Daniel Fitzpatrick’s book is, in essence, a diagnosis of the ills of modernity viewed from the aspect of the Sabbath. Lost today are the grandeur and the normative and unitive force of the Sabbath, the center of the life of the individual, the family, and the community.
Restoring the Lord’s Day: How Reclaiming Sunday Can Revive Our Human Nature, by Daniel Fitzpatrick (243 pages, Sophia Institute Press, 2024)
This past year I read a good number of excellent books, but one of the most important for sheer weight of subject was Restoring the Lord’s Day: How Reclaiming Sunday can Revive Our Human Nature, by Daniel Fitzpatrick. This will not be a book review in the strict sense, but more of a review-essay in which I meander a bit around the tremendous topics Mr. Fitzpatrick has introduced. I beg the reader’s indulgence.
Mr. Fitzpatrick explains why the observance of the Lord’s Day is the lodestar of life itself. He writes as a Christian and more specifically a Catholic. The book, published by Sophia Institute Press, is vast in its scope (what could possibly be bigger than reviving human nature itself?). The author argues, with force and reason, that the pressures of modern life—social, cultural, moral, economic, and more besides—have weakened our sense of the Sabbath as a day of rest and worship, leaving us prey to acedia (spiritual sloth or indifference) and various unnatural anxieties. The book is, in essence, a diagnosis of the ills of modernity viewed from the aspect of the Sabbath, with all its theological associations.
Fitzpatrick’s analysis of the Sabbath goes back to its origins in the Old Testament. The Sabbath (Hebrew Shabbat) commemorated God’s resting on the seventh day of creation. The Sabbath observances were among the distinguishing features of the Jewish people, marking them out as followers of the Lord among the various pagan peoples surrounding them. The Sabbath created a bond that sustained the Jews during their bondage in Egypt and subsequent wandering in the desert. Jesus challenged the strict observance of the Sabbath in its outward forms, proclaiming his own lordship over the holy day. This he confirmed when, after his death, he remained resting in the tomb during the Sabbath, then established the Sabbath of the New Testament by rising on Sunday, the day after the Jewish Sabbath. Thus, Jesus’ sojourn in death, followed by his rising to new life, shows the transition from the old covenant to the new.
We have come a long way since that miraculous event—an event whose effects bear witness, in pragmatistic fashion, to its truth. We have behind us two thousand years of Christian civilization, which has gradually metamorphosed into something we call modernity.
This thing has many aspects. For one thing, our society has made money-making and material success are the main end of life. Professions, many of them, have become repetitive and monotonous, aided by the involvement of technology. Education is all about passing the next test, the next class, and moving onward and upward so we can all have successful jobs and make money that will sustain us until we retire and eventually sink into the grave. Were one to suggest that there was some overarching purpose to this conveyor-belt existence, this possibility would get shunted into a small compartment of life known as “spirituality” or “religion,” which one is free to define for oneself and which is treated more or less like an interesting hobby.
Lost are the grandeur and the normative and unitive force of the Sabbath, the center of the life of the individual, the family, and the community. Instead, we have the “weekend,” a pernicious concept in itself. The very name “weekend” proclaims its lack of real existence, since it is merely the tail end of the week, understood as the time of wage-earning and shuttling around in cars (the latter of which continues right on through Sunday).
Meanwhile, we who are believers are forced to live in two worlds: the secular world, the world of commerce and business, and the religious and God-oriented world, the world we encounter in church on Sunday and in the privacy of our hearts. The world has a split personality, and man follows suit. In church we declare the ancient mystery, “We proclaim your death, O Lord, and profess your resurrection, until you come again.” We await his coming, use the same language of expectation year after year, but nothing ever seems to change, and as time passes the whole thing begins to appear a legend or fairy tale and entirely remote from the world of thermodynamics and tax policy—because there is the world of the Sabbath and there is the world of the weekday, and never the twain shall meet. Or so it would appear. This separation or split is also a part of that thing called modernity in which we are involved, whether we like it or not, and whether we admit it or not.
This Sabbath/weekday split can be seen in the language we use when talking about our lives. Sometimes we profess that God guides our lives: “God gave me a vocation, led me to my spouse, etc.” At other times we speak as if we are in control: “I chose a career/spouse/home, etc.” Or consider the response we often get now when we ask someone how they are doing: “Life is good.” Why is life good of its own accord? Where is God in all this?
You see what happens? We play at religion when it is convenient or when it suits the occasion. When we are in Sabbath mode, we speak of God, as if we were putting on a suit and tie. Otherwise, he is off the table and we carry along as if he didn’t exist. But we cannot have it both ways. Either religion penetrates our inner being, becomes part of our consciousness and worldview, or it means nothing.
