An invitation to Talk about Selah
Photo by Sincerely Media on Unsplash
I was invited as a virtual panelist to talk about my forever favorite subject—rest—with two other panelists. The panel discussion focused on “Selah: Self Care While Serving in Ministry.” Linease Bertha, the person who invited me was a former student. We shared a Zoom screen every Saturday during a Spiritual Formation class at New Brunswick Theology in the spring semester of 2022. I was co-teaching.
In the 2024 LinkedIn message, Linease wrote: 🙃Your teachings on quietness and writing still impact my life. God’s still working on me with consistent journaling. 😁
I, too, smiled. It was now two years later.
A few months after Linease’s LinkedIn message, she invited me to join the virtual panel hosted by D.E.W. Ministries, a worship arts ministry through liturgical dance. I was excited. I had much to say about rest because I’d been practicing the process of rest, and processing the practice as I applied rest to my everyday ordinary lifestyle. Speaking about rest was easy because I rested in small and large doses in a variety of ways.
As Tricia Hersey writes in her book Rest is Resistance, A Manifesto, “There is a trend happening in speaking and writing about rest. Most of the culture is not resting. The trend of talking and writing about it is rooted in capitalism, toxic groupthink, and opportunity—both connected to grind culture and the way media consumes and extracts.”
I no longer consider myself part of a culture that does not rest. My desire reflects “practicing what I preach.” My practice included pausing in between the busyness and truly living into Selah.
Selah, a mystery word, is a musical term, an interlude, an intermission, a pause. The Hebrew definition means to lift up, exalt, to end. In the Psalms, Selah appears 71 times in NSRV, and three times in Habakkuk’s prayer. It can be a transition in the text, a change of speaker, a shift of time, or an emphasis on a particular point in which the reader pauses and reflects on the passage.
What’s so mysterious about Selah, the hours of the day are swift and if seduced by the grind culture and social media, we can miss time shifts from dawn to midmorning and noon hours to midafternoon, evening, and night. A pause can become difficult. Taking an intermission, a break offers rest to the body, mind, soul, spirit, and heart. The whole self.
When my awareness of slowing down increased I began the practice of pause with Macrina Wiederkehr’s book Seven Sacred Pauses, Living Mindfully Through the Hours of the Day. Seven times a day for one, five, or ten minutes I paused to reflect and pray, being mindful of the hours.
I agree with Wiederkehr that “the word practice is one of the most important words in the spiritual life.” Whatever we want to do in life we must practice and that includes deepening our spiritual life. There is no better way to deepen our spiritual life than practicing Selah.
Wiederkehr writes, “We practice pausing to remember the sacredness of our names, who we are, and what we plan on doing with the incredible gift of our lives—and how we can learn to be in the midst of so much doing. We have to practice loving and forgiving. We practice breathing and being careful with one another’s life. We practice nonviolence. We practice enjoying what we have rather than storing up possessions. We practice silence.”
For more than a year, this book has been a mini-retreat for my soul, reminding me to pause and enter God’s rest, daily in-between things, to slow down, pare unnecessary items from my agenda, more often than not relinquish my agenda, and linger more with God,.
So, when invited to speak about Selah, even with my enthusiasm, I scanned my calendar to ensure I had enough time to rest as I prepared and afterward. Nowadays a pause may be an hour or a day in which I do “one thing.”
“God paused from his labor and rested. God blessed day seven and made it special—an open time for pause and restoration, a sacred zone of Sabbath-keeping.”
This preparation answered the first question presented to the panel: “What does self-care look like for those serving in ministry?” Soul-care, taking time to be with God alone. Soul care is a sabbath rest in the image of “God when he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done” (Genesis 2:1-3). “God paused from his labor and rested. God blessed day seven and made it special—an open time for pause and restoration, a sacred zone of Sabbath-keeping” (The Voice).
Finding “an open time for pause and restoration” pointed to Selah. A musical interlude to help focus on one thing, interrupt time. When my time is interrupted to lift up, and give praise to God, I remember who God made me to be and the amazing gift in my life. Selah mirrors Hersey’s manifesto that rest “disrupts and pushes back against capitalism.” How can I enter God’s rest if I’m tuned into reels and more reels, producing and consuming? Adele sings it best “Should I just keep chasing pavements? Even if it leads nowhere?”
It's in the chasing and getting nowhere that answered the next panel question: How do you know when it’s time to take a break? When one cannot enter God’s rest, just be, take a nap, and awake joyful, think only of the right now, then it’s time for a break. It’s time for a break when body, mind, heart, soul, and spirit are disconnected. When the body is exhausted, one doesn’t want to wake from a nap. When the mind is constantly plugged into and available, juggling things too heavy to carry or not meant to be carried, and trying so hard to meet other people’s expectations. It’s time for a break. The mind cannot rest when thinking about our trauma, our past, and our future and the “shoulda, coulda, woulda” haunts us.
If your body is exhausted and your mind remains engaged in a hurricane of thoughts, your heart is restless and perhaps hardened. The heart is our thoughts, our integrity, our character. The heart is connected to our mind, and we are engaged in our thoughts, sometimes we no longer feel. Without a moment or two to pause and take a break reflect on the chaos, pain, loss, and or even jealousy our soul suffers. Our soul is our me, myself and I. Our innermost being. Our soul is connected to our heart for the soul is desire, appetite, emotion, and passion. Inner being, our very breath. If our being is suffering we need a break. Otherwise, our spirit becomes embittered. Psalm 73:21different translations “When my soul was embittered, when I was pricked in heart,” Our eyes, our minds, our hearts, our thoughts are focused on the inequities of the world, the disparities. Loss of fellowship with God, struggling with our doubts.
We need a break: When there is no time to stop there seems like no space for an interlude. Pause. Rest. “when the gridlock of your schedule forbids it… That is when your heart beats against the prison walls of your enslavement” Ruth Haley Barton says.
When we need to ask for a fresh burst of grace. When we leave God out of our daily struggle, thinking we could manage without this help, when we set our agendas without him when we build our businesses, our ministry on something less than prayer.
I enjoyed this panel. I entered the livestream studio rested. I sat with God all day to contemplate these questions. I lingered long enough to rest and pause. I said no to my regular Pilates routine and phone calls, so I could live into Selah and speak about rest. The final question for us that evening was why do we say yes when we can say no to an assignment.
My answer loosely pointed to the false self that needs to be needed needs to succeed, feel special, make sure we are checking each box, live securely by structure and belief, and avoid or be against something or someone. Ouch. I know where I fit in that list.
And yet I am reminded of the wisdom of St. Augustine of Hippo and Henry Nouwen “We are aren’t rest-filled people who occasionally become restless. We are restless people who sometimes find rest.” Augustine writes in his Confessions, that the Lord has “made us for yourself, our hearts are restless until we rest in You.”
What does your Selah look like? I end this blog with my final reflection of the evening: “Where is God in all this, doing?”
