#peacewitness — Public Fediverse posts

The Sabbath Sabotage

They told us
holiness was neat,
pressed flat like Sunday clothes,
folded into bulletins,
spoken in indoor voices,
kept safely between hymns
and handshakes.

They told us
Sabbath was a soft thing,
a nap for the soul,
a gentle pause
before returning
to the holy machinery
of earning, buying, proving, becoming.

But Sabbath was never safe.

Sabbath is a wrench
thrown into Pharaoh’s gears.
A door barred against the market.
A candle lit
in defiance of the floodlights.
A refusal
to kneel before the stopwatch.
A holy no
rising like thunder
from tired bones.

Six days, they say,
you shall labor.
And the seventh?
The seventh is mutiny.

The seventh day
the fields are not your masters.
The ledgers do not own your name.
The inbox may howl
like a beast outside the gate,
but you will not feed it.
The empire counts bricks.
Sabbath counts blessings.
The empire demands output.
Sabbath gathers manna
and says, enough.

Enough for today.
Enough for this body.
Enough for this earth.
Enough for a life
that was never meant
to be fed into furnaces
just to keep the towers warm.

Sabbath is not laziness.
It is revolt
with bread on the table.
It is trust
with dirt under the fingernails.
It is the slave
remembering he is human.
The widow
remembering she is seen.
The ox
remembering grass.
The land
remembering how to breathe.

And maybe that is why
they sabotage Sabbath.

Because rest breaks rank.
Because silence interrupts slogans.
Because delight cannot be monetized forever.
Because a people
who learn to stop
may also learn
they can refuse.

Refuse the lie
that worth is measured in production.
Refuse the sermon
of profit without mercy.
Refuse the fear
that if we cease for one day
the world will fall apart—
as though we were the ones
holding up the stars.

No.
Sabbath is the admission
that we are not God,
and the miracle
that God is still good.

So let the engines choke.
Let the schedules stutter.
Let the tyrants call it weakness.
Let the anxious call it waste.
Let the merchants stand bewildered
before shuttered stalls
and unhurried hearts.

For this is the sabotage:
to rest in a restless world,
to feast in a famine of joy,
to loosen your fist
when all of history
has trained it to clench.

To stop.
To breathe.
To bless.
To remember
that we were not made
for endless extraction,
but for communion—
with God,
with neighbor,
with creature,
with soil,
with our own forgotten souls.

And so, on the seventh day,
we commit our small rebellion:
we light candles against consumption,
set tables against despair,
sing psalms against the grind,
and call this shattered life
still sacred.

This is no small thing.
This is how the kingdom enters:
not always with trumpets,
but with napping children,
unbought hours,
shared bread,
and a people audacious enough
to believe
that the world can turn
without their frantic striving.

Blessed are the saboteurs of empire.
Blessed are the keepers of Sabbath.
Blessed are the tired
who lay their burden down
and find, beneath the weight of all they carried,
a joy the masters could not confiscate.

For every Sabbath kept
is a crack in the idol.
Every prayer whispered at rest
is a seed beneath the pavement.
Every holy pause
is a hammer blow
against the myth
that Caesar owns time.

He does not.
The clock does not.
The market does not.

Time belongs to God.
And God,
in mercy,
has given some of it back to us.

Who Will Be Romero Today?

On this day we remember Archbishop Óscar Romero, murdered on March 24, 1980, while celebrating Mass. The church remembers him not simply as a tragic victim, but as a martyr whose blood was joined to the blood of the people he refused to abandon. Vatican sources still name him what so many already knew him to be in life: a “voice of the voiceless,” assassinated at the altar because he would not stop speaking for the poor.

Romero was killed soon after one of the most fearless sermons of the twentieth century. Addressing soldiers and police, he said that they were killing their own campesino brothers and sisters, and that God’s law stood above the commands of violent men: “Thou shalt not kill.” He declared that no soldier is obliged to obey an order against the law of God, and he ended with that thunderous plea: “In the name of God… cease the repression!”

That is why Romero remains dangerous. He did not speak in abstractions. He did not bless power from a safe distance. He did not soothe the conscience of empire. He named the sin directly. He named the victims directly. He named the moral responsibility of those ordered to carry out injustice. And for that, he was silenced by a bullet at the altar. Yet even in death he was not silenced, because martyrdom is a form of speech the powers of this world do not know how to answer.

Ten years later, in 1990, his name was still summoning people into the streets. The flyer for the Washington march commemorating Romero’s assassination called for an end to U.S. war in Central America, a march from the Capitol to the White House, and even nonviolent civil disobedience after the rally. It named the demands plainly: end U.S. aid to El Salvador, withdraw U.S. advisers, stop repressing the people, end the war against Nicaragua, lift the trade embargo, normalize relations. That call was real, and it was public. It survives in archival collections even now.

And I remember that day not as a line in a history book but as something lived in the body. Ten years after Romero’s assassination, I was arrested outside the White House after I and other activists built a miniature Central American village there. We were trying, in our small and vulnerable way, to make visible what policy papers and patriotic speeches tried to hide: villages, families, campesinos, the poor, the disappeared, the threatened, the dead. We were insisting that Central America was not a chessboard for Washington, but a place of human beings made in the image of God.

Read the rest of the essay at PeaceGrooves.