Sabbath Empire Takes a Sabbath

Happy trails, my friend, until we meet again

Back to the woods…

Hi, friends—this is to let you know that I have paused billing for Sabbath Empire, because I'm also pausing these essays and poems for awhile.

I will say a little bit about why below, but the main you thing you need to know is you do not need to do anything:

MONTHLY subscribers: You don't need to do anything. Your monthly payments are now suspended, and will not resume until I resume writing again, and unpause billing (I will give you a heads up before this happens).

YEARLY subscribers: You don't need to do anything. Time is now frozen for you. If Sabbath Empire starts up again, for example, after a three month hiatus, your annual subscription will automatically be extended by three more months than it otherwise would have. And so on.

FREE subscribers: You don't need to do anything.The only way in which this affects you at all is you'll be unable to become a paying subscriber until the hiatus is over.

ALL subscribers: You needn't have done anything at all, so thank you for having been here! And, as always, you are still free to unsubscribe, if you wish—with no hard feelings.

I do intend to crank this back up again in two or three or four months, who knows—God knows.

But, for the moment, I need to stop.

Mainly, I'm a slow, slow writer, and this takes almost all my time—but I can't afford to use my time this way anymore. I need to find a real job again.

And I need to find myself.

I've alluded to having been a teacher in a few of my essays, for example in How I Learned That Only a Few Words Are Needed If You Find the Right Ones And Are Alive Within Your Human Body. After a few years of twenty-something wanderings—working in the absolute spiritual hellscape of an ad agency in Chicago, running away to the mountains of Iceland with a friend to write a really stupid novel (don't look for it, it doesn't exist), building a cabin and living in a hippie commune in North Carolina—you know, stuff like that—I got married, and got (for me) a little more serious about the normal stuff that one is supposed to be doing: For eleven years, I was a teacher (three different schools, and some time as a private tutor). I had found my way.

It was a career I loved. I had a deep knack for it, but also just got better and better—I've always wanted to learn, always understood that I have more to learn. I got a lot of praise for my skill as a teacher, a lot of glowing regard from students, their parents, my colleagues, etc—I was thriving; I was thriving more and more.

Or, that's how it felt to me, anyway: Like the classroom was an F-16, and I could fly it through the Grand Canyon, afterburners blazing, and we could go anywhere, explore anything.

Maybe it was just my own head that was on fire, I don't know.

In circumstances I still don't really understand—internal and external, emotional and political—I was ejected from that F-16, which evaporated in a ball of flames. Not only was I fired from my teaching position in my last school; my whole teaching career itself was set on fire—people who didn't know me, but who had an agenda to attack somebody else, published inflammatory, defamatory things about me (taking, yes, a spark of truth but turning it into their useful thermonuclear explosion).

It was all so strange!

So, what do you do when the sleek machine you were sitting comfortably in a moment ago, taking joyrides through the sky, evaporates, and it's just you, yourself, and the empty blue air—suspended in that Wile-E-Coyote approach to physics which says if you don't look down and see the Earth, Earth won't look up and see you, either, with the dark, unrelenting gravity of its eyes...

I love writing, as I think you can tell.

I always have, but I really started to embrace writing as a deep, existential struggle maybe 22, 23 years ago. I've been devoted to it. I write all the time, throw away my writing all the time—always have. For a long time, I've been pursuing the right words, and the right order in which to place those words.

For a long time, what the poet A. R. Ammons said about himself has been true of my own inner struggle, too:

I desire the ease of wisdom

But have been unwilling to surrender the madness of poetry

So up there in the sky suddenly missing an airplane, my first and only real idea (I cycled through a lot of despairing ones) was: OK, maybe now is the time to become a writer: My older, though not wiser, first love, before teaching.

And I had gotten some good encouragement from a lot of directions, too: This was a pipe-dream, maybe, but the pipe was actually connected to something. Maybe not the gushing wellsprings of life, but something. There were other indications, besides the big one, that Now was the time. Things were happening. The dawn of a new day, etc.

So that's why I started Sabbath Empire last February. And what I expected to happen was slow, steady growth, punctuated by little spikes if I did a podcast, or somebody mentioned my writing, or whatever.

Which is indeed what happened for awhile—and I thank everyone involved in making that happen. From the bottom of my heart. Really: Thank you so much. You have helped us make ends meet, when I wasn't sure how else to do that.

But for quite awhile I've been losing subscribers overall. With every piece of writing that goes out, I might gain a couple new subscribers, but if I do, I lose more.

It's not just a one week or one month thing, but an overall pattern, it seems. The numbers are negative, and have been, and will be, as far as I can tell. In fact, there seems to be an almost inverse relationship between how I feel about my own writing and how other people do: The better I think an essay is, the more people unsubscribe!

I'm not tearing myself up about it. It just is what it is: Not working out. For now, anyway. Not enough to justify continued financial bleeding when I have little ones counting on me.

Got to go get a real job, get back on my feet, take care of the family, and come back to writing when I can.

Find my way again.

A new career, a new path forward—and then figure out how to fit writing into that new picture.

And I do intend to return!

But when I return, listen man, just to warn you: I'm going to be working on the same damn thing I've been working on this whole time. (I'm saying that because many people have come looking for something and gone away again, apparently not finding it.) This is what I'll be working on, as always:

Let's imagine Orthodoxy together as a kind of quietly subversive, radical “Sabbath empire” of Ethiopian-style forest churches bearing witness to the Eden from which we all came, and to the Eden to which we are all meant to return, by God's redemptive power—a world of green plants and blue skies and earthborn, Earth-loving men and women under the yellow sun, where all things, men and women, boys and girls, trees and birds, sun and moon and stars, trickling brooks and soaring white mountains of clouds, sparkling blue seas and leaping blue whales and gleaming tribes of silver dolphins, and clouds of iridescent dragonflies and sapphire-armored bluebottle flies, and sun-lilies and asphodels and yellow goldenrod flowers and fragrant nectarine trees, receive their lives directly from the breath of God, and freely offer their lives to God and one another, a vast communion of love giving thanks with their whole lives to the Father of all things. This is the future—the Messianic Age—which Yeshua, the “Last Adam,” has allowed us to begin realizing even now, celebrating it with our communal feasting, despite the bleakness of our times; this is the bright future to which his Eucharist points, and in which it already participates every seventh day, the day of the Sun...

That's the last paragraph of Sunlilies, which I said in the first essay of Sabbath Empire was the vision I was going to be expounding upon.

And in one way or another, this is all I've done on Sabbath Empire, all I'm interested in doing.

If I've attacked a few sacred cows along the way, it's only because I think they're obstructions. Wisely or unwisely, I'm picking my battles, and I'm picking them for a very specific reason. And I think I've been pretty mild about it.

If you're still interested in the vision above, by all means do stick around. I hope you do.

We'll keep chipping away at it in a few months.

And thanks so much for being here.

And I hope I do see you in a little while when I return.

love,

graham