Rest Is Resistance...Still
Rest and self-care are not rewards for work or struggle
This is a continuation of my series on what’s sustaining me right now.
I’m in a confessing kind of mood. Just two weeks ago, I admitted to feeling unsafe in the world for much of my life. Now I have another confession: I’ve been misleading you about self-care.
When I started teaching about self-care 20 years ago, it was not the popular topic that it is today. There were few books on the topic and no commercials promising that self-care was to be found in a bar of soap or a Nespresso machine. We were not yet at the smartphone era and iPods were new, so there were no apps or podcasts offering the solution to stress, illness, and self-neglect.
My self-care ministry started in the women’s ministry of the Black Baptist church where I would eventually be licensed to preach. Later, it expanded to my seminary classmates, not to mention the occasional faculty or staff member with whom I had to put on my psychologist hat and have a heart-to-heart. In those days, even most seminarians had never heard of womanist, mujerista, or Black liberation theologies. They could not imagine a theology that did not center self-sacrifice. There was a lot of resistance to the message that we needed to prioritize our own health and well-being.
I responded by doing what psychologists do: I treated the resistance. I tailored my message for Christians who were resistant to the idea of rest, arguing that self-care was a means to an end. “Self-care isn’t a threat to discipleship. It helps us to do more for God.” Self-care, I preached, was the fuel we needed in order to sustain a long life of ministry and service to our families, our churches, and our communities. “We have to take care of ourselves or we won’t be able to do what we are called to do.”
The message drew people in, undoubtedly because it reinforced the capitalism-friendly works-righteousness mentality that pervades much of modern Christianity. For people who believe that their faith is measured by how much we do in the world, self-care offered the possibility of doing even more.
To be fair, I was also misleading myself. For the first decade of my self-care journey, I thought of self-care as a set of activities that I added to an already busy life that would give me energy to do more. I fit self-care in by getting up extra early to read scripture, pray, meditate, and exercise before I went to work. For a long time, that seemed to work. Then the diagnoses started coming: hypertension, IBS, fibromyalgia, breast cancer. Initially, I just threw more self-care at each diagnosis, determined to find the right combination of exercise, nutrition, meditation, and alternative therapies to resolve the problem. It took me years to realize that some of my self-care (especially overdoing exercise) was triggering some of my health problems. In the meantime, I kept doing more – more teaching, more speaking, more writing, more trying to be the quintessential student, professor, mother, wife, and daughter. It almost did me in. Over time, I learned that caring for myself required more than engaging in more self-care activities. It required doing less of everything else. It required learning to rest.
Over time, I learned that caring for myself required more than engaging in more self-care activities. It required doing less of everything else. It required learning to rest.
That’s a hard lesson for people in ministry and other helping professions who are oriented to prioritizing the needs of other people above their own. It’s a hard lesson for justice activists who are constantly aware of the inequities that mark our world. It’s a hard lesson for academics who have learned that our worth is determined by the length of our vitae. And it’s a hard lesson for people whose hustle lifted them out of economic struggle.
With the onslaught of human rights violations under the current administration, there has been a lot of talk about rest, or sometimes the absence of it. Social media accounts of human rights organizations laud their staff for working 24/7 to push back against executive orders and policies that threaten the lives of many people in the United States. Activists argue that rest is only resistance when it involves rest from resistance, as if we have to be engaged in the struggle in order to merit rest.
Many of us have been taught that rest is a reward for work. We are taught that both by capitalism and by our religious communities. Interestingly, though, that’s not what Scripture says. Genesis teaches us that God rested from work, but not that God worked in order to earn rest.
On the sixth day God completed all the work that [God] had done, and on the seventh day God rested from all the work that [God] had done. God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all the work of creation (Genesis 2:2-3, CEB).
Maybe the problem is that we think that “in the beginning” was the first day of God’s creative work. That was the first day for us, but not for God. What did God do for the millennia before God created the earth? I like to think that God was just chilling all that time.
