Diana Butler Bass On The Radical Act of Rest

The popular writer, historian, and theologian is celebrating her 65th birthday with a six-month personal sabbatical

In this week’s conversation, I was joined by Diana Butler Bass, Ph.D., an award-winning author, historian and public theologian.

Diana Butler Bass

also writes the popular Substack publication The Cottage.

Diana Butler Bass

is a national treasure. If you don’t believe me, then listen to Anne Lamott who has this to say about her:

Diana Butler Bass is one of only a few modern Christian writers who can absolutely blow me away with both spiritual insight and beautiful writing. She is a brilliant scholar and a wonderful storyteller, charming and devout, erudite and deeply human.

Diana is turning 65 on Monday, so be sure to wish her a Happy Birthday! She will be celebrating this milestone with the radical act of REST.

With a lot of planning, saving, and cutting back on expenses, Diana was able to gift herself a personal sabbatical, which will mean six months off from a job that typically has her on the road most of the year. Diana can also take this time to rest and reflect because of the financial support she receives from the readers at Substack, who value the love and labor she puts into The Cottage.

So, whoever you are, bless you!

We covered a lot of ground in our conversation, but one thing Diana told me really struck me. Many of us know that in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the Sabbath calls for a day off from work for rest.

But Diana highlighted another purpose of the Sabbath: to break corrupt economic practices that trap people into overwork.

Diana explained that a Sabbath is "meant to get people off the gerbil wheel of production and being just one more cog in somebody's corporate machine. That's not just a problem of contemporary capitalism. It was a problem, even a spiritual temptation, and a real social problem for thousands of years."

She said:

A Sabbath is really a move within time. Instead of breaking with an entire culture, you're breaking with a cultural pattern about the use of time. That's what Sabbath was intended to be. Every single week Israel would rehearse being outside of any kind of structural economic system that would tempt them toward not being fully human, not being the kind of people that God dreamed for them to be.

I think some of us here can relate to the idea of a living in a system that makes it hard to be fully human, in the way we were designed to be.

I hope you enjoy this fascinating discussion. You can watch the interview below or read the transcript if you prefer.

AI Generated Transcript

Kirsten Powers:

Diana, I'm so excited to talk to you. For those who don't know, this is Diana Butler Bass and this is going to be running on Substack. So you are famous on Substack, first of all, one of the most successful Substack newsletters, theologian, bestselling author. I have your book right back here. You can see I have probably many of your books here, so I'm just thrilled to have you.

And the work you do in this world is so important, really just helping people navigate their faith journeys and how to have a healthy spirituality. So I'm really grateful too for that.

But what we're talking about today is Diana's turning 65 and you're going to do something to commemorate, celebrate that. Can you tell us about that?

Diana Butler Bass:

Yeah, it is wonderful to be with you. It's been way too long since we sat down and had coffee together or lunch or anything like that. So this is really a treat for me. I was just looking ahead to my 65th birthday and it seems like such a huge milestone. I remember when I was a little girl, my parents, their whole lives, my parents were working class people and they talked about turning 65 and retiring and getting social security and all that stuff on that big birthday.

And somehow I thought that was the epitome of being the old person. And now I'm turning 65 and I can't believe it. And so I thought, what do I really want to do to Mark this year? And I thought, I want to do something that will take care of me, that will really prepare me not simply to think what is ending or what might be ending, but to think about how my life is going to change over the next 20 to 25 years that I hope that I still have around here and to do some retooling.

So I decided to take six months off. And it's my own personal sabbatical.

And when I got your newsletter about moving to Italy, I just went, yes, there was something that was resonant between your choices and choices that I was making. Even though I'm not going across an ocean, I'm staying where I live about wellness and wholeness and becoming a better human being where I had already decided to take some time off for myself next year.

Kirsten Powers:

How did you come up with the idea?

Diana Butler Bass:

One of my friends had taken his 60th year and done something very similar, and it was life giving for him. He's also another writer, and I can say with some honesty, he's now seven or so years past the 60 mark that it rejuvenated his writing career. And I think that the last couple books he's written are so much better than the books that he was sort of cranking out when he was in his late fifties. So I could see that it really made a difference to someone else that I admire.

