I was raised in a church-going family. From an early age, I had instilled in me the habit of attending services on Sunday morning, followed by a family brunch. It became ingrained in me to have a day each week centered on spiritual and moral reflection.
For people who grow up with a similar practice, grounded in a faith tradition, but who then move on, how do they experience that time of the week? If they were raised Christian, what does Sunday morning feel like to them?
These questions came to mind when I recently listened to Kris Kristofferson's hit song, “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” one of the great, sad country songs.
In the song, the narrator wakes up hungover on a Sunday morning and wanders through town, lost and purposeless. He smells fried chicken cooking:
And it took me back to somethin'
I'd lost somehow, somewhere along the way.
Later in his wandering, he hears a Sunday school choir, and then a church bell. He sings:
And there's nothing short of dyin'
Half as lonesome as the sound
On the sleepin' city sidewalks
Sunday morning coming down.
A few years after he wrote this song, Kristofferson had a conversion experience while attending a Tennessee church. From that experience, he wrote the gospel-influenced “Why Me Lord?,” also a big hit.
And then, at age 77, he wrote “Feeling Mortal:”
God Almighty here I am
Am I where I ought to be
I've begun to soon descend
Like the sun into the sea
And I thank my lucky stars
From here to eternity
For the artist that you are
And the man you made of me
As I reviewed “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” it reminded me of a poem from my life as a college English major, “Sunday Morning” by the modernist poet Wallace Stevens.
In this poem, a woman ruminates on the meaning of life without Christianity and on what happens after death. The objects around her, while beautiful, are fleeting. They seem like they are:
Winding across wide water, without sound.
She wonders if she can find the divine in “comforts of the sun,” in the experiences of daily life … or if “divinity must live within herself.”
The poem includes the famous phrase, “Death is the mother of beauty.” It is the fleeting nature of all things, of impermanence, that enables us to create something new and to recognize the beautiful.
But even as she considers rejecting religious myth and embracing a secular view, she says:
"But in contentment I still feel
The need of some imperishable bliss"
The poem closes with the image of the tomb in Palestine and this haunting visual:
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambigous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.
Stevens was raised in the church but struggled with questions of religious faith throughout his life. In 1955, it was reported by those present that he had a deathbed conversion to Catholicism, though that was later disputed by his daughter.
So here we have two reflections on Sunday morning, one coming from the very down-to-earth world of country music, the other from the academic world of modernist poetry. Kristofferson concludes his poem with the image “sleepin' city sidewalks” whereas Stevens presents us with pigeons swirling into the darkness.
Of course, there is a very good chance that Kristofferson had read “Sunday Morning." Like me, he majored in English as an undergrad. He was then a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, where he wrote this thesis on the mystical religious poet, William Blake.
Perhaps he picked up on this theme from Stevens, and decided to give us a more down-home version as he woke one Sunday morning, and went looking for his “cleanest, dirty shirt"!