We started taking Sundays seriously when our oldest was about five years old. For the past 25 years our family has worked towards living Sunday, as God has commanded and the Church has encouraged, as a day of worship and rest. We learned to prepare for Sundays by finishing our homework, our professional work, and our weekly chores on Fridays and Saturdays, preserving Sunday as an oasis for worship, works of mercy, recreation, and rest. We gave due priority to worship by attending Sunday Mass as a family, by dressing our best, and by planning our Sundays to include family outings, games, music and reading. For many years Grandma would come over on Sunday afternoons for games and family dinner; when her health made this impossible, we would visit her, attend to her laundry, and bring her a meal. I cannot claim that our Sundays were always lived in perfect conformity to God’s plan, but more often than not, they were a rich experience of worship and restful family life.
 
Times change. Our children have left the nest, and our elderly parents have left this earthly life. In this new season of our lives, living Sunday well has presented new challenges. With children out of the house, we no longer need to set a good example, except for each other, and we have found it disconcertingly easy to slide back into doing our professional work on Sundays. In addition, with children out of the house and our elderly parents gone, the leisure of Sunday lures us into spending the day in self indulgence, rather than in true leisure and charitable service. In spite of new temptations, we are not willing to let our Sundays go down without a fight! We put our heads together, and came up with some new ideas and ways of life.
 
Putting first things first, we re-thought our choice of Holy Mass. No longer needing to get a household ready for Mass, no longer needing to take into account our children’s tastes in and tolerance of liturgical styles, we are now able to attend the Mass which we find most conducive to worship and recollection. For us, that means an earlier and quieter Mass at our parish, but for others it might mean a Mass with more music, a Mass in Latin, or Mass at a later hour. We often try to arrive early for Mass in order to make our prayer in front of the Blessed Sacrament, a practice that would not be tolerated by squirmy toddlers or surly teens. We take advantage of our new circumstances to linger after Mass, making an act of thanksgiving, greeting friends, or introducing ourselves to fellow parishioners we’ve never gotten around to meeting.
 
We have discovered Sunday as a day of hospitality, caring for others in our home. Sunday mornings seem to be remarkably open on people’s calendars. We help to prepare engaged couples for marriage, and we have yet to work with a couple who can’t meet on Sunday mornings. They join us for pancakes after Mass (the Sunday morning tradition in our home whenever there are more than two of us at the breakfast table) and then, fed, relaxed, and better acquainted, we chat with them about marriage over a second cup of coffee. On some Sundays we invite young adults over to play cards or board games in the afternoon. At least one of our adult children is able to join us for Sunday dinner. Hospitality on Sundays has its own rhythm and tone: we rarely plan dinner parties and other more labor-intensive forms of hospitality on Sundays, as we find the work involved can make our hospitality feel burdensome and not rejuvenating.
 
When our children were young, we learned that it was not enough to say “no work on Sunday,” for doing so gave Sunday a negative tone, setting it apart as a day when we can’t do whatever we like. We learned to be positive, planning outings, activities, visits and projects, so that Sunday was something to look forward to as special and different and interesting. With our empty nest, we still need to plan, not only for hospitality, but for our own leisurely and cultural pursuits. When buying tickets to plays or art museum exhibitions, we usually schedule them for Sundays. We make plans to have a fire in the fireplace and read for pleasure, to go for a walk and pray the Rosary together, or to work on a pleasant home project together. We have reclaimed our Sundays, for this new season, and are reaping the rewards of peace, rest, friendship, and Christian joy.