Restoring the Lord’s Day

Years ago, I was a shoe salesman for Kinney's. Everyone wanted to work in Missouri. Why? Because Missouri prohibited shoe sales on Sunday, you were guaranteed every Sunday off!

From Crisis

By Jon M. Grondelski, PhD

As Fitzpatrick shows, worship is not just an “obligation” imposed externally by some deity but also a response to some of man’s deepest needs, yearnings, and sense of order.

If you asked the average American why “blue laws” once existed, he’d likely stare at you in confusion. “What are ‘blue laws’”? he might ask.  

Those of us beyond a certain age remember when certain things could not be sold on a Sunday in America. In the New Jersey of my childhood, there were aisles in the supermarket cordoned off on Sundays. Smaller establishments just didn’t open. Only in the 1970s did the phenomenon of “Sunday-at-the-[Paramus]-mall” arrive.

Lest one dismiss my memories of the Paleolithic Era, let me add that when I lived in Switzerland (specifically, Protestant Bern) from 2008-11, “blue laws” were alive and well. Most stores were closed, usually by 6 p.m. on Saturdays. On Sunday mornings, one bakery in a district was open for bread, dairy products, and cold cuts, but it closed by 1 p.m. Thereafter, if you wanted to “shop,” your choices were three: one store in the central train station downtown; the shops connected to gas stations along the highways; or drive 35 miles to Catholic Fribourg, where supermarkets were open.

But why did blue laws exist? In Protestant lands, it was to “observe the Sabbath” and “get thee to church.” But Catholic lands had blue laws, too, to “observe the Sabbath”…but in a broader, more global sense.

All this is a build up to my endorsement of a new book by Daniel Fitzpatrick, Restoring the Lord’s Day: How Reclaiming Sunday Can Revive Our Human Nature. I especially want to emphasize the subtitle.

This book stands out because it’s more than what one might expect in a Catholic book: “you should keep the Lord’s Day because God said so and not enough people go to church!” That’s true—but Fitzpatrick goes far beyond that.

Some Catholics seem to labor under a Protestant dichotomy that radically separates the things of God and the things of man. Push that far enough and God turns into the enemy of man, He who “alienates” man from himself. History proved where that Protestant opposition of God and man led: to “Enlightenment” thinkers of “alienation” like Kant and Marx and those pushing the necessary “death of God” for human freedom—like Nietzsche.

But as Karol Wojtyła pointed out even before he was pope, man’s genuine good and God’s design for man run in direct, not inverse, ratio. Far from being “alienated,” man is fulfilled, becoming most truly who he is—the image and likeness of God—to the degree he lives as God intended him to.

When Fitzpatrick talks about “restoring Sunday,” he identifies not just the importance of worship, which is, after all, both a debt owed God and a privilege that divinizes man. A “day of rest” reminds man that he is not just a laborer. It should give him time to consider things beyond the mundane and quotidian. Liturgy, well-executed, does not just worship God, though that is its primary mission. It also elevates the worshipper’s cultural level. 

He learns how to sing (and where else does that occur in modern society, particularly without vulgarity). In many churches, his awareness of beauty is elevated, which is why the Swiss thinker Alexandre Cingria identified ecclesiastical ugliness with the devil. (Throw in ecclesiastical utilitarianism—for example, the “multifunctional worship space”). Just even consider our Sunday prayers: Mass may be one of the last places you’ll hear uncommon and polysyllabic words (like “consubstantial” or “grievous”). Liturgical texts would never pass muster with the “editors” of blogs that insist we write like seventh graders (and challenged ones, at that).

What I’m getting at is that a too narrow view of “Sunday” reduces it to an “obligation” checked by going to church and abstaining from “servile work.” What Fitzpatrick and I are getting at is a view of Sunday as an “institution,” as not just a religious rule but a whole religious and cultural vision that fits into and shapes the life of man. Jews long ago recognized this when they spoke of the Sabbath as “queen of the week,” and why the Sabbath supper is in many ways as essential an element of its celebration as synagogue service. What’s happened to Christian “Sunday dinner?”

Fitzpatrick writes from a particular context: the Catholic subculture of Louisiana, whose values and contours he wants to make better known, including that of a Louisiana Sunday.

Among the controversial claims Prof. J. Budziszewski makes in his great book What We Can’t Not Know is that we should not divide the tables of the Ten Commandments too rigidly. Traditionally, they are depicted as two tablets: commandments I, II, and III and then IV through X. It’s not that Jews or Christians were bad at division. The first three commandments were looked at primarily as man’s obligations toward God, the others as his duties toward men.

Again, such contraposition can be distortive. One cannot have a relationship with a God who is life, fidelity, and truth unless one does not kill, commit adultery, steal, or lie. But, as Budziszewski noted, the problem is that many people think the first three commandments are only relevant to believers.

Perhaps believers pay more attention to them, but every man has a “god,” the ultimate in his life taken on faith to which all else is subordinate. It may be the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—or it may be his made-up supreme being, but he has a god. And, as Fitzpatrick shows, worship is not just an “obligation” imposed externally by some deity but also a response to some of man’s deepest needs, yearnings, and sense of order. So, the first three commandments are not “optional extras.”

Would that we recognized how “keeping the Lord’s Day” does not just serve the Lord but also enables what He wishes as our true and lasting good: to be happy with Him forever. Daniel Fitzpatrick helps us see that bigger picture.