Yesterday was intertesting.

After many months of thinking about it, and now that my “de-cluttering of the calendar” has opened the door to it, I took my first official, honest-to-goodness, no-compromises Sabbath day yesterday in the first time in — well, more than a decade.

Here’s what I did:

• Woke up around 8 a.m., made coffee, attended to the cats.
• Recited Lauds I from the Breviarium Romanum, editio typica MCMLXI — the last fully Latin, traditional version of the Divine Office before the Vatican II liturgical reforms. I’ve got a lovely three-volume set of the 1963 printing, re-set by Barionius Press. I blame Patrick for this situation. 🙂
• Read the second chapter from Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago (I’m on the first volume of a three-volume unabridged set).
• Showered, put on a suit, and went to Sacred Heart for the 12:30 Mass — Fr. Sirico celebrated a High Mass for the 2nd cl. feast of Blessed Virgin Mary of the Rosary. (Sacred Heart, every Sunday at 12:30, offers Mass according to the Extraordinary Form, the version using the 1963 edition of the Missale Romanum, which again pre-dates the Vatican II liturgical reforms. Of significance, both the old-style Mass and the old-style Divine Office are still permitted; they’re just not the ordinary forms of those liturgies.)
• Came home, changed into walking garb.
• Grabbed quick bite to eat.
• Went to the north trailhead for Kent Trails, near the old Coca-Cola bottling plant. Went on a 5.23-mile walk with a 16:32 pace (good for 1 hour, 29 minutes on the asphalt trail) and a good heart-rate distribution throughout. So, speed-walk but not a jog.
• Came home, showered again.
• Read chapters three through six of Gulag. Enjoyed a pear and a little bag of mixed nuts, and a ton of icy distilled water, as well as some lap time with Fiona d’Cat.
• Recited Compline.
• In bed by 10 p.m.

Here’s what I didn’t do:

• Touch my computer.
• Use my iPhone or Apple Watch for more than a grand total of five minutes of screen time, cumulatively, for the day. I checked the weather and set UA Record to track my walk and Spotify to play a symphony sampler. That’s it.
• Worry even a little about what my task list looked like.
• Chores or errands.

The great thing about yesterday was that it felt like a day. It didn’t fly by. It didn’t drag. It felt deliberate. And refreshing. And peaceful.

I recently watched the four 2018 debates between Jordan B. Peterson and Sam Harris about the utility of religion. I’ll have much more about that, later. For now, one thing that strikes me that Harris and the New Atheists overlook is that religious practices, honed over millennia, remain responsive to the rhythm-and-flow of human needs on a minute level.

Catholics have it on good authority that man wasn’t made for the sabbath, but sabbath for the man. Regardless of your own religious beliefs, there’s an essential kernel of truth there that the atheists and the not-very-observant lose at their peril. So this practice, I think, must now become my norm. Not that I’m complaining!

Oh, and as of this morning, I’m down nine pounds since my birthday. I’ve been tracking my weight since 2013 in MyFitnessPal. I’m now tied with the low point of 2017 — i.e., I’ve not been this “light” in two years, and I felt it in both the suit I wore yesterday as well as my jeans that I wore Saturday. Both cases, I needed to move in a notch on my belt. So, yay.