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Chapter VIII
In Your rest

Come apart . . . and rest a little. Mark 6, 31.
I should like to meet You, O Lord, just as much in my rest as in my day’s work. But is it my rest? No, it would be more accurate, more in keeping with the intention and with the general line of these thoughts to say: in Your rest.

Master, in Your Gospel, I scarcely find any words which could refer to what we would call rest, recreation or vacation.

You seem to ask a constant attention of Your disciples, an almost continuous labor.

It is with a sort of ironical trembling that You denounce rest which is taken at an unsuitable time – at a time which is least fitting, as was the case when Your disciples fell asleep in the garden of Olives: “Sleep ye now and take your rest. Behold the hour is at hand: and the Son of Man shall be betrayed into the hands of sinners.” O Lord, how often I have remained idle, when You had need of me at Your side . . .

And yet, once, only once does the Gospel show You inviting Your apostles to rest. They have returned from a mission and they gave You an account of what they had done.

Now there is so much hustling and bustling around them that they do not even have time to eat. Then You say to them: “Come apart into a desert place and rest a little.”

What could be, what should be the disciple’s rest – my rest? Our rest, like all other actions, must find its basis, its transfiguration and its blessing in Your own acts. Our rest must be a participation in Your rest.

What then was the nature of Your rest?
In all things, O Lord, You imitate the Father. If we look for what could be Your rest, we must ask ourselves: Is there such a thing as God’s rest? In what does it consist?

Now Scripture describes for us this rest which is God’s. “And God saw all the things that He had made, and they were very good . . . And on the seventh day God ended His work which he had made: and He rested on the seventh day . . .

And He blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because in it He had rested from all His work.”
This text indicates very clearly what God’s rest is, what the Son of God’s rest is and the Son of Man’s, and also on what conditions God blessed the rest of His people. “For he that is entered into his rest, the same also hath rested from his works, as God did from his. Let us hasten therefore to enter into that rest.”

The Creator’s rest is bound up with the awareness that His work is now completed and done according to his will. God rests because all has been done and done well.

You, O Lord, likewise had the right to take rest because You saw that Your work had been accomplished and was successful. Through You salvation came to souls, in the world.

Your disciples also had the right to take rest. For they had just finished their first mission. They had preached repentance, they had driven out demons and cured the sick. They had come back joyfully. You showed Your appreciation for their work by saying to them: “I saw Satan like lightning falling from heaven.”

Just as the Creator and You Yourself, they too could take rest by seeing that their work was good.
But I, Lord? I, whose life is sin? If I cast a glance on what I have done since my birth, can I continue to exist in Your Presence?

You called me to walk with You, but even though my existence has been traversed by flashes of Your pardon and tenderness, has it been anything but a long infidelity?

It seems to me I read my own condemnation in the statement with which You first inspired the psalmist, and which another sacred writer then repeated: “And I said: they always err in heart. And they have not known My ways . . . As I have sworn in My wrath: If they shall enter into My rest.”
Your rest seems then to be forbidden to me, just as the garden of Eden was closed to Adam and Eve after the fall. I bow down before You and I humbly confess: “Lord, I am not worthy to enter into Your rest.”

And yet if I continue reading the same sacred author, I read: “Seeing then it remaineth that some are to enter into it, and they to whom it was first preached did not enter because of unbelief: Again He limiteth a certain day saying . . . Today . . .”

This day can become “today,” for me, right now. If, yesterday, my unbelief (manifested in actions) prevented me from entering into Your rest, today, rejecting what I was yesterday, coming to You once more, and offering myself once again to Your yoke, I shall find this rest of which You speak: “Come to me . . . Take up My yoke upon you . . . and you shall find rest to your souls.”

Lord, if my work has been bad or worthless, I can at least participate in the Creator’s rest, in the Saviour’s rest, by seeing how good, how very good, Their work has been. “And singing the canticle of Moses . . . and the canticle of the Lamb, saying: Great and wonderful are Thy works, O Lord.”
Alas! is this the way I spend my hours of rest, my days of rest and the days which are especially consecrated to You? What do I do with them? Oh, my wretched leisure time . . . !

Lord, the problems of the sanctification of leisure time is solved close beside You and by You alone. My rest will sing, If You Yourself are my rest. I shall meet You in my rest, if I enter into Your rest. You are the fullness and the joy of the seventh day.

Increase my gratitude so that I might make of all rest, of all recreation, of all vacation time an entrance into the rest of the Creator who has formed me and conserves me, an entrance into the rest of the Lamb who saves me and forgives me. In them I shall find the greatest rest, because Their work of goodness has been of the greatest.

Master, make my rest a participation in that rest which You wanted to take with Your apostles on the shore of the lake. “For we, who have believed, shall enter into rest; as He said.”