Let us be frank: modern life is, in large part, a dreary bore. Any meaning that it might have must be brought to it by the lone individual informed by perennial truth and tradition; it will certainly not come to us from the culture or society at large, maybe not even from the church. Now, someone might point out that, at least if we live in a part of the world that is prosperous and not at war, then life is not so bad. After all, technology is always marching forward.
Fitzpatrick acknowledges that technology has brought countless benefits. It is no mean thing to improve the material conditions of life so that we can more easily devote ourselves to the higher things, to prayer and worship and contemplation, the things of the Sabbath. But progress is a double-edged sword, and with every gain there is a loss. The fact is that technology has also tended to make life purely horizontal, disrupting our inclination toward transcendence as well as breaking our ties with nature.
Every way of life, every period of history, has its own type of anxiety. There is the anxiety of struggling to food on the table, yes, but there is also the anxiety of finding meaning and purpose in a life that seems to putter meaninglessly along—a life that seems less like a pilgrimage than a merry-go-round.
One of the chief targets of Restoring the Lord’s Day is the modern sense of the “daily grind” (also known as the “rat race”) which the modern world has bequeathed to us. Instead of having professions, we today have “jobs,” tasks which earn us our daily bread but aren’t necessarily our life’s passion. Technology creates all sorts of obligations, real or perceived, which eat away at our inner peace and poise. The daily grind brings with it its own brand of anxiety, and Fitzpatrick has much to say about anxiety in Restoring the Lord’s Day. There is an anxiety to which we can hardly put a name because it is so subtle and hard to discern, and it relates to time and to time’s passage. Fitzpatrick identifies it as acedia, a kind of spiritual boredom. Webster’s defines acedia as “sloth; spiritual torpor or indifference; apathy.” (I can certify that writers know acedia very well.)
Time, as St. Augustine recognized, is a source of much of our anxiety. Our minds are continually being stretched from the present moment back into the past and forward into the future. This happens through the operation of sloth or acedia, a result of the Fall. The Sabbath is meant to heal this sort of anxiety. It is a “school of eternity,” in which we learn to be at rest with God, in the present moment. Worship directs the senses to their proper end (the contemplation of God’s truth) instead of their becoming scattered over a thousand different objects. The Sabbath is nothing less than “being present to Him in that contemplative joy in which the human heart is called to rest.” This is in accord with the best traditions of philosophy, for example Aristotle and Plato and their emphasis on contemplation as the end of life.
Instead, however, we treat Sunday relaxation as a sort of palliative to help us forget about the stresses of the week. The relaxation is merely an uneasy truce between battles; it does not rise to the level of actual contemplation and being with the Lord.
Part of the problem is that acedia aggravates our time-related anxiety and can even make us despise time itself, even though it is one of the media in which God reveals himself and works his wonders. In practice, this often means that Sunday then becomes clouded over by worries and anticipations about the work week. Here Fitzpatrick’s analysis hit home. I will admit it: I do not much like time. Its passage, its inexorable slipping away, gives me a host of anxieties. I want to arrest time, to preserve a moment under glass, to reach a Platonic never-neverland of timelessness. I am, in short, always seeking escape from time. Can Sabbath worship heal this? (Could it even be this?) I leave the question hanging in the air.
Fitzpatrick has much to say about how technology militates against the Sunday spirit of rest. In particular, he points to the hold that electronic devices have on modern people. Such devices, hooking us up to the universe of information, are promoters of acedia, aiding and abetting in the distension of time by taking us away from the present moment and involving us in remote affairs. (Among philosophers, Kierkegaard had some choice words about those who are wrapped up in World History to the neglect of their own personal existence.)
While I found Restoring the Lord’s Day absorbing and relevant, I approach the book’s topic at an oblique angle. Let me explain. I belong to an odd profession, that of freelance writer. This profession involves a lot of lallygagging at home around books, my best friends, with an occasional bout of walking or violin playing to break up the monogamy. My life often feels like one big endless Sabbath, one uniquely solitary but nevertheless holding out the reward of occasional flashes of epiphany or insight.
What I mean is that for someone of my occupation, the work/leisure distinction can be rather faint. While at Mass and listening to the homily or participating in the Eucharist, the spiritual juices will start to flow and as essay on some spiritual topic will start forming in my head. Or while waiting in line at the post office, I will suddenly be struck with what Melville was trying to say about office life in Bartleby, an idea I should have incorporated into the scholastic guide that I submitted the day before yesterday. And so on. I am as prone as anyone to become distended in time and wrapped up in anxieties.
Through it all I try—in fact, I must—achieve that radiant Sabbath mood of the soul in which the mind can come up with and develop ideas. That remains the case whether the calendar happens to say Sunday or Thursday. To put it simply, the “rat race” and I parted company a long time ago, if we were ever together to begin with. But for someone whose work week looks Sabbath-like to begin with, the challenge is what to do on the Sabbath itself that would make it different. After worship is completed, I typically spend time cleaning, organizing, and setting up and preparing for the following week. Also organizing my thoughts, such as they are.
