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The following is an excerpt from the 1955
book "Around the Year with the Trapp Family," by Maria Von Trapp of the
Trapp Family Singers ("Sound of Music") fame.
Our neighbors in Austria were a young couple, Baron and Baroness K.
They were getting increasingly curious about Russia and what life there
was really like. One day they decided to take a six-weeks trip all over
Russia in their car. This was in the time when it was still possible to
get a visa. Of course, at the border they were received by a special
guide who watched their every step and did not leave them for a moment
until he deposited them safely again at the border, but they still
managed to get a good first-hand impression. Upon their return they
wrote a book about their experiences, and when it was finished, they
invited their neighbors and friends to their home in order to read some
of their work to them. I shall always recall how slowly and solemnly
Baron K. read us the title "The Land Without a Sunday." Of all the
things they had seen and observed, one experience had most deeply
impressed them: that Russia had done away with Sunday. This had shocked
them even more than what they saw of Siberian concentration camps or of
the misery and hardship in cities and country. The absence of Sunday
seemed to be the root of all the evil.
"Instead of a Sunday," Baron K. told us, "the Russians have a day off.
This happens at certain intervals which vary in different parts of the
country. First they had a five-day week, with the sixth day off, then
they had a nine-day work period, with the tenth day off; then again it
was an eight-day week. What a difference between a day off and a
Sunday! The people work in shifts. While one group enjoys its day off,
the others continue to work in the factories or on the farms or in the
stores, which are always open. As a result the over-all impression
throughout the country was that of incessant work, work, work. The
atmosphere was one of constant rush and drive; finally, we confessed to
each other that what we were missing most was not a well-cooked meal,
or a hot bath, but a quiet, peaceful Sunday with church bells ringing
and people resting after prayer."
Here I must first tell what a typical Sunday in Austria was like in the
old days up to the year before the second world war. As I have spent
most of my life in rural areas, it is Sunday in the country that I
shall describe.
First of all, it begins on Saturday afternoon. In some parts of the
country the church bell rings at three o'clock, in others at five
o'clock, and the people call it "ringing in the Feierabend." Just as
some of the big feasts begin the night before--on Christmas Eve, New
Year's Eve, Easter Eve--so every Sunday throughout the year also starts
on its eve. That gives Saturday night its hallowed character. When the
church bell rings, the people cease working in the fields. They return
with the horses and farm machinery, everything is stored away into the
barns and sheds, and the barnyard is swept by the youngest farm-hand.
Then everyone takes "the" bath and the men shave. There is much
activity in the kitchen as the mother prepares part of the Sunday
dinner, perhaps a special dessert; the children get a good scrub;
everyone gets ready his or her Sunday clothes, and it is usually the
custom to put one's room in order--all drawers, cupboards and closets.
Throughout the week the meals are usually short and hurried on a farm,
but Saturday night everyone takes his time. Leisurely they come
strolling to the table, standing around talking and gossiping. After
the evening meal the rosary is said. In front of the statue or picture
of the Blessed Mother burns a vigil light. After the rosary the father
will take a big book containing all the Epistles and Gospels of the
Sundays and feast days of the year, and he will read the pertinent ones
now to his family. The village people usually go to Confession Saturday
night, while the folks from the farms at a distance go on Sunday
morning before Mass. Saturday night is a quiet night. There are no
parties. People stay at home, getting attuned to Sunday. They go to bed
rather early.
On Sunday everyone puts on his finery. The Sunday dress is exactly what
its name implies--clothing reserved to be worn only on Sunday. We may
have one or the other "better dress" besides. We may have evening
gowns, party dresses--but this one is our Sunday best, set aside for
the day of the Lord. When we put it on, we invariably feel some of the
Sunday spirit come over us. In those days everybody used to walk to
church even though it might amount to a one or two hours' hike down and
up a mountain in rain or shine. Families usually went to the High Mass;
only those who took care of the little children and the cooking had to
go to the early Mass.
I feel sorry for everyone who has never experienced such a long,
peaceful walk home from Sunday Mass, in the same way as I feel sorry
for everyone who has never experienced the moments of twilight right
after sunset before one would light the kerosene lamps. I know that
automobiles and electric bulbs are more efficient, but still they are
not complete substitutes for those other, more leisurely ways of
living.
