Never on Sundays
Vacek, Edward
NEVER ON SUNDAYS WHATEVER HAPPENED TO LEISURE? EDWARD VACEK In the 1950s, experts predicted that by the nineties we would all be working three or four days per week. Their predictions would...
...Why has this solution itself become questionable...
...All is determined by the interests of individuals...
...We need time to reassess our priorities and summon the courageous resolve to enflesh them...
...There is a communal need for communal leisure, a leisure that is not the same as each individual taking the time that she or he needs...
...Studies consistently show that most workers do not have great say about the hours they work...
...Not only are there cultural reasons for working more and being busier than we say we would like to be...
...We work long hours in order to be able to afford such costly leisure...
...A suitable rhythm of life must be discovered by the human heart, through individual and communal experience...
...those who don't want to work or shop can simply refrain...
...An earlier, easier age—only a few decades ago—provided one answer to these tensions: weekend 13 rest and especially Sunday worship...
...In either case, we need a respite from work...
...we work to cooperate with God: our appreciation of these meanings of work will likely fade unless there is time to reflect...
...The values involved are too important to be allowed 15 LZi to drown in the whirlpool of busyness...
...Management itself is under great pressure to work longer hours...
...some religious restraints against work and possessions have been left behind...
...Most of us, if we are not unemployed, find that our lives are too busy...
...They also follow different rules—Christians allow what is explicitly forbidden by the Hebrew Bible...
...We also view possessions less as dangers to our salvation and more as gifts from God...
...In sexist fashion, Sunday rest tended to benefit men more than women whose work was never done...
...The deep social structure of weekends, including Sunday's rest and worship, still prevails, however growing the number of exceptions...
...This practice, the pope claims, leads to dissatisfaction, "because one quickly learns...that the more one possesses, the more one wants, while deeper aspirations remain unsatisfied and even stifled...
...The threat of job loss and the decline of organized labor have meant that management decides when and how long people work...
...When we are not working, we devote substantial time to shopping...
...This is an identity too small, too constricting for its members...
...The chance to walk through tastefully decorated shops, to gaze at goods that stimulate the imagination, and to satisfy our desires: all these bring pleasure to people...
...Jesus proclaimed, "what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life...
...In this context, John Paul II's frequent admonitions against consumerism take on new force...
...Another factor is that the status of work has been upgraded...
...In comparison with Western Europeans, according to Sehor, we Americans spend more than three times as many hours shopping...
...we work to contribute to others and to the world...
...Parents often have to choose on Sunday mornings between church and sports for their kids...
...Further, Christians claim that all days are holy, not just one day...
...Even on the home-front, Schor argues, we have taken time saved through labor-saving devices, and we have spent it by setting higher standards of what shall count as a decent life, e.g., in cleanliness, health fitness, variety and quality of foodstuffs, or diversity of activities for children...
...Family cohesion has declined, as each member of the family pursues his or her own unique interests...
...Since we cannot be existentially attentive at every moment to all that we need, we must establish a rhythm in our lives, wherein in due course we attend to the basic goods that make life whole and meaningful...
...The Sabbath is the seventh day of the week, theologically selected because on that day Yahweh rested (Exod...
...In recent times, however, Vatican II and John Paul II have stressed that work is intrinsically valuable...
...But, our actions do not follow our words...
...We buy and sell "with no other horizon than the multiplication or continual replacement of the things already owned with others still better...
...Their predictions would have been right, if we had chosen to work fewer hours for the same level of productive output...
...The European comparison, of course, makes clear that more time does not automatically translate into greater church attendance...
...The traditional weekend with its focus on Sunday is one such pattern, and it deserves shoring up...
...extended families...
...But for many Americans, the problem is what the pope describes in Sollicitudo rei socialis as "superdevelopment...
...And those of us in manufacturing are annually on the job 320 hours more than our counterparts in France or Germany...
...percent of us say that marriage and family are so important that we would willingly sacrifice work to spend more time with them...
...We now work the equivalent of one month, 163 hours, more per year than we did twenty years ago...
...What is needed is an awareness that each of us needs a rhythm of life that includes rest, prayer, and play...
...Too much of what we value in contemporary life might have to be given up...
...It is also a time for regeneration and a feeling of satisfaction in the work we have done...
...These values cannot be imposed by rules...
