I was asked to share some thoughts on the Lord’s Day and my experience of it with you, as a fellow young-adult, living far away from family, with roommates from all different backgrounds and places. My hope is to give you some ideas as to why you, in your own homes and with your own friends, should do something to intentionally keep the Lord’s Day and some ideas as to how you might go about doing that.
An encounter with some deeply-moving words about the Sabbath, along with a craving for deep rest, convinced me that I needed to prioritize keeping the Lord’s Day holy. When I picked up The Sabbath by Abraham Joshua Heschel upon the recommendation of a colleague, I found Susannah Heschel’s description of the Sabbath in her father’s home beautiful and tantalizing:
“Friday evenings in my home were the climax of the week, as they are for every religious Jewish family. My mother and I kindled the lights for the Sabbath, and all of a sudden I felt transformed, emotionally and even physically. After lighting the candles in the dining room, we would walk into the living room, which had windows overlooking the Hudson River, facing west, and we would marvel at the sunset that soon arrived. The sense of peace that came upon as we kindled the lights was created, in part, by the hectic tension of Fridays. Preparation for a holy day, my father often said, was as important as the day itself. During the busy mornings my mother shopped for groceries, and in the afternoons the atmosphere grew increasingly nervous as she cooked. My father came home from his office a hour or two before sunset to take care of his own preparations, and as the last minutes of the workweek came close, both of my parents were in the kitchen, frantically trying to remember what they might have forgotten to prepare — Had the kettle boiled? Was the blech covering the stove? Was the oven turned on? Then, suddenly, it was time: twenty minutes before sunset. Whatever hadn’t been finished in the kitchen we simply left behind as we lit the candles and blessed the arrival of the Sabbath. My father writes, ‘The Sabbath comes like a caress, wiping away fear, sorrow and somber memories’” (Introduction to The Sabbath)
There was a Shabbat table. There was good food. There was no talk of politics or anything that would contaminate the atmosphere of rest with a sense of worry or anxiety because “it was a sin to be sad on the Sabbath.”
This sounded like true rest. This sounded like holy rest, like a rest that would delight our Creator and like the rest that our Creator delights to give. This sounded like a rest that could save anyone weary from a frenetic pace of constant activity. This sounded like a rest that could transform, that could resurrect, that could free.
And for Abraham Heschel, nothing less than our freedom and ability to enjoy eternity depend on how well we practice menuha, the rest of the seventh day. He says, “Unless one learns how to relish the taste of the Sabbath while still in this world, unless one is initiated in the appreciation of eternal life, one will be unable to taste the joy of eternity in the world to come” (The Sabbath, 74).
As I was reading, Heschel’s words were filling me with a greater desire to observe the Lord’s Day as a day of rest and also a sense that doing so was more pressing than I had initially thought. But, especially given previous short-lived attempts on my part to honor the Lord’s Day as a day of rest on my own, there was still the question of putting all this into action — How should I keep the Lord’s Day as a young Catholic woman? What could I do to keep this day holy? How could we as young adults, no longer living with families and not yet caring for families of our own, cultivate this menuha and respond to this commandment in our homes?
For the past few months, three friends and I have been spending the Lord’s Day together. We made a commitment to keep the Lord’s Day together after speaking with some other friends who are also trying to intentionally keep the Lord’s Day. These three friends and I sat down to have a conversation about what we wanted our Sundays together to look like. Everyone contributed wonderful ideas and helped craft the day into the beautiful, restful day that it has come to be each week.
Each week, one of us serves as the host for the Lord’s Day. The host coordinates who is bringing what for brunch (we have enjoyed everything from a pancake bar to a charcuterie board) and opens his or her home for the occasion. We arrive at Mass ten to fifteen minutes early and spend this time in silent preparation. After Mass, we head to the host’s home. We enjoy conversation while preparing brunch together. The host says a prayer and lights a candle and we enjoy our meal together. After eating, we spend a few hours of quiet time together in the living room; someone reads, another writes a letter to a friend, another sketches the view out the front window (but, in an effort to maintain an atmosphere of rest, phones and laptops are kept tucked away). After this quiet time, we go on a walk, either through the neighborhood or at a park. We return to the host’s home and say a ‘gratitude rosary’ (in place of each Hail Mary, we say, “in thanksgiving for…”) and close with Evening Prayer. During this closing time, we pass around a journal and everyone writes a word or phrase that stands out — it could be a word from Father’s homily that stood out, a phrase from the Gospel, or a phrase that characterizes our experience of the Lord’s Day that time around. In the journal, we write the intention for the week that is given by the host. We carry this intention with us in prayer through the week. We pack everything back into our traveling Lord’s Day bag — which contains our journal, an icon, a candle, and some tea — and pass it off to next week’s host.
