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….)

Column

Creed

Feminism

Monastic life

29 May 2025

4 min read

Cancelled but not forgotten, the medieval heretic who still intrigues today

Despite erasure and desecration, Guglielma was a trailblazer.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

Seth Johnston on Unsplash.

Is it possible to be martyred years after dying a natural death? The question occurs to me under the Alps between Lyon and Milan and arises from a late thirteenth century story of Guglielma, a spirited 50-year-old to say the least.

She arrived in Milan in 1260 like Ruby Tuesday. No one knew where she came from and yesterday didn’t matter, because it was gone. She lived in poverty, but gathered quite a following. Some said she was the daughter of the King of Bohemia (she was certainly bohemian in the cultic sense), others that she was the cousin of Elizabeth of Hungary or had been married to an English prince.

Guglielma (we have no surname) claimed equality with God, a new dawn for womanhood, and according to a contemporary account stated she was “the Holy Spirit made flesh for the redemption of women” whom she baptised “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of herself.”

Some 20 years after she died, Dominican agents of the Inquisition arrived in Milan and burned a top nun, Maifreda da Pirovano of the local ruling family, at the stake, for claiming that she would be made Pope. Then they pitched up at the Abbey of Chiaravalle, desecrated Guglielma’s tomb, dragged her mouldering remains to a field and burned her bones to dust, scattering her ashes to the winds.

I resolved to embark on a little pilgrimage to Chiaravalle when I arrived in Milan, to pay my respects to Guglielma, my kind of heretic. I’d never heard of her before a short account from the podcasting historian Tom Holland, whose book Dominion, on “the making of the western mind”, I was finishing as I crossed the Italian border.

Pilgrims used to visit her tomb twice a year in the Middle Ages before she was violently exhumed. But you’ll find no record of her at Chiaravalle now. Bizarrely, there were Italian supercars being photographed outside of the abbey when I arrived, but it’s peaceful and original, nonetheless. And Guglielma is, of course, missing.

Speak to one of the Cistercian monks there and they will affect not to have heard of her, then murmur “heretic” and “Bohemian.” But a gentle monk called Davide sweetly told me he would show me her former tomb, in the private grounds out of bounds to visitors, if I returned in 20 minutes.

We walked through the brothers’ vegetable garden and cemetery, where hares were nibbling around a statue of St Francis and the trees grew unruly. There, under a twelfth century arch, was her former grave, now marked with the names of local Milanese benefactors of the abbey. I wondered if they had known they would be laid to rest in heretical soil. The birds sang on.

As such, heresy serves as a reminder not only to overthrow prevailing orthodoxies, but is also divinely owned.

There are lessons to learn from the Gugliema cult. The first is that, as the author of Ecclesiastes has it, there really is nothing new under the sun. Women have been fighting the patriarchy perhaps since Mary Magdalene encountered “the gardener” outside an empty tomb.

There was no word for “deaconess” in the early church, only deacons. The Gugliemites were heralding the dawn of a new age for the Christian Church run by women. That may not be wholly the ambition of today’s women priests, but let’s note in passing that it’s taken more than another 700 years for women to be consecrated as bishops.

The second point is that she really might have had a point about the Holy Spirit. Claiming the third person of the Trinity as herself may have gone a bit far, even by today’s standards, but for a God who holds within “himself” all gender, there is a venerable tradition of considering the Spirit as female.

The Hebrew bible often casts this spirit as female, as in the book Proverbs, where Wisdom is a woman who “shouts in the streets” and “cries out in the public square.” It was St Paul, much later, who said she must keep quiet in church.

Guglielma is a saint only in Folk Catholicism, but women like her and Maifreda were authentic witnesses and trailblazers for women’s apostleship. We can still be too sniffy, even afraid, of heresy and we do well to remember the main charge against the Nazarene at his arrest and execution was precisely that. As such, heresy serves as a reminder not only to overthrow prevailing orthodoxies, but is also divinely owned.

As I left Guglielma’s last grave, I knew it was empty of her, not unlike that other empty tomb. Her violators had liberated her into the world. She’d gone before me.

It was fitting that her ashes had been thrown to the wind, like the wind that had moved across the waters in the act of creation; like the wind that had blown over other disciples at Pentecost. And like the wind that was now gently rustling the trees in this quiet monastic back garden.

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