Each year, on the night before Easter, we huddle around a fire in the dark as the following words are boldly said: 

Christ yesterday and today!
The beginning and the end!
Alpha!
Omega!
All times belong to Christ
and all the ages.
To Christ be glory and power
through every age for ever. Amen. 

All times belong to Christ. What we are claiming here is no less than this: In Christ, because of the resurrection, even our calendars are redeemed. Christ’s resurrection has radically transformed time. No more is time a cycle of despair-until-death; for baptized people, time can be experienced — celebrated — as seasons of grace. Passing through these seasons fulfills human history and brings our destiny: eternal life, that time-beyond-time when the cosmos will be healed, all people will live justly in peace, and God will be all. 

This does not mean that we always do experience time this way. We still are bored sometimes. We still succumb to the stress of having too much to do and too few hours in which to do it all. We still waste time here and there. This is so because we are living in the in-between time. The mystery of this period of waiting and working between Christ’s resurrection and second coming in glory to judge the living and the dead we experience as “now and not yet.” The reign of God is now and yet still to be fulfilled. Christ is present among us now and yet still to return. Time is redeemed yet still awaiting completion, wholeness. So our calendars strike us occasionally as ambiguous — full of potential, yes, and yet susceptible to breakdown. We must choose how we will use this hour and that, how we will spend our time until the moment of our death or of Christ’s return. 

Author Annie Dillard spoke to this ambiguity in The Writing Life: “What then shall I do this morning? How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing” ([Camp Hill, Pa.: Book of the Month Club Edition, 1990], 32). In talking about the importance of maintaining a schedule as a writer, she explains how a calendar — our communal schedule — helps: “A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.” 

Conflicting calendars

True enough. But which schedule best defends from chaos? Which calendar best serves as a net and a scaffold? There’s the school year, which begins in late August and ends in June. It throws in three-day weekends here and there, a week off in winter and another in spring. There’s the financial calendar, which begins July 1 and ends June 30, punctuated with quarterly deadlines. There’s a calendar of civic holidays. There’s the retail year, with “sales” that accompany many of the civic holidays and a huge, amorphous “holiday shopping season” that begins around Halloween and ends the first week of the following January. And there are myriad personal calendars: work schedules, season tickets, practice times, volunteer commitments. 

Despite the busy-ness that our many calendars bring, we also live in an “open 24 hours a day and seven days a week” world. One day seems pretty much like another, especially for those who work six days in shifts. The evening television schedule provides variety, perhaps the only indication that today is Thursday because ER is on and not Monday, when we watch CSI: Miami. 

Contemporary life is scheduled by more than one calendar. How the various calendars are combined, how we “spend our days” and “spend our lives,” is our attempt to find meaning, to make a difference with the time we have. As baptized people, we have another calendar available to us, a calendar that in fact can organize all of the other schedules by which we live: the liturgical year. If we trust the liturgical year, if we keep its fasts and feasts, we will enter more deeply into the mystery of time and know more fully that “all times belong to Christ.” 

The key to keeping the liturgical year is keeping Sunday, the basic building block of the Christian calendar. If we keep Sunday, it will keep us — keep us free from experiencing life as an inexorable cycle of working-shopping-amusing-ourselves-unto-death. If we keep Sunday, it will keep us — in a rhythmic way of life that frees the body to rejuvenate, the imagination to recreate, the heart to reel and celebrate. This is what Pope John Paul II meant when he wrote in his apostolic letter Dies Domini that Sunday “reveals the meaning of time” (75). What does Sunday tell us, then, about time? 

Past, present, future

Sunday looks back and recovers the past into the present. The pope called Sunday “the weekly Easter, recalling and making present the day upon which Christ rose from the dead” (ibid.; emphasis added). Sunday is a sacrament, a sign that effects what it signifies, a day that makes holy the human experience of time. In this sense, it shares in the holiness of God, for whom all things are eternally present. So we call Sunday “the third day” and say, “On the third day [Christ] rose again [from the dead] in fulfillment of the Scriptures.” 

Those Scriptures tell us: “On the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee” (Jn 2:1). At that primordial wedding, where heaven comes to earth as bride to groom and as groom to bride, Jesus changes the water of history into the wine of eternity — “the first of his signs,” we are told, revealing glory (2:11). Sunday, the third day, is a day for searching out glory — signs of new life busting out of old tombs everywhere.

