Sabbath

When I remember, I tune into WGN at 9:00 pm. The wonders of cable tv: I sit in my south Louisiana living room and watch the local Chicago news. It tickles me every time. (I'm a simple soul, obviously.)

This past Wednesday, Keith was on the couch as well, so we both had a good chuckle when one of Chicagoland's ace reporters told us that because Easter is late this year, Lent is longer than usual: 46 rather than 40 days. Ummm. If Easter is late, so is Ash Wednesday and there are always 46 days between: 40 days of Lenten observance and the six Sundays which are Feast Days, and therefore not part of Lent. But you knew that already.

Sundays are Feast Days.

Gosh. Not quite the way I was raised. Certainly the Christian Reformed Church regarded Sundays as special but its interpretation and enforcement of that specialness translated not into festivity but rather into tedium: two lengthy somber church services (no children's sermons or any such levity), compulsory afternoon naps (required for everyone, adult and child; we took "Day of Rest" literally), and a variety of bizarre prohibitions. These prohibitions varied by family. My family was on the liberal end--unlike many in our church, we could watch tv and do homework on Sundays. But the list of what we could not do was still lengthy. Most importantly, we could not earn money (I still remember the face of the "Hickory Farms" manager at the mall when she asked my 15-year-old self if I could work on Sunday in an emergency and I replied, in utter and absolute sincerity, "Well, yes, but I couldn't accept payment for it."). But we could also not spend money (no shopping, no movie-going, no dining out), do housework or laundry or yardwork (not a much resented prohibition, actually), or join in any neighborhood activities (definitely no Little League or any kind of organized sports). More confusingly, we could not play catch or ride bikes or jump rope but it was ok to play inside with paper dolls or stuffed animals or board games or even consumerist secular fashion-obsessed Barbie and Ken. In other families, the prohibitions were similarly odd: one friend could not use scissors.

Things got really bizarre, however, during summer vacations. There we'd be, at the cottage--no air conditioning, sweltering heat, the lake glistening before us. But swimming on Sunday was forbidden. Unless, that is, the temperatures rose above 90 degrees. Then we could swim; evidently heat wiped out the sin. So we'd cluster, sweaty and forlorn, around the outside thermometer, desperately willing the mercury to climb. My friend Cindy had a different Sunday swimming rule. No matter what the temperature, they could swim out to the floating deck and lie down there. But no splashing or jumping or overt enjoyment. Just, you know, sober reverent holy swimming.

Slowly, gradually, the prohibitions lifted. My mom began buying the Sunday paper at the White Hen Pantry (but not from the White Hen just down the block from the church, in case a church member saw her). We stopped going to the cottage and started taking hotel vacations that required us to use restaurants on Sundays. I went off to college and--even tho' it was Calvin College, where the library was closed on Sundays and where we all got up and went to church, even without our parents' presence, and then went back to the dorms and took naps--we quickly grew used to Sunday laundry stints and pancake suppers out at the IHOP. By the time I graduated, even my grandmother was ok with buying a nice dinner out at a nice restaurant after church. God seemed ok with it too.

But, you know, it's a slippery slope. We're a church-going family, but the rest of Sunday is just like the rest of the week: hectic, disheveled, crammed with the detritus of daily living. No rest, nothing special, nothing sacred.

Still no Feast.