...On the other hand, it may be that we are not leading the lives we want...
...Modern economic freedom argues that we should be able to work and shop when and how long we want...
...Leisure itself has become a busy, high-ticket activity...
...In her arresting book, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure (Harvard, 1991), Juliet Schor documented how busy we Americans have become...
...What was admirable about the tradition is how it protected manual laborers...
...It describes Sunday as a "Feast Day," and after asking the faithful to participate in the Mass, it says (canon 1247), "they are also to abstain from those labors and business concerns which impede the worship to be rendered to God, the joy which is proper to the Lord's Day, or the proper relaxation of mind and body...
...Instead, we chose to increase the amount we own and consume by two-fold...
...Furthermore, the change since 1964 to allow Saturday evening Mass indicates that considerable flexibility is thinkable...
...Things are to the contrary, Schor and many others argue...
...They must find a way to encourage us to effectively want leisure and rest...
...Our treasure is not where we say our heart is...
...All these activities consume our time...
...Unlike human beings, the machine does not need to rest, reflect, pray, or play...
...we buy expensive home entertainment equipment...
...serve for the coming of the definitive Kingdom...
...Through Christ's victory, Christians have felt themselves freed, in varying degrees, from observing the Third Commandment...
...We might be better off if collectively we slowed down, but, absent communal discernment and cooperation, we end up creating a way of life that drives us on...
...Refusing these goods and ceasing from work, then, can seem to be a failure to cooperate with God in fostering the kingdom...
...We work to live...
...But this is not a good formula for social life and therefore, in the long course, not for individual life...
...These needs or hungers cannot be satisfied without spacious periods of restfulness...
...The proportion of families with both parents working has risen...
...In Western Catholicism, work was long evaluated mainly in negative or utility terms...
...Nevertheless, through discussion and experience, individuals and communities must chart the general pattern these various human goods should have in their lives...
...Of course, for lots of people the problem is a lack of resources for even adequate living...
...If we structure our collective time so that economic activities are always encouraged, then we signal that these activities are too important to ever be displaced...
...Despite what people say about their desire for family, centrifugal forces often overwhelm centripetal desires...
...Thus for many working parents (especially single parents), evenings and weekends have, as a consequence, become packed with shopping and household details...
...Play has a healing, recreative power, and when shared with others it creates and deepens interpersonal relationships...
...Many societies have happily existed without these pressures...
...A common justification of Sunday rest pointed to the Third Commandment...
...What has changed...
...And, speaking generally, science does not know any special times or days of the week...
...It helps define what counts as valuable for us...
...Since we are more than economic beings, we need to resist unfettered economic activity which currently threatens to swamp the other areas of our lives...
...Their predictions would have been on target, if we had been satisfied to live at '50s standards...
...In past Catholic teaching, it was permitted on Sundays to write a book, but not to plant a small garden, to crochet but not to knit...
...The new code, in effect, asks us to test whether what we do on weekends promotes certain important values we can all assent to...
...One of religion's social tasks is to resist the tendency of people in affluent individualist cultures to devote themselves wholly to private economic gain...
...Christians observe a different day, Sunday, and for a different reason, the Resurrection...
...Americans also lean toward an industrial and scientific mindset, each of which has an undifferentiated sense of time...
...In ranking nine basic values, we prize materialistic concerns last...
...Rest from work can seem to threaten these values, and it can feel like negligence in not doing our part to keep the economy flowing...
...Too much work can deaden our spirits...
...Such surcease is itself liberation...
...In a word, the market economy creates homo economicus...
...Even shopping has become for many a form of recreation...
...The question, of course, is whether further change in our practices, further exceptions, will eventually make this background pattern obsolete...
...In quiet time, we participate in that rest in which even God engages in...
...To be sure, work for many is drudgery...
...We all need a rhythm of life that includes more than working and spending...
...Furthermore, the pre-Vatican II casuistry of what constituted forbidden work on Sunday became unbelievable, especially as more people did white-collar and service work...
...If weekends are just days to catch up on unfinished tasks, they become one more busy period, not a time for refreshment and perspective...
...The major loss has been in our free time...
...We have a deep need to pass time in receptive communion with God...
...We need time to be with one another...
...If Sundays must be busy, then, without prejudice to the communal ideal, other times for worship and rest should be sought...
...The Code of Canon Law sets up an ideal that most of us can affirm...
