The Sunday Blues

For a couple years now my wife and I have talked about what we call the “Sunday blues.”

Maybe you know it by another name, but it’s that feeling that comes around every Sunday morning in the days, months, and years after you leave ministry.

A low-grade melancholy. An inexplicable sadness. A surprising anger. A weight in your chest. And some mornings just a generous dose of textbook depression.

We didn’t know it was the Sunday blues, at least not at first.

We’d just have these days where we’d think “It’s beautiful outside. I’ve had bagels and a big cup of coffee. Why do I feel so damn sad?” Or “why am I snapping at my kids?”

Bessel van der Kolk has a book by the title The Body Keeps the Score.

The Sunday blues are a reminder that the body is, in fact, pretty good at remembering.

It remembers Sunday’s early mornings and long days. It remembers the prayer and preparation. It remembers the sense of significance, the singing, and the electric rush of feeling like what you’re doing really, really matters. It remembers the communion & the community, the sermons & songs.

And so what happens when you take a body that has accumulated years and years of Sundays in church, of Sundays full of activity and emotion and connection, and take it out of that environment? Not just for a week or two, but for months?

What happens when you take a day that was at one time the pinnacle of your week and make it just… another day?

Grief. That’s what happens.

Enough grief that, as it turns out, bagels can’t solve. (I tried)

Even if you stand back and question whether what you were doing in church was meaningful, there’s no escaping that it meant something to you. That’s why Sundays hurt so bad.

A few years back I wrote this prayer:

“It’s a sad irony that a day for resurrection and rest can feel each week like grieving a death.

The death of faith,

of an enchanted world,

of conviction and clarity,

of community of knowing my place,

of what was as a kid my favorite day of the week.

Some mornings it has even felt like the death of me.”

It also turns out that neither going back to church or skipping church ease the Sunday blues (I tried both. You’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t.)

The Sunday blues can come for you in the form of guilt, loneliness, and sadness at home, or anxiety, grief, and fury (perhaps towards that pastor with the Australian accent) at church.

Either way, the Sunday blues come one day a week.

So what do you do with the Sunday blues?

You wait.

I know that’s a crappy answer, but it’s what worked for me.

I’ve tried everything from beer to screens to brunch to muscling through a megachurch service. But nothing has relieved the Sunday blues apart from waiting – each Sunday feeling the sadness and looking at Maddie as one of us asks, “the Sunday blues?” and the other says “yeah.”

Do that for months (and in my case years),

leave space for all that pain,

and follow it (whether to church or not)…

and you might find that the Sunday blues don’t necessarily go away, but they do start to feel a little bit smaller.

To where now there are some Sundays where the blues don’t come around. We go to Bagel Church (our most consistent congregation the last few years) or actual church and feel okay.

Is that every Sunday? No way. But most Sundays the blues are a bit smaller and call less often than they used to.

And, given time and waiting, I hope you begin to hear from the Sunday blues a bit less too.

After all, I’ve heard some stories about life rearing it’s head on the other side of death, grief, and waiting. Maybe it will for you too.

-Collin