The Revolution Will Be Slow
What would shift in your life if you knew, deep in your bones, that you had plenty of time?
What would you do, if you knew you had plenty of time?
Who would you be?
Where would that knowledge live in your body?
What muscles would loosen?
What possibility would open?
Friends, you have plenty of time.
This is not to say that I know how many days remain to you on this earth or what will fill them (by necessity or choice).
This is to say that whatever time you have can be full and beautiful and abundant.
This is to say that in the time you have there can be plenty… If you will go slower.
Can you imagine it, the pace of plenty?
…
Nope, even slower than you’re imagining.
…
Mmmmmm, slower still.
…
There. Can you feel the plenty around you? Can you taste it on the air?
When our pace slows to the point of radical presence to the moment at hand, we touch eternity. Time opens up. And there is nothing but enough.
In this moment of time, there is plenty.
….
This is the first year of my life I’ve ever felt that I had enough time.
A stopwatch has been ticking away at my ear since the day I was born into this culture of do and make and achieve and produce and if you don’t your life will be meaningless and then why were you even born?
This is the first year of my life I’ve ever felt that I had enough time.
And that is kind of a wild thing to say because I have a four year old and a six year old, who consume time as voraciously as goldfish crackers.
But there it is. Even with my children gobbling it up, this year, I have had enough time. Why? How?
It’s still a bit mysterious to me, but I think it has to do with walking in the woods.
By some miracle of the expanding and contracting universe, I have stumbled upon a portal or wormhole, where walking and praying in the woods for an hour somehow expands the time I experience the rest of the day.
On days when it is very rainy or very cold or I am simply tired, my cozy bed, with no devices, becomes the same portal.
And I realized recently, that these portals exist because they are both, for me, forms of rest — the walk in the woods, the lounge in the bed. And because in rest I am beginning to experience a sense of deep sufficiency that expands to the rest of my day.
The slower I go even for one hour, the more I notice the enough-ness of the trees on the trail and the maple outside my bedroom window. The slower I go, the more I grasp the connections between me and the people I encounter whether I am beside a hospital bed or in a grocery line. The slower I go, the more the golden light across the bare branches in the yard is a moment of eternity and less a sign of another day gone.
The slower I go, the more curious I am able to become about the subjective experience of the creatures around me. The world shifts, like magic, from crushing machine to breathing earth.
I’m not saying going slow is easy.
For me, it has felt impossibly hard. I’ve been racing the stopwatch since the day I was born, and I did not know how to go slow until my body halted and demanded it.
Until years ago my inflamed nervous system sent disabling symptoms through my neurons to my muscles. And even then, I’d only slow down as a way back to the place where I could speed up again. The more humane pace never lasted.
Then in 2021, I had a four month sabbatical from my work in ministry, and I didn’t have any work to distract me. So I devoted myself to slowing my pace.
I slowed way, way down on purpose. And you know what happened?
I started having panic attacks.
So that is how hard going slow is for me.
That sabbatical year I gathered all my tools around. Prayer, spiritual direction, therapy, lexapro, dance, beloved friends and family. I gathered all my tools to help me slow down without panicking. For three months it was excruciating.
And then, suddenly it was not. The trees on the trail helped. And my cozy bed. And the therapy. And my beautiful dawdling children.
But I worked so hard to go slow. So hard. And now.
Now I have enough time. For the first time in my life.
Now I know how the world can shift, like magic, from crushing machine to breathing earth.
And now I believe, in the marrow of my bones, that in this shift lies our salvation, our liberation, and the thriving that every creature, every cell, every atom on this planet deserves… A planet where living and dying are linked and time is enough and presence is our pathway to justice, and rest is our birthright, and joy is more, as Mary Oliver reminds us, than just a crumb.
….
In her manifesto for her powerful Nap Ministry Project, Rest Is Resistance, the Nap Bishop Tricia Hersey reminds us that systems of capitalism and white supremacy were established to grind us all to the bone in the nihilistic culture of always more and never enough.
These systems carefully place Black and Indigenous People and other marginalized people closest to those grinding gears, but the machine is there to consume every last one of us.
