be observed three times daily – in the early morning, at noon, and in the evening. Its name comes from the first word of the prayer which the faithful were supposed to say as the bells were tolling – ‘The angel of the Lord declared unto Mary’ – which is a translation of the Latin “Angelus dei nuntiavit Mariae’, and recalls the Annunciation of the birth of Jesus to the Virgin Mary by the angel Gabriel. It was celebrated throughout Catholic Europe, and you may be familiar with Millet’s painting called The Angelus, which shows two French farm workers with heads bowed, her basket on the ground alongside his pitchfork, taking a quiet moment of prayer. I find it a very moving picture – although some people, I’m sure would consider it sentimental. It reflects simpler times, harder times perhaps, maybe even mythological times, when people could still find time to lay down the implements of their trade and to lift up their hearts in prayer.
When I came here, nearly ten years ago now, I was quite surprised to see the Angelus being observed on the television. I thought it rather charming and quaint and, since it enabled me to see the news headlines on the BBC before switching over to watch RTE, it was also rather convenient. But, over the years, I’ve grown to appreciate it. It couldn’t have a better slot: just before our eyes and ears are assaulted by the latest tales of carnage, disaster, duplicity, and mayhem, we are given the opportunity to centre ourselves, to slow down a little, and to place what is to come in a slightly wider context. How long it will remain on our screens, though, I have no idea. Its days are probably numbered. As Catholic Ireland becomes increasingly secularised, and as other faith communities grow, calls to remove it as an anachronism, or, as a barrier to interfaith relations, will undoubtedly become louder*. I’d be surprised if it were still around, in its present form, ten years from now. I, for one, would regret its passing, although I can appreciate that some people feel it to be a relic of Catholic dominance which has no place in a multi-cultural context.
In any diverse society it is wrong that one section should impose its customs on the rest; and even when people are generally in sympathy with a particular observance, they still tend to resent its imposition. I think I would resent the five calls to prayer made daily from the minarets in Muslim countries, even though I think that I would benefit enormously from five moments of reflection and prayer each day. But there’s something about being told one has to do it which brings out the rebel in us all.
But what the Angelus represents is really much wider than Catholicism, and is a feature of spiritual practice in all spiritual systems: that is, it reminds us of the vital importance of finding time – making time – for quiet reflection. This is not an option for those who claim to be on a spiritual path; it is an absolute requirement, but it needs to be part of a system of self-discipline, and not something one is made to do by some external agency. Any spiritual practice which is not absolutely voluntary is tyrannical and counterproductive.
The same is true of Sabbath observance. The word ‘shabbat’ in Hebrew means ‘rest’, and the Sabbath, which few non-Jewish people care two pence about these days, is one of the Jewish people’s great legacies to the human race. Just listen to this short passage from the Book of Exodus:
Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.
Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work:
But the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates.
(Exodus 20:8-10)