Although the commitment has been there, nothing is set in stone. We have made modifications as we’ve continued. We realized that it would be nice to have a day of rest on our own every now and then, so each fourth Sunday we rest on our own, in our other communities. In addition to allowing for a bit more freedom, this Sunday on our own also acts as a kind of test — Have I let the Lord’s Day transform my being, so that I can now keep it holy on my own? Can I fight whatever temptation there might be to do work? What are other things I can try on my own to keep the Sabbath restful? And, how can I share some of the joy of this menuha with those other young adults in my home and friends and family who are far away? On the Sundays that we spend on our own, we are called to strength and creativity, as well as service.
Observing the Lord’s Day with these friends has been everything I hoped it would be and then some. My Sundays have been filled with rest, worship, and relationship — these friends have helped me keep the Lord’s day holy. The words of Psalm 39 and 90 capture perhaps one of the most important things the experience has taught me thus far. The Psalmist prays, “ Lord, let me know my end, and what is the measure of my days,” and “Teach us to number our days, that we may gain wisdom of heart.” When I give the hours of the seventh day back to the Lord, I am handing time back over to Him. I am asking Him to reorder my sense of time, to give me the wisdom to use it well. And, this is a challenging question: How do I spend my days well? The Lord’s Day has helped reorder how I use my time the rest of the week. Knowing that Sunday is not a catchall day to clean up whatever I couldn’t take care of during the week, I work more diligently and with greater care during the weekdays. There’s a kind of joyful fervor that was not present before because I am reminded each week that there is an end to my work and worry and that my work and worry are not the end. To keep the Lord’s Day is to acknowledge that we and the work we do is not so important that we cannot set it aside. Heschel describes this re-ordering of time and humble surrender that the Lord’s Day requires of us:
“He who wants to enter the holiness of the day must first lay down the profanity of clattering commerce, of being yoked to toil. He must go away from the screech of dissonant days, from the nervousness and fury of acquisitiveness and the betrayal in embezzling his own life. He must say farewell to manual work and learn to understand that the world has already been created and will survive without the help of man. Six days a week we wrestle with the world, wringing profit from the earth; on the Sabbath we especially care for the seed of eternity planted in the soul. The world has our hands, but our soul belongs to Someone Else” (The Sabbath 13, emphasis mine).
Abraham Heschel wrote The Sabbath out of concern that Jews who were immigrating to America were quickly adapting to the workaday America way and losing their faith, heritage, and holiness in the process. Heschel’s words seem especially relevant at this moment, when the closure of many public spaces, including churches, could threaten the spiritual life of our communities. But, if we use this time well, to learn or relearn how to rest and how to pray, might there be a kind of new life in this? In her beautiful poem Pandemic, Lynn Ungar puts it like this:
“What if you thought of it / as the Jews consider the Sabbath— / the most sacred of times? /Cease from travel. / Cease from buying and selling. / Give up, just for now, / on trying to make the world /different than it is. / Sing. Pray. Touch only those / to whom you commit your life. / Center down.”
What if we thought of this time, our time, as the most sacred of times?
Happy Lord’s Day to you and yours.
Colleen Coleman is a teacher currently living in St. Paul, MN. She is a transplant from MI. When she is not teaching, she can be found reading, cooking, spending time with friends, drinking tea, dreaming about gardening, or marveling at the natural world while roaming around outside.
Find friends who are willing to commit to keeping the Lord’s Day together. Have a conversation about what this should look like. Be creative. See how it goes. Take time to reflect on your experience.
Study up on the Sabbath/Lord’s Day and talk about it with others (see the reading recommendations below for ideas).
Let yourself joyfully anticipate the Lord’s Day. I have a ‘Sabbath bag’ that I fill with things that I want to spend time with but don’t have time for during the week — books, articles, or sometimes treats (chocolate). This helps me build up joyful expectation for the Lord’s Day.
Rethink your relationship with technology and consider setting it aside altogether on the Lord’s Day. It’s very hard to maintain a spirit and atmosphere of rest when you are looking at emails, texts, and news headlines. Consider how you might put boundaries around your use of technology to keep this day a day set aside.
Find time for silence on the Lord’s Day - before Mass, in the evening...
Consider starting your Lord’s Day at sundown on Saturday. It takes time to enter into a spirit of rest. If you use Saturday evening to enter into a spirit of rest, your Sunday will be all the more restful.
Compose your own prayer to say at the beginning and end of the Lord’s Day.
Consider how you might spend part of your Lord’s Day forming new relationships, tending to old ones, and healing broken ones. Write a letter to a friend. Call a sibling or a grand parent. Reach out to a relative you’ve been reluctant to speak with. Call someone who is elderly or might be particularly lonely in this time – listen to them, pray with them, offer them a word of encouragement; do whatever you can to lift them up and let them know that they are loved and not alone.
Reflect on your attitude toward the Lord’s Day and leisure in general: ‘Do I know how to rest? Is it hard for me to rest? What things, in myself and around me, make it hard for me to rest? How do I define/think of rest? What have been my most restful experience? – What am I doing, where am I, when I most often experience true rest?’
The Sabbath by Abraham Joshua Heschel
The Supper of the Lamb by Robert Farrar Capon
Man at Play by Hugo Rahner
Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport
Acedia and Its Discontents by R. J. Snell