Katherine Turpin
Sabbath Spaces: Reclaiming Time and Making It Holy
June 14 - 20

“You are not made for the Sabbath, the Sabbath is made for you.” – Mark 2:27

“After he dismissed the crowds, he went up on the mountain by himself to pray.” --Matthew 14:23

“Great multitudes gathered to hear and to be healed of their infirmities. But he withdrew into the wilderness and prayed.” – Luke 5:15-16

Wayne Muller begins his challenging book, Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal, and Delight in Our Busy Lives, with these words – words with which most of us can agree:

In the relentless busyness of modern life, we have lost the rhythm between work and rest.
All life requires a rhythm of rest. There is a rhythm in our waking activity and the body’s need for sleep. There is a rhythm in the way day dissolves into night, and night into morning. . . .
We have lost this essential rhythm. . . . Because we do not rest, we lose our way. We miss the compass points that would show us where to go, we bypass the nourishment that would give us succor. (p. 1)

Muller later recounts the story of a South American tribe “that went on a long march, day after day, when all of a sudden they would stop walking, sit down to rest for a while, and then make camp for a couple of days before going any farther. They explained that they needed the time for rest so that their souls could catch up with them.” This is as good an explanation of renewal or Sabbath as I can think of – a period of stopping from the “long march” so that our “souls can catch up” with us. This is often why people come to make retreat—to have a “Sabbath” at Ring Lake Ranch.

Moses and Ezekiel, Jesus and Muhammad all went to the mountains to pray and received divine words there. I believe that same impulse still draws us to the Wind River Mountains, this sacred wilderness.

Making a retreat serves us well as a time-out, a space to breathe. But we need a rhythm of Sabbaths to keep us on our way, to make sure our compass reading is heading us in the right direction. A friend of mine used to quip, “God took one day off. I need at least two.”

When I was a kid growing up in Memphis, TN in the 40s and 50s, “blue laws” shut stores and factories, offices and filling stations, even bus service. Good people were supposed to go to church in the morning, visit their families, and -- for many -- go to church again in the evening. Our family ritual was to go to early church services, come home and have a our big Sunday breakfast while listening to big band music, then go to my grandmother’s house to visit with her and the extended family. Year after year, we did this. As an adolescent I bridled at spending Sundays this way. From the vantage point of my 63 years, I own a certain nostalgia for those silent Sundays.
So, I am delighted that Katherine will be offering this session on Creating Sabbath. We don’t need Sabbath for nostalgia. We need it to “let our souls catch up” to us. Just as Katherine took up the topic of helping young people free themselves from consumer culture in her book Branded (see below), she has practical ideas about ways of creating Sabbath in this era.

Not only will this week offer us rest and renewal, it will help us reframe and reform our Sabbath practice every week.

-- Carl Koch, Director

Branded: Adolescents Converting from Consumer Faith addresses and examines three key elements: the distortion of adolescent vocation in a consumer-focused culture; the dream that adolescents would discover the freedom to live into a vocational path not dominated by consumer culture; and an educational process of enlivening agency and imagination that would allow for such freedom of vocational development.

The second book in the Youth Ministry Alternative Series published by Pilgrim Press, Turpin’s work helps define the adolescent world in today’s society and how vocational exploration is influenced by consumerism.

A reviewer – Jonny Baker from the UK jonnybaker.blogs.com/jonnybaker wrote about Branded --

Katherine Turpin “has a very clear perception of the power of consumer culture in the formation of and funding the imagination of young people. Turpin takes Wesley's notion of ongoing conversion and applies it to the challenge of how to help young people's imagination be formed by the alternative of a Christian faith that runs counter to a culture predicated on the logic of consumption. . . . I liked the use of ongoing conversion and the honesty with which Turpin describes the challenge. She proposes a gracious and gentle way of helping the process of conversion. The main strategy is small circles of grace which she describes as a way station along the path of conversion for young people, a place to breathe, to be formed, to celebrate new visions, and to be connected with others who share them. I call these small communities circles of grace both because they are a gracious space of transformation for participants and because they embody the possibility of gracious alternatives to a broader culture. . . . This is a really good book.”