On Sabbaths

Forty Acres, A Husband, & Three Kids · The Sabbath With a Bird, Flowers, and Calves Thrown in the Mix.

The post I have linked to above really got me thinking about Sundays.  Or, perhaps, I had better say Sabbaths. I find it very sad that we no longer keep the Sabbath in Scotland.  And yet I know I would be among the first to complain if I found myself unable to buy a pint milk on a Sunday.  The days when the only person working on Sunday was the Priest are long gone.

I imagine we all have different constraints placed upon us on Sundays.  Perhaps Sunday is a day of work.  Perhaps it’s the day you do your shopping.  Or perhaps, as the weather heats up, you find yourself mowing the lawn.  Maybe your sabbath isn’t a Sunday at all.

My Sabbath is a Sunday.  But I count it from Saturday’s Vigil Mass until the last mass on Sunday evening.  This means I have some ‘ doing time’ on both Saturday and Sunday but I also have  at day of rest.  After dinner on Saturday I try to get everything in the kitchen cleaned up and any washing hung to dry so I have to do is little as possible on my sabbath.  On Sunday itself, I sometimes attend a knitting group with a friend (and, yes, I know this means asking other people to perform servile work — I choose to assume that they have the opportunity to enjoy a sabbath on another day of the week).  If Liz and I are not meeting to knit then I probably spent most of the day reading.

And that’s where Sunday becomes The Lords Day for me.  I don’t read secular books on the sabbath.  Or magazines.  I really like having one day of the week set aside to read Christian books.

I usually go to the Sunday evening mass and I like to have a long, hot shower first so that’s my Sunday treat.  And, when I come home, my sabbath is over and I start thinking about the week ahead.

What’s your sabbath like?