Rest and Worship

One

In the 3rd Commandment, God links the command of rest to the command of holiness.

In practice, that means there are two obligations for Sunday. One is to rest, the other is to worship, to go to mass. And for many of us, these two obligations seem kind of disconnected, or even in tension.

When my kids were little it took a lot of effort, a lot of work, to get everybody up and dressed and in the car for Sunday Mass. 

One Sunday Sara didn’t have shoes on – we could never find shoes – and I said, “If it was good enough for Moses then it will work for you…”

So, it might not seem “restful” getting the family to church and keeping them well-behaved for over an hour in the pews. And yet the truth is, worship and rest go together. Because we can’t do anything human, we can’t do anything natural, we can’t even really rest, unless we put God first.

Worship, God, Sunday Mass, these don’t get in the way of rest. They’re actually what makes rest possible. 

Two

Spiritual dimension vs. body and brain

Rest is our time to spiritually nourish ourselves. 

Work is usually focused on earning money so we can support the body. 

But rest is when we feed our souls with truth, goodness, and beauty. Because if we just indulge our senses, if we just eat too much, drink too much, and watch too much, we will be wretchedly unhappy. We will, like so many people in this society, lose all joy in life. We might even get to the point a lot of people get to, where we despair and don’t even want to live anymore. Because stimulating the body, and stimulating the senses, isn’t enough for us. We are more, we are bodies and souls, and our souls demand the food of spiritual joy, spiritual delight.

When we turn to God, when we honor Him, we remember that we are made in His Image. We remember that we aren’t just bodies to ingest things. We aren’t just brains that need to be lulled to sleep with entertainment.

The ancient materialistic pagans who didn’t believe in heaven, who didn’t believe in the Fatherhood of God, thought the best they could hope for was bread and circuses. 

But we Christians are immortal, spiritual beings. We are heirs of the Kingdom of Heaven. We are the stewards of God’s world. 

We know we are made for more. We are made for truth. We are made for beauty. We are made for glory. And on Sunday we renew our commitment to pursuing those joys, the only joys which are ultimately worthy of us. 

Three

Reality as good

Rest means a celebration, an appreciation of the goodness of reality.

But how can you celebrate reality if you’re not convinced that reality is actually good?

If you think that everything is blind chance working on unthinking matter, if the nature of life is to be born, then scurry around clutching desperately at pleasures that you know you can’t hang on to, and then die - How can you celebrate that? How can you rejoice in human existence if your vision of human existence is so ugly?

But when we come before God together, and we recite the creed, and we give God thanks, and we receive Him in the Body which He offered up for our sakes, then we remember that this world, this life, is made by a good God, that it’s designed for no other purpose than to perfect us and to make us everlastingly happy. We remember that it’s a journey filled with good things along the way, and ending up in the embrace of the Infinite and All-loving God. 

Reality is this: A good God, made a good world, and he made you very good and he is bringing it all to a very good end.

How can that not fill us with peace? How can that not fill us with joy? If we remember what we say and do when we go to mass, how can that not grant us what we need for rest?

Four

Distraction doesn’t work if death is the end.

Because secular society has no confidence in God and heaven, it cannot rest. It can only try to offer sensational pleasures in an effort to distract the mind.

The old hedonistic pagans would say, “Eat, drink, and be merry – for tomorrow you die.”

But of course, if you’ve already despaired, if you really think death is the end of everything, then you really won’t be able to enjoy the pleasures you’re using to distract yourself.

No death-row inmate really enjoys his last meal before execution, even if he was able to select everything on the menu. 

That’s not a restful, joyful meal. 

The food might taste good, but he’s panicking on the inside.

Those are the pleasures of a secular people. They’re panicky, anxious pleasures. 

But a Christian who worships God – who loves Him and appreciates Him on the day of rest – that Christian can actually enjoy the good things of life, even though they’re fleeting, because the Christian knows that much greater pleasures are on their way.

Five

The ultimate goodness of reality can only be appreciated when the Divine Order is appreciated

So do you see why God has demanded that we attend to matters of prayer, of holiness, on the day dedicated to rest?

It’s because unless He is at the center of our life, unless He is the most important thing,  we’ll be unable to rest. We’ll forget all the good He has done, and all the good He has planned for us. We’ll forget the good way He has made us. We’ll forget to be grateful for His gifts now, and we’ll forget that greater gifts are coming. 

In other words, we’ll forget to be happy. And our happiness is the whole point of the Third Commandment.

So don’t be resentful about getting your family to mass on Sunday. Don’t resent that God has asked you to attend to the font, the basis, the foundation, to your happiness and your family’s happiness in this world and in the world to come.

For God Himself is that foundation, that basis, that source of our happiness.

Without Him, there is only fear and distraction and despair.