Throughout the country, all the smaller towns and villages have their
cemeteries around the church; on Sunday, when the High Mass was over,
the people would go and look for the graves of their dear ones, say a
prayer, sprinkle holy water--a friendly Sunday visit with the family
beyond the grave.
In most homes the Sunday dinner was at noon. The afternoon was often
spent in visiting from house to house, especially visiting the sick.
The young people would meet on the village green on Sunday afternoons
for hours of folk dancing; the children would play games; the grownups
would very often sit together and make music. Sunday afternoon was a
time for rejoicing, for being happy, each in his own way.
Until that night at Baron K.'s house we had done pretty much the same
as everybody else. Saturday we had always kept as "Feierabend" for
Sunday. There was cleaning on Saturday morning throughout the house,
there was cleaning in all the children's quarters--desks and drawers
and toys were put in order. There was the laying out of the Sunday
clothes. There was the Saturday rosary, and then--early to bed.
On Sunday we often walked to the village church for High Mass,
especially after we had started to sing. Later we used to go into the
mountains with the children, taking along even the quite little ones,
or we used to play an Austrian equivalent of baseball or volleyball, or
we sat together and sang some of the songs we had collected ourselves
on our hikes through the mountains. We also did a good deal of folk
dancing, we had company come or we went visiting ourselves--just as
everybody else used to do. And if anybody had asked us why we began our
Sunday on Saturday in the late afternoon, why we celebrated our Sunday
this way, we would have raised our eyebrows slightly and said, "Well,
because that's the way it's always been done."
But when my husband and I were walking home that night from Baron K.'s
house, we realized that our complacency--so prevalent among people in
pre-war days--had received a rude shock. It dawned on us that we had
taken something for granted that was, in reality, a privilege: namely,
that we lived in a country where Sunday was not so much observed as it
was celebrated as the day of the Lord. This was a new way of looking at
things, and the light was still rather dim, but I can see now in
retrospect that a new chapter in our life as a Christian family began
that very night.
We were lucky. The priest who stayed with us at that time, saying Mass
in our chapel, and who had become a close friend of the family, was in
a very special way a "Sunday fan," as we teasingly called it.
"I don't know what is the matter with Father Joseph," my husband had
remarked to me at various times. "He always hints that we don't make
enough of the Lord's Day. Why, we stop work on Saturday when the
"Feierabend" begins; like everybody else, we get ready for Sunday by
preparing our Sunday clothes, going to Confession, reading the Epistle
and Gospel. On Sunday we go to Mass together with our children, we have
a good Sunday breakfast, later in the day we go visiting. If there's
anyone sick among our friends, we try to see him. We spend the day
together as a family, as it should be. We go for hikes with the
children, or we play games, or we have some folk dancing, or we make
music....I really don't know what he means."
I do know now. It is true that we spent the Day of the Lord as a
family, praying, resting, and rejoicing together. I'm sure Father
Joseph did not object to that. But what he felt was that we did it
unthinkingly, as a matter of routine, because everybody in Austria in
those days did it like this. It had become a tradition. Father Joseph
must have sensed the great danger to a nation once people observe
religious customs only because "everybody does it" or "for hundreds of
years it has been done this way." He knew that every generation has to
rediscover for its own use the inheritance that has been handed down
from its ancestors. Otherwise all those beautiful old customs,
religious or other, lose their vitality and become museum pieces.
Father Joseph noticed that increasingly people were answering, when
asked why they observed certain rites, "because we have always done it
that way," and he was alarmed. What he was most concerned about,
however, was the celebration of Sunday.
On the crucial night, we decided that we would get together with Father
Joseph the very next day and ask him to tell us all we didn't know
about Sunday. So we asked him to have a cup of coffee with us. If he
had a weakness, it was for coffee. With this, one could lure him
always. Smiling in anticipation, he took his cup when my husband asked
quite casually, "Father, would you mind telling us all about Sunday and
why you were so upset when we once wanted to go to a movie on Saturday
night, or when Rupert and Werner took their bicycles apart on a Sunday
afternoon?"
