Vacation as Spiritual Discipline
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A series in the Cathy comic strip about vacationing caught my eye, perhaps because it was really about the opposite. In one sequence, a vacationing colleague calls Cathy to ask her to fax him a deal he had left her in charge of. In another, the only messages left for the boss are emails, faxes, and cell phone calls from “vacationing” employees, assuring him they’re easy to access if he needs them for anything.
This little series went on for quite awhile. You’d almost think they were onto some kind of phenomenon.
Then I read a business column whose author was upset at executives who do not get back to a newspaper columnist within a day of their phone call. That’s not good enough for business these days, the columnist asserts, and goes on to describe how one person called her back from the Olympic stadium while watching a gymnastics meet.
To which I say, Oh, come on. Get over yourself. Are we really so hooked into the working world that we can’t escape for a day or two? Or even watch a sports competition in peace without the interference of a phone call? We may have lost some of our ability to take vacation as seriously as it deserves.
There was, it seems, a time when… well, there was more time. When people had dinner together every night; when Sunday meant gathering with family and taking it easy; when weekends weren’t frantic, and going on vacation meant you were away from it all. I fear we’ve lost the capacity or even the inclination to let go and be gone. And with that, we’ve lost some important spiritual connections. That’s why I want to reclaim the Spiritual Discipline of Vacation.
We could blame our drift from the sanity of peaceful escape on the Technology Era—the instant access provided by cell phones and emails and social media, the changing expectations of availability, the fraying of boundaries between home and work. Yet, I know we’re fighting a bigger issue—a human drive.
This problem did not start with the Internet or even the telephone. I’m certain of that because there have always been religious strictures that push us to let go of all that distracts us from genuine living. That’s what I think the Jewish Sabbath laws are about.
I’m not just talking about rest. Of course we understand the need for rest, for a break. Everyone knows that a good night’s sleep makes most problems easier to tackle. And when the mind just isn’t on top, even a five minutes’ stretch on the couch can do wonders. What we’re after here, though, is bigger than that.
The biblical Book of Leviticus, part of the Torah, lays out these demands and fits them into an even larger calendar of taking it easy. Every seventh year, says Leviticus 25, you shouldn’t work the land. You can eat anything that just naturally grows on it, but tilling and planting and harvesting is out. This is the origin of our sabbatical, that is, the academic and religious practice of taking significant time away from the regular working grind every seven years.
This may seem esoteric to you. Who cares what rules a group of tribal people put together six or seven hundred years before the Common Era? Well, this matters because it reminds us that there has always been a need to tell people to stop, to chill, to take a break, a breather.
Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor has been practicing a weekly Sabbath for years. She sees it as quite different from the brief breaks most of us try to take. In an article in Christian Century titled “Sabbath Resistance,” she says, “Plenty of us take an hour here or there and call it Sabbath, which is like driving five miles to town and calling it Europe.” Taylor writes that for the first couple years of Sabbath-keeping, her mind swam with questions. Does looking at a catalog count as shopping? Is puttering in the garden work if I’m just entertaining myself?
By the third year, she became capable of resting without leaving home, letting all the work go when Sabbath came. She now describes Sabbath as “an experience of divine love that swamps both body and soul.”
It’s hard for contemporary people to understand such an experience occurring on a weekly basis. For many of us, even occasionally achieving it seems improbable. Summer, though, may be our opportunity to try to stretch our minds around this concept. Authors Gary Schmidt and Susan Felch have compiled what they call a “spiritual biography” of summer.
In summer, they say, time “does not seem to move; instead, time collects, or perhaps it might be better said to pool. To halt in our headlong rush. To be fully in a particular time. To stop long enough to see what lies around us, rather than to be always merely glimpsing.” Maybe now, in the summer, we can construct for ourselves this new/renewed/renewing sense of time. There is a reason that we are ready for vacation. There are lessons we can learn here.
Vacation invites us to go out and play. Remember going out to play when you were a child? You didn’t go out with any intention beyond play. And something happened. Maybe it was ball; maybe it was house. Maybe it was making mud pies or climbing trees or chasing lightning bugs. Whatever, it simply came into being from the gathered children, or from you alone. Play is spontaneous, fresh, lively, and
refreshing.
As adults we play when we set out to follow Route 66 and see what comes along. Or walk down an unfamiliar street to see where it leads. Or stream-walk—in the creek more than alongside it. When we remember how to plop down on the ground and stare up through the trees, and watch the clouds drift by. Some of us can set aside our adult judgments and play freely with our children or our grandchildren.
