Restoring the Lord’s Day by Daniel Fitzpatrick addresses the difficulty modern man has entering into worship on Sunday and proposes how we may begin to solve this problem. Fitzpatrick, educated in classical literature, approaches this subject with a unique cultural background as a native of New Orleans. Hints of his southern Catholic experience can be seen as he weaves stories of his own combined with elucidations from literature, theology, and scripture. A delightful amalgamation of quotations and footnotes from authors such as the Catholic novelist Walker Percy, theologians John Paul II and Hans von Balthasar, philosophers Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and Jacques Maritain, the Catholic mystic and poet Caryll Houselander, the Catholic author Stratford Caldecott, and poets ranging from Dante, Homer, and Shakespeare to the 20th-century American poet Ezra Pound in the first chapter alone excites the audience to read on. Fitzpatrick presents a compelling thesis—illustrated by a gamut of philosophical and theological quotes and literary metaphors—which outlines the current issues discouraging mankind from honoring the Lord’s Day and how reclaiming Sunday can revive our human nature.
Fitzpatrick begins with the scriptural reference to the Israelites in Egypt given the command to travel three days into the desert to offer worship. The power play between Pharaoh, who needed these people for labor, and God, who asked these people to worship him, becomes the first example of the problem of Sunday: work versus worship. “Would they persist in fashioning bricks…or would they themselves become, in time, a living temple of the Lord?” (13). This was ancient Israel’s choice, and it continues to be ours. Work is the driving force behind so much of our inability to truly rest in modern society, but the decline of Sunday Mass attendance is caused by a much more insidious evil and one that may seem contrary to the American work ethic—the sin of sloth.
Lazy Souls
How could sloth—specifically spiritual sloth, also referred to as acedia—be at the heart of man’s slavery to his work? Fitzpatrick looks to fourth-century desert monk St. Cassian for a definition. “Acedia, as Cassian observed it, was not simply laziness. It came upon monks as it comes upon us; as a deep sadness of heart” (20). It is like a restlessness of spirit, which “drove Cassian’s monks from their cells, whether in imagination or in fact, in search of some better way of serving God” (20). A desert monk’s cell was the heart of his vocation—how he was supposed to know, love, and serve God. This temptation of the “noonday devil” of sloth drove the monk from his cell in search of some grass-is-greener scenario which ultimately caused the spiritual malaise of neglecting his real duty and vocational calling.
Fitzpatrick makes a comparison of the monk’s cell to the various vocational “cells” of modern man—career, marriage, parenthood, the cultural attractions of city life, the responsibilities to one’s church or parish, and even the often-disconcerting circumstances of the very times. Afflicted by the same devil, modern man often restlessly leaves his station in pursuit of a more alluring end. For “those striving for holiness in the midst of modernity, the temptations of sloth are grave, urging us to hate our age entirely, to despise the efforts of those around us in their own labors, to wish so deeply for a better cultural milieu that we despair of the opportunities for charity before us” (30).
Fitzpatrick next examines the nature of man and other factors in modern society that cause “Acedia’s Ascendancy” (the title of his second chapter). According to Aristotle, man’s natural end is the contemplation of the highest things. However, because our flesh is often at odds with our intellect, it is a rare occasion in which mankind achieves this lofty end. Sloth exploits this “division of faculties” further with the human experience of time—the regret of the past, the anxieties for the future, and our inability to stay in the present, as well as the disconnection from the rhythms of nature through the advancement of technology. The rise of consumerism and the sexual revolution spurned by an existentialism that cannot grasp the transcendental are additional examples in which we have replaced our natural end with one of our own creation.
Debt is also part of the problem, as Fitzpatrick sees it. The author explores how it has become part of American culture, and how usury, the practice of lending money at unfair interest, is a practice of the modern American economy that takes advantage of the American economy’s reliance on debt. Through predatory lending, the poor are oppressed and the average family is enslaved by its interest payments. The repayment of loans drives the need to work more hours. This becomes a repeating cycle of more work, purchases, and debt. “We ought to at least recognize that the modern economy, inasmuch as it looks to monetary gain as man’s chief goal, will persist in being a key tool in acedia’s belt, driving man to despise his eternal end and bidding him forget the Lord’s Day in favor of another day’s profit” (74). In a final thoughtful summary of the above arguments, the author paints his thesis with the image of the “American dream” in the financial- and lust-driven main character of the American novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.
Time to Wake Up
After what has heretofore read like a deep and convicting examination of conscience, Fitzpatrick now offers his suggestions to counter acedia in our lives. He begins with “reclaiming time,” starting with an explanation of the ancient Sabbath rest as “contemplative imitation” of God who rested at the creation of the world. Jesus Christ, God’s Son incarnate, makes all things new and re-creates the Sabbath because he is Lord of the Sabbath. Although Christ works on the Sabbath, this work is not contrary to rest because he is engaging in the Father’s ongoing work of ordering creation—healing, making new, bringing to perfection and making good. The last Sabbath labor of Christ is the labor of his death and the release of souls from the netherworld. Adam is restored to paradise! The day of resurrection, the Lord’s Day, the day Christ rises from the tomb, becomes the day Christian’s celebrate as the moment of the new creation in Christ.
