“We’re all going on a summer holiday,” sang Cliff Richard. The idea of ‘holiday’ is an interesting one; the etymology of the word is not hard to see. It comes from ‘holy day’, in other words a time when Christians would get together to celebrate a particular event in the life of Jesus or to remember one of the Saints. And the roots of this go as deep into the past as it is possible to go. The idea of time set apart for rest and relaxation goes back to the beginning of everything according to the Judaeo-Christian tradition. God is said to have rested on the 7th day of creation, and the notion of the Sabbath is that of spending time away from work in order to rest, and not just to laze around, but to spend time with family and with God.
The concept of the ‘holy’ is important here – not a word we use or much understand in modern parlance! But the word suggests the idea of being set apart as special. A holiday is simply the idea of setting a period of time apart as special.
In our part of the world we are blessed in that most of us are able to go on holiday. But research seems to be increasingly showing that we need time set apart not just during the summer but weekly and even daily; time apart from screens, time apart from work, even (dare I say it) time apart from the demands of our own appetites, from that voice within each of us that cries out for indulging in whatever we feel like doing. It seems like our world is becoming increasingly focused on, even obsessed with, the self, to the detriment of all the satisfaction and meaning that genuine altruism can bring. So let’s all take a holiday this summer, in every sense of the word.
Rev Oliver Strange
