sunday morning

My friend just received copies of his nth publication. When he told me the name, he got a disappointed look on his face. It’s a collection of Blues/Jazz piano arrangements of hymns and the like. “Hymns for a Jazzy Sunday Morning” was not his first choice of titles. He told me that he’d submitted “My Blue Hymnbook” as his title, but they didn’t even consider it. There are layers to that title, but I guess publishing companies aren’t interested in layers.
I tried to console him by telling him how much I liked the phrase, “Sunday Morning”. I’ve always been a sucker for songs, etc. with Sunday Morning in the title or lyric, or as a theme.
Sunday morning. There is something serene about the words. It must be association. To me it implies hope, peace, life, tranquility. That’s why I’m easy, I’m easy like a Sunday Morning. I play a guitar piece called “Sunday Morning Overcast”, by Andrew York. I always liked the sound of that title as much as the music. It implies permission to behave as we’re supposed to on Sunday. Even the sky is quiet with its eyes closed.
I always enjoy hearing a portion of St. Paul Sunday Morning on the radio on my way home from church. I always wished it was on Saturday night, but with the same title. Bill McGlaughlin’s voice sounds like Sunday Morning.
Then I thought of what was probably the first “Sunday Morning” song I’d ever heard. Yes, it’s that infamous year, 1973 again. It’s that giant with a scar in the black suit. “Sunday Morning Coming Down”. I had no idea what that song meant, but I felt the pain and loneliness without understanding it. “There’s nothing short of dyin’ that’s half as lonesome as the sound of the sleeping city sidewalk and Sunday Morning coming down.”
Its seems that for some, Sunday morning serves as the first coherent thought after an evening given to thought curing chemotherapy. The Saturday Night, a living, active metaphor for all that has gone wrong in life. As the song says, “echoes in the canyon like the disappearing dreams of yesterday.” Can you imagine facing a day made for joy with nothing but guilt, pain, abandonment?
But somewhere in the created memory of everyman is the faded, torn, recollection of something lost “somewhere, somehow along the way.” We may have never had it, but we do have a memory of it. Somewhere across the millennia, across time itself, it was there. Some seem to have found it again. It’s elusive but can be found. Cry out for it. It remembers you, your voice. The writer of that song found it again. Found Sunday mornings easy, once more. Found an easy yoke and light burden. Died 30 years later on a Friday morning and spent the weekend resting with the One he’d lost somewhere, somehow along the way.
That's the magic of Sunday Morning. Rise to life. New Day. Brand new creation. Hope is born.
I am resting.