Remember, these words were written hundreds of years before the time of Jesus. The passage prohibits even slaves and animals working on the sabbath day. What an incredibly liberating instruction this is! No wonder, then, that the Jewish people would welcome the Sabbath day with great rejoicing; at least on one day of the week one is spared the awful drudgery of work.
What was originally liberating eventually became a burden, so that for many people, actually keeping the Sabbath became harder work than ignoring it. Those with legal minds started to define what exactly was meant by work. Is it work if I enjoy it? Is it work if I don’t get paid? How much weight can I lift? How far can I walk? Can I light a fire? Even now, in strictly observant Jewish households, switching on a light, or turning on the gas, or boiling the kettle, are not allowed. The rabbi who taught me Hebrew in the early eighties told me that in his house all food was prepared on the day before the Sabbath, and a pan of water was kept hot on the stove throughout the day, so that no one needed to boil a kettle.
Christians have never really observed their own Sabbath day with the same rigour, although I do dimly recall the priest fulminating against those housewives who did their washing on a Sunday; ‘servile work’ it was called in the catechism. And some men would hide the fact that they were working overtime on Sundays. Joe McDermott told me that in Mayo the farmers would ask the priest for permission to bring in the harvest on a Sunday.
One can understand how resentment builds up in such a context, and one can understand, too, why Jesus took on the lawyers of his own day when they protested that rubbing out the ears of grain was ‘work’. ‘The Sabbath was made for people,’ said Jesus. ‘People weren’t made just so that they could perfectly observe the Sabbath.’
As a communal observance the Sabbath seems to be a lost cause and, despite the efforts of the Lord’s Day Observance Society, it will never be resurrected. The world of work is too complicated now; Sunday has ceased to be special and is well on the way to becoming just like any other day. The days when athletes would refuse to run on Sundays, when shops were closed, when pubs closed early, are long gone. I remember going to Scotland with a friend in the late sixties. It was a Sunday in summer and still light, about nine o’clock, and we stopped the car and asked an elderly man if there was a pub nearby. ‘You’ll no be getting a drink at this time of night,’ he sneered. Nowadays, Scotland has the most liberal licensing laws in the whole of the U.K.
So, the Sabbath is gone and the Angelus s going, and perhaps we should not lament their passing, but what has been lost to the life of the community needs to be reclaimed by the individual. Each of us should observe a Sabbath – it need not be Sunday – a day on which we withdraw our energies and our attention from the world of work, and engage in more reflective activities. It should be a time devoted to quiet contemplation, walking – on grass if possible -, gardening perhaps, uplifting reading, stimulating conversation, minimal television or other forms of distraction. Although it need not be a Sunday, it is a good idea to keep the same day of the week and perhaps to let people know that this is your Sabbath day so you won’t be routinely disturbed. And, dare I say it, it may be a good idea to switch off the phone. Monday is my day – it seems to be the day off of most priests and ministers – and I observe it, but I don’t make a fetish out of it. Sometimes I’ll do a little washing, sometimes a little shopping, but even these can be opportunities for reflection if approached in the right spirit. The body and the spirit know their own needs, and one should not impose too harsh a regime on oneself; and one should always be prepared to drop it all should circumstances demand it.
Similarly with the Angelus. We shouldn’t have to rely on those Angelus bells at six o’clock to remind us to pause for a minute or two. Devise your own system of ‘triggers’, things which ring your imaginary Angelus bells. When shaving in the morning, perhaps, or when combing your hair; when you pour out your cornflakes, or flick the switch on the kettle; when you take off your shoes, or remove your make up. Pick your own moments, but try to make them regular. And in each moment make a silent prayer of thanksgiving; remember what Meister Eckart said: ‘If the only prayer you ever say in your whole life is “thank you”, it is enough.’ Remember a loved one who might be in need; pray for people in distress throughout the world; tell yourself you are a child of God. It doesn’t matter really what your silent prayer, affirmation, or reflection is: what is important is the pause, the drawing back, the little reminder to yourself that you are not just a machine that runs automatically, but that you have – or can have – some measure of control over your life. These are your own Angelus moments, ‘angel moments’, moments of contact with a deeper part of your psyche than you are ordinarily aware of. In addition to these regular moments of pause, there are also the random ones. I have always been impressed by the Catholic custom of making the sign of the cross as a funeral goes by; it is not just respect for the dead, it is a brief reminder of our own mortality and our own frailty. And here in the city, the sirens of police cars, ambulances, and fire engines can act like the Angelus, pulling us from our reverie, prompting us to reflect on the fragility of life, and inviting us to say a silent prayer of solidarity with those in distress. My own subconscious mind has a peculiar way of randomly alerting me to my own need for momentary reflection. I’ve mentioned before that I regularly glance at my watch and find that the time is exactly ten minutes to ten. Not nine minutes to, or eleven minutes to, but ten minutes to precisely. This happens so frequently that it has become something of a joke between Morag and me. When it happens I smile, reflect briefly that here again is confirmation that there is more to me than meets the eye, silently thank God for my existence, and then get on with what I was doing. You may like to try this little spiritual exercise, which I came across recently, and which I haven’t fully explored yet. Again, like the Sabbath, it comes originally from the Jews:
It is taught that sometimes when a person eats, he should concentrate totally on the food and the experience of eating it, clearing his mind of all other thoughts. He should have in mind that the taste of the food is also an expression of the Divine in the food, and that by eating it, he is incorporating this spark of the Divine into his body. A person can also have in mind that she will dedicate the energy she will obtain from this food to God’s service. It is taught that when a person does this, it is counted as if the food she is eating is a sacrifice on the Great Altar in Jerusalem.
(Spiritual Literacy, page 185)
All these – ‘angel’ moments, Sabbaths, mindful eating – are ways in which we can practise that most important spiritual exercise, the same one I told the children about earlier: that sometimes, for the sake of bodily and spiritual health, we have to stop running and step into the shade.

Rev.B.Darlison 29th January 2006
Dublin Unitarian Church

* How strange that, six weeks after this sermon was delivered, a certain John Rochfort from Waterford should complain in a letter to the Irish Times (14th March) that the Angelus on RTE is 'a sectarian statement' and should be discontinued.