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 PrintableVersion Letter from AmericaHolidays and holy daysAnother holiday season is coming to an end as I write and I wonder ‘What is the point of it all?’ If I remember rightly from my early modern history at Cambridge, summer holidays (as a distinct and expected season of rest for a large majority of the population) is a fairly recent invention. Harvest originsIt bears the rhythm of the farm. School summer holidays the world over were set around the particular cycle of the climate with relation to harvest to enable the maximum possible number of young willing (or not so willing) labourers to help out in the fields getting in the harvest. But the ability to take extended periods of paid leave every year from gainful employment depends upon an economic infrastructure, a degree of social wealth, which, I seem to remember learning, was the creation of modernity (and, when a Cambridge historian says ‘modern’, they don’t mean the last ten years but pretty much anything after the Middle Ages, or thereabout). Real restBut, all that being said, rest is not a creation of a relatively novel socio-economic contract that is historically rooted in various political and financial arrangements in modern European history. Rest, if we believe our Bibles, is commanded of God in the Ten Commandments. Rest is something, we are told, that God did and that, therefore, we are to do as well. In an alternative piece of theological logic, we are told that rest is rooted in the experience of God’s people of being rescued from Egypt. Rest, then, reminds us of our dependence upon God for our existence and for our salvation. Rest, therefore, is not simply an opportunity to ‘recharge our batteries’. I find increasingly that my batteries need more and more frequent recharging, which is the curse of the sun-drenched plains of the apparently unending labours of creaky middle age. I have nothing against a good recharge; in fact, I recommend it to you right now. But rest is more than recuperation, though it is certainly not less than that. What is it for?We are not, you see, homo economicus, where the purpose of a holiday, and of rest, is to make us more productive for the economic labours for which we were really made. Certainly labour is to be worshipful, and in God’s order can have meaning, even though it is tarnished by meaninglessness in this world according to the teaching of the Teacher of Ecclesiastes. Work was intended to be good. But we were not made for the factory, nor the desk. We were made for God: and factories, farms, offices, art, science, labour of any kind all overflow from this one true origin of ourselves as belonging to God both naturally and redemptively. I say all this (in Letter from America), because, anecdotally, Americans tend to have briefer holidays than their British counterparts. Statistics seem to bear the stories out: I am told that some have estimated that vacations have shrunk from an average of a week’s vacation 25 years ago to only four days. There are all sorts of reasons for this, and various complexities that such anecdotes and figures inevitably mask. And it may be that the British love their grand old summer hols a bit too much. Still, the Bible seems to suggest an intrinsic value for the Christian to be placed upon rest for its own sake. My guess is that if I do that I will be more productive. I also guess that if I rest in order to be more productive I probably won’t be. Josh Moody,
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