Labour Day (Redux)

A year ago, I wrote something about labour and surcease from it. It has always seemed to me that the end of labour is the fit ending to any endeavour.

For rest, the 'ground state' of being, is the baseline from which all things are measured. An object at rest remains at rest; an object in motion cannot be said to be in motion unless compared to an object at rest. If two or more objects are in motion, define one to be at rest, and the system remains unchanged as long as you haven't already defined the space they are in.

It is altogether fitting and beautiful that Labour Day should be made a day of rest, a day on which things normally in motion realise that without a resting state, their motion is in vain. It is like atheism; how can it be defined without the idea of God? And if it were to be defined as the lack of God, how sad should it be that it must be defined as an absence of essence, rather than an essence itself?

Rest defines the universe of motion and action, just as God defines the Universe. To say that there is no God is an assertion of faith equivalent to saying that things move without something to measure their movement by. To say that an atheist believes in one less God than a theist is to deny the difference between one and zero, and to say that all other numbers partake of the same essence that is 'one'. For 'one' is the first of something that is not nothing; of 'one' all other numbers are made, and their identity sustained. This is not true of any other number for that kind of process.

And so, we rest our case, and case our rest.

Labour Day

Here are some good words:

Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made. And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made.

I thought that it was a fitting conclusion to last night's cell group meeting. It reminded me of this show I saw on the History Channel, about life after the humans had gone. I think we tend to see the Creation account as ending on the sixth day, with Man the capstone of creation. Well, yes, it does seem that way, especially to Man.

But 'six' has always been the number of imperfection; 'seven' is perfection. And what God did on the seventh day was that he created the sanctity of rest, which had not been seen in the universe up till then. God did not end creation at the end of the sixth day, but on the seventh day, by establishing an end to work and the hope of a better life beyond mere humanity.

We all need to learn this; if a man will not work, neither let him eat, says the Good Book. But if a man will not rest, he deserves whatever he gets for thinking that the be-all and end-all of Mankind is Man.