Sunday Does Not Know What To Be

Sunday used to start at ten past nine with somebody shouting up the stairs.

Then there was the business of getting out of the house, which took eleven minutes longer than it should have, every single week, for about fifteen years. Then there was the row about the shoes. Then there was the drive, and the sitting together, and the going home, and the enormous lunch, and the afternoon where everybody fell asleep in different rooms and nobody admitted it.

That was Sunday. Nobody designed it. It grew.

And now it is the second Sunday in October and you got up at twenty past nine, and there was no shouting, and nobody could find a reason for the eleven minutes, and you were out of the house early for the first time in fifteen years.

And it was fine. And the lunch was fine, and smaller. And by two o'clock the day had a strange amount of afternoon left in it.

Here is what I want to say to you about that, and I want to say it early: what you are missing is not your son. You spoke to him on Friday. What you are missing is a day that had a shape, and the thing that gave it the shape has moved four hundred miles away without meaning to take the shape with him.

A Sunday is a small thing to grieve. It is also a real one.

We walked unto the house of God in company

There is a line in the Psalms about a friendship, and it is remembered mostly because of what went wrong afterward, which means people skip the part that matters here.

We took sweet counsel together, and walked unto the house of God in company. (Psalm 55:14, King James Version)

Look at what he chose to remember. Not a conversation, not an agreement, not a moment. He remembered the going. The walking there. In company.

Sweet counsel is the talking. Walking in company is the shape of the day around the talking, and both of them are in the sentence, and he names both of them as the thing he has lost.

You are missing a shape and not only a person, and the loss of a routine has never once been too small a thing to be sad about. Psalm 55:14 remembers the walking and the company by name, and the Holy Spirit is the one who understands why a house is strange on a Sunday and normal on a Tuesday.

That is worth sitting with for a second, because you have probably been trying to talk yourself out of this all month.

A Sunday is not a person. Nobody has died. And so every time the flat feeling arrives at about two o'clock, some part of you says that this is a ridiculous thing to be bothered by, and puts it away, and it comes back next Sunday at two o'clock exactly.

A flat Sunday is not a verdict on a family.

You have been putting away something that keeps coming back at the same hour, and a feeling that returns on a schedule has never once been solved by being called ridiculous. The written word names the walking in company as a real loss without qualifying it once, and the Spirit of God is the one who lets a small true thing be said out loud.

The shape was doing more work than you knew

Now the practical part, which is the bit almost nobody notices.

That Sunday was not just pleasant. It was doing structural work in your household, and it was doing it invisibly.

It put five people in the same car. It put five people at the same table at the same hour. It produced, every week without anybody arranging it, about four hours in which the family was in one place with nothing else scheduled. And a very large amount of what your family actually is got built in those four hours, in fragments, sideways, while somebody was passing a dish.

Take the shape away and the hours are still there. But the hours no longer collect anybody.

You are looking at hours that stopped collecting people, and an empty afternoon has never once meant that the family that filled it has gone. The Holy Spirit is the one who can rebuild a shape when the old one has moved out, and Psalm 55:14 puts the counsel and the company in one sentence because they belong together.

And here is the thing that makes this urgent rather than merely sad. There are still people in that house.

There is whoever is left at home. There is the other adult. There is, quite often, somebody older who used to come on Sundays and has not been asked since September because nobody has thought about it. All of those people were being collected by that shape too, and when the shape dissolved, they stopped being collected, and nobody decided that.

You are a household with people still in it, and one person leaving has never once been a reason for the rest to stop gathering. Psalm 55:14 speaks of walking in company rather than of walking with one particular man, and the Spirit of God is the one who gathers a household that has drifted into separate rooms.

Name four o'clock out loud

So here is the change, and it is deliberately small, because a family that has just lost a fifteen year old habit does not need a new fifteen year plan.

At breakfast on Sunday, say out loud what happens at four o'clock.

Out loud, at the table, to whoever is there. Not a suggestion. Not "we should do something at some point". A sentence with a time in it. At four we are walking to the end of the lane. At four we are having the tea in the front room. At four we are going round to your grandmother.

Then at four, do that thing.

You are able to put a shape back into a day by saying one sentence with a time in it, and a small arrangement has never once been beneath the seriousness of what has changed. It is written in Psalm 55:14 that they walked unto the house of God in company, which is an arrangement and not an accident, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is in a front room at four o'clock on a Sunday.

Here is why saying it out loud matters more than the thing itself. An unspoken plan is a hope, and everybody in a quiet house is currently being careful with everybody else, which means nobody will propose anything in case it lands wrong.

A sentence at breakfast takes the proposing away from all of you. It is simply what is happening at four.

You are able to take the awkwardness out of an afternoon by naming an hour, and a household being careful with each other has never once been the same thing as a household with nothing left to do. Scripture puts the walking and the company into the same clause, so the arrangement and the love are not separable things, and the same Spirit who joined them in that verse is at your table on Sunday morning.