As this magazine covers the summer months it seems appropriate to think about holidays. The origin of the word is of course to do with the Church: a holiday is a holy day, a day consecrated to the celebration of a religious festival for which people needed to be exempted from work. It is clear from the uses of the word in the Middle Ages that such days were often kept in a not entirely pious manner. Thus the golden curled parish clerk, Absalon, in Chaucer’s ‘Miller’s Tale’, used to go round the parish on holy days censing all the women but also casting ‘lovely looks’ on them. Nowadays the holy part of a holiday is now almost entirely forgotten except at Christmas and Easter. Whether your holidays include any ‘lovely looks’ I leave to your conscience. There is, however, I believe still a Christian way of spending a holiday.
First of all a holiday is a time to imitate our creator God on the seventh day of the first week and be radiantly inactive. This is difficult if you have children but perhaps it is possible for Mum and Dad to have some time to themselves during a holiday. The purpose of such a time is again to share in the divine appreciation of creation, ‘and God saw all that he had made and it was very good.’ To do this you don’t have to be sitting on a balcony overlooking the Mediterranean and sipping a cocktail. Toiling up a hill to look at a view, wondering at the architecture of an ancient cathedral, splashing about in a rock pool looking for crabs, taking days out to visit new places near where you live, or just appreciating a good meal you haven’t had to cook are all ways of imitating God. After all the order of creation is the order of a meal (as Anthony Burgess pointed out in his novel ‘Earthly Powers) – order out of chaos (interpreting the menu) light out of darkness (lighting the candles), the seas (soup) vegetation (salad) fish, and fowl, and then the human beings who being unfallen and therefore godlike were themselves able to create cheese and puddings. Holidays should be a time for special meals!
The biblical concept of rest involves more than radiant inactivity, however; we are ‘rested’ by the exchanges of love and friendship so holidays should also be a time for renewing relationships. Holidays are also a time for laying to rest our anxieties and preoccupations, a time for tidiness of spirit and long perspectives when you leave work behind together with the post, the telephone, the blackberry and even perhaps newspapers and television. At such a time it may also be possible therefore to begin to think about the things you really value and the direction you really want to travel in. As the book of Ecclesiasticus puts it, ‘The wisdom of the learned man cometh by opportunity of leisure; and he that hath little business shall become wise.’
Guidebooks are often something we take on holiday. Guide books began to be popular in the 19th century as the early modern tourist found himself in need of instruction as he struggled round ancient ruins, museums, galleries and churches. The best known were published by Karl Baedeker of Leipzig (with fascinating descriptions of local etiquette and customs – in London in 1923 men didn’t raise their hats to other men and kept their hats on in public places though not in lifts when ladies were present.) Most familiar to the English were the guidebooks, coloured a rosy red, which were published by John Murray. Cardinal Manning once spoke of an Italian sacristan who, deeply impressed by the piety of the English, asked about the red prayer-book which they always carried and read so devoutly in churches. Nowadays perhaps alongside a guidebook and a novel we might also pack a book on spirituality.
Though we may like to think of ourselves on holiday as a traveller rather than a tourist, the word tourism has interesting origins. A tour derives from a Latin word meaning movement round a central point. Tourism suggests the action of movement around a circle – a round trip, leaving from and returning to the same point. And that might remind those with a taste for quotations of some words of TS Eliot and the definition of God as a circle whose centre is everywhere and circumference nowhere. Wherever we travel we move in God and the activity of God includes everyone we meet on our journey. Holidays are a time both for expanding our experience of the church and a challenge to our definition of our neighbour. And Eliot of course reminds us that ‘the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.’ He did not, of course, have holidays in mind, but it is true that, the experience of the unfamiliar casts new light on what is familiar. The more seriously we attend to the experiences which travel may give us the more we shall see and value in our own surroundings; we may even return determined to be look harder and make more of that ‘Sabbath rest which remaineth to the people of God’ – something to be looked for all the year round. We might learn to imitate the film star, Spencer Tracy, who when asked what he looked for in a script replied, ‘Days off”.
Bon voyage,
THANK YOU to all who made the ordination here such a special occasion; To Judy and to our efficient and alert team of servers, to Lee, David and the musicians, to all who cleaned and decorated the church and welcomed our guests, to Bill and Diana and the sidesmen, to Angela James for all her work on the order of service, to Elizabeth Beesley and Andrew Penny and all their helpers in providing the reception and of course to Emma for being our curate.
The Vicar Writes
Stephen Tucker