...Most of us no longer live within older social networks such as small towns, ethnic cultures, or 14...
...Currently, in our collective psyche, the weekend is a time for relaxing...
...Consumerism and the consuming "progress" it generates are not essential traits of human nature, but products of our market-driven culture...
...Play, which was often frowned upon in the tradition, has become an important form of recreation, even as it now competes for our time...
...They can do what they want, either privately or as long as they find someone else willing to satisfy their wants...
...We could be working only six months of the year...
...The competitive nature of the market system promotes not only individual initiative but also increased interest in getting ahead...
...The status of play has also undergone an upswing...
...we work to fulfill ourselves...
...Not so long ago, the Carnegie Institute recommended that parents resign themselves to being clearing-house managers of their children's activities outside of the home...
...But possessions and services are not enough, no matter how many of them we can afford...
...Eighty EDWARD VACEK, S.J., teaches Christian ethics at the Weston School of Theology in Cambridge, Massachusetts...
...Moreover, it is through work and the wages we earn that most of us are able to make a contribution to religious institutions and social justice concerns...
...Prayer and rest provide us with the context within which we can appreciate the gratuitous and grace-like quality of life...
...The church regularly defends the right to private property, and, as John Paul II writes in Sollicitudo, "the goods of the world and the work of our hands...
...Still, the structuring of time should be not only an individual decision, but also a political act...
...In a modern time frame, any hour and any day is the same as any other hour or day...
...There must be background patterns, publicly supported and encouraged, that promote communal leisure...
...Only a few points can be made...
...We need a wider array of human goods including personal relationships, above all, a relation with God...
...We need not invent such a rhythm...
...The problem is not so much that we become slaves to instant gratification or idolators of our possessions...
...hat values of our past Sabbath and Sunday observance deserve to be promoted in our time...
...Parents spend, Schor observes, ten to twelve fewer hours per week with their children than they did twenty-five years ago...
...we join health clubs equipped with elaborate exercise machines...
...And if pleasure doesn't bring us to the stores, the desire to keep up with others will...
...Churches must help us resist the temptation to become homo economicus...
...Social changes often occur through an accumulation of small decisions, each of which seems good, but which accumulate in social patterns that on the whole are undesirable...
...Since the industrial revolution, clock time has tended to override human rhythms...
...As a consequence, we are materially quite comfortable...
...Such rules too severely constricted Christian freedom, and they have been greatly abandoned...
...16...
...We also spend a greater percentage of the money we earn, not to mention a good bit of money we haven't yet earned...
...or it can become the controlling center of our emotional energy...
...For other people, however, work provides a great sense of meaning, worth, companionship, and accomplishment not found in other areas of life...
...We need time to be quiet, to reflect, to read, to explore the meaning and purpose of our lives...
...Individuals must swim in the fast-flowing stream or drop out altogether...
...It is a theological mistake, however, to confuse the Sabbath with the "Lord's Day...
...we need them in order to live and to give...
...The Starship Enterprise has no holy days...
...Idleness" can be the devil's workshop, but it is also the contemplative's family room...
...The deep human need for something like a weekend rhythm should become socially affirmed, as it is in Europe...
...We have become accustomed to living in small families whose members are encouraged to pursue their own interests...
...The Vatican itself cited weekend vacations and skiing as reasons for instituting Saturday evening Mass...
...Even in the midst of great unemployment, there have been few proposals to reduce the work week so as to spread the work among more people...
...We live in an intensified, liberal culture in which devotion to individual freedom challenges any restriction on economic activity...
...we take formerly undreamed-of vacations...
...Then, without background patterns shared in common, individuals seem most free since most unconstrained...
...In the early centuries, most Christians worked on Sundays...
...So the argument goes...
...A community is more than an economic unit...
...There is, of course, no simple formula that will establish the proper balance between economic activity and other goods...
...Work is a good, a subordinate good...
...Many of us eat out frequently...
...Through its public proclamation and practice, Christianity can contribute to society by insisting that individually and communally we develop a rhythm of life that includes all the human goods and relationships that make life more than just getting and spending, getting and spending, getting...
...it is a time for worship and for family life...
...Curiously, our self-stated values are still "traditional...
...People act for positive values, and so we have to ask whether we really want to be less busy...
...20:11...
Vol. 121 • February 1994 • No. 3
