Today is Sunday.
In church we call this the Lord’s Day and celebrate it as the Christian sabbath. It’s meant to be holy, a sanctuary carved into time itself, a time when the most wretched of us can walk into the Presence and be welcomed not just by the Creator but by others as well.
The medieval church had more days set aside for fasting and penance than you could shake a stick at, but never Sunday. Sunday is always a feast day.
Sometimes the feast is hard.The liturgy may be clear of sour faces and there’s no vinegar scheduled for your corn flakes, but the liturgy doesn’t always match the weather. The sun will shine when it will shine, and dark clouds will block it out when a cold wind blows them in. It may be a feast day, but that doesn’t put food on the table or wine in your glass. The fiddlers may play but that doesn’t mean you want to dance.
Sometimes when you want sun, it just keeps raining. The night ends but instead of dawn, dusk comes again until the only light left is the last failing ember of a candle that has burned itself away. Joy becomes the friend who moved away with no forwarding address, who left no number to call. Holding onto her feels an impossible task.
There are times you feel so fundamentally alone that the only thing that makes sense is to yell at God and tell him off.
So go ahead and do it.
There are times life is so unjust that the only thing left is to let loose your inner Karen and complain to management that their customer service sucks.
Go ahead and complain.
It won’t make your life better. Your friends and family will still ignore you. You’ll still have lost the family home. Your goldfish will still have been eaten by the cat, and the cat will still have choked to death on the goldfish.
It will still be dark.
But you’ll have changed. You’ll have raged into the whirlwind, and while it probably won’t grant you the answer you wanted, still you’ll come away with a new appreciation for its power.
It’s Sunday. You don’t need to go anywhere. The sanctuary came to you, and it ushered you in.
Grace be with you all.
Copyright 2023 by David Learn. Used with permission.
