Keeping the Sabbath

It's Sunday afternoon and I always used to hate Sundays. Sunday was the day that was the worst for me as a child. Abuse in the morning, followed by pancakes, sausage, then church, followed by the rest of a day set aside as God's. The All-American Grand Slam!

Then I grew up and Sundays held no abuse, no church, and pancakes only if I wanted them. And yet, I would find myself waking up on Sundays, sad and crying, weeping over some pain I couldn't locate, couldn't pinpoint or describe. Finally, I realized the pain was my inside-baby girl's pain; she was still there, she was still hurting.

Oh. Well. I see.

Got myself off to therapy which was wonderful, in the way that vomiting nails would be wonderful, because of the relief of not having those nails in the belly any longer. Still, though, Sundays were hard. I would tiptoe around the land mines always lurking there, no matter how thorough the digging had been to locate, disarm, and defuse them. Tricky business for me and for my family, too and I frequently bemoaned the loss of one seventh of my week to such ridiculous and needless sadness.

Then one Sunday, a good friend of mine died. She'd been sick for a long time and her death was as beautiful and grand a death as anyone could want. She was surrounded by friends who loved her. We held and stroked her, whispered our love for her. And she went like a rocket! onto the next level. Into the place where babies come from and where we will all return someday. Birth, in reverse, a tidy packet of here-to-there, instead of there-to-here. That's exactly what it felt like, including the joy.

After that I was fine for a long, long time on Sundays. It was if my friend had given me, with her profound gift of such a holy death, an erasure of the pain that day had always brought me. I could wake up on Sunday morning without the heaviness in my heart that foretold the heaviness in my eyes that preceded tears. It was beautiful. Divine, even. That was twelve years ago, and I am still mostly fine on Sundays. Mostly. That's how powerful my friend's gift was.

But there are still some Sundays that a trace of sadness can cast a tiny shadow over me. It's as if that inside-baby girl sometimes sighs on a Sunday morning. She doesn't wail anymore, or scream or even weep silently. She simply sighs a little breath of despair of ever being rid entirely of pain. But so what? We all have pain. How could we know the joy of release if not for the pain?

And I get up and make pancakes (real ones, not like the Bisquick ones of my childhood) and serve them up to the family I have now and we like to eat them under the trees in the back yard next to the bird feeder with the dogs lazing around our feet, hoping for scraps, panting softly in the building heat of a summer day.

No church for me, thank-you.

And I think ALL the days are set aside as God's, if by God you mean that net of life that connects us all- that web of quarks and sparks the universe is made of.

Or something like that.