I’ll say one thing about us English: we really don’t know how to have a good time. Maybe it’s a kind of hangover from the Commonwealth of the 1640s and 50s, when the Government banned the celebration of Christmas. Perhaps there is still something of that Puritanism in the national character, creating an imbalance in the way we approach celebration.
Lots of people will deny this. Aren’t we widely known as a fun-loving nation, who enjoy our partying? But I would say there is something disordered about the way many English people try to have a good time nowadays. The culture of binge-drinking among some young people, where the purpose is not to enjoy yourself but simply to drink until you pass out. The violence that accompanies these binges, and goes along with a lot of our sporting events, especially football. The frantic way we do so much of our partying and holiday making. Is this really having fun? Isn’t it more like torturing ourselves for some far from obvious reason?
According to official figures, we have fewer public holidays in England than in most other countries. We work longer hours, and productivity is lower than in most other European countries. I often wonder why no one has ever added these figures together and asked if they might be connected? Instead of trying to increase productivity by making people work harder and longer, as so many governments and employers have done in the past, why not make the working week shorter? It seems pretty clear that if people have adequate leisure, and are able to enjoy their free time to the full, they will make happier workers and be correspondingly more productive.
Not that we can be very sure about how refreshing the English leisure experience can be. When so many people list shopping as one of their favourite leisure pursuits, doesn’t it just give the truth away? Our quest for this kind of enjoyment is all about materialism, rather than genuine fun shared with other people.
So what’s the remedy? Well, I’d say we need to recapture a sense of the holiness of time. We need to put the holy back into holiday, and the calling back into work. In other words, return to the conviction that all our time (the 24 hours a day which is everyone’s equal share) is a gift from God, and the best course of action would be to use our time the way God intended. To do the things he has designed us, and created us, to do.
The first effect of this, would be to restore the idea of sabbath. According to the Ten Commandments, we are to work for six days, but the seventh day is a day that is holy to God. Its purpose is for worship, recharging our spiritual batteries as we spend time with God, and taking time for rest and recreation through wholesome pastimes. I believe that future social historians will come to judge our dismantling of Sunday as a shared day of rest, as one of the most socially destructive decisions of our time, wreaking untold damage on individuals, relationships and communities.
A restored pattern of the weekly sabbath should then help us to restore the holiness of all our holidays. In earlier, more believing times, all public holidays were based on religious festivals, and