Return to centre - the Sunday space

Post-war London Sundays were monochrome in every sense. They are to be remembered for grey buildings, lacklustre parks and gardens, boredom and an all-pervading sense of absence. Sundays had to be got through, not that we were forced to attend church. It was just that there was nothing to do and nothing was happening. Perhaps the post-war Sunday was an overhang from the war itself, a flat calm in the wake of a tornado. I am still surprised at the resistance which Sunday trading encountered from a generation who, logically, should have welcomed its inception rather than viewing it as Mammon incarnate. They should have welcomed it because, if for no other reason, ‘business as usual’ 7 days a week obliges us to question what we really understand Sunday to be for.

In the Christian calendar this particular Sunday (February 1^st¸ 2015) is kept as the Feast of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple. The gospel reading set for today (Luke 2:22-40) speaks of the fulfilment of promise, in a moment which a man and a woman who are both well advanced in years had thought would never come. The man had been promised by the Holy Spirit that he would not see death before he had seen the Christ, God’s Messiah. So it is a life-defining moment, a moment of truth.

Moments of truth tell us what our lives are meant to be, or, as in the case of this elderly couple, what our lives have been about, what they have been for. They bring everything together. I think this initial moment of recognition, between the old man and the infant Christ, also tells us something of what Sunday is for. It is a space for encountering God. The ‘Sunday space’, whatever form it takes, or whatever day of the week it happens to be, lends depth and colour, shape and coherence to our lives.

Sunday is shaped from within ourselves. In fact, Sunday has always been at the centre of our DNA, as persons who are shaped in and for the love of God. It is defined to a far lesser extent by contextual or cultural circumstances. The Sunday space could be on a Friday or a Saturday, if you are Muslim or Jewish, or it could simply be defined by the constraints of shift work, so it is probably best not to define it at all and not to hedge it about with conditions and restraints. It should be ‘free time’ in the fullest sense.

It is only in freeing Sunday from outdated protestant Sabbath thinking that the idea of Sunday can become a permanent and vital fixture in our lives. As such, it becomes a place for encountering God, one to which we can return in any vacant moment, as well as in moments which are fraught with anxiety or filled with joy. By encountering God, I mean being surprised, or taken unawares, by his sheer faithfulness. The Sunday space, however we think of it, is a space for ‘returning and rest’ to quote the prophet Isaiah. But this in turn begs the question of what we mean by rest, given the times we live in? Sunday can also be the day for doing all the tasks and chores which cannot be done during the week because of other work commitments. Doing nothing is out of the question.

Rest is not about doing nothing. It is not some kind of neutral gear. On the contrary, it has its own dynamic, its own rhythm and pace. It is the paradox of which the prophet Isaiah speaks when he says that ‘in returning and rest, you shall be saved’. Real rest only happens when God is allowed into whatever activity or thought, good or bad, that occupies our attention and draws on our emotional or physical energy. This is the kind of rest which makes the Sunday space truly productive, or regenerative. 

All living things need places and periods of regeneration. The kind of regeneration experienced in our inner Sunday space also confronts and overwhelms what is de-generate in ourselves and in the world around us. It enables us to ‘see salvation’ through the darkness and to return the darkness to God. The infant Christ was inviting the old man to ‘see salvation’ that morning in the Temple. He was inviting him, and us, to re-focus and return ourselves and the whole world into God.