Kirsten Powers:

I wrote a post about laying fallow and how we need to take that idea of, it's like the land needs to actually have that break to then be able to grow something new. And we don't really operate like that. We're just go, go, go, go, go. And that a lot of times, I mean, I think we should take downtime just to take downtime, not because it will make us more productive or make us do greater work, but it also will do that. And so I mean, I've experienced it. It really does make a difference. So what have you thought about what kind of things you want to do on day to day? What's your day going to look like or what do you hope at the end of it to have done?

Diana Butler Bass:

Yeah. Well, what are the things that has kept me from doing it have been economic factors. And when I sat down and I looked forward to a sabbatical, which is both that natural sort of spiritual pattern that you're talking about that we find in just the earth, gardening lay and follow farming. But it's also found in every faith tradition, every religion I can think of is that there's this beautiful place for rest and renewal.

And since I'm a Christian and Christian theologian and I care about my tradition and its scriptures and its patterns of practice, that's one of the deepest practices within the Jewish and Christian Bible is the idea of Sabbath. And why I mentioned that here with economics is that originally the idea of a Sabbath rest in Judaism, which Christians inherited, was partly about God rested. So we must rest too if God needs it.

But there's this other piece of it that's an economic piece. And then on the Sabbath not working means you take a certain amount of time off, whether it's one day or there were patterns of practice of the Sabbath in Judaism where you took a year or every 49 years, there was a very radical communal Sabbath for the whole of the community of Israel.

Those were meant to break corrupt economic practices that that trapped our lives into what you were describing, that gerbil wheel of production and being just one more cog in somebody's corporate machine. That's not just a problem of contemporary capitalism. It was a problem, even a spiritual temptation and a real social problem for thousands of years.

So for me, the thing that kept me from doing it for the longest time was economics. And then I looked at myself in the mirror and I said, what kind of lousy theologian, Christian practitioner are you if you're not even willing to break with the economic system that surrounds us and go after what is a clear kind of spiritual directive in all of the world's greatest religions?

So that was one of the prompts besides my birthday, and that meant that I had to really think in advance about how does a middle class writer like myself make six months off from work happen? What kind of choices do I have to make and what has to work in advance? And so one of the things I've been doing over the last year since I committed myself to this was saving a lot more money, just putting it away so that I would have money to be able to live off of well. And when I got to the Sabbath to do things that I wanted, and so I created a little nest egg for myself, which was a surprise that I could do that. But the pandemic taught me how to be a little bit more closed, a little bit bit more guarded in my spending and all those kinds of things.

So basically what I'm planning on doing is I'm still going to be writing just part of who I am, and I love to write, so I'm not stopping that. And that means I will be writing with my audience on substack, but it means that I'm going to be writing things that point towards projects that I'm hoping to do in the future, exploring territory of the heart, not feeling quite so bound up in every political question that comes up in the news. And I will not be for six months doing any events or even any online things. Yeah, that's great that people hire me generally to do.

So that means all the time that I would have spent traveling to events, being at sponsored events, working on behalf of other people online. Now I'm going to spend in the space of my home, my office, I have a little cottage in my backyard where I write and focused on my craft as a writer and then the travel that I've wanted to do for a long time. So it's really a shift.

There's still work involved, and there will be some level of my income coming in through Substack, which I'm deeply grateful for. But I saved, I rearranged my sensibility about what I needed, and I'm getting ready to take time for me.

Kirsten Powers:

I love that. Before I get to the travel, what are you going to do about social media?

Diana Butler Bass:

I have already cut back quite a bit on social media. Twitter I used to love, and I kind of stopped loving it even before Elon Musk took over, but now it's just a disaster.

Kirsten Powers:

Yeah, I'm the same. I really spent almost no time on social media anymore, but I did. And that's been for a while, but I do feel like that's something that can kind of creep in these spaces. You can get pulled into things. So in terms of travel, what are you thinking of?

Diana Butler Bass:

Well, the first thing that I'm doing is taking a retreat at a place in Arizona I like very much. And getting massages and walking in the desert and doing things that will just reground me as I grew up in Arizona. And then the second big trip I'm doing is I'm going to Iona.

Kirsten Powers:

I know, yeah, hopefully I'll be going with you.

Diana Butler Bass:

That would be wonderful.

And so that's in early May, so I'll be going on that retreat. And then I booked more time at the beach at this house where we stay every year. I took up a much bigger chunk of time than I usually can do only a week. And looking at a couple other pieces of travel this summer that haven't quite crystallized yet, but there are some opportunities. One potentially to go to Egypt and the other to spend time this summer in Hungary with a very good friend of mine who is a New Testament scholar. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, so it's a really kind of an interesting mix of places I haven't been and have always wanted to see. I've never been to eastern Europe, and I've always wanted to go to Hungary and the Egypt piece. Ever since I was a tiny little girl, I wanted to go to Egypt.

