The Sunday Night Draper of Eternity

Lauren and I used to watch Mad Men on Sunday nights, but the show was so relentlessly dark and my moods were so blue that I tapped out about halfway through the series. A year or two later, I was reading a Q&A by sportswriter and owner of Grantland (now The Ringer) Bill Simmons in which a mailbag writer talked about Mad Men being great but also made the Sunday night blues way worse (a lot of people call these the Sunday scaries). Simmons agreed and renamed those feelings the Sunday Night Draper. He went further and said that Labor Day weekend was typically the kickoff of school, shorter days and less sun, more stress, and so forth, and he dubbed the evening of Labor Day “the Sunday night Draper of the whole year.”

Man, do I feel that, and I sort of think there are three of them: Labor Day, Sunday after Thanksgiving, the evening of New Year’s. I was a lay bishop in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for close to six years. Like a priest in other churches, a bishop hears confessions, does pastoral counseling, visits the sick and afflicted and so forth. Sometimes, the depth and breadth of people’s suffering was so overwhelming that I often felt as though I needed to go to a shed and cuss for half an hour just to purge some of the feeling. When I was a teenager, I gave up watching football on Sunday in order to do better about keeping the Sabbath Day holy.

As a bishop, I backslid on this vow because football was the one thing that helped me de-stress and prepare for the week. When Sunday Night Football was introduced, I went to the basement while Lauren watched Mad Men in the family room.

Halfway through my time as bishop, I started noodling around with family history. This is a big plus among Latter-day Saints. Our theology holds that we can help save our previously unbelieving dead by searching out their records and being baptized on their behalf in temples. Through this, Latter-day Saint leaders tell us, we can become saviors on Mount Zion in the company of all those grateful dead.

I got really good at family history. I did an hour or two every Sunday. Even better, I could use my laptop and do it while watching football! I found thousands of relatives in my lines and in Lauren’s (I know way more about her family history than she does). Lauren is super elite since she descends from five different Mayflower passengers. I am LDS royalty because I had ancestors in the tragic Martin Handcart Company. Knowing members of the Church are like, “Is that where you get your questioning of Church authority and know-it-all attitude—the handcart leaders who ignored Church leadership and started across the plains too late in the year?” (If you know, you know.)

I descend from various American Revolutionaries and could definitely qualify for the SAR. Yay, ancestors! Unfortunately, those ancestors were also unrepentant slaveholders who perpetuated the peculiar institution over generations and fought in the Confederacy to preserve it. Boo, ancestors! So I have researched many, many enslaved people and their descendants, then created trees in FamilySearch for them so that others can add to them.

If some of the language here makes you uncomfortable, I get it. It makes me uncomfortable: “saviors on Mount Zion” sure sounds a lot like the paternalistic white savior types who created a problem then anointed themselves the people to deliver others from it. I don’t have an easy rejoinder to that—families are complicated. And this is a critical point: at least some of the former enslaved were listed as mulatto in postbellum census records. I imagine I don’t need to explain how that happened, right? It suffices to say that DNA will probably soon reveal cousins whose appearances would surprise those who have not researched.

So am I spending Sundays in this way out of a sense of guilt? Sure. But not over these heavier issues. I am not responsible for my ancestors’ actions—good or bad. They make me neither special nor evil.

I am pretty worried about keeping the Sabbath Day holy, though, and my inability to do so. Two wrongs don’t make a right. But do a right and a wrong cancel each other out in the great ledger in heaven? Allegedly not. “No unclean thing can enter” into the presence of God. So says our scripture. In that sense, my ancestors are probably going to get off easy—they sinned in ignorance and then I helped save them. I sin knowingly and hope for the best.

No wonder Sundays are scary!

I hope when I die there’s a big party for me with all those dead I helped. I hope the Lord lets me enjoy that for a few minutes before the darkness of Sunday descends and I lock arms with Don Draper and trundle off to Monday.