One of the questions I don't really like to answer comes on most Mondays at work. “How was your weekend?” The question might come from a co-worker or a former coworker or maybe even a complete stranger. This past week, I called our tech support hotline on Monday about a situation I’ve been having where people inside my company cannot call me from a work number. I let it go for as long as I could because it was really great for a while, but I finally needed to get it resolved. The tech had to get some other departments involved, and while we were waiting for them to get on the call, this otherwise total stranger I’ve never talked to before in my entire life popped the big question: “So how was your weekend?” I gave a vague answer and then pivoted out of it back to the support issue I was having. (I’ve watched far too many politicians answer questions for the past two years on Face the Nation, so now, like they always do, I use the pivot in my conversations.) This resistance to the question is likely because I'm not a person who enjoys small talk. To me, the question is a deep one and ultimately leads to a similar conclusion every week: the weekend was a disappointment. Friday evening holds so much promise but then when the weekend actually arrives, I'm lost and out of rhythm because the regular routine has been interrupted by unplanned, ad hoc days that somehow always seem to turn out the same way. What begins with so much hope ends with me feeling as if I never got to do what I actually wanted to do. But when you don't know what you wanted to do in the first place, it is hard to do what you wanted to do.
Right now this Saturday morning is starting like many start for me. I sleep a little later than usual, and I read the newspaper a little more thoroughly than usual. I think about several things I should do: go for a bike ride, take a prayer walk, paint the inside of the kitchen cabinets, paint the garage, replace the rubber gasket on the garage door, tighten the screws on our storm windows, or any other number of things that come to mind. I also think it might be nice to go to the Columbia-Yale football game, or even the Fordham-Holy Cross game. Both of these games are about 20 minutes from our house. but it takes a big commitment to go to a three-hour football game when you didn’t think about it until an hour before the game starts. If we do go to the football game, that will mean a bunch of other things will not get done, like tightening the screws on the windows. If you wonder why I keep mentioning the screws on the windows, it's because I noticed them a couple of weeks ago and they have been bothering me ever since. Also, as I mentioned above, the garage needs painting as both sides of the garage are peeling badly and needs scraped and painted. (I did the garage door last week, and that was exhausting!) Again, painting is one thing, but scraping and painting takes it to a whole new level of commitment and I’m just not sure I’m up for that on a Saturday. We also need to put away the outdoor furniture that sits on our patio since it is now November, and also since it is November we need to take the air conditioners out of the bedroom windows and put them away in the basement. But unfortunately, the closet where I keep the air conditioners has a bunch of other stuff in the place where the air conditioners are supposed to go, so it looks like I now have another project to clean out the closet. One thing always has something to do with another.
These are the kinds of things that go through my mind when someone pops the big question to me on a Monday morning: “How was your weekend?” Because by Monday you realize that the things you would have liked to do and the things you should have done were not done. And then the feelings of failure and self-loathing start in and you also realize the things that were not done will still not be done when the next Friday rolls around and another weekend starts. But there is one thing that always gets us through the weekend: the hope of calling for a retroactive Sabbath.
As early evening comes on Saturday and it becomes clear that none of the things I wanted to do and none of the things I should do actually will get done, my wife or I will say something like, “It's okay! We're taking a Jewish sabbath.” This means that we've simply been unable to accomplish one thing from Sundown Friday to sundown Saturday. When we figure this out, we retroactively credit ourselves for observing a Jewish sabbath. This allows us to live with our failure and lack of productivity and even turn it into a virtue. It is a ray of hope that would otherwise lead to Saturday evening despair. We can live with ourselves after all. We just observed Shabbat!
On Sunday, we have our worship services at our church. Our big decision for Saturday night before we go to bed is always, “Which service do you want to go to?” We have an 8:30 a.m. service and a 10:30 a.m. service. The 8:30 a.m. service has fewer people and it is shorter since there is a service after it. However, it is 8:30 a.m., so we have to get up early to go, realizing that when we walk to the car our neighbors will all likely still be sleeping and this makes me envious sometimes. Also, the music is loud at our church, and loud music 8:30 a.m. just seems wrong to me, especially after I've started the day reading the newspaper and drinking a cup of coffee in the quiet. But, if we go at 8:30 am, we get out at about 10 a.m. and it feels like we’ve still got a whole day to ourselves to try and accomplish the things we failed to do on Saturday. When we go to the 10:30 a.m. service, there are a lot more people, so not only is this a service longer because there’s nothing after it, there are also many more people to talk to. So when we go to the second service, by the time we get out, it feels like the day is over because we have to go home and figure out lunch, and after lunch all of the undone things start bearing down on us as we begin to realize that once again nothing will get done on day two of the weekend. So the second round of feelings of failure and self-loathing set in.
But then comes the awareness that Sunday is the Christian Sabbath, so we can now, in the absence of any accomplishments on Sunday besides going to worship, pronounce that we are observing the Christian Sabbath today after observing the Jewish Sabbath yesterday. So what appeared to be a weekend of epic failures ends with us being reclassified as a spiritual giants because we've’ve observed both the Jewish and Christian Sabbaths.
Now that I've given this some thought, I think I know what I'll say the next time someone says to me, “How was your weekend?” I think I'll just tell them, “I had a great weekend. I was a good Christian, and I was a good Jew. How about you?”