Sabbath Rest
“And on the seventh day, He rested.”
Adam and Eve’s first day was the Sabbath – a day of rest and communion with the Lord. Rest is not merely the cessation of work but entering a way-of-living that rejoices in the goodness of life itself, and the goodness of the One who has given this great gift.
The common phrase used to describe Mass attendance – “Sunday obligation” – shows just how far we’ve fallen from grasping the gift of this great day! Obligations must be completed, and one is always aware of the time passing as an obligation is undertaken. Sunday, on the other hand, is a day in which the clutching, anxious hand of time has no grip.
Sheldon Vanauken offers a poetic image of this timeless quality of Sabbath rest: “In a golden summer when our love was young Davy and I had sat on a stone wall near Glenmerle and talked about unpressured time—time to sit on stone walls, time to see beauty, time to stare as long as sheep and cows. At my father’s club, sitting before the fire, we had spoken of ‘moments made eternity’, meaning what are called timeless moments, moments precisely without the pressure of time—moments that might be called, indeed, timeful moments. Or time-free moments. And we had clearly understood that the pressure of time was our nearly inescapable awareness of an approaching terminus—the bell about to ring, the holiday about to end” (A Severe Mercy, chapter 9).
Anxiety is driven less by the quantity of obligations as the feeling they invoke – of running “behind time” and “not having enough”. Sunday frees the human spirit from this temporal confinement to taste the eternal.
Sabbath rest planted the seed of holy yearning for eternity in young Terese of Liseaux: “The big feasts did not come along so often but there was one most dear to me, and it came every week—Sunday, Our Lord’s own day, a wonderful day, a day of rest… these wonderful feasts, which used to pass so swiftly, were not untinged with sadness, and after Compline my happiness gave way to a certain pensiveness. Tomorrow I would have to go back again to my daily routine and my lessons; I felt an exile again and longed for Heaven, my true home, where it would be always Sunday” (St. Terese of Liseaux, The Story of a Soul, chapter 2).
How, then, should someone fill the hours of Sunday, if not with sports, cutting grass, or watching TV?
Play.
Joseph Ratzinger compares liturgical rest to playfulness: “Play takes us out of the world of daily goals and their pressures and into a sphere free of purpose and achievement, releasing us for a time from all the burdens of our daily world of work. Play is a kind of other world, an oasis of freedom, where for a moment we can let life flow freely. We need such moments of retreat from the pressure of daily life if its burden is to be bearable” (The Spirit of the Liturgy, chapter 1).
The Sabbath is meant to be filled with activities that delight for their own sake. Games and apple picking. Walking – fast or slow – and sometimes pausing to see the way the sunlight looks in the leaves. Meeting new potential friends after Mass, simply because they sat by you, and it is Sunday, a good day for making friends. Showing up at the brunch late and also staying late; telling old stories that call forth smiles and laughter. Reading books that do not teach, but fill the soul with sentiments of wonder, yearning, and delight. Playing sports – but not to win – simply because the play feels good and the banter is fun. Playing to win can happen on other days. Sunday – a day unto Itself – its activities governed by no man than the one who rightfully claims the title of Son of Man, Lord of the Sabbath.
