The case for taking a holiday

The reasons we need to rest and re-boot.

Natalie Garrett

Natalie produces and narrates The Seen & Unseen Aloud podcast. She's an Anglican minister and a trained actor.

On a beach lounger someone holds a book aloft to read.

Well, here we are, either literally or metaphorically breaking up for the summer. School’s out and the long evenings demand al-fresco dining – even in the UK where it’s far more likely than not to rain. And of course, it is time to Live Our Best Life as we chase the fantasy and book an eye-wateringly expensive holiday – to “get away from it all”.

In my early adulthood, holidays were unquestionably lying on a sun-drenched beach with a very large pile of novels. It was escapism pure and simple. And sun worshipping. Then I went on a skiing holiday for the first time in my 30s and was amazed how refreshing it was. When you’re concentrating on not dying, hurtling at high speed down a slippery mountain, the regular patterns of thought are left behind; there is simply no headspace to worry about the things that normally occupy the mind. I came back from a week on the snow with my body feeling completely trashed but my mind fresher than ever before.

But whatever our holiday preference, be it active, sedentary or a cocktail of both, it is short-lived. A fortnight is the average length of a holiday, maybe it’s just a cheeky long weekend. If you’re really pushing the boat out (literally if going on a cruise as many people do these days a) – a luxurious three or even four weeks. But however long it is, it is – by definition – not lifelong. We build up to it – “can’t wait to get away” and there can be huge expectation for all the things we’ve been struggling with to be magically less stressful “when I get back”. We think all the exhaustion we carry, all the frustration or disappointment, the overworking we live with on a daily basis, will disappear. We binge on relaxation and put huge pressure on ourselves to HAVE FUN and – that which has become the sly new marketing strategy – “making great memories”. Which can all turn out to be even harder work than what we’re trying to get away from.

Last summer, we went to the Lake District. And it rained. A lot. I mean coming in under the doors/through the windows sort of a lot. So we played Monopoly. And watched the Mission Impossible films. We went for walks in the rain and ate picnics quickly between showers. It was rather like we were living through a low budget British 1980s adaptation of an Enid Blyton novel, instead of the big budget Caribbean fantasia of one’s dreams. By any official descriptor, it was a holiday – but I’m not sure it felt like one.

There is a call for some time to be kept holy, time set apart when we’re not busy being busy, when we remember that we are human and limited and need rest.

So, as I’m keenly interested in the etymology of words, I looked up holiday* to find out whether I had achieved the objective. Holiday = a period of time when you are not at work or school – check; holiday = a period of time spent travelling or resting away from home – hmm, not sure about the resting but we were away; holiday = holy day – hang on, what?

Most world religions or philosophies have some sort of rhythm or pattern for life which includes times of rest. These often (though not always) coincide with some sort of worship or festival. These are times set apart from the day-to-day occupation of “normal life”. Interestingly, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, rest is baked in right from the beginning. After a six “day” working week, so the beginning of the Creation story tells us, God rested. And just to underline the point, sometime later, that same God gave his people the 10 Commandments, one of which is – take a day off.

The word “holy” means set apart, sacred and right at the heart of the Jewish and Christian lifestyle there is a call for some time to be kept holy, time set apart when we’re not busy being busy, when we remember that we are human and limited and need rest. When we can get some objectivity on our productivity; when we can see (as God did all those years ago) that what we have done is good and we can enjoy it.

In our 24/7, I-achieve-therefore-I-am culture, we almost certainly don’t do nothing for a day a week. We are always doing something. Even on our day(s) off, we’re reading or scrolling or running or “making memories”. Where is the rest? Where is the holy?

We don’t function properly – by which I mean we don’t flourish – if we never switch off. That’s how we were made.

There is an ironically busy industry that has flourished in recent years around mindfulness and retreats; an industry which highlights the ultimately human need for rest. There are apps which help us breathe, there are gurus who massage us in body and mind. Cynically, some say capitalism has caught on to the ancient necessity of acknowledging and attending to our humanity, our need to stop doing and simply be. I think God would say, hooray! Or as Jesus put it, “Come with me to a quiet place and find some rest.”

How can we put rest back on the agenda of our own lives? It’s different for each of us. One person’s rest is another person’s nightmare. Whatever it looks like, we need to learn how to have “a period of time not working” (whatever work may occupy us, paid or unpaid, seen or unseen). It’s a well-recognised fact that if your electronic device stops functioning properly, if you turn it off for a bit, it’ll restart happily and we are encouraged to restart our devices regularly. We all know that we’re a bit like that and yet... We don’t function properly – by which I mean we don’t flourish – if we never switch off. That’s how we were made.

We need those moments when we put a spiritual umbrella in the glass of our life, kick back and look at what has been. We can give space for gratitude; for reconnection with ourselves, with our life and even with the omnipotent God who role models rest.

So, this summer, we’re going to the South of France. I’m absolutely exhausted already. I’ve been organising a rota of (very kind) people to look after our dog; preparing work so I’m ready for the day after we get back; buying gallons of sun cream (just in case France runs out); booking trips and Googling where the nearest boulangerie is so we can have idyllic, spontaneous visits for life-changingly delicious croissants… Going on holiday is really hard work and I haven’t even gone yet. But this year, as I put on my sunglasses and factor 30, I am determined to make time to put the holy in my holiday. And holy days in my life.

* (of course, if you’re not British, you might be interested in the etymology of the word vacation = "formal suspension of activity, time in which there is an intermission of usual employment"/state of being unoccupied. Which to my mind is summed up by the old adage, a change is as good as a rest, with which I have always taken issue….)

