Looking back over the past year it’s hard to find an ordinary day. Depending on which calendar you use the year is crammed full with special days for everything under the sun. Into that crammed schedule Jews, Christians, Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists and hosts of other religious groups insert their own particular feasts and festivals.

Amongst the plethora of annual religious and secular special days are the weekly celebrations for those of us in the Jewish-Christian tradition – Shabbat or the Sabbath (sunset on Friday until sunset on Saturday) and the Lord’s Day (Sunday, from when we wake up until when we go to bed!) In an increasingly secular world these weekly feast days get lost or, if not lost, at least radically changed until they are barely recognisable as holy days.

David Klinghoffer is an articulate Orthodox Jew. It was not always so. In his spiritual memoir, The Lord Will Gather Me In – My Journey to Jewish Orthodoxy, he describes his upbringing in Reformed (liberal) Judaism, his flirtations with Christianity, his anxious searching for his Jewish roots and his homecoming to Orthodox Judaism. His writings have all the marks of a convert who has given up smoking, and his cavalier treatment of liberalism, which he sees as the slippery slope to secularism, is only one of many dogmatic positions he espouses.

Nevertheless, his recall of a conversation with a certain liberal Rabbi, Rabbi Dinnerstein, on what is important for Judaism, set me thinking about the question of the Sabbath and Sunday in our almanac of feast days and festivals.

Says Klinghoffer: “Rabbi Dinnerstein believes that there are moral absolutes in the Torah (the firsts five books of Moses).” Answering Klinghoffer’s request for elucidation, the Rabbi replied: “I think keeping Shabbat is a bottom line responsibility, but how I keep Shabbat, that’s up for negotiation.”

That remark led me to pick up Stephen Miller’s The Peculiar Life of Sundays. It’s a lively history of how the Lord’s Day has exercised its hold on countless numbers of us over the past 2000 years. Unlike Shabbat, which springs from the divine command in the Torah, the Lord’s Day arose as a celebration in miniature of Easter Day and in that regard recaptures, on a weekly basis, one of the great annual Christian festivals. As such, Christians have regarded it historically as a “bottom line responsibility.” But, like Rabbi Dinnerstein’s Shabbat, Sunday is increasingly “up for negotiation.”

In his fascinating survey of Sunday, Stephen Miller traces its historical roots and the conflicts observance of the day has engendered. Catholics and Protestants, Church and State, fundamentalists and liberals, high Church and low Church parties, not forgetting Seventh Day Adventists with their Sabbatarian polemic, have all contributed to Sunday’s bad press. “Gloomy Sunday” has entered the vocabulary of artists and writers, many of who depict or describe Puritan or Victorian Sunday as dolorous affairs.

In the 18^th century famed essayist Samuel Johnson, a devout Anglican and defender of the faith, found himself uncomfortable with public worship, bored by most sermons and generally reluctant to get out of bed to attend church, even though he acknowledged he should regularly attend divine worship and be a devoted observer of the Lord’s Day. Johnson’s struggle continues into the present as we too find ourselves equally ambivalent about Sunday’s observance.

Visit any New Zealand city on a Sunday and you would find it difficult to distinguish it from any other day of the week. Numbers of Christians would be seen attending churches and then linking with the general population in running “Around the Bays” marathons, dining out at nearby cafés, wandering through local malls, shopping for groceries, kicking tyres in the local car dealer’s yard and playing or watching sport.

Certainly secularisation has freed Sunday from many of the historical and often ridiculous restrictions that gathered around it, lifting the weight of burdensome forms of Sunday observance and producing an approach to Sunday previous generations would find it hard to comprehend.

But society in general needs to give expression to the principle of “Sabbath rest” by providing significant time for rest and reflection. Christians in particular should heed the historical genesis of the day as a constant re-enactment of the Easter event. Whilst rejoicing in Sunday’s newfound freedoms we should ensure the Lord’s Day is honoured through regular celebration of the great and mighty acts of God.

We live in an instant society, and many of us approach our spiritual lives that way. We look for quick, easy, painless ways to grow spiritually and often end up disappointed with the growth. The long history of Shabbat and The Lord’s Day points to the importance of patient practice and reminds us that engaging in everyday – sometimes tedious – practices over long periods of time is the most trustworthy way to foster spiritual depth.

Before abdicating the keeping of the Lord’s Day as a special day and yielding meekly to the enticements of bread, circuses and banal commerce, we should listen to Pope Benedict’s plea:

“Give the soul its Sunday, give Sunday its soul.”

– Tom Cadman