By Canon Chris Palmer
It’s Bank Holiday weekend. It’s the last decent break of the summer, before we get back into the rhythm of work and term time and Autumn. A chance to hit the beach whilst it’s still sunny, and the sea is warm. An opportunity to be in the garden into the evening before the nights draw in.
We use the word ‘holiday’ to mean a break from work or time away from home. But, of course, the word ‘holiday’ is really ‘holy day’. The word means a festival in the churches year, a day of liturgical or religious significance when work was suspended in order to keep the feast the better.
We’ve lost the spiritual meaning of the word in modern English. But I wonder whether in the process we’ve also lost the spiritual significance of rest and time off. We easily invest work with meaning. We use words like vocation and calling to describe our work, implying that we are discovering God’s purpose in our labour. We might even talk about cooperating with God’s creativity, if we’re engaged in work that beautifies the world or manufactures what is useful.
But aren’t not working, resting, and taking time away also spiritually meaningful. Rest isn’t merely the gaps between work, it is an endeavour in its own right. Rest is the time for recreation, which of course is ‘re-creation’ – another way of joining in God’s creativity. Rest is the time for friends and family, that is for honouring the relationships which are part of our vocation. Rest is a time for reflection, pilgrimage, and celebration – all of which are ways of noticing God’s presence and purpose, even when we don’t name God specifically.
The Jewish tradition, of course, invests rest with a sense of obedience to God’s will in laws about the Sabbath, the seventh day of the week when work was forbidden. The Hebrew scriptures – the Old Testament – clearly see the command to observe the sabbath, not to work one day in seven, as a way of honouring God. Indeed, resting is taking a leaf out of God’s own book, because God also rested on the seventh day of creation. Even creativity is not all activity, but ends in stopping!
We live in a non-stop world, in which shops are open every day, news services constantly bombard us with information, and mobiles phones mean we’re endlessly available. But this becomes oppressive. Sometimes we need a sabbath rest from all this.
Of course, for rest to become true ‘holy day’, for it to ‘re-create’ us and those around us, it needs to be more than just booking time off – though that’s a start. Rest needs to become a way of slowing our minds, stepping aside from the pressures that build nervous anxiety within us, finding ways of eating and sleeping and loving that honour the people and bodies and minds that God has given us, and allowing the cracks in life to open up to allow God’s light and grace to shine through.
And when we do this, we discover that we are far more than our productivity or usefulness. We are called to be, not merely to do. We are called to live, not just to labour.