Robert Dessaix; 14/2/09;
The Peculiar Life Of Sundays; Stephen Miller; Harvard University Press.
A few weeks ago British rationalists sponsored advertisements on buses urging Britons to stay in bed on Sunday mornings because “God probably doesn’t exist”. If Stephen Miller is to be believed, they were barking up the wrong tree. Christians have been lolling in bed on Sunday mornings since the first century. Even in Virginia in the 17th century, when the penalty for repeatedly breaking the Sabbath was death, some no doubt lolled. Whether or not we stay in bed on Sunday mornings has little to do with our belief in a deity. In any case, nowadays with Godcasting and digital discipleship you can stay in bed and attend a service on your mobile phone. In Britain, for instance, more than two-thirds of the population (if you count Jedi Knights and voodoo worshippers) at least “subscribe to the idea of God”, in Miller’s words, but only one in 20 Britons bothers to go to church on any given Sunday.
See: Review; The Sydney Morning Herald; No Internet Text
Until recently, Sunday has simply been the day set aside for expressing our fundamental values: not just by worshipping in church but by manifesting our joy or despair, alone or with loved ones, at being who we are in the world. However we’ve chosen to do it (and the state has not always given us a choice), we’ve usually taken care to mark off the last day in the week from the first six when, like God, we’ve been busy making things. And in doing so, we’ve also carefully singled ourselves out from those with different values from our own (heathens, Catholics, pantheists, our mothers, the trading classes and so on).
As Miller points out in his illuminating new book, Sunday wasn’t the last day in the week until the early Christian church’ made the switch from Saturn’s Day to celebrate the Resurrection. Or, as St Augustine put it, until “in the
fullness of time” the Jewish sabbath had been superseded by the Christian one. In fact, Sunday wasn’t even called the Sabbath in English until the late 16th century – it was called the Lord’s Day.
It was the Emperor Constantine who first gave Christians permission to celebrate the Day of the Lord on the Roman Day of the Sun, and they have been publicly celebrating the Resurrection on the Day of the Sun ever since. Across large swathes of Christendom, especially on the Continent, they kept celebrating the sun as well – Jesus was, after all, the Light of the World – and indeed sun worship in one form or another (Sunday drives, family barbecues, nature rambles) seems to be again edging out the Resurrection as the focus of our Sunday devotions.
Miller, who comes from a secular Jewish background, argues persuasively that it’s worth trying to preserve the “peculiar life of Sundays”, whatever our religious beliefs might be, although he’s gloomy about the prospects.
He is not gloomy on Sundays, however. So, while listening to Billie Holiday singing Gloomy Sunday a couple of years ago (”Gloomy is Sunday, with shadows I spend it all,/My heart and I have decided to end it all”), he decided to look into why so many people, particularly writers, artists and songwriters, have found Sunday so dismal, especially in predominantly Protestant countries. In fact, it is Monday and Tuesday that are the peak days for suicide in America and Britain but the number of writers and artists who have found Sundays oppressive is astounding.
Boswell could relieve the heaviness of Sundays only by thinking about sex and imbibing large amounts of alcohol; Ruskin was unhappy all day, loathing the “dull-droning drowsing inanity” of the sabbath; Elizabeth Hardwick felt the day had a “downtrodden air”; Emily Dickinson didn’t like the idea of paradise because “it’s Sunday – all the time”; and the Velvet Underground sang about the anxiety and despair of Sundays when they had “a feeling I don’t want to know”.
Why the gloom? After all, it’s supposed to be a day of gladness, whether you’re celebrating the sun or rejoicing over the Resurrection. In an exhilarating sprint through the centuries, stopping off for a closer look at 18th-century England and Scotland and 19th-century America, Miller surveys the various ways in which Sunday has been marked off from the rest of the week and how we ended up with Billie Holiday choosing Sunday as the most fitting day to top herself.
During the early Christian era, how you celebrated the sabbath distinguished you from pagans, who had a predilection for gladiatorial contests, obscene plays and chariot races on their day off work.
Caesarius, the bishop of Arles in the 6th century, in his zeal to make it clear that remembering the Sabbath day to keep it holy did not mean having fun in the sun with your pagan neighbours, ordered Christians to abstain even from sexual relations on Sunday, warning that children conceived on a Sunday would be born lepers or epileptics or possibly even possessed by the devil. You want spectacle? Come to church. In Elizabethan England and later, the crowd to fence yourself off from was European Catholics, who were ceaselessly plotting to snatch England back for the Pope. For Catholics, Sunday had become not just a holy day but a holiday. They ate, drank, danced in public and larked about in a jovial mood; so Protestants didn’t. The Act of Uniformity of 1559 required that
everyone in the realm attend church twice on Sundays. There was unceasing argument as time went on about what you could do as a Protestant and what you couldn’t: now you could indulge in a bit of bearbaiting and wrestling and go to the theatre, now you couldn’t. Everyone agreed, though, that trading was out of the question, although in 1688 the sale of mackerel was permitted before and after divine service.
It wasn’t enough for the Puritans, though, who now wanted to differentiate themselves from Anglicans. After moving to America they made the sabbath even less Continental by banning all travel, the making of mince pies and the playing of any instrument apart from the drum, trumpet and jew’s harp. Yet back in England by the 18th century it wasn’t much better: Samuel Johnson, a believer who rarely went to church, could countenance walking on the Sabbath but not throwing stones at birds or any kind of levity.
By the first half of the 19th century, Sunday had become a very dreary day indeed. In some households it was not permitted to laugh or smile, let ‘alone play games or repaint the barn.
What was worse is that, sitting in church listening to the sermon or at home reading the Bible, you were constantly haunted by two unsettling possibilities: that you were suffering for no reason, because Christianity was all humbug and lies, or that Christianity was the truth – an even more alarming prospect, if the preacher was to be believed.
During the past century or so attitudes to observance have softened, starting with the opening of museums and art galleries in the late 19th century, then cinemas, sporting venues and in England, finally, in 1972, theatres. Some still start the day with a church service (nearly half the population in the US), some Americans even go to a mosque or Buddhist temple on a Sunday, while some meet friends or family or spend the day in the country, worshipping something vaguer than the Christian God. Yet Sundays, as Miller explains, continue to be unlike Mondays or Saturdays.
Whatever our ideas about a deity and the need to worship, “we need a sabbath for our psychological health”, Miller told me during a recent conversation. We need a time in the week when “we’re not focused on goals”. As the bookshop Barnes & Noble puts it in one of its promotions, “Sunday is a day when your personal soundtrack takes a more reflective turn”. Of course, as Miller says, what we reflect on when we wake up on Sunday mornings may be the disorder our lives are stuck in the freedom of Sunday mornings “can be a terrible burden”.
The threat to this seventh day of rest is not a decline in religious belief but what Miller calls global time and 24/7 mercantilism.
It is simply increasingly difficult in a globalised world to stop buying and selling things on Sundays. Computers are outside time. Even recent developments in religious affiliation have eaten away at the notion of a shared sabbath: in the West, where religious options are now almost endless, to mark yourself off from others is a pointless exercise.
Nobody is watching.
Besides, people now change their affiliations regularly as they experiment with different ways of being “spiritual”, rather than religious. Being “spiritual” might involve anything from singing in a gospel choir to going bushwalking. Or, for that matter, lying in bed with a good book.
“We’ve lost it,” Miller told me with regret, “and that means it will become almost impossible to keep order in our soul.”
Tags: Christianity