More often than not, though, after worship is completed, the Sabbath makes me feel as if in a strange sort of limbo—neither there nor there: a real spiritual problem. Maybe one of our theologians should produce a guide called The Sabbath for Writers.
The book’s points about digital technology did not resonate with me too strongly, as I do not own a smartphone and never intend to if I can avoid it. For me the electronic media, true miracles, are for one purpose and one purpose only, namely study and learning—and, yes, for that speedy form of mail. Everything else is folderol, as my grandmother used to say. One of the most comforting feelings I know is turning the ringer on my phone, a landline model, off. Granted, nobody calls me other than salesmen and scammers anyway (“phishers of men,” my mother calls them). But the act itself is symbolic, cutting me off from the world and surrounding me in my zone of silence.
This whole matter of technological distraction reached a sad point, for me, when Mr. Fitzpatrick described a contemporary scene: worshippers praying from something called an “i-breviary” in church while fending off the distraction of social media updates. It confirms for me my longtime hunch that culture does not disappear, as prophets often predict, but merely hobbles along accommodating itself to decadence. Some of us, meanwhile, have checked out, the better to observe our Sabbath in peace.
Opposed to the “daily grind” is the concept of festivity that informed ancient and medieval cultures. Here Fitzpatrick brings in an element of personal experience, for he grew up in New Orleans, a city with a distinct cultural heritage informed by a keen sense of festiveness. New Orleans is a “southern” and a “Latin” place, and one gets the distinct impression that the Latin cultural traditions are particularly conducive to Sabbath festivity. In New Orleans, the rhythms of life were closely tied to the liturgical calendar, to Sunday Mass, and to feasts like Mardi Gras. Fitzpatrick later moved to Dallas for college, where he was shocked to discover that Sunday was just as miserable as any other day. (Fitzpatrick, incidentally, edits a cultural journal called Joie de Vivre.) Catholicism in the United States was long dominated by more northern European cultures, namely the Irish and the German, rather than “Latin” or “Mediterranean” ones. I would be curious whether this had any impact on the flavor or quality of Sabbath celebration in these shores.
Fitzpatrick’s observations in this area rang a bell with me, having grown up as I did in an Italian-heritage family. Many of us have fond memories of Nonna’s Sunday sauce simmering on the oven early in the morning before Mass. After Mass, the preparations for dinner would begin amid mounting appetite. Dinner itself would involve the whole family in a multi-course feast. Afternoons would bring the old musical movies on television (maybe Meet Me in St. Louis, or Carousel, or The Music Man), with games among the kids while the adults sat around the table and debated politics or (more to my taste) reminisced about old times, maybe over a good glass of wine.
Eventually we migrate from Nonna’s farm and go to the big city, where we come into contact with the daily grind and its soul-killing demands. How do we find our way back to paradise?
I don’t know the answer. Wise men like Mr. Fitzpatrick have laid out the case many times, but I fear the world is not listening and never will. But that is really no matter to me personally. My mission is not to change the world; my mission is merely to recollect a few fragments of poetry.
Do I have any complaints about Restoring the Lord’s Day? If anything, I think Mr. Fitzpatrick could have dwelt a bit more on the connections between Sabbath culture and the Mediterranean/Latin culture of festivity—an interesting topic that we rarely hear about. Instead, we get a lengthy restatement of the common conservative prescriptions about art, architecture, and music in the Mass and the true meaning of the Second Vatican Council—all right and just, but things we have heard many a time, albeit not always as eloquently as here. A book of this nature should have had an index. And in one place the author slips into a kind of Platonizing rhetoric: “Nature […] lifts a mirror to us, showing us that we, too, are natural beings, albeit with a nature that calls us beyond the bounds of material nature and into that immateriality which is, of all things, most real.” With all respect to Mr. Fitzpatrick, this sounds more like Plato than the Gospel. It is the sort of slip many of us are prone to make, but that doesn’t make it any less unfortunate.
In the credit side, Mr. Fitzpatrick’s style and approach is sympathetic, balanced, and even-tempered. Unlike some tradition-oriented writers, he is not content to take a wrecking ball to the enemy and leave it at that, but seeks to build up the soul as his main goal. And he is often lyrical. Here is one example among many:
We should make merry, not because tomorrow we die, but because Christ has died, and tomorrow marks another chance to die with Him and to rise again into that Today that He proclaims in the heavenly liturgy, the day that He has made. Even now, whenever now may be for us, that day is today, the eternal now.
There is no doubt about it, the Sabbath is the key to the good life. But as Mr. Fitzpatrick shows us, the key is now buried and we will have to go diligently looking for it.
The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics—we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please consider donating now.
The featured image is… This file is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