Play, it’s been said, is the work of children, what teaches them about the world. For us grown-ups, it’s our refreshment. Vacations remind us to play. And there are no Sabbath strictures against it, no matter what our puritanical forebears may have said.
Significant in playfulness is spontaneity. Part of what vacation frees us from is our regular routines. We don’t have to get up at our usual time. We eat different things, and when we feel like it, instead of on a schedule. We try something new—scuba diving or rock climbing or painting with watercolors. With nothing pressing to do, we notice the texture of the moss on rocks or the exact shade of blue of the lake. We take time to follow the song of the finch and try to catch a glimpse of bright feathers. Robbed of our routines, vacation demands spontaneity.
Sometimes we become most productive by letting go of the need to produce. Creativity, particularly, does not come when we are pressed for time. Rather, it grows out of the void, the emptiness, boredom—the same place that produces play, lightness, and spontaneity. Every creative artist knows that you have to let go and play with the ideas, the materials, and the arrangements to get there. You can’t force it.
How often do we keep ourselves from doing nothing because we are convinced we have too much we have to do? We can only let loose—go on vacation, or even take time in our everyday lives—if we can trust the world to go on accomplishing what it needs to get done without us. But it turns out that we are actually not crucial to the world staying on course. We become wrapped up in believing that our particular work, our peculiar approach is required, or all hell will break lose. It’s not true.
This is not to say that what we do doesn’t matter. We have to have a sense of purpose in our lives, an idea that we are making a real and valid contribution. The problem comes when we are so steeped in ego that we lose sight of our relatively small place in the scheme of the universe. Too easily, we get caught up in earning money, in producing things—essentially in making idols. Often, our egos are so tied to our achievements that they are very hard to release.
That’s why one of the spiritual lessons of vacation is letting go of our normal drive to achieve, to produce, to accomplish. And simply, instead, to be. It requires humility to understand that others will find a way to take over what we usually do, and they’ll do fine. Or it can just go undone—for a day or a week. It takes even more humility to realize others may do it differently, and maybe even better. Don’t you hate when that happens? But it’s good for us.
It leads us to play, spontaneity, creativity, and ultimately to gratitude. If we make space for the goodness of life to creep into our awareness, we cannot help but be grateful. It’s what we feel lying in a hammock in a gentle breeze. It’s our response to being overwhelmed with the love of family or friends surrounding us as we sing together or eat together or tell old stories that everyone already knows.
It’s not really about a particular time in the summer, or a particular day of the week, or even a particular event in our lives like a vacation. We can do vacation wrong, as Wendell Berry describes in his poem, “Vacation,” in which a man so diligently videotapes his trip down a river for later memory that he manages to entirely miss actually experiencing his vacation itself.
No, that’s not the way. The way is to be in it. To be in the moment—Sabbath or not, vacation or not; home, away; summer, winter, spring, fall—is core to all religious traditions.
Alan Watts quoted the T’ang master Lin-Chi as saying, “In Buddhism there is no place for using effort. Just be ordinary and nothing special. Eat your food, move your bowels, pass water, and when you’re tired go and lie down. The ignorant will laugh at me, but the wise will understand.”
Jesus said, “Consider the lilies of the field. They neither toil nor spin. Yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed as one of these.”
My favorite teacher, the Chinese Taoist Chuang Tzu, said, “Do not be an embodier of fame; do not be a storehouse of schemes; do not be an undertaker of projects; do not be a proprietor of wisdom. Embody to the fullest what has no end and wander where there is no trail. Hold on to all that you have received from Heaven but do not think you have gotten anything. Be empty, that is all.”
May you make time in your life to play. May the riches of living wash over you spontaneously. May your heart know both gratitude and humility. May your life be composed of one moment after another of wonder, goodness, beauty and awe.
A graduate of Harvard Divinity School (MDiv), Johns Hopkins University (MS) and James Madison University (BS), Jonalu was ordained in 1993 by the UU Fellowship of Greater Cumberland (MD).She has contributed leadership to various community and church boards and committees, including Manhattan Alliance for Peace and Justice; Interweave Continental; and the Southwestern UU Conference Board. She has served her UUMA colleagues as a Good Offices Person and Lead Mentor. Her role as spiritual director complements and enhances her commitment to social justice.
Before becoming a minister, Jonalu worked in mental health and special education in Virginia, Maryland, and West Virginia.She enjoys living and walking in the Flint Hills of Kansas with her partner of more than 30 years, Jane Powell, a retired social worker and devout long distance hiker.
- Vacation as Spiritual Discipline - July 1, 2018
- The Movement of the Spirit - June 1, 2017