Christ’s labor, which encompasses the sabbath as a demonstration of God’s ongoing work of causing the universe to be, gives way to the timelessness of the resurrected Lord, who invites us, as it were, into the eighth day—that reality in which space and time are drawn up eternally and glorified into the presence of the Lord (95).
The Lord’s Day is our antidote to the anxieties of the world and of time and serves as a “school of eternity”—practice for Heaven. The liturgy itself is our telos, our ultimate aim, in this world—this is what we must turn to as the cure for acedia. When we enter into worship in the Mass, we are entering into the proper ordering of reality, the restoration of the world and ourselves through Christ’s sacrifice. The Mystical Body of Christ finds its form in Mass, and here, as we worship together, head and members, we participate fully in this sacrifice with Christ when we offer ourselves in union with him. Fitzpatrick realistically acknowledges this is difficult. Man “does not have eyes to see. We doze off as the homily drags on, we desperately check our watches, and we rush off in relief when the final blessing is said, if we have lasted that long, or if we have come to Mass at all” (111). We are ever battling our flesh and spirit to do the work of worship.
Art as Antidote
After a lengthy discussion on the nature of man and our limited ability to contemplate our telos, Fitzpatrick raises another issue influencing our experience of the heavenly sacramental reality: the interventions of the Second Vatican Council. He deals delicately with this controversial topic, unbiasedly addressing ways in which errors since the Council have attributed to the ascendancy of sloth while pointing to the actual documents of the Council, which call us to restore true worship and festivity. For humans, reclaiming the Lord’s Day “must look to the means whereby through our senses, through space and time we may be guided back to that flesh which is true food and true drink” (143).
Here Fitzpatrick makes his case for beautiful and meaningful art, architecture, and music. Drawing from Sacrosanctum Concilium, the author states that good architecture can reveal God’s reality, guiding our senses by its structure and symbolism. “Good architecture, strengthening our sight, refining our imagination, allows us to see that this earth itself is the house of God” (159).
Good music “trains us not simply to live in the moment, but rather to allow moments to be woven together through art and so elevated to the eternal. Good music thus becomes inimical to sloth, which wants to use time to draw our minds out of God’s presence” (165). Here he addresses not only good music but the difference between “real” and “false” music reaching back even before the Council to the writings of Pope St. Pius X. He summarizes seven principles to renewing sacred music by modern day composer Paul Jernberg, which is a refreshing take on what has already been taught in Church documents.
At the end of his chapter on music, Fitzpatrick reminds us that music must arise from and return to silence. He uses this idea to segue into his next point, the need for silence and personal prayer and a life of devotion:
“We defeat sloth by withdrawing into the silence where we learn to speak with God’s voice. That is, made one with Christ through the eucharistic liturgy, we hail the Lord enthroned within us and thus learn the real music of the Word—the one Word that the Father speaks from all eternity, the Word through whom all that is was made and redeemed. Learning this language, we come to rejoice in the concrete circumstances of life so repugnant to acedia. The silence wherein we attend the Lord within, the one who casts out the inner pharaoh, becomes the means whereby we live the joy of the Lord’s Day through all the days, remembering that This Day, the one the Lord has made, is the eternal now into which we are called” (188).
Convincing Convictions
The last few chapters address more modern societal structures which need galvanizing before the Lord’s Day can be fully restored in our culture—such as governmental legislation, education of our children, and a reevaluation of corporate and lending practices. Overall, if we desire change, we ourselves must become saints and lead that change. This starts with living a life grounded in the liturgy. Our families must be a school of sanctity where we live and learn love for God and love for one another. The final chapter outlines how to properly feast on the Lord’s Day—not just with food but with fellowship and works of charity all centered around the Mass.
Readers will be captivated by Fitzpatrick’s approach to this topic through his lens of literary classics, theology, and scripture, conjoined with his personal glimpses of New Orleans culture. He writes to an educated Catholic audience that is at least moderately invested in the faith. The argument of sloth being at the heart of mankind’s repugnance of worship is convincing, leaving the reader hungry for a solution to this “noonday devil.” The second half of the book, which outlines how to reclaim the Lord’s Day, reads familiarly to those who have studied liturgy and liturgical documents and contains a solid plan of action for restoration. Fitzpatrick’s final thoughts summarize his thesis well:
“Our age has sought to destroy the Lord’s Day. Under the yoke of sloth, we have become sick with ourselves, sick with each other, sick with God. We have given ourselves over to the slavery of the dollar and the slavery of that pharaoh within who seeks to destroy all worship and to stretch us on the rack of time, ripping us apart between the past and the future so that we can no longer rejoice in the One who is forever present. The Lord’s Day teaches us anew to worship, to rejoice, and to be glad. For this is the day that the Lord has made. Let us leave pharaoh behind, go out into the desert, and greet that day with joy” (242).
