On Sunday, I found myself driving down a winding road with my now one-year-old son. His birthday was this weekend. My wife was feeling ill (she’s better today) and my daughter was napping. Papi and Basil are off to an adventure! Hmmm. The car needs washing. I need a number of items at Costco. Oh. We could go get Basil his first baseball glove (although I am not sure if he is a righty or a lefty). But I feel guilty about shopping on Sunday, about making others work.
Protestants of a strict sensibility have solved this issue. No Chik-Fil-A or Hobby Lobby on Sunday. A Protestant sense of the Sabaoth seeks to cast off the profane for the sacred. Or at least, it places the observance of provisions of rest at the forefront.
It’s not just commerce that overtakes our Sundays. Chores at home are more common, either to catch up from the previous week or to prepare for the next. Emails interrupt our rest. We might even work at our jobs a bit. Those of us who have school-age children might well find ourselves driving to games and spending much of our Sundays on the sidelines or in the bleachers. Schools (even our Catholic ones) are increasingly scheduling sports games, and youth groups are increasingly ubiquitous on Sunday evenings. Every member of the family is busy.
Our Secular Sundays
Our Sundays often look no different from those of our secular counterparts. I hesitate to call this a scandal. Yes, it is certainly a bad example. On our part, as we have been baptized with Christ and thus have died to be reborn into His life, our lives are not bearing the fruit of that transformation. We are the vine that is withering from the stock and failing to bear fruit. In some respects, we might not even realize how we are meant to bear this fruit.
We are caught between not only the competing claims of the secular and our faith, but also amidst a failure to properly understand why we Christians even prefer Sunday over the covenant day of Saturday. As St. John Paul II wrote in Dies Domini, the Lord’s Resurrection altered the Sabbath. “In the weekly reckoning of time Sunday recalls the day of Christ’s Resurrection,” he writes.
It is Easter which returns week by week, celebrating Christ’s victory over sin and death, the fulfillment in him of the first creation and the dawn of “the new creation”. It is the day which recalls in grateful adoration the world’s first day and looks forward in active hope to “the last day”, when Christ will come in glory and all things will be made new.
It calls us to rejoice.
Rightly, then, the Psalmist’s cry is applied to Sunday: “This is the day which the Lord has made: let us rejoice and be glad in it”. This invitation to joy, which the Easter liturgy makes its own, reflects the astonishment which came over the women who, having seen the crucifixion of Christ, found the tomb empty when they went there “very early on the first day after the Sabbath”. It is an invitation to relive in some way the experience of the two disciples of Emmaus, who felt their hearts “burn within them” as the Risen One walked with them on the road, explaining the Scriptures and revealing himself in “the breaking of the bread”. And it echoes the joy—at first uncertain and then overwhelming—which the Apostles experienced on the evening of that same day, when they were visited by the Risen Jesus and received the gift of his peace and of his Spirit.
On Saturday of this past week, I started cleaning out the ditches that flank the driveway in front of our house. It’s probably the ultimate sign of privileged leisure that I’d choose ditch-digging as my go-to activity while my children napped. I wasn’t exactly sure how this would turn out.
But as I dug, I began discovering medium-sized rocks. It turns out the ditches had once been thoughtfully cared for, with stones arranged to prevent erosion. Over time the stones had been covered with dirt and the ditch filled up and became clogged. When I had finished cleaning out the ditches, I placed the rocks back and suddenly, I had a rather elegant solution bought with about an hour’s work.
Maybe ten minutes later, my neighbor walked up the driveway hauling stones in his lawn tractor cart. He offered me his rocks which he was about to dump in the woods. It turns out we could really use these stones to line our creek bed, to protect it from further erosion in the heavy rains and to fill in another ditch, which the highway department is trenching but not landscaping on the other side of our property next month. It won’t be the first time they’ve done this job. With the stones, we can make it last.
The True Purpose of Sundays
The use of Sunday St. John Paul II describes is for many of us the stones long buried. Rediscovering the true purpose of Sundays is going to require work. Our families and our parishes need to lead each other in exploring the place this day should have in our life.
For the parish, this will require the pastor and his staff to remind and to work with people to revive the true purpose of Sundays. Some of this normative work requires the pastor to avail himself of his pulpit and remind his faithful about the importance of setting aside the tasks of every other day, in order to observe this one. This might even require some serious conversations with local leaders—of schools, businesses, and other civil society organizations like sports’ leagues—to convince them to respect the rest that is proper to the sabbath.
But the parish will also have to make Sunday a day of fellowship. Many Knights of Columbus groups, for example, host monthly pancake breakfasts after Mass. That’s a good start. But we also should work to strengthen those relationships, nurtured in parish life, and invite in the community, starting with the lost sheep of our brothers and sisters in the faith.
If you say, “I haven’t seen you at Mass in a while,” you sound like Big Brother. But saying, “Hey, why don’t you come by for pancakes after Mass,” is friendly and perhaps opens the door so our brothers and sisters in Christ know they are missed.
Sunday should also be the day the parish encourages works of mercy. Perhaps the parish can enable youth to visit local shut-ins. Maybe this is the day brown-bag dinners are prepared for the poor. Sunday could become the day when needy people in the community know they can come to a Catholic parish and have their needs met.
The Yes We Have to Say
The family also has a central role. I’ve spoken with parents who feel the burden of getting Mass “out of the way” as quickly as possible to get to the sporting events with everyone else. I understand the concern. But at some point, we parents need to simply say no—to the sporting events, to the email, to the busyness of Sunday. Without this no, we cannot possibly say yes.
And the yes we have to cultivate needs to be about returning ourselves and our families to living Sunday as the Lord’s Day. This day has been set apart. On that first Lord’s Day, Christ visited his disciples. For us, that discipleship is found with those most immediately close to us, and in a special way within the family. It means a day of prayer, of gathering, and of fellowship. Like the first Resurrection Sunday, it can be a day of both excitement, like John running to the tomb, or fear, like those gathered together in the locked Upper Room. The Lord’s Day finds us where we are.
Many families (and groups of friends) have begun making a “Lord’s Day Feast” a central part of their weekly Sunday celebration. This often means preparing special foods, making the house spiffy, and inviting people to join us in uninterrupted times of fellowship. This witness is both simple and human. It might be awkward at first, but with practice, we will wonder how we lived without it.
If we as Christians gathered with one another in this spirit, others would soon see and understand. Like my neighbor who suddenly brought over his stones, we would find our friends and family members contributing in ways unexpected. In this Year of Mercy, especially, this might mean a renewed practice of visiting the sick and helping those in need around us. It might practically mean reserving a seat each week at our dinner table for someone who we know needs company.
This Catholic recovery of the Sabbath is far from our stricter Protestant brethren’s do nothing profane on this day. The Catholic way requires work. But this work is itself not the toil of the curse, but a hoped for participation in the new creation that Our Lord ushered in with His Resurrection. And if put into practice, we may discover again old stones long buried that give us the foundation of our own piety for the rest of our work and lives.
For Further Reading
St. John Paul II’s Apostolic Letter Dies Domini
Catherine Duggan’s Being Ordered by Time
Melinda Selmys’s Mass as Nourishment, Not as Obligation
David Mills’s We Need the Sabbath
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