And now something unexpected happened. Father Joseph put his cup down,
went over to my husband, took his hand in both of his, shook it
heartily, and said with a voice audibly moved: "Thank you, Georg, thank
you for this question. I have been praying for this moment for a long
time!" And then he added, "I won't be able to tell you all about
Sunday, but we can at least start...."
How well I remember it all--for I have re-lived this moment many times
since, only now it is I who take Father Joseph's place and listen to
some more or less impatient good Christian questioning: "May I ask what
is the matter with you and your Sunday and what you are always fussing
about?"
Father Joseph was right. He was not able to tell us everything in this
first session. When my husband and I saw that we were on the threshold
of a great discovery, we suggested that we let the older children
participate. From then on we spent many, many evenings, and every
Saturday evening, listening to Father Joseph explaining to us "all
about Sunday."
He began by giving us a history of the development of the Sunday in
Apostolic times. The first Christian community in Jerusalem remained
faithful to the observation of the Sabbath Day as well as to the prayer
in the Temple, as we know from the "Acts of the Apostles." But at a
very early date the Apostles themselves must have instituted a new
custom after the close of the Sabbath, the Christians remained
assembled in prayer and meditation and chanting of hymns to spend the
night in vigil and to celebrate the Holy Eucharist in the early hours
of the morning. As their Lord and Saviour had risen from the dead on
the day after the Sabbath--"in prima Sabbathi," as the four Evangelists
call that day--the first Christian community celebrated, not the
seventh day, like the Jews, but the first day of the week, and so made
every Sunday into a little Easter.
Then Father Joseph suggested we read in the "Acts of the Apostles"
about those times when the young Church was increasingly faced with the
perplexing question whether non-Jewish converts from paganism should be
obliged to observe all the Jewish laws too, as, for instance, the
observation of the Sabbath Day. And we read about the Council of
Jerusalem around the year 50 A.D., when the Apostles decided that the
Sabbath Day need not be observed any more. From then on the "Acts of
the Apostles" reveal that those two sacred days begin to conflict. St.
Paul still uses the Sabbath to teach in the synagogues about Jesus
Christ, but he also organizes and presides over the Sunday celebration
in the new Christian communities of the Greek world. The conflict
becomes more open toward the end of the first century when the
Christians cease to call their holy day "Sabbath" and name it "the
Lord's Day," or "Dominica," instead. We find the first mention of "the
Lord's Day" in the first chapter of the Apocalypse, where St. John says
that his vision took place on "the Lord's Day." St. Ignatius of Antioch
will use this term again in his letters to the young Christian
communities. In the Didache, one of the earliest descriptions of the
lives of the first Christians, we find the sentence, "But on the Lord's
Day, when you have gathered together, break bread and give thanks."
In the days of St. Ignatius, who was martyred around the year 110, the
Christians went one step further in their detachment from the Old
Testament, which now was considered as a symbol and prefiguration, to
be fulfilled in the New Testament. St. Ignatius writes that "it is
monstrous to talk of Jesus Christ and to practice Judaism." In his day,
the Sunday already had completely replaced the Sabbath of the Old Law
as the weekly sacred day.
Then Father Joseph told us about the situation of the Christians
outside the Holy Land. In the Roman Empire, every ninth day was a
holiday. The Christians in Rome and Asia Minor were unacquainted with
the main characteristic of the Jewish Sabbath Day--the complete
cessation of work. Living under Roman law, it would have been
impossible for them to stop working, especially in periods of
persecution. We now came to see that, while the act of worship of the
Sabbath of old consisted in abstaining from work, the act of worship of
the Sunday of the Christians consisted, from the very beginning, in the
celebration of the Eucharist. To assist at the sacrifice of the Mass
was strictly indispensable. Even in times of persecution, when the
Church had to go underground, the Holy Eucharist was celebrated
secretly in private homes early in the morning. Every Sunday morning
the Christians risked their lives in order to celebrate the Holy
Eucharist. We know that Rome had its very efficient secret police and
that during the first three hundred years of Christianity, thousands of
martyrs sacrificed their lives. What a great day Sunday must have been
to those people! One of our children asked, "Father Joseph, didn't the
early Christians always celebrate Holy Mass in the catacombs?" and he
answered that the most recent archeological findings show that the most
ancient churches in Rome were erected on the foundations of private
homes; the common belief is now that the catacombs, as public
cemeteries, would have been too easy a target for the Roman police.
