No Vacation from God

By Russell Shaw
Herald Columnist
(From the issue of 7/1/04)

With vacation season hard upon us, a question comes to mind: Did the Holy Family take vacations? Surprisingly enough, I think the answer is yes. Or at least Jesus, Mary and Joseph took what were the equivalents of family vacations in their time and place.

These were the pilgrimages to Jerusalem that pious Jews made at the time of great religious feasts. We get a glimpse of one of these in St. Luke’s account of the finding of Jesus in the temple: "His parents went to Jerusalem every year at the feast of the Passover. … Supposing him to be in the company they went a day’s journey, and they sought him among their kinsfolk" (Lk 2:41-44).

The pilgrimages had a serious religious purpose, but they were fun. Families, neighbors and friends traveled together. "There was a continual singing, the sound of innumerable voices chanting the famous psalms of pilgrimage to the tune of popular songs," says historian Henri Daniel-Rops. "The Passover was a very cheerful feast."

There’s a lesson here. The philosopher Joseph Pieper points out (in his book Leisure: The Basis of Culture) that ever since the French Revolution secularizers have labored to turn our public celebrations — and our vacations — into exclusively secular events. And they’ve had much success.

But it doesn’t work in the long run. True leisure is intimately linked to celebration, and at the heart of any celebration worth the name is something religious. "There is no feast that does not draw its vitality from worship and that has not become a feast by virtue of its origins in worship. … A feast ‘without gods,’ and unrelated to worship, is quite simply unknown," Pieper remarks.

This isn’t just a pious thought. Many people have trouble enjoying their vacations. Look around you at any amusement park or boardwalk — not to speak of any singles bar — and you’ll see what I mean. At least some of the people you see will probably be making themselves visibly wretched trying to have a good time.

Two vacation-related mistakes are typical.

Busy-ness is one — the rat race of frenzied activities that leave people exhausted in body and soul. The other is idleness, a condition frequently terminating in boredom, drinking, quarreling and other ugly behavior. (As St. Josemaria Escriva shrewdly remarked, "even to rest is not to do nothing: it is to relax with activities that require less effort.")

At the heart of this problem, I suspect, lies the error of seeing a vacation as an occasion for time off from God. That frustrates the purpose of the vacation by severing its link to authentic leisure grounded in contemplation and prayer. And then? "The vacancy left by absence of worship is filled by mere killing of time and boredom," Pieper remarks.

The point isn’t that in planning a vacation you count on spending all your time in church. There’s no reason to think the Holy Family did that. The suggestion is simply that, for the sake of the vacation itself — and for the sake of leisure — you find time, in a way that is natural and spontaneous, to stay in touch with God.

But let Joseph Pieper have the last word:

"Leisure is not simply the result of external factors, it not the inevitable result of spare time, a holiday, a weekend or a vacation. It is an attitude of the mind, a condition of the soul. Leisure implies an attitude of non-activity, of inward calm, of silence; it means not being ‘busy,’ but letting things happen."

Another name for that is prayer.

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