A life in letters: Sundays

When I was a child, Sunday was a different kind of day. In my early teens, for instance, we’d have a later breakfast – bacon and eggs rather than cereal – and we’d listen on the radio not to Today  with Jack Di Manio, but to a hymn programme.  Mum and dad were generally enthusiastic about its content, but I do remember them shaking their heads disapprovingly when Sidney Carter’s then-new piece Lord of the dance was sung. The association of Christ with dance was for them at that point a step too far.

While my parents were getting ready to go out, I’d play hymns on the piano from Golden Bells or another of my mother’s old hymn books. We’d walk round to Carluke Baptist Church, past the IRA slogan paint-sprayed on a garden wall in Kirk Road. ‘Ira’ was the first name of the famous 19th century American compiler of Sankey’s Sacred Songs and Solos, and it always puzzled me why a 1960s Lanarkshire graffiti artist would be interested in a historic purveyor of gospel hymnology.

After the service, we’d go home for lunch. My mother would tackle the dishes, and then we’d sit down in the living room for the afternoon reading, listening to music or both. My parents would read missionary magazines, or the Christian Herald which they took regularly. I remember the note published weekly in its pages indicating that the return of the Lord could occur at any time, and the inner disquiet which, without fail, this gave rise to.

There was no watching TV on the first day of the week, no listening to music unless it was specifically Christian – occasionally if you were ill it might just be permissible in addition to listen to a piece of classical music which had some tangential connection with spirituality. I remember a piece by Vaughan Williams was once permitted on this ground.

I can’t remember any rules governing what I read on Sundays, and I suspect nothing was barred: certainly the specific ‘Sunday reading’ which was available to me as a younger child  – those austere Sunday School prize books such as a small-print edition of Pilgrim’s Progress and the old evangelical classic Teddy’s Button by Amy le Feuvre - were dull and unattractive and wouldn’t have held my attention for long.

At about half past four, my mother would make tea, after which we’d head off to evening church. Home for supper and bed, unless I was going to the Youth Fellowship at the Baptist Manse which I don’t think I attended very frequently. When we joined the Carluke Brethren Assembly in 1970, we would often be invited out in Sunday evenings after church for supper – fellowship, and chat, and tables over-laden with cake and meringues and sandwiches.

In the summer of 1969, I was staying with family friends when on the evening of Sunday July 20^th the Eagle touched down on the moon’s surface. It was only with considerable difficulty that I persuaded these good people to make an exception to their unwavering rule on this historic Sabbath and turn on the radio on so that I could listen, fascinated, to the commentary and the crackling conversation between mission control and the fragile Lunar Descent Module.

This Christian attitude to Sunday was rooted in God’s commandment to the Jewish people: ‘Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy.’  Just as in the creation story God had rested on the seventh day after six days of ceaseless activity, so God’s people’s busy lives were to be regularly punctuated by days of rest and reflection, when they would take time out to be still and to meditate on the reality and goodness of God and on their dependence upon God.

Some Christians took this principles and applied it to what was sometimes referred to as ‘The Christian Sabbath,’ the first day of the week,  decreeing that Sunday was a time for serious reflection on God and for evaluating your life and faith in the light of God’s presence. Nothing which might distract from this process was permitted, and for those brought up in a Christian culture while not sharing the vision of the awesomeness of God which in theory at least motivated those around them, Sunday could seem an endless, austere desert.

Other Christians understood the symbol of rest after six day’s work to reflect the glory of the Christian good news. No more need we attempt to earn relationship with God through our own ceaseless striving, an attempt doomed by the inherent imperfection of even our best efforts. Through Jesus Christ’s activity on our behalf, we receive from God as a free gift the intimacy with him which we can never earn. And when we recognise that this gift of love is there for the taking, and receive it, we find that the days of labour are over; the day of resting has come.  And so according to this line of reasoning, for the Christian every day is a Sabbath, a time for reminding ourselves that our security is to be found in God alone, and that we can rest in him and rejoice in him, and enjoy him in every aspect of our lives. We may assume that the explorer David Livingstone  took this second view – he regarded a traditional Sabbath as ‘a day of one’s life lost.’

My childhood Sundays definitely tended towards the austere model, but I didn’t have a particular problem with this as ironically we were so very busy on the day of rest, shuttling between meeting hall or church and house with little time to pause. But this approach to the first day of the week did reinforce my sense of a dichotomy between God and the world. God was the God of Sundays, and austerity, and church meetings. God was of course, present through the week, but God seemed merely to tolerate school and books and games rather than being as passionate about them as about hymns and prayers and church meetings. This was a God who did not positively affirm the joys of life.

In my 20s, I occasionally stayed with my mother’s old friend Marion Brown and her elderly husband John in their house in Paisley Avenue in Edinburgh, and I was impressed and touched by John’s Sabbath keeping which was sweet and positive and life affirming. He’d be out in the garden on a sunny summer Saturday, cutting the grass, trimming the edges, turning the soil until everything was in order. He’d come inside about 4pm and wash and change, leaving the silent garden basking in sunlight, fragrant with the scent of flowers and the aroma of freshly-turned earth, calm.

After tea we’d go to the Saturday evening prayer meeting along the road at Holyrood Abbey Church of Scotland. Throughout the evening there was about John an almost palpable peace as he prepared for the coming day, a peace which lasted until the Sabbath’s end and beyond.