If Sunday is the day for snatching life from death, it is because Sunday is first the day for separating light from darkness: “Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day” (Gen 1:3–5). The third day — the day of resurrection and re-creation — is also the first day, the day of original creation. So Sunday is the day for making and for making new, for making love and for making love new, for making peace and for making peace again even though we’ve lapsed back into war yet another time. The creative power of the first day and the recreative power of the third day are made present — really present — on Sunday, not only for Sunday’s sake but also in the hope (God’s very own) that the other six days will soon be more like the first. The saving deeds that seem to be past events live anew each Sunday, and the power of these divine deeds saturates us like sunrays, monsoon rains, and microwaves. 

Sunday also inaugurates the future. “Everything that will happen until the end of the world will be no more than an extension and unfolding of what happened on the day when the battered body of the Crucified Lord was raised by the power of the Spirit and became in turn the wellspring of the Spirit for all humanity,” the late pope wrote (75). “Christians know that there is no need to wait for another time of salvation, since, however long the world may last, they are already living in the last times.” 

Sunday is the day of the Spirit. According to the Gospel of John, the risen Christ breathed the Spirit on frightened followers that very Easter Sunday evening. According to the Acts of the Apostles, the Spirit came as wind and fire 50 days later — but still on a Sunday. Sunday is the fiftieth day, the day of fullness. If God made seven days in the week, then seven is the fullness of time. When you multiply seven by seven — that’s fullness times fullness — you get 49. But God — so gracious in giving — throws in another day, a Sunday, for good measure: 50 days for our delight! Sunday is eternally Pentecost. 

And so Sunday is ultimately the eighth day, as the early Christians were happy to call it, a sign of what lies beyond created time: “His kingdom will have no end.” This is another way of saying that Sunday is the Lord’s Day, domingo, dimanche. This term “Lord’s Day” would have had resonance for the first Christians that we sometimes do not hear. The prophets ranted about the Lord’s Day, the day of judgment and consummation — the last day. Sunday — especially the Sundays of what we call Ordinary Time — recalls and makes present this reality: Our days are numbered. Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again. 

Sunday, then, is the sacrament of the present moment. Living in the present moment is sorely needed in a society so whipped up by advertising that we can only look forward to getting something else. This sacrament of the present moment is sorely needed in a society so distracted by the scandal du jour that the past is merely yesterday’s spin on now-forgotten transgressions. If we keep Sunday, then Sunday will keep us — in this hallowed present moment. 

How do we keep Sunday? By gathering as church! By celebrating Eucharist! And, to the extent possible, by not busying ourselves with our normal daily routine, whether that be work, shopping, watching TV — whatever. Honor your body with a walk or a bike ride and a healthy meal. Nourish your soul at an art gallery. Play your favorite CDs! Attend to wondrous signs of new life breaking out everywhere: the scent of oranges in the produce aisle, the loaf of bread browning in the oven, the eyes of a lover looking at you. 

Those who must work, however, take heart! As a sacrament of the present moment, Sunday unlocks not only the meaning of time but also the meaning of work: The skills that we exercise for the good of others, the service that we perform humbly in Christ’s stead, hasten the dawning of the eighth day. 

A year of Sundays

Keeping Sunday weekly leads to keeping the three days of Easter annually. The heart of our year together as church, the paschal Triduum richly rewards those communities that enter into the three days fully. Can we encourage one another to plan ahead, to take time off from work, to forego traveling, to keep the paschal fast, to watch and pray, to gather for the liturgies and enter into them undistracted and unhurried? Can we be profoundly serious about our role in bringing to birth new children of God, more sisters and brothers of Christ, at the Vigil? 

If so, the rest of the calendar falls into place. The spirit of Lent deepens and our ability to savor Easter for 50 days grows. We begin to understand Advent and Christmas as our winter Passover celebration — paschal mystery celebrated at the feeding trough that becomes the cradle of the child who is born to die so that others may live. Slowly, surely, life in community and life at home begin to resonate to the rhythm of resurrection, and when the time finally comes, we stand ready to greet Christ when he comes again in glory to gather us home. LC

David Philippart, the editor of this magazine, works with parish staffs and ministers to better integrate the work of liturgy, catechesis, and charity/justice. Write him at DavidP@rpinet.com.

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