The days of the week derive their names from gods: “Woden’s day” and “Thor’s day”. Tuesday, is “martes” in Spanish, for Mars, the god of war. Friday is “viernes” for Venus, the god of love. The pantheon changes according to the language and the culture, but the practice of respecting each day as sacred is good for the spirit any day of the week.
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“O we give thanks for this precious day.”
Every day is precious.
You’ve probably heard someone say, “Every day is a gift. That’s why they call it the present.”
Emerson spoke of this in the reading we used for our Call to Worship.
He looks out his study window at the rose bushes growing outside and says:
“These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God today.”
There is no comparison in them. Roses don’t worry that they aren’t beautiful enough, or wish they were a different color, or miss the stronger fragrance they had before they started to fade.
“they are for what they are; they exist with God today.”
Roses, don’t recognize passing time. They exist through time, of course. They change as time passes. But they know nothing of the conscious qualities of remembering the past and imagining the future. All they experience of existence is the single present moment, and whatever state they find themselves in right now.
Emerson says:
“There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence.”
Perfect in every moment of existence. O we give thanks for this precious day.
Emerson observes that in every moment, the nature of the rose is perfectly matched to that moment. It was different before, but that was then. It will be different tomorrow, but that’s for tomorrow, not for today.
For now, the rose, and all existence is exactly what “now” requires. It can be no other. The fullness of existence happens at every moment.
“Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower there is no more, in the leafless root there is no less. Its nature is satisfied and it satisfies nature in all moments alike.”
Emerson’s observation is that people experience our existence very differently from the way his roses do.
He writes:
“But we postpone or remember. We do not live in the present, but with reverted eye lament the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround us, stand on tiptoe to foresee the future.”
So his advice, for our spiritual health, is to live more like the rose.
He writes:
“We cannot be happy or strong until we too live with nature in the present, above time.”
Many years ago, I read a quote from Emerson that I have always loved and that I offer you for my worship theme today. I can’t find the reference, so I can’t quote it exactly but I’m sure it was from Emerson.
Emerson said that we should greet each new day as a god, or a goddess, if you will. That each new day is a divine being. That this divine being unique to the day comes into our lives as we awake each morning. And we have exactly one day with this particular divinity. And then as the day closes, and our eyes close to sleep, we say goodbye to that divinity never to see them again.
And thus, we should treat each new day with the exact, extravagant respect with which we would welcome a divine personage. We should let no day go by without acknowledgment and honor. We should humble ourselves beneath the gift of the day’s presence. And we should make all the use we can of that day’s particular divine powers, before we forever lose the chance.
That doesn’t mean that every day has to be spent on our knees in worship. Each day has its own character and is honored in its own way.
So it’s perfectly OK to say that today’s god is the god of naps. Or today’s god is the god of sitting on the couch. Or today’s god is the god of working in the garden, or the god of volunteering with my kid’s soccer team. Today might be the god of writing the quarterly report, or the god of debugging the database, or the god of grocery shopping.
Whatever the content of the day, the day itself is divine. An unrepeatable container for one divine experience. Even the god of feeling miserable. Or the god of hearing bad news.
This is the day when my life happens. “For all that is our life, we come with thanks and praise.” Why give over the god of this day in lamenting what we did or didn’t do with yesterday’s god? Why stand on tip toe trying to see tomorrow, when there’s a god already here today surrounding you with riches?
“O we give thanks for this precious day.”
It’s a great spiritual lesson.
And we have this awesome reminder to regard each day as a divinity because in fact our days are actually named for gods.
The Greco-Roman, and earlier Mediterranean cultures traditionally followed an eight-day week. The change to a seven-day week occurred gradually, from between the first and third centuries of the common era, corresponding with the rising influence of Christianity, which inherited the seven-day week from Jewish culture.
Originally, the seven days were named for the seven celestial objects that visibly move against the background of the stars, each of which was also associated with a particular divinity.
So we had the Sun’s day
Then the moon’s day. In Spanish Monday is Lunes, related to the word Lunar for the moon.
Tuesday is Martes is Spanish, from Mars, the planet, and the God of War.
Wednesday was named for Mercury or Hermes. Wednesday is Mericoles in Spanish.
Thursday is Jupiter’s day. Jove or Zeus is the god. Jueves is the Spanish name.
Friday is Viernes in Spanish. Or the day for the goddess of love, Venus. Keep that in mind when you’re planning your next date night.
And Saturday is Saturn’s day. The god of time. Or Sabado, in Spanish, for the sabbath.
In English, some of the Greco-Roman gods are still represented in our names for the days, plus we substituted a few others from the Norse and Germanic deities.
So Sunday is still the Sun’s day
And Monday is still the moon’s day.
Tuesday is named for the God named Tiw. That’s T I W in Old English, or T Y R in Old Norse. Tyr is the Norse god of war, the same way that Mars is associated with Tuesday, or Martes in Spanish. Tyr is also the God of justice. Tyr is a one-handed god. His lost his right hand when he and other god’s were working to trap a giant wolf that was causing trouble and the wolf bit off his hand. There’s a funny story in Norse mythology where Tyr’s brother, Thor (who we will get to in a moment) tells Tyr that he can’t serve as the right-hand of Justice when he doesn’t even have a right hand! Tyr is associated with man-to-man combat, and also the god of making pledges. So Tuesday might be a good day to sign a contract.
Wednesday is Woden’s Day. The same god as Odin. Tyr is a son of Wodin. Wodin, like Mercury, who gives us the name of the day in Spanish, is a god of magic and wisdom.
