A cat, a cradle, and a Sunday challenge

Perhaps the most practical and inexcusably overlooked of the 10 commandments is the fourth one, which implores the children of Israel to chill the heck out one day a week.

“Remember the Sabbath Day, to keep it holy,” is how it was miraculously imprinted upon those stone tablets, a command aimed at those gathered at Mount Sinai and, by proxy, me at 394 Main Road, and maybe you, wherever you are. Today, in 2015, the pursuit of holiness doesn’t come up much in casual conversation. (Coveting things — your neighbor’s wife, or house, or Harley, or donkey, and taking the Lord’s name in vain in your enviousness — gets way more airplay.)

But when you read the small print of the fourth commandment, you’re bound to be delighted. Essentially the deal is that after six days of labor, thou shalt not do any work, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, nor thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates. Apparently, because God was tuckered out on the seventh day of creation and presumably lounged by the brand new seas and engaged in some bird watching, we have every right to be tuckered out, too, and lounge around His creation.

I’ve only recently deduced why a friend of mine has so many unfinished home repair projects. It’s because he keeps holy the Sabbath in all its traditional, prescribed ways: Church, followed by a full day enjoying time with his wife and three children. That leaves little time for chores. Indeed, after 18 months, three piles of fir flooring remain in bundles in his upstairs hallway, and the back of his house is only partially sided.

“It’ll get done,” he says. I’m not certain that’s true, but I am certain his disarray isn’t the sign of negligence and laziness. Rather it’s the sign of a guy who understands that his children are growing up quickly and that he better enjoy them before he drops dead.

I’ve coveted my neighbor’s resolve.

This summer, my deck has gone unstained, the vegetable garden is only three-quarters planted, its fencing still not secured, and anyone who snoops around probably concludes I now live like a slob. Yes, I have undertaken an experiment of keeping holy the Sabbath Day (particularly the fine print), nary lifting a shovel or a paintbrush. As an obsessive compulsive, I grow existentially disturbed by unfinished projects. But my wife and our boy are psyched by this weekly ceremonial disengagement from the forward-heaving herd to explore the wondrous wild places in the greater hill country. We hike places we’ve never been to, and we find lakes to sit beside, swim within and paddle above.

Back when I was a self-righteous teen and disdainful of the adult world with its seemingly myopic chase of money and career, I latched on to the writings of that transcendentalist slacker and backwoods bard Henry David Thoreau who famously sentenced himself to solitary confinement on the banks of Walden Pond to figure out the facts of life. He famously wrote: "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

Now older and wilier, I respectfully suggest that’s a lot of pressure to put upon oneself, particularly when one works three jobs and barely has time to chew his own food. We who sometimes feel like office slaves in a Dilbert comic strip—our soul waning, its reflected light blocked by the orb of an oppressive mortgage payment—already know the essential facts of life: You’ve got to scramble your way through it and insure yourself against future regrets. I can live with chores left unfinished, but it’d be disastrous to grow into old age having not spent enough time with family.

Here’s a little test: If, as a father, you find yourself driving along, flipping the stations and settling on “Cat’s in the Cradle” by Harry Chapin, and if you find yourself idly humming along untroubled, it’s time to make haste to keep holy the Sabbath Day. On the other hand, if you think “Cat’s in the Cradle” is the scariest song you’ve ever heard — ever — maybe we’ve run into each other at a lake or hiking trail on the Sabbath Day. Indeed, that awful song serves as a how-to guide in how not to be father.

For review, a child is born. The father is a hard-working yet self-centered jerk. The boy wants his father’s attention — to play catch, things like that — but the father is always too busy for him. Years go by. Promises are left unfulfilled. The son grows up and leaves home whereby the father now wants his attention, but now the son is too busy. I have no clue what role the “cat” and the “cradle” play in this tragedy, but it’s a God-awful song and probably a spot-on depiction of many parent-child relationships when there’s been a failure to keep holy the Sabbath.

We’re three weeks into unshackling ourselves from the duller pursuits of adulthood one day a week. To heck with the unstained deck. It’s pressure-treated anyway, and you can’t even see it from the road.