The cycle of seven days: taking time out...

In the lovely novel “Gilead” by Marilynne Robinson the following quotation struck me as particularly true.

“Now it’s Sunday again. When you do this sort of work, it seems to be Sunday all the time or Saturday night. You just finish preparing for one week and it’s already the next week.”

The novel is about a church minister and the feeling expressed in this quotation is something that I and many of my colleagues feel. Sunday comes again in seven days no matter how much other important stuff fills your week. No matter how little time you find you have left for preparation, the “big weekly gig” will come around as regular as clockwork. On a bad week the approach of Sunday can feel like the sword of Damocles hanging over your head.

On the other hand I like the routine that having a set pattern to the week brings. For Christians, as for Muslims, a week is a period of time that marks a regular cycle of devotion. My life is shaped in segments that regularly return to the source of life.

In contemporary society I believe much disfunctionality comes because every day is the same and people's work patterns do not differentiate between work days and weekends. Sunday is lost in the chaos and struggle of everyday life. Though I may feel Sunday is somehow special, if I go into the supermarket after church, I see that for the majority of people it is just another day.

The regular cycle of seven days goes back before the Jewish bible (Genesis) to the Sumerians and Babylonians who were observers of the night sky. They saw and named the days of the week after the five visible planets and the sun and the moon. This tradition has continued through to the present day. In many cultures across the world seven is a holy number which may also account for the choice of seven days for a week. There is actually no logical reason why there should be seven days in a week – it doesn't fit any natural cycle: lunar, planetary or otherwise. But to me it feels right. And certainly I agree with the sentiment that on six days you shall labour and on the seventh you shall rest.

In practice though that can be more difficult than it seems. The commandment comes from an agrarian, subsistence economy where work was often a backbreaking struggle for survival. Today people often narrowly define work as the time they spend selling their skills to others and all the other parts of life are defined as leisure. But I think it is more confusing than that. Is shopping work or leisure? (growing/harvesting/gathering food would have been work) Is repairing or working on the home work? (the fact that you enjoy something does not make it leisure) Is digging the garden work? If you lose the simplistic distinction that work is what you get paid for and everything else is leisure then it all becomes very complicated. I can't even define work as what I have to do rather than what I want to do as much of the time I am in the fortunate position that what I am paid for doing what I want to do.

So whilst accepting it is virtually impossible to define work, I want to affirm that it is important to have a regular rhythm to life. Time to be rather than do should be built into the schedule at regular intervals. When Jesus took time out and went away alone to pray he was doing just that. He was making time to be in the presence of God and these moments of calm allowed him to return revitalised into his busy life where people were always making demands on him and on his time. 

See also my related blog post on the use of Sunday .