Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy. For six days you shall labour and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work [...] For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it.
- Exodus 20:8-11

One of the ways in which we as St Mary’s express our identity as a Christian and Anglican school is in keeping Sunday as the sabbath. While the scheduling of events outside St Mary’s campus on a Sunday is beyond our control, no events take place on a Sunday on campus. This enables our girls and our staff (both teaching and support staff) to take a day of much-needed rest. It is a day that does not contain scheduled activities and which, therefore, gives all the opportunity to attend worship services and to spend time together with family and friends, should they so choose. Maintaining a Sunday as a day of rest, on campus, is not new – it has been the practice of the school for years.

Walter Brueggemann (2014), in the preface to his book Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now, states that “in our own contemporary context of the rat race of anxiety, the celebration of sabbath is an act of both resistance and alternative” (page 55). How apt an act, in our society today. I commend the book to your reading.

Revd Claudia Coustas