Explainer

Creed

3 January 2025

5 min read

Creator or creature – a centuries old question of identity

Why does a 1,700-year-old creed still matter?

Frances Young

Frances Young is Emeritus Professor of Theology at the University of Birmingham.

An abstract depiction of The Creation shows an aperture in a cloud like formation over water.

The Creation, James Tissot.

James Tissot, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

2025 will be the 1,700th anniversary of the Nicaea Creed. In October 2024, Prof. Frances Young gave the inaugural lecture of the McDonald Agape Nicaea Project at St Mellitus College.

In the year 325CE the first ever “ecumenical” (= “worldwide”) council of bishops assembled at Nicaea near Constantinople (now Istanbul). It was summoned by Constantine, the first Roman Emperor to convert to Christianity and patronize the Church. Why does this seventeenth centenary of an obscure discussion around complex words matter to us today?

The outcome of the Council was agreement to the text of a creed, and banishment of a pesky priest named Arius, whose bishop disapproved of his teaching. Unfortunately, some other bishops remained sympathetic to something like Arius’ viewpoint, and for political reasons Constantine was desperate for Church unity. Argument over the issues went on for half a century, until another Council in 381CE reaffirmed the position established in 325CE and agreed the version labelled “the Nicene Creed” and still used in Church liturgies across the world today.

The controversy was basically about the identity of the pre-existent Word or Son of God incarnate in Jesus Christ. Nicaea established that the Son was “of one substance” (homoousios) with the Father – in other words, he was fully God in every sense of the word. But for many traditional believers at the time this was difficult to accept.

The common sense of the culture thought in terms of a “chain of being.” Most people in the Roman Empire were polytheists – there were loads of gods: Mars, god of war, Nepture, god of the sea, and so on. Each city, each ethnic group, had its own god, as did every family, every interest group, every burial society – you name it. But generally there was a sense that above all these was the Supreme God, who was worshipped indirectly through worship of these lower gods, and below them were all sorts of nature spirits, daemons, benign and malign, then souls incarnate in human persons, then animals, even vegetables as living entities, and finally inert matter like earth and stones, at the bottom of the hierarchy or chain of being.

Jews identified their God with the Supreme God and insisted the one God alone should be worshipped. But they also imagined a heavenly court of archangels and angels, then below that the souls of the righteous, and so on in a somewhat parallel hierarchy. No surprise then that Christians assumed a similar picture: God, then the Son of God, then the Holy Spirit, then archangels and angels, then souls, and so on in a hierarchical ladder.

But in the second century Christians had argued their way to the idea of “creation out of nothing.” Many non-Jewish thinkers, including some early Christians, followed Plato, conceiving creation as the outcome of Mind (the Demiurge or Craftsman) shaping Matter into whatever Forms or Ideas were in mind. But other Christian thinkers argued that God was not a mere Craftsman who needed stone or wood to work on like a sculptor – God produced the Matter in the first place. This then triggered a full-blown critique: God did not create out of pre-existent Matter or there would be two first principles; God did not create from God’s own self or everything would be divine; so God must have created out of nothing.

Now try to fit that to the chain of being: where do you draw the line between God the Creator and everything else made out of nothing? This was the issue which surfaced in the so-called Arian controversy. What we might call the “mainstream” remained wedded to the hierarchy, not least because of earlier controversies about God’s monarchia. The word did mean “monarchy” – single sovereignty; but arche could mean “rule” or “beginning,” so monarchia also referred to the single first principle of all that is. It was natural to attribute monarchia to God the Father, a view that worked OK with the hierarchy. But some had suggested that the one God 'changed mode', as it were, appearing now as Father, now as Son, now as Holy Spirit, taking different roles in the overarching scriptural story. This suggestion was mocked as all too similar to the pagan god, Proteus, who in mythology kept changing shape. It is even possible that that key word homoousios had been condemned along with this “Modalist” view.

Traditionalists were suspicious. The first historian of the Church, Eusebius of Caesarea, was present at Nicaea, and wrote a somewhat embarrassed letter to his congregation explaining how he had come to agree to this formula. Even Athanasius - the one who would come to be regarded as the staunch defender of Nicaea - largely avoided the term for a quarter of a century, though that does not mean he did not identify the principal issue. He campaigned hard and ended up in exile five times over. The fundamental issue was whether Christ was God incarnate or some kind of divinised superman, or a semi-divine mediating figure, a created Creator. Arius is supposed to have said, “there was a when he was not,” even though he was “the first and greatest of the creatures” through whom God created everything else.

So why does it still matter? Four simple reasons:

Because it was basically about identity, and the question of Christ’s identity still matters.

Because we still find people treating Jesus Christ as superhuman – not really one of us, or semi-divine – not God in the same sense as the God the Father. If we are to be ecumenical, across different denominations today but also across time, we need to affirm that God’s Son and Spirit are truly of the one God. As early as the second century the first great Christian theologian, Irenaeus, characterized the Word and the Spirit as God’s two hands – we can imagine the Trinity reaching out first to create and then to embrace us with God’s redeeming love.

Because it means we can look to Jesus and there catch a glimpse of God’s very own loving face - not just a dim image but the reality itself.

And because only God could recreate us in God’s own image and raise us to new life.

To find out more about the McDonald Agape Nicaea Project being held by St. Mellitus College in London, come and join the public lectures, or look out for other Nicene celebrations in 2025.

For more information or to register for these events, you can visit the Nicaea Project website

The Nicaea Project