Only occasionally Holy Mass was said there, over the body of one of the
martyrs; the usual Sunday celebration would take place secretly in
private homes.
Next we saw the Church rising in the beginning of the fourth century.
The times of persecution were over; a new life was beginning. The
ceremonies of the Holy Eucharist did not have to be held in secret and
in the dark of the night; they could now be celebrated in broad
daylight. This led to important changes in the celebration of Sunday.
From now on the Sunday liturgy begins to develop more and more. In the
fourth century the great Roman basilicas were erected in different
parts of the big city.
At this phase of our study, we spent many evening hours with Father
Joseph, listening to his explanation of the origin of the station
churches. On the main Sundays of the year, such as Pentecost and the
Sundays following the Ember Days, the Pope used to go in solemn
procession to celebrate Holy Mass in one of these basilicas,
accompanied by all the clergy and faithful of Rome.
Father Joseph's enthusiasm was contagious. He knew Rome as well as we
knew our house and garden. He brought a box with postal cards along,
showing all the ancient basilicas, all the station churches, details
from their architecture, and especially the mosaics. When our concert
tour several years later took us to Rome, it was like coming home to a
familiar place.
In the fourth century the Sunday took on a new character. Now the
Church could afford to declare it the official holy day of the week. In
the sixth century we see that the cessation of work has already become
a law.
A new change became apparent with the flowering of monasticism. From
the very beginning, the monks took up the idea of hourly prayer
throughout the day and of special prayers at midnight. This had a
decided influence on the celebration of the Sunday vigil, which had
always been observed but was now becoming a general practice. After
having spent the greater part of the night from Saturday to Sunday and
the morning hours in prayer and meditation, the Sunday necessarily took
on the character of a day of rest. Now the Sunday had taken over
completely the function of the Sabbath. It had become both a day of
worship and a day of rest.
Parallel with the development of the Sunday went the development of the
liturgical year. In the beginning, the Christians celebrated only one
feast: that of Easter. It began on Good Friday, rose to its height on
Easter Sunday and was continued during fifty days, the Paschal season,
which ended with Pentecost Sunday. The first four hundred years of
Christianity did not know the season of Lent, but the Christians fasted
every Friday, and later every Wednesday also.
In the fourth century a new feast came to be celebrated: the
anniversary of Christ's birth; and just as Pentecost was the completion
of Easter, so the feast of the Epiphany became the conclusion of the
festive Christmas time. The liturgy of the fourth century, then, was
centered on two big feasts Christmas and Easter. As time went on, both
of these feasts developed further and added weeks of preparation, the
season of Lent and the season of Advent. Now the liturgical year was
formed. Its development had a most important influence on Sunday. So
far the Sundays had repeated over and over again the celebration of the
same mystery: Christ rising from the dead. Now, however, each Sunday
took on a significance of its own. No longer were there just "Sundays,"
but Sundays during Advent, Sundays during Lent, Sundays after Easter,
and Sundays after Pentecost. Some took on a special name, such as
"Gaudete Sunday," "Laetare Sunday," "Good Shepherd Sunday," "Rogation
Sunday."
Of course, our children wanted to know: "And how about the feasts of
the saints?" And we learned that during the first few hundred years
only a martyr was considered worthy of being commemorated on a special
feast day. On the anniversary of his martyrdom Holy Mass would be said,
but only at the place where his body rested. This restricted the feasts
of the martyrs to specific places. Beginning with the fourth century,
saints that had not died the death of martyrdom were given a special
feast. Such a feast doubled the octave of the day; hence the name
"double feast." For many centuries, however, the sanctoral cycle was
considered secondary to the temporal cycle, which is seen, for
instance, in the law that during the time of Lent no feast of a saint
could be celebrated. Of course, no Sunday would ever yield to the feast
of a saint, however famous.
During the Middle Ages the Sunday, besides still being the
commemoration of the Resurrection of Christ, took on a special
character as a day of forgiveness and mercy. From the ninth century on,
the Church asked that on Sunday all military operations be suspended!
