From the Desk of Father Stephen Buting
Parochial Administrator
The Gift of Sunday
In 2021, Archbishop Jerome Listecki published a document entitled ‘The Gift of Sunday’ (https://shorturl.at/c0xY0). It explored the various reasons why Sunday is a gift from God to humanity and how we in turn are called to give it back to God. This reflection was all the more important in the wake of the pandemic that had hit our society. For various reasons, participation in Sunday Mass, the heartbeat of our Catholic faith, dropped sharply, and it has not yet fully rebounded. There are many folks in our communities who used to go to church who semi-consciously realized over time that they didn’t need this weekly ritual any longer.
“What return can I make to the Lord for all his goodness to me?” the Psalmist asks. He responds, “The chalice of salvation I will take up, and I will call on the name of the Lord” (Ps. 116:12-13). How can I begin to make a response of love to the God who loves me? First, I can offer God prayer and worship through Sunday Mass and other holy days of obligation. From the dawn of creation, God set aside the final day for rest and worship. It is the center around which everything turns. God knew that we would be tempted to make an idol out of work, and we would choose to ‘live to work’ rather than ‘work to live’. Each Sunday, we return from our work to offer praise and thanks to the One who provides all that we have. We not only thank God for the wondrous act of creation, but for the still more wondrous act of redemption, by which he promised us salvation by his Son’s Resurrection on ‘The Lord’s Day’.
So we need to worship infinitely more than God needs our worship. Sunday is a gift to us, and if we don’t use it properly, we don’t get Monday (or the other days) right either. So on Sunday, God sets aside the day for us to engage in several non-work activities: worship, charity, and family. We come to worship God, to thank him for all the good of the past week, to ask his help for the trials of the coming week, and to receive from him the priceless treasure of the Eucharist to strengthen us. We perform acts of charity, especially for our neighbors, for we know that “he who does not love his neighbor whom he sees cannot love God whom he does not see” (1 Jn. 4:20). Finally, we spend time with our family, for we should begin our exercises of charity with those closest to us. Making Sunday special has the added benefit of linking worship with other types of flourishing (like good food or quality time) that will encourage kids to continue worshiping long after the parental requirement fades. All these ways of setting aside Sunday ensure that our priorities are rightly ordered and we flourish in the way God intended.
Summary of Precept #1:
To attend Mass on Sundays and other holy days of obligation and to refrain from work and activities which could impede the sanctification of those days.
In Christ,
Father Stephen