Fragment 4: Human Right.

Welcome to the 4th?‘R’ Fragment.

R for ‘Rest’.

Fragment for piece and parcel, excerpt and exegesis.

While the rest of the month, the?‘R’ Letter?sheds light on a professional and their relationship to Rest, a primary need we all have, once a month, the 'R' Fragments consists of excerpts from Tricia Hersey's 'Rest is Resistance' (2022) that I will share and muse on.

You can use the Fragments in different ways: to get a taste of the Rest Bible everyone needs to read, to use its Word as a powerful mantra to steer rest in instead of outside of one's life, to practice thinking of rest as sacred politics in action, and most of all, like any spiritual practice, to take a break (in your break, or at work) and daydream with yourself.

HUMAN RIGHT (p. 185)        

This is an experimentation in imagination, dream-making, and a politics of refusal. The sooner you can wrap your hearts and minds around the reality that rest is not a privilege or a luxury but a divine and human right that is always available to us when we reimagine, the richer the beauty of rest will be made plain to you. It will be a slow unraveling, so do not try and take this information in quickly and do not attempt to try and ignore your fear. Take a deep breath and slowly imagine your life well-rested. Give yourself grace and mercy. It is yours to cocoon and swaddle yourself in. You can rest! You can imagine. If it sounds scary or impossible, that is part of the process. You can create a portal of rest, care, and imagination at any time. Resting is our divine right. Our birth anoints us with the power of divinity.

'A politics of refusal.' Rest, living with/for rest is a politics of refusal of the systems that slowly or quickly, invisibly or very openly kill us all in various ways. Its actualization might look like a privilege when we remain within the framework of the oppressive systems: only a few can easily materialize rest as their next 'possession'. While in fact, it is a right, a human right, a divine right even when one accepts the divine nature of all life, which spiritually transcends oppression(s) and lack of materiality.

75 years ago, a privileged group of individuals gathered to draft a declaration which they wished universal and listed all the rights human beings are born with.

Article 24 of said declaration even reads: 'Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.'

Not only was the declaration aspirational at the time – just keep in mind that peoples under colonial rule are not mentioned in it (despite the insistence by a few women delegates from different regions of the world, involved in the drafting). But it is still very much so, if not even more, when one looks at the current state of the world at 'peace' or at 'war'. (Quotation marks are meant to question what we mean by a state of peace – is it indeed peaceful? – and a state of war – is it only just war?)

However steeped in theology (among other sources), or perhaps because it is steeped in theology, Hersey's work is a powerful take on the language and the praxis of human rights as a lens to reconceptualize and reimagine the role of rest, and that of resistance, in our lives irremediably interconnected.