Give it a rest.

Whether you find sustenance in the Eucharist or your family's gobs-of-pasta Sunday dinner, whether you get wrapped up in your garden or the music of Miles Davis, honoring the Sabbath is an essential anchor to living a spiritual life

ON SUNDAY MORNING THE UNDERSIGNED groans awake, pads out to the hallway, and summons his twin sons from their slumbers, ungently. After some minor nutrition this rumpled trio sets sail for Sunday school, where the patriarch holds forth as the nominal teacher, and the younger men, accompanied by many other electric small people, teach the teacher about grace and love and wiggling in chairs and drawing pictures of the teacher's nose that look like nothing so much as a series of Mounts Rushmore.

After this adventure the man and his sons shuffle over to Mass, where they meet the female members of their nuclear family, and generally the man and the woman pay close attention--the man because he is absorbed by stories and magic, and the woman because she wishes always to be moved and startled by what sometimes happens in a Mass, which is to say a shafted arrow to the heart disguised as a word, or a phrase, or the Eucharist, or a song, or a child grinning, or the way the priest exuberantly rings out communicants' names when he hands them the miraculous splinter: "The Body of Christ, Peter!"

Then back to barracks for various and arcane family matters, which usually include chess and laundry and editing the garden, and which conclude, most important, with early dinner, all together, always a monument to chaos and hubbub and laughter.

And here's the nut of this story: I think that dinner is holy, in that it is the key to my family's observance of the Sabbath. To me it is more important, at an elemental spiritual level, than Sunday school or even the Mass, much as I love that miraculous communal theater.

Our Sunday gobs-of-pasta dinner is where we are gathered as a clan in regular and ritual gratitude for the grace of God in making us a family, and keeping us, for a flashing moment, together, healthy, warm, fed, in love. It is the anchor of our week, a tradition, a ritual, a thing set apart, a sweet meal unlike the hurried and harried weekday repasts, riddled as they are by work and practices and traffic and such. It is the base from which we try to build a family unit that will be not only a sum greater than its parts, but a shafted arrow in its own right--seeking to puncture the sadness and loneliness of others, to do what we can to see and serve the flitting figure of Christ .in every person we meet.

In fact, our Sunday pasta party is a form of respectful, if loud and bubbly, prayer; and I believe that for us, and perhaps for all people who believe in God, something like it is crucial to a rich spiritual life. We need a day apart, a day to pray--in whatever of the million forms of prayer we prefer.

HOW ANCIENT IT IS, THE HOLY DAY, THE DAY SET APART, the Day of Contemplation, taken out of the line of its peers by human tribes for aeons longer than we know! And the need and command of it ring from the records we have. Exodus: "Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy ... for this is a sign between Me and you throughout your generations." Leviticus: "... a Sabbath of solemn rest, that you may humble your souls." Psalm 92, a song for the Sabbath day: "I will sing for joy at the works of Thy hands."

Matthew tells of Jesus on the Sabbath healing a man with a withered hand and causing the blind to see and the mute to speak. There were grumbles against him for this sweet work on the Sabbath, but did he not tell them that compassion was the rule of the Sabbath? And Luke tells of Jesus standing proudly and reading aloud on the Sabbath--reading Isaiah predicting Jesus, that he had been "sent to set free those who are downtrodden."

And John tells us of Christ healing the lame on the Sabbath and making clay of his spit and healing the blind, and the Acts are filled with Saint Paul giving riveting speeches on Sabbaths, and walking, walking, walking as tired and rapturous and diligent in his working prayer as Jesus was.

I begin to think, in my middle years, that it doesn't matter how or when or how long we observe the Sabbath; it matters only that we do. You play with the children, let us say, though there is much to be done in the house and many chores grumbling for attention. You order the riotous jungle that is your garden.

You call your mother, which you always say you are going to do but do not. Or you kneel, there in the brown shriveled grass and flecks of dirty snow that was your garden, and you pray to the Mother for your mother, who died and left a ragged hole you will never fill. You read, perhaps--Thomas Merton, Flannery O'Connor, Andre Dubus, Annie Dillard.

You watch the sparrows, who do not spin, neither do they reap. You listen to Bach, Van Morrison, Miles Davis--listen intently, listen for the divine ache in the music, the shining bars of mathematical rapturous prayer.

You paint the kitchen meticulously, even behind the stove, even the backs of the cabinets, as a form of swirling prayer.

You mow the lawn of the ancient woman down the street even though in your heart of hearts you detest her with the detestation of three men.

You drive to the hospital on the hill and there, with your heart sagging, you enter the pediatric intensive care unit and sit yourself down in a rocking chair and hold babies who cannot move and will never move but in their eyes is a flicker of desperate energy because they are alive; and you look angrily and humbly in their endless eyes for the fingerprints of he who made them, made them even in their awful brokenness, made them to be held and loved, for reasons we do not and will not understand.

THE SABBATH IS MAYBE A DAY TO SET AGAINST ALL YOUR days like a compass, an arrow, a mold for the making of other days.

So who are we, I ask you, to let the Sabbath slide anonymously into the amorphous Weekend? Who are we to not set a time apart for quiet contemplation, or for active prayer in service of the Christ in every face, or for silent desperate gratitude that God has seen fit to give us the capacity to love?

And I say: It doesn't matter how or when we observe the Sabbath. It only matters that we do.

I think such observance, in the endlessly creative and idiosyncratic ways in which we variously pray, is crucial.

What do you think?

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BRIAN DOYLE, editor of Portland magazine at the University of Portland, Oregon. He is the author of Credo (St. Mary's Press, 1999), a collection of essays.