Thursday is Thor’s day. Thor is the god of thunder. Which also relates to Thursday being Jove’s day, who is also the god of thunder, and the guy who throws lightning bolts down to Earth. Thor is Tyr’s brother and another son of Wodin.
Friday is Frige’s Day. Frige’s is Wodin’s wife. She’s the goddess of marriage, childbirth, the home, the earth, and the harvest. Frige is associated with the planet Venus, called Frige’s star, which matches the Spanish name for Friday, Viernes.
Of course there are many variations in the day’s names from language to language and culture to culture. But it’s surprising how many cultures name the days in the same order and for the same celestial objects. It’s true in the Hindu cosmology, and in Chinese.
It has to do with those particular seven celestial objects being visible to the naked eye, and arranged in descending order of brightness. First the sun, then the moon, mars, mercury, Jupiter, venus, lastly, Saturn.
In Hebrew the names of the days are simply numbered.
Yom is the Hebrew word for “day”
Yom rishon means first day. That’s Sunday. Monday is second day, “Yom Sheni”. And so on.
Shabbat, though, doesn’t mean seventh day. Shabbat means, “rested” or “stopped working”. Shabbat is simply the name for Saturday. If you wish someone, “Shabbat Shalom” all you’re saying is, “Happy Saturday.”
From Shabbat, we get the English word Sabbath, which is the weekly day of worship.
Originally, Saturday was the Sabbath for Christians, just as for Jews. But when the Romans adopted Christianity they switched the Sabbath day to Sunday so it would coincide with the day that was already the festival day in the Roman religion. Christianity has a long tradition of putting its holidays on top of existing festival days in the indigenous culture. That way you can’t tell whether someone is celebrating the old pagan holiday or the new Christian holiday, and eventually the two assimilate into the same thing.
The reason the Seventh Day Adventists worship on Saturday is that they feel it’s important to preserve the original day of rest commanded by God in the Jewish tradition and not follow the bastard Roman practice of worshipping on the day of the Sun.
Sunday was originally the first day of the week, with Saturday being the seventh day, when God rested after the work of creation. When Sunday became the Sabbath day, in Christian cultures, they started to call it, “The Lord’s Day.” In English, we still call it Sunday. But in Spanish and other languages descended from Latin, Sunday is “Domingo” or the Lord’s Day.
And now, officially, according to the international standard for software, Monday is the first day of the week, and Sunday is the seventh day.
So gods and goddesses are threaded through our days. Gods of war and justice, and pledges, and wisdom, and magic, and the earth, and love. The god that rested and commands us to rest, too.
Today is a god, as Emerson reminds us. The day of the sun god, perhaps. Or the Lord’s Day, perhaps.
And although Sunday will come again next week, this Sunday will never come again.
“Oh we give thanks, for this precious day.”
As my time with you comes to a close, I am perhaps especially cognizant of the preciousness of each day.
We have only this day, to do this day’s work. We have only this day, to spend this moment of our lives together.
Each morning is an experience of saying “hello” to a brand new creation. A day of possibility. A day of freshness. Of becoming. Each of us is a brand new person each morning. Say hello to the new you. And each of your friends and every person you meet throughout the day is brand new that day, too.
It wasn’t them you met yesterday. That was someone else. This is someone new, today.
And each evening is an experience of leave-taking, of saying goodbye, to a day that will never come again. And saying goodbye to that person we were this morning who we have outgrown by the evening. We will never again be the person we are today. And the person we were yesterday, well that’s already yesterday’s news.
And every other person we meet throughout the day, a stranger, a loved one, will only be that person for just this day. We will never meet them again. As much as we love them, each day, we must let them go.
The days walk in, like divinities. And then they walk out again. They walk away.
Our children will soon outgrow being children. As we age we won’t be the younger selves we used to be. As our loved ones age, we need to love them for who they are today, rather than clinging to the person they were when we first fell in love.
Julie Means shared a meditation with me last week that eloquently expresses this lesson of our need to get comfortable in life with the ever-leaving quality of existence.
This is by a psychologist and author named Heidi Priebe
“To love someone long-term is to attend a thousand funerals of the people they used to be.
The people they’re too exhausted to be any longer.
The people they don’t recognize inside themselves anymore.
The people they grew out of, the people they never ended up growing into.
We so badly want the people we love to get their spark back when it burns out; to become speedily found when they are lost.
But it is not our job to hold anyone accountable to the people they used to be.
It is our job to travel with them between each version and to honor what emerges along the way.
Sometimes it will be an even more luminescent flame.
Sometimes it will be a flicker that disappears and temporarily floods the room with a perfect and necessary darkness.”
If each day is a particular divine being, then each day’s version of ourselves is also a particular form of divinity. We are the divine person we need to be today. Maybe that’s a divinity who is necessarily sad today. Or a goddess nursing a headache. Or a god receiving a challenging diagnosis. Maybe today’s divinity is bright and energetic, or creative and calm, or strong, or fired up. Maybe today’s divine person is thoughtful, or quiet, or removed.
We can be no other person than the person we are. Today. A person of inherent worth and dignity. Like the rose, whether bud, or flower, or leaf-less bare root, “perfect in every moment of its existence.”
And tomorrow we and our world will be a new divine creation. Welcome the divinity of the day. Let it walk among you. Let it bless you with whatever gifts it has to give. Pay it notice, and honor. Give thanks, for this precious day.
And when the day is done. Send it off with farewell. Say goodbye – God be with you. And let it go. Let it go.