And the dominant culture of our society is one of enthusiastic consent to this grinding. Grind culture, as Hersey calls it, is intentionally and often uncritically elevated in our society. We hustle, achieve, succeed in its logic, and willingly drive ourselves into the ground, thereby supporting the culture that grinds others into dust too in its machinery of racial, hetero-patriarchal terror.
Hersey is inspired by her ancestors, enslaved people whose time, labor, and rest were stolen from them, to resist grind culture. She does this by, simply and powerfully, resting, napping, daydreaming, and creating space for others, especially Black women, to do the same. Rest is the resistance, she tells us. Rest is the pathway to liberation.
“I will not donate my body to white supremacy and capitalism.” She says. “I will rest.”
And whether humans created systems of plunder out of fear that we’d never be enough or whether the systems themselves handed us that fear in the first place, Hersey points out, these systems that grind and our sense of unworth are inextricably linked.
If we think grind culture is what can give us our worth, we will hand our bodies over to it. So, to resist grind culture, we must find our worth elsewhere: in our divine bodies, in the sacredness of the world, in the time that is plenty, when we will slow down enough to experience its abundance.
What would it be like, what would it feel like, for you to find your worth elsewhere?
In your body.
In the earth.
In the deep wellspring of being beneath us all.
In the face of the grind culture that Hersey describes, I believe that my faith tradition, Unitarian Universalism has a powerful theological intervention: From our Unitarian ancestors, we inherit the claim that we are born not into sin, but into blessing, deserving of thriving simply by our presence here on this earth. Our lives are a blessing. Period.
And from our Universalist ancestors, we inherit the claim that there is nothing we can do to earn nor lose the divine love that is our birthright. We will not and cannot be cast outside the circle of that Love beyond our imagining. We cannot be cast out.
Unitarian Universalism has a powerful theological intervention into grind culture, but we, like the rest of the dominant culture, are less replete with embodied practices to live out those claims.
We are also descended, after all, from the puritans who brought the Protestant work ethic to this land alongside their smallpox blankets and colonizer mentality.
I carry in my lineage a theology of sufficiency, but I was still born and bathed in a culture of radicalized capitalism that insists that we can never be enough and will never have enough.
In the fact of that insistence, we must practice.
We must to slow our pace.
What if a collective and communal commitment to rest is one of our most necessary faith practices?
What if we are called together to leave behind our urgent striving in favor of a slower, deeper presence to one another and the earth as our pathway to salvation?
What if the fierce urgency to save the world is exactly part of those colonial systems that grind us under their fiction of progress? And what if we could be radically present instead, slow enough together, all of us, to halt the gears entirely?
This is Hersey’s claim: that our refusal of its inhuman pace is what will eventually destroy the machine entirely.
That the Kingdom of God and liberation for us all is a room full of Black women safe and nurtured and napping.
That the revolution begins with a long hug and a sleepy time tea for the most reviled.
That the revolution continues every time one of us steps off the conveyer belt and back onto the breathing earth.
When we halt the machine we can build alternative structures of slow thriving that work for everyone: where rest is not a privilege but a birthright, where our imaginations flourish in well-rested abundance, and where there is, indeed, plenty of time.
So I ask you, how can you build rest into your daily liberation practice?
How can you help to ensure rest for those at the margins through communal care?
How can you refuse the cultures that steal away our humanity, starting with our sleep?
Because,
Rested bodies are grounded and flexible.
Rested bodies can bend and adapt.
Rested minds are spacious and vast.
Rested minds can imagine incredible possibility.
And rested hearts? Rested hearts are tender and open.
Rested hearts can connect so deeply.
The revolution will be slow.
The revolution will be slow because the Love Revolution requires rested bodies, minds and hearts to open, bend, and dream. The revolution will be slow, because our earth needs rest, needs us rested — and therefore creatively connected.
Start here. Know this;
Our joy does not come from the machine that grinds our bones,
our lives, our worth did not come from that machine.
and our rest will never come from that machine.
Our joy, our worth, and our right to rest were not given to us by anything but the Universe itself, and they cannot be taken away.
They are our birthright,
they are our promise to one another,
they are enough.
