It is said that a change is as good as a rest, a
proverbial truism which provides us with something to tell ourselves when the
change has not been all that restful. But as I look back on the full-bodied
living which has been our recent family holiday, I find that rest is not always
what is needed. Noise, good food (and the cooking of it), laughter, children
screaming (not always joyfully), parties, the comings and goings of old friends,
and some new ones, have made this year’s summer holiday a vivid reminder of
what rest is meant to be, and of what life is really about. Change, in any
case, obliges rest because there is no way we can do the things we normally do
in circumstances which take us away from our customary day to day patterning, or
which simply oblige us to switch off our normal thought processes.
Patterns and processes define us to ourselves and shape
our lives. They both contain and enable our goals and ambitions, the things
that matter to us. But these things are no more than objectives which are often
shaped by our own persona, or false self-image, and hence driven by anxiety.
Rest alone will not necessarily help us to see this.
What really matters in life happens in the company of people
we love. It can even happen in the context of rambunctious family holidays in
which we experience the kind of good stress which comes with change, stress which
keeps us alert to one another, so that everything else takes second place. Good
stress keeps things taut. It re-sets priorities and stops relationships
slackening into indifference. Good stress comes with noise, with a chaotic living
room and with watching out for children near water. It is relieved by such
moments as gardening with a small boy who insists on managing the wheelbarrow,
who observes me freeing yet another bird trapped in the strawberry nets, and
who is quietly fascinated by plants. All of these moments amount to happiness
which, like stress, is a variegated multi-layered thing.
We are so pre-occupied with trying to mitigate the
effects of stress these days, often with the help of various meditation techniques,
or with drugs of one kind or another. Holidays can help us to begin to see what
we call ‘stress’ in a different light, as energising and life giving, rather
than something which leads automatically to exhaustion.
The root of the word ‘holiday’ is ‘holy’. Holiness is not
a matter of introspective detachment from life, or from other people. It is
about being fully in the world, with
all its confusion and its physical and emotional needs, but not of the world. Holiness is not of any
system or oppressive set of private dictats
which tell us that we need to be something other than what we are, that we
should achieve at all costs and, in order to do this, control others by
suppressing their gift and their true personhood. Holiness is about freeing and
enabling others. Good family times help us to become more fully who we are, not
by limiting ourselves or others, but by giving others ‘permission’ to become
more who God created them to be and so discover his constantly changing and
renewing image in their faces, their voices and their presence at any given
moment – even when siblings fight and toddlers scream.
For this to be possible, we need grace. Grace is not God
using human beings in order to achieve certain goals, or to demonstrate his
power. The grace given to us in the context of a family holiday is the patience
which allows for a more tempered response to the demands of young children. It
is not God controlling us, or the situation. Rather, it is the experience of
God’s love for us and, of course, for the children. His creation is the stage
on which that love is set.
All of this makes it possible for us to see what we call stress
in a wider context, and as part of a greater whole. The bird caught in the net
holds still while I disentangle it. Perhaps it also senses God’s love in the observing
presence of the boy, who only a little while ago was fighting with his sister. These
moments acquire coherence because they are held together in God’s greater love
and it is this coherence which holds our lives together. It works through the
variegated happiness of family life, through the noise, the mess and the
knowing love which flows, like a clear underground spring between parent and
child and between grandparent and grandchild.
It will reveal what is of true worth in that supreme last
moment of remembering, when we shall know what has made life truly worth living
and, in that moment of knowing, see God face to face.