When humans enter the picture, God commands us to rest, not to work to earn our rest.
Remember the Sabbath day and treat it as holy. Six days you may work and do all your tasks, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. Do not do any work on it–not you, your sons or daughters, your male or female servants, your animals, or the immigrant who is living with you. Because the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and everything that is in them in six days, but rested on the seventh day. That is why the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy (Exodus 20:8-11, CEB).
Apparently, God knew that we would underestimate the need to rest, that left to our own devices, we would just keep working. Not only that, but the privileged and powerful would force the marginalized and vulnerable–children, servants, animals, immigrants–to work as well. The Sabbath command was assurance that creation–the earth and all its inhabitants–would get to rest as well.
Rest, not work, is our birthright. Rest is the divine gift. Capitalism wants us to forget this. As I write in Sacred Self-Care, capitalism “teaches all of us that our worth is dependent upon our productivity and our service to others. It teaches us to prioritize our jobs, roles, and responsibility over ourselves…It teaches us to disregard or rush through Sabbath rest so that we can quickly return to offering wheat for sale, making the ephah smaller, and enlarging the shekel. A hyper-capitalist economy is disinterested in the survival and well-being of anyone beyond their utility as workers.”
We see this disregard for human worth in the policies of this administration. Federal employees are described as people who don’t do any work but who instead leech off taxpayers. People from Central and South America, from Asia, and from India are being shipped to prisons where they will engage in forced labor, likely making products that will end up on the shelves of US stores. At least one state is trying to upend child labor laws so that children can be made to work overnight. When we insist that rest is a reward only for those who have engaged in active struggle, we are engaging in the logic of empire.
When marginalized people rest, we subvert the logic that our worth is dependent upon our productivity for empire. We reclaim our right to be whole and healthy, to experience joy and love and creativity. We refuse to be yet another statistic in the health disparities that plague Black, Indigenous, and Latiné peoples, trans peoples, immigrants and refugees, and the poor. Any time that we refuse to yield to poor health and early death, we are engaged in resistance. Each day that we draw breath in a world that, as Audre Lorde wrote, never meant for us to survive, we are resisting.
To be Black and alive and joyous and healthy is an act of resistance.
To be Indigenous and alive and joyous and healthy is an act of resistance.
To be Latiné and alive and joyous and healthy is an act of resistance.
To be trans and alive and joyous and healthy is an act of resistance.
To be a non-White immigrant and alive and joyous and healthy is an act of resistance.
To be a refugee and alive and joyous and healthy is an act of resistance.
To be poor and alive and joyous and healthy is an act of resistance.
Let us resist. Let us care for ourselves not so that we can work more, but so that we can be…just as we are.
Did something in this post resonate with you? Bother you? Join the conversation.
Speaking of Rest
I have made the hard decision to cancel the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction course that I’d planned to offer in May. I wrestled for weeks over whether I was going to offer the course. I knew that I needed to lean into the remainder of my sabbatical period, but I was also afraid of missing out on the only window during 2025 where I might be able to offer it. On Thursday, I listened to “I Release” by Beautiful Chorus and I decided to release the fear. I’ll eventually offer it, but when I do, it will be out of joy and abundance, not fear and scarcity.
What Sustains Me in a Time of Political Cancer
This is the first in a series of posts about the practices that are sustaining me during our political and social upheaval.
Yes and amen. Thank you. It strikes me that Jesus died right before the Sabbath. His followers couldn't throw themselves into avenging or working or anything that required doing. It was a full day of rest to experience alllll the emotions and self care before the joy of resurrection. Without rest we miss so much
Thank you. I couldn't agree more that "Rest is Resistance." Your honesty in writing about the discipline(s) of self-care complements that. To me, being true to yourself, authenticity, something you write about without writing it, is the true act of rest. Rest and self-care begin with it. Again, thank you for your honesty about rest and self-care.