When the News Is Just Too Much....Take a News Sabbath

"Sabbath is not simply the pause that refreshes. It is the pause that transforms. "   --Walter Brueggemann

I’m a news junkie.

Have been since my days as a newspaper boy in West Springfield, Massachusetts. Six mornings a week I’d arise before dawn, fold up sixty copies of the Springfield Union morning paper, stuff them all into a well-worn canvas bag that hung around my neck and shoulder, and then mount up on my bike for deliveries. After the last broadsheet was tossed on to a front porch, I’d bike home, and many a morning sit down in the driveway and then read the paper cover to cover.

Reading the news. Listening to the news. Watching the news. Scrolling through the news. 

I have to confess I’ve morphed from a new junkie into a news addict, especially in the past few intense years, as the pandemic hit and then there was not one but two crazy elections and now the war and the mass shootings and…well…you get the picture.

So many of us now are on 24/7, when it comes to the news. I have National Public Radio on in the car most of the day as I drive and as I shave in the morning and fix my dinner at night. I read the New York Times and the Boston Globe first thing and then I visit other news sites too: the Associated Press, the Drudge Report, the Wall Street Journal. To fall asleep at night I listen to the BBC on the radio.

Until last week. 

Then, something just broke inside me when it came time to read the news one morning and flick on the radio as I made the coffee. I began to realize that my “bordering on obsessive” news consumption wasn’t just keeping me informed. It was also making me depressed. Anxious. Worried. And yes, sad. When the news about the mass shooting in Texas was breaking and those awful and terrible headlines were shouting out from my computer screen, and when the emotional voice of the news reader talked about of all those innocents dying, I had to switch it all off, finally.

OFF.

Shut it down. Slam closed the computer. Switch over in the car to my satellite radio 1970’s station, those soothing and familiar and yes, cheesy songs from my adolescence, comforting me somehow. On my walks and bike rides, I now mostly listen to podcasts and books on tape rather than the news. Yes, I still check the headlines and catch the hourly news rundown a few times each day. I still open the paper first thing to see how bad the Red Sox were last night and how great the Celtics were and maybe even read about how our dysfunctional leaders are doing. 

But overall, I’ve cut my news appetite by at least by 50 percent, maybe even more. At the suggestion of a colleague, I’m also taking a weekly news sabbath, eschewing all news for at least one day a week. Twenty-four hours of rest from 24/7 news.

Once every seven days.

It’s not just me voraciously consuming news in 2022. It’s so many others too. Folks responding like Pavlov’s dog when a news notification “dings” on their phone. I call on shut-ins at their homes and hear and see the buzz of Fox News or CNN on in the background. I know that station is blaring in that room at the nursing home from morning until night, rarely if ever muted. I worry about how such non-stop doom and gloom and fear makes those seniors feel. Warps their view of real life just as too much news can warp my view of life.

It's not just our fault and our addiction that we are now so turned on to news. The number of places to get and to see and to hear the news has multiplied exponentially. You can watch the news at the gas station as you pump and even in some grocery stores as you shop. I get why we are so drawn to news. It tries to convince us that if only we have enough information, then we can be in control, in a world that feels so, so out of control right now.

More information may make us well informed, but it does not increase the stability of this world. If anything, too much news makes us feel caught up in the chaos. Which is why I’m on a new news diet and a news weekly embargo. We’ll see what it does for my spirit. Maybe you might try a news sabbath too.   

On the seventh day God rested. I am learning I need to take a break too, claim sabbath from my hunger for the latest news. The news will absolutely still be there when I leave that time of rest. But for now?

No news is good news.         

The Reverend John F. Hudson is Senior Pastor of the Pilgrim Church, United Church of Christ, in Sherborn, Massachusetts (pilgrimsherborn.org). He blogs at sherbornpastor.blogspot.com and is a resident scholar at the Collegeville Institute at Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. For twenty-five years he was a columnist whose essays appeared in newspapers throughout Massachusetts and Rhode Island. He has served churches in New England since 1989. For comments, please be in touch: pastorjohn@pilgrimsherborn.org.