Sunday Reclaimed: An Interview About Rest and Leisure on the Sabbath

If the end of the weekend has you wishing for just one more day, read on to hear how you can reclaim Sunday and be refreshed for the rest of the week. Dr. Michael Naughton, Professor and Director of the Center for Catholic Studies, and his wife, Teresa, joined me to talk about the importance of leisure and resting on the Sabbath. 

Susanna Parent: What is the thesis of your book Getting Work Right: Labor and Leisure in a Fragmented World?

Dr. Michael Naughton : If we’re going to get work right, then we have to get leisure right. The nature of labor and leisure relates to an age-old distinction in the Church related to contemplative and active life. If we go back to the book of Genesis we see that God commands us to both work and rest. It’s in our DNA. The challenge is that we live in a culture that elevates work, achievements, and accomplishments and it dismisses the importance of rest, understood in its authentic manner. The thesis is that these two go together in an ordered relationship.
   
MN: The word amuse comes from the Greek word Muses. Muses were the goddesses of the liberal arts, they were meant to refresh you and help you see a larger horizon of the world. When you put the word “a” in front of something, you negate it. If I am a theist, I believe in God. If I am an atheist, I don’t believe in God. One of the definitions for amusement is “to stare stupidly at something." The problem with amusement is that there is a passivity to it. We are distracting ourselves  from ourselves. Billy Joel has a great line in The Piano Man , “He knows that it’s me they’ve been comin’ to see to forget about life for a while." Our amusements often distract from deeper questions of our reality. They are not inherently evil or bad, but the problem is that most of us spend way too much time on them and then we claim that we “don’t have time” for authentic leisure.

Screens are probably the most notorious reality of that. With COVID, we have seen a jump in time spent on video games, screen time in general, pornography sites, etc. - all things that are actually soul-destroying forms of leisure and we call them “amusements."

SP: In your book, you talk about how balance is determining how to tip the scale while integration allows for complementary. People often talk about the struggle to ”find balance” in their lives. What advice do you have to help people become more integrated?

MN: We often try to use balance to solve all our problems, and it can’t solve everything. One of the problems is that there’s a dividedness in us in terms of our deepest convictions and what our actions are. The Latin word for integration comes from integritas and it means to make one whole. What integration is attempting to do is to integrate this contemplative active life in a way that contemplative life  informs , animates , and purifies our active life. Balance won’t achieve that, it perpetuates the divided life. The modern world thinks that everything is in my control and we can control things with balance. But that is not the solution. The solution is found in a deep sense of receptivity that gives us the resources of God’s grace to inform the kinds of actions or work that I am doing. 
 
Teresa Naughton: It is written into creation itself, this idea of rhythm, patterns of creation, and the need to re-calibrate. We have to lay things down, we have to let go, and we have to trust that God’s providence will take care. Sunday is another way of doing that. We anchor our week, we let go, give things back to God, anchor again, and trust in God’s providence that He will take care of things.

We have bodily rhythms. We need rest. Brenda Jank wrote a wonderful program called ‘ Run Hard. Rest Well.' She talks about how sleep and rest are not design flaws in creation. Sometimes we think “I’ll sleep when I get to Heaven." But if you look biblically, dreams speak to us. We hear God when we give God the time when we lay down and examine our conscience. This whole idea of rest is written right into creation and the weekly sabbath is another part of that. There is also the incredible need for worship. To go do something outside of yourself. During the week we disintegrate a little bit because we are running frazzled and it’s time to reorient again and remember who we are in God’s creation. That it’s not our created world but His.

SP: You say that silence, celebration, and charity are the essential habits of the Lord’s Day. How does your family live these habits out?

TN: We start the day with prayer and quiet.

MN: For us, the question is how do you enter into Sunday? We don’t always do it right, but it’s entering into silence. Taking that time of deep receptivity and just sitting with the Lord. Just saying His name and saying the Jesus prayer. We also tend to listen to Bishop Barron’s homily because it is often very good and leads to great conversation.

TN: We have a family breakfast or pastries and try to go to Mass together. There is usually a time for a walk or a bike ride during the day and now that our kids are no longer living with us we have an Adoration time on Sundays. If we are going to entertain, Sunday is often the first day we ask about. Sunday is the day that we give over to relationships. 

MN: What Sunday does is it gives us space and time for relationships because for us, the week is filled with so many tasks. When we had just graduated school and bought our fixer-upper house, we were working seven days a week and renovating our house, but what happened was that our relationships started to suffer. I love how Teresa describes reclaiming Sunday and recalibrating. We’ve had some of our best conversations on Sunday walks, and sometimes it’s just silence and being together.

SP: How did this reclaiming of Sunday incorporate your whole family and what was your children’s response?

TN: When the kids were in high school and we were trying to take this more seriously, we couldn’t demand it of the rest of the family. What we did do was ask them to clear their schedules. We weren’t going to prescribe what to do with their time other than our family meal and Mass, but we asked them not to do their homework till 3 o’clock. We knew they had things to do, but this time set aside was really helpful for them. They began to dread 3 o’clock because then they knew they had to go back to work. They realized how precious this time was and would sit with us on the front porch and chat, not running off to go do anything. It relieved them of guilt that they should be doing something else. I think that's something we don’t do enough of for ourselves. 

MN: Sunday was a day for Church and family. We were not going off to the mall or to our friends, and sometimes at three, they were off, and that’s where you have to make those adjustments. You want to create limits and expectations, yet you don’t want to make it so overburdened that resentment builds.

SP: I’ve got to ask about sports, did Sunday include any practice or games on television?

MN: At one point our daughter was on a traveling softball team. I like softball and I enjoyed watching my daughter play, but all day Saturday tournaments can get exhausting.

TN: When it came to Sunday practices, it just took a little bit of pushback to one of the coaches and we said, ‘our daughter can’t make that practice, is there another time that she can come? We reserve Sunday for Mass and Church.' Without us even asking, the coach wholeheartedly agreed and he changed the entire practice time. 

MN: One of the things we used to do with the kids was play sports together. We all got together with a couple of other families and played football. Watching football is not wrong, and sometimes we did that as well, but the question is how much time do you spend watching it and how habitual is it. 

SP: Where can people find out more about how to transform their Sundays and honor the Sabbath?

MN: Teresa, along with many others, helped develop a website called sundayreclaimed.org

TN: It is really nice to give some inspiration to new families who are wondering “how do you do this? What does it look like?” It is meant to be a tool for faith formators to have the discussion about taking Sunday more seriously. This site provides information for people to help get them started. 

I know that my family will be visiting sundayreclaimed.org to learn how we can better reclaim and recalibrate our own Sundays. If you enjoyed this interview, go check out Naughton’s book, Getting Work Right: Labor and Leisure in a Fragmented World!
 

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Susanna Parent is a freelance writer who begins her mornings brewing French press coffee in the home she shares with her husband and daughter in the Twin Cities. When the sun sets, you’ll find her with friends enjoying a glass of red wine, preferably outside underneath twinkly lights or brainstorming their family’s next new adventure. Her published work can be found at fiatandalily.blogpost.com