Kirsten Powers:

Do you think you'll have any anxiety once you stop doing all the things?

Diana Butler Bass:

Well, yes, and that's what I want to train myself not to do, because I have noticed that one of the things that happens with my friends who retire, so they reach 65 or 68 or 72 and they just say, Nope, this is it. I'm retiring. They tend to stop cold Turkey and then they look forward to it. They look forward to it, they get there, and they literally don't know what to do with themselves.

And I have watched so many of those friends get lost and even sick because they didn't know how to find meaning outside of their work. And so that's for me, a part of this next year is to find myself in a different kind of time so that when I do come to the moment when I realize I just want to really wrap up this whole phase of my life and just move on to whatever we consider to be retirement in the 21st century, I won't have that shock of [inaudible]/

Kirsten Powers:

Do you think you'll retire?

Diana Butler Bass:

Well, writers never retired.

Kirsten Powers:

Yeah, writers don't really retire. I don't think you'll ever retire. Maybe you'll cut back on the speaking or something. But even that I wonder about, I think, yeah, it is unique in that sense when your job is also a calling.

And something that you love. I think that one of the things that I think is really important for people to understand, although it sounds like you've already pulled back on a lot of this stuff, but when you're going, going, going and you're on social media and you're traveling, you're doing all these things and you stop literal, it's a shock to your physical system.

And we've all been doing it for so long that it's detoxing. So there's actually, it's almost like just imagine you were going off heroin or something. I mean, that's what it feels like. And so people actually, there need to be guides or something for people when they're coming out of this to say, it's not always going to feel this way.

You have to get your system adjusted to just normal life, of not being constantly moving and going and all of these kinds of things, which I think is what life used to a little more, I don't know how you feel sort of looking back when you were growing up or even younger in the beginning of your careers. I don't remember it being so the hustle thing, right? The go, go, go, go, go where people just kind of fell apart when they retired.

Diana Butler Bass:

One of the comments that stuck with me through most of my career was, I think I was probably in my mid to late forties when I had a friend who was in her late seventies, and she's since passed away, and I depended on her so much. She constantly was giving me advice. She was a real mentor to me. And I had been in one of these very intensive times where, oh my gosh, I used to, before the pandemic, it was not unusual for me to do 40 events a year. Oh my gosh. And to be gone, that was as much as 150 days on the road in hotels away from my family. And it was that. It was just this constant, constant, constant push from one place to another.

And I remember coming home from one of those really hard seasons and sitting down and just feeling this utter emptiness. And I called my friend and I said, I don't know what to do with myself. And she's so sweet. She kind of laughed. She was from the south, and so she had this incredible deep Tennessee accent. And so she kind of laughed at me and she said, well, honey, you are just addicted to your work.

She says, you're addicted to that schedule. And I remember feeling like, is this how someone feels like in an AA meeting?

Kirsten Powers:

Yes! And then what happens is a lot of people end up reaching for the drug again, right? Because it's like they're going off of it and they're like, this is too much. I'm just going to get back into it. It's either going to, I'm going to go back to the job, or I'm going to find something that's like that just keeps me numbed out and kind of, yeah. So that's why I think what you're doing is actually pretty radical because you're not really, I know people do retire at 65, but that's not who you are. You know what I mean? You're nowhere near that. So it's not like, oh, you're winding things up or something. You're in your prime. So I think that taking a step back now is a more radical thing.

Diana Butler Bass:

Well, thank you. I really appreciate that.

Kirsten Powers:

In this culture in particular. And when people I think are always worried like, oh, if I take a step away, will I not matter or will I lose my relevancy or whatever. But you mentioned thinking about what you want the rest of your life to look like. Do you have a sense of that? Does this feel like a very different part of life than the last 25 years? Or how does it feel?

Diana Butler Bass:

It does feel different. And it started to feel different in the last couple of years. And at first I was very resistant of that difference because I wanted to continue to feel that the relevance and people really needed me to be in particular conversations or I needed to get my voice into the public square. And now something about that's really begun to switch up for me, which is the other thing that I've been watching with what you've been writing, is that there comes just sort of this time when you look at all this and vanity, vanity all is, vanities says the wisdom writers.

