By Clare Boyd-Macrae
Right now I’m on holidays. Two blissful weeks in the beach shack my forbears built nearly 100 years ago. It doesn’t get much better than this. Don’t care what the weather does. If it’s hot we swim endlessly. If the weather turns wintery, as it often does on this part of the coast, there is an open fire to light after long, blustery walks by the shore. Whatever the weather, there are sleep-ins, good food and wine, time for uninterrupted conversation and a massive pile of mouth-watering books.
Sounds pretty good. But here’s a conundrum. The truth of the matter is that I find holidays difficult, and I suspect that I’m not alone in this. It’s not that I’m a workaholic. Simply that I feel guilty about taking time off, in a world where there is so much to do. As a result, I find it hard to switch off, not from my work so much as the traumas I read about in the daily papers, and those I know personally who are in pain.
I suspect that lots of dinki-di, driven, it-all-depends-on-me Uniting Church types share my experience of holidays tinged with guilt. People like us are happiest, or certainly least anxious, when we are working our butts off, doing our tiny bit to make the world a better place.
In the UCA – our beloved church which is so full of committees and activism, where even our liturgy tends to be written afresh each week – a casual observer would be forgiven for deducing that we really believe if we just work a bit harder, we will actually fix the world and hasten the coming of the Reign of God in all its fullness.
While being theologically suspect this approach can generate some positive results. We get a lot done, and that’s not a bad thing. It becomes dangerous, however, when this ‘drivenness’ makes us forget about grace. Grace is the core Christian conviction about God’s basic disposition towards us, namely unconditional love, love that cannot be earned, love that is poured upon us whether or not we are being ‘good’ or ‘busy’.
One of the most effective and beautiful traditional Judeo-Christian ways of reminding us about grace is the practice of Sabbath – one day a week where we take our cue from the Creator and do no work. The divine mandate is for the community to rest, to reconnect with each other, with themselves, with God. And holidays (holy days) are to the year what Sabbath is to the week.
Of course any lifestyle coach will tell you that it is important to take time off for good physical and psychological reasons. For Christians, however, it’s deeper than that. Sacred rest is a spiritual discipline. Certainly it restores our bodies, minds and souls. Even more importantly, it reminds us of grace.
When I take holidays and deliberately switch off and rest for a week or two, it is my way of re-learning two vital things. That God’s love for us is not dependent on anything we do. And that it is ultimately God who will bring about God’s Reign. In turn, this fills me with refreshment and energy to go back and do my tiny bit to humbly partner with God again as a faltering agent of God’s light and life.
Clare Boyd-Macrae blogs at www.clareboyd-macrae.com
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