In this period falls the development of the liturgical drama. The
reading of the Gospel, the reading of the Passion on Good Friday and of
the Gospel of the Resurrection on Easter Sunday started it. Several
members of the clergy, dressed in alb and stole, took on the different
parts in order to make Holy Mass more interesting to the faithful who
no longer understood Latin, the language of the Church. It became more
and more common to enact parts of the Gospel stories in the sanctuary.
In those times the people began to forget that the liturgy should,
first and foremost, be prayer and adoration, and not entertainment for
the faithful. Furthermore, throughout the Middle Ages the liturgy of
the saints grew in importance. The feast of the saints were multiplying
and encroaching on the Sundays. Finally, the slightest double feast had
precedence over the Sunday, until, finally, in the eighteenth century
only Easter Sunday and Pentecost Sunday were properly Sundays and not a
saint's day. All the other liturgical Sunday Masses had vanished, even
those of the Sundays of Advent and Lent. This condition lasted until,
finally, the holy Pope Pius X saw the seriousness of this state of
affairs and remedied it with his great reform, which gave the lost
Sunday back to the Church.
This is only a brief summary of what we learned in weeks and months
about the history of the Sunday. We were also made aware that Our Lord
had singled out Sundays for His most solemn acts and commands--His
Resurrection, the command to the Apostles to go and preach to the whole
world, the institution of the Sacrament of Penance and the Descent of
the Holy Ghost on Pentecost. Having realized this, the Sunday can never
be a day like any other to us. It is truly a consecrated day, a day of
grace.
And this launched us on a new search--for more and more knowledge about
the "day of grace." From the very beginning Sunday brought to all
Christians, first of all, the grace of dedication. It gave and gives
them the unique chance to surrender themselves entirely to God. To what
an extent this was true we came to see especially at the times of
persecution. Since, from the very beginning, to assist at Mass was
identical with receiving Communion, anybody who did not appear at
Sunday Mass thereby excommunicated himself and was not considered a
member of the Church any more. To the ones who cooperated with this
grace of dedication, however, Sunday turned immediately into a day of
joy, because joy is the result of dedication. As soon as we surrender
ourselves completely to God, our hearts will be filled with peace and
joy. Therefore, every Sunday the Church repeats in the Office the words
which sound like an echo from Easter: "This is the day which the Lord
hath made. Let us rejoice and be glad." So we see that, besides the
grace of dedication, the liturgy of the Sunday obtains also for us the
grace of joy and the grace of peace. Another grace we discovered, which
is designed directly for the majority of the faithful who cannot afford
to say with the psalmist, "Seven times a day I have given praise to
Thee," and for whom the seven canonical hours and the nightly vigils
are some kind of spiritual luxury. God, in His great mercy, has set
aside for them every week a sacred day and for that day has provided
the grace of contemplation, which otherwise seems reserved only for the
ones who have "time to pray." Since the days of St. Jerome it has been
believed that the Sunday bestows on all who celebrate it in a Christian
manner the grace of contemplation. In the Middle Ages the lay people
used to flock into the convents and monasteries on Sundays to talk
about God and spiritual things with the ones they considered
professionals--the monks and nuns--as we can read in the autobiography
of St. Teresa of Avila.
Yet another grace Sunday has in store for us. As we have a right to
believe eternity will be one uninterrupted Easter Sunday, so every
Sunday throughout the year helps the Christian people to prepare for
that great Sunday to come. It is a day of expectation, a weekly
reminder that here is only the beginning of true happiness.
The theme is endless. More and more graces will be discovered as we
meditate together on the mystery of the Sunday.
It is wonderful to make such discoveries together with children or
young people. To them, things are either right or wrong, and as soon as
they feel in their own lives that they are not as they should be, they
immediately undertake "to do something about it." That is the way it
was with our children and the Sunday.
Soon after our research had begun, they founded an "Association for the
Restoration of the Sunday" with Father Joseph as president. It was
their own idea. The association appointed one member of the family for
each Sunday, and he or she had the responsibility of seeing to it that
this Sunday would be observed to the best of our ability as the Day of
the Lord. The more we learned about the great sanctity of this day, the
more disturbed the children became over the inadequacy of our Sunday
habits. From now on, Saturday evening would be kept free from any
outside appointments. The "Feierabend" would no longer be kept because
"everybody did it," but because Saturday night had now become the vigil
of the Day of the Lord, hallowed by almost two thousand years of
observance. The Sunday clothes were no longer "an old Austrian custom."