And I really, I get that now. It's some deep sort of soul level that I never understood when I was a little younger, when I was still chasing it all. And it was partly me wanting to chase all of that. But it's partly the expectations of our culture. And also I do think that the economics of our culture is so corrupt. Even the best of intentioned people casually or quietly unwittingly get caught up into that real driving addiction or success because they can't, how are you going to pay for your health insurance? How are you going to get your kids to college?

Kirsten Powers:

And if there's no safety net to catch you with health insurance, for example, we hear the stories every day, people going bankrupt. I was just reading something today on Substack about this woman who had a workplace injury and now owes like a million dollars and is being sued to pay for what on so many levels. This is for her health, for the surgeries and all the things that she needed to survive to live. So if you're living in a culture like that where people who have health insurance are running GoFundMe campaigns to help pay for their, what the insurance didn't cover, we're not even talking about uninsured people.

Of course, you feel like you have to work all the time and have lots of money and what's going to happen to you. And we don't have pensions for the most part anymore. And so you have to be planning, I don't know how long I'm going to live and just all these things that I do think causes us to just, we live in a lack mentality, you know what I mean?

Which is we just don't know when the other shoe's going to drop. And so we just have to keep making more and more money. And it's scary to get off of that and to just say, I'm not going to do that anymore because of all of these things. So which is why I want to move to Italy. So I think that we're put in a kind of bad position of pursuing this economic stability, whatever that is. It seems unattainable. Even super wealthy people still think they don't have enough money.

Diana Butler Bass:

Yeah, that's really true. People I know who have considerably more resources than I do, they think they're worry about it all the time.

Kirsten Powers:

And so there's never any peace. And then you add in that it's also your identity.

Diana Butler Bass:

So that cluster is just really so hard to break. And it's both a personal, we all get caught up, and again, this is a theological idea, but we all got tendencies that take us in the wrong direction. And Christianity is referred to that as sinfulness for its most of its history. So that's one of the things that Christianity teaches. Everybody is caught up in some level of self-serving interests at the expense of others sin. So we have that, and that's the part that we need to watch for and guard and think about our spiritual lives and be responsible for. But then there's this other thing, and that's the structure.

And when the structure that we're talking about now is what's driving a certain amount of that, I've got to get mine, then that becomes the moment of realization, oh my gosh, I really do live within a structure that is tempting me toward being less than human, less than neighborly, less than compassionate and completely self-absorbed.

And so that's what something like your geographical move or my Sabbath. A Sabbath is really a move within time. Instead of breaking with an entire culture, you're breaking with a cultural pattern about the use of time. That's what Sabbath was intended to be. Every single week Israel would rehearse being outside of any kind of structural economic system that would tempt them toward not being fully human, not being the kind of people that God dreamed for them to be.

So that was the divine intention, I think, with this practice was more just let individuals take little naps, but let them see very clearly how the systems and structures around them tempt them to being less than fully human and to be able to provide those breaks to reclaim that humanity. And so for me, that's what I'm hoping Sabbath does. And just as you're talking, one of the gifts that still is present in our culture is that when you turn 65, you got Medicare.

And so many people I know that's what they have just been waiting for. When I turn 65, I don't have to do this lousy job anymore because then I'm finally going to have Medicare. And Medicare is not perfect, and it's always under threat by politicians that are deeply complicit in that economic system that wants to hurt people. But right now it's still in place, and that is giving me a breathing space. One of the reasons I started my substack originally was to pay for my healthcare because my husband retired and he's older than I am. So his healthcare had been taking care of me as a freelance writer for all these years. And then he has to go on Medicare and it's great for him. But then I got stuck with a $1,200 a month bill

Kirsten Powers:

And your copays and all that. It's just not okay. I'm sorry. I mean, I wrote about this in my piece. I think insurance for me in Italy will be like a thousand dollars a year and it'll cover everything. And they have excellent healthcares, and that's just the way it is in most industrialized countries. It's just understood to be a right, because I mean, first of all, you need healthcare to live, to be alive and also to be healthy, but also just what you're talking about of how in the United States is tied to your job. And so it really constrain people in terms of what even just their livelihoods or what they can do and those kinds of things. And it shouldn't be that way.

Diana Butler Bass:

That's the problem with sabbaticals too, is unless you belong to a profession which actually ties one of these periods of rest into it, or you contractually figure that out

Kirsten Powers:

Like a professor or something.

Diana Butler Bass:

Professor, there are sabbaticals that do get available that even high school teachers, really good high school teachers can win certain kinds of awards that come attached with sabbaticals. Pastors usually get sabbaticals. So I don't know if there are professions that do that, but I can imagine there might be a few at least. So they have that built into the expectation for those jobs. But other than that, I mean, it's literally just press, press, press to keep being able to make sure that your family is provided for. And that's one of those structural problems that inhibits this. So that's partly why I waited till 65, unlike my friend who did it at 60. I'm not quite sure how he pulled that off, but because now my medical insurance bills, again, Medicare is not entirely free, but it goes from over a thousand dollars a month to, well, about a third of that. And so I can take advantage of that.

So these are the moments when I think that as long as some of these programs are still in place, at least for people who are in their sixties, this becomes a really good time when you can say, okay, there's that just the threads of this social safety net that's still in place for adults of a particular age. And I want to be able to take advantage of that in ways that will benefit who I am, so that then I can turn around and use the wisdom of my experience, the profession that I've invested so much in over the years to serve others. And that's what ultimately this becomes about for me. It's retooling myself so that I can invest all that I've learned and all that I care about into the next generations of folks who are behind me and work in mentoring and even activism that I've never been able to do before because I was too busy working.

Kirsten Powers:

Yeah. Well, I think it was going to be really interesting is that when does this start? When do you actually start this?

Diana Butler Bass:

March 10th

Kirsten Powers:

March. Is that your birthday?

Diana Butler Bass:

No, my birthday is a couple weeks before that. And my agent, I wanted to do this, and so he said, oh, that's a great idea. And then he booked me all the way a month past my birthday. My birthday is actually February 19th.

Kirsten Powers:

I'm writing that down February 19th. Oh, thanks. Okay. So March 10th. And so then we'll have you come back in six months after that and tell us what happened. Because what I'm really interested to see is if you want to go back to your old life or if you're going to want to just keep sticking with, maybe you'll do some speaking, but it'll just be interesting to see how you see things differently.

And even seeing what it's like to live with less money to realize maybe I didn't really need some of these things that I thought that I absolutely had to have. I mean, when I left CNN, I didn't have a job waiting for me. And I do have a husband, thankfully, so I'm not completely on my own, but I still have to pay for things for myself. And I went through and just cut everything, literally everything. That's not food, shelter, whatever, healthcare. And it has been kind of interesting to go, gosh, just never really.

Now you just think you need so many things that you want them definitely. But it's like when you get to have to go, but do I need it? Right? It really changes things. And so it'll just be interesting to see how you feel looking back. I'm sure you're taking, keeping a journal and all that kind of stuff, right?

Diana Butler Bass:

Yes. I'm going to just keep a single separate sabbatical journal and just kind of track my, what's going on with my soul.

Kirsten Powers:

That's so exciting.

Diana Butler Bass:

I'll have time to do it. So that would be exciting.

Kirsten Powers:

This is the best birthday gift you could ever give yourself.

Diana Butler Bass:

Well, I just want to encourage other people who might be turning 65 this year. I don't know if you know this or not, but 1959, the year I was born, it's the largest single birth year of the baby boom. It came at the end of the baby boom, not in the middle. Baby boom. Wasn't like a bell curve.

The baby boom had this big pop in 1959. And so this year, 2024, the biggest group of Americans ever in American history are going to turn 65.

Kirsten Powers:

Oh wow.

Diana Butler Bass:

All at the same time, all in these 12 months. And so I just dream of people who are in this sort of tail end. We've always been sort of what I call the lost boomers. We don't have the same experiences, the older boomers, and it switches to Gen X pretty quick right after we're born. So we always were a little bit lost. I'm hoping that this is a year, this

Kirsten Powers:

Is your moment,

Diana Butler Bass:

And that we really find ourselves. And in that finding can contribute all of the beauty and all of the energy and just all the gifts that we've always had back to the world around us as we dream of the kind of future we want to handle on to our children and grandchildren.

Kirsten Powers:

That's beautiful. That's a great place to end. So thank you, Diana, so much for talking to us about this, and I just can't wait to have you back and hear about all the exciting adventures that you have.

Diana Butler Bass:

Oh, well thank you so much, and thanks for leading on so many of these issues. I just love what you're doing.

Kirsten Powers:

Thank you.

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