They helped to stress the sacred character of the day. No one would
have wanted to put on dirty work clothes in order to take one's bicycle
apart.
Even the younger ones knew that "to visit the sick" and "to help the
poor" on Sunday corresponds to the character of a day of mercy--"dating
back to the ninth century," they would proudly explain to an
unsuspecting uncle.
But, most of all and above all, the gay, joyful character of Sunday was
jealously guarded, "because this is the day we should rejoice in the
Lord." The children would arrange folk dances with their friends, ball
games in our garden, hikes through the mountains, and home music.
Through all these activities, however, the contemplative character of
Sunday was always evident, with the children demanding to read the
Gospels together and to discuss the liturgy even during mealtime.
After our talk with Father Joseph, our previous observation of Sunday
seemed to me like a house built on unprepared ground, until a true
builder saw it, straightened it up, and put a strong foundation
underneath.
And then we came to America.
In the first weeks we were too bewildered by too many things to notice
any particular difference about the Sunday, but I remember missing the
sound of the church bells. When I asked why the bells of St. Patrick's
Cathedral do not ring on Sunday morning, I was told, to my boundless
astonishment, that it would be too much noise. These were the days when
the elevated was still thundering above Sixth Avenue. Never before had
we heard noise like this in the heart of a city!
Then we went on our first concert tour. As we were driving from coast
to coast in the big blue bus, we tried to make the most of Sunday--as
much as the situation permitted. On Saturday afternoon "Feierabend" was
declared, and this meant no school (our children had their lessons in
the bus and had to take tests twice a year). Then we met to prepare for
Mass, as had become our custom under Father Joseph. Everyone took his
missal and we either crowded together in the middle of the bus or met
in a hotel room, all taking turns reading the texts of the Sunday Mass.
This was followed by a more or less lively discussion and a question
period led by Father Wasner. Sunday we would wear our Sunday dress, the
special Austrian costume set apart for that day. But otherwise Sunday
was the day when we were, perhaps, a little more homesick than on any
other day, missing the church bells, missing the old-world Sunday.
As we got more used to being in America and as our English progressed,
we made a startling discovery Saturday night in America! It was so
utterly different from what we were used to. Everybody seemed to be
out. The stores were open until ten, and people went shopping.
Practically everybody seemed to go to a show or a dance or a party on
Saturday night. And finally we discovered the consequence of the
American Saturday night: the American Sunday morning. Towns abandoned,
streets empty, everybody sleeping until the last minute and then
whizzing in his car around the corner to the eleven o'clock Sunday
service.
Once we were driving on a Sunday morning through the countryside in the
State of Washington and we saw trucks and cars lined up along the
fields and people picking berries just as on any other day. To see the
farmers working on a Sunday all across the country is not unusual to us
any more, and this happens not only during the most pressing seasons
for crops.
When we lived in a suburb of Philadelphia in our second year in this
country, we found that the rich man's Sunday delight seemed to consist
of putting on his oldest torn pants and cutting his front lawn, or
washing his car with a hose, or even cutting down a tree (doctor's
orders--exercise!); while the ladies could be seen in dirty blue jeans
mixing dirt and transplanting their perennials. There was none of that
serenity and peace of the old-world Sunday anywhere until we discovered
the Mennonites and the Pennsylvania Dutch. They even rang the church
bells!
The climax of our discoveries about the American Sunday was reached
when a lady exclaimed to us with real feeling, "Oh, how I hate Sunday!
What a bore!" I can still hear the shocked silence that followed this
remark. The children looked hurt and outraged, almost as if they
expected fire to rain from heaven. Even the offender noticed something,
and that made her explain why she hated Sunday as vigorously as she
did. It explained a great deal of the mystery of the American Sunday.
"Why," she burst out, "I was brought up the Puritan way. Every Saturday
night our mother used to collect all our toys and lock them up. On
Sunday morning we children had to sit through a long sermon which we
didn't understand; we were not allowed to jump or run or play." When
she met the unbelieving eyes of our children, she repeated, "Yes,
honestly--no play at all." Finally one of ours asked, "But what were
you allowed to do?"
"We could sit on the front porch with the grownups or read the Bible.
That was the only book allowed on Sunday." And she added: "Oh, how I
hated Sunday when I was young. I vowed to myself that when I grew up I
would do the dirtiest work on Sunday, and if I should have children,
they would be allowed to do exactly as they pleased. They wouldn't even
have to go to church."
This was the answer. The pendulum had swung out too far to one side,
and now it was going just as far in the other direction; let us hope it
will find its proper position soon.
And then we bought cheaply a big, run-down farm in northern Vermont and
set up home. By and by we built a house large enough for a big family,
and a chapel with a little steeple and a bell. We could celebrate
Sunday again to our heart's content just as we were used to doing.
Saturday is a day of cleaning and cooking in our home, and five o'clock
rings in "Feierabend," when all work ceases and everyone goes to wash
up and dress. If there are any guests around the supper table, Father
Wasner will announce that "after the dishes are done we will all meet
in the living room, everybody with his missal, for the Sunday
preparation, and everyone is heartily invited to join." When we are all
assembled, we start with a short prayer and then we take turns reading
the different texts of the coming Sunday's Mass, everybody
participating in a careful examination of these texts. First we discuss
briefly the particular season of the Church year. Then we ask ourselves
how this Sunday fits into the season. Do the texts suggest a special
mood? Some Sundays could almost be named the Sunday of Joy, or the
Sunday of Confidence, the Sunday of Humility, the Sunday of Repentance.
Everybody is supposed to speak up, to ask questions, to give his
opinion. It is almost always a lively, delightful discussion. At the
end we determine the special message of this Sunday and what we could
do during the next week to put it into action, both for ourselves and
for the people around us. After this preparation for Mass, we all go
into the chapel, where we say the rosary together, followed by evening
prayers and Benediction.
On Sunday we often sing a High Mass, either in our chapel or in the
village church, and on the big Sundays of the year we sing vespers in
the afternoon. We know this should become an indispensable part of
Sunday, now even more so because the Holy Father has spoken.
I remember my astonishment when our Holy Father, Pope Pius XII, found
it necessary to say, in his address on Catholic Action in September,
1947 "Sunday must become again the day of the Lord, the day of
adoration, of prayer, of rest, of recollection and of reflection, of
happy reunion in the intimate circle of the family." Such a
pronouncement, I knew, is meant for the whole world. Was Sunday
endangered everywhere, then ?
In the year 1950 we traveled through Mexico, Guatemala, Panama, through
the Caribbean Islands and Venezuela, through Brazil and Argentina; we
crossed the Andes into Chile, we gave concerts in Ecuador, Peru, and
Colombia; and after many months of travel in South America, we went to
Europe on a concert tour and sang in many European countries. And I
came to understand that the Christian Sunday is threatened more and
more both from without and from within--from without through the
systematic efforts of the enemies of Christianity, and from within
through the mediocrity and superficiality of the Christians themselves
who are making of Sunday merely a day of rest, relaxing from work only
by seeking entertainment. There was once a time, the Old Testament
tells us, when people had become so lazy that they shunned any kind of
spiritual effort and no longer attended public worship, so that God
threatened them through the mouth of the prophet Osee: "I shall cause
all her joy to cease, her feast days and her Sabbath, and all her
solemn feasts."
And now the words of our present Holy Father in his encyclical
"Mediator Dei" sound a similar warning:
"How will those Christians not fear spiritual death whose rest on
Sundays and feast days is not devoted to religion and piety, but given
over to the allurements of the world! Sundays and holidays must be made
holy by divine worship which gives homage to God and heavenly food to
the soul....Our soul is filled with the greatest grief when we see how
the Christian people profane the afternoon of feast days...."
Newspapers and magazines nowadays all stress the necessity of fighting
Communism. There is one weapon, however, which they do not mention and
which would be the most effective one if wielded by every Christian.
Again the Holy Father reminds us of it: "The results of the struggle
between belief and unbelief will depend to a great extent on the use
that each of the opposing fronts will make of Sunday." We know what use
Russia made of the Sunday. The question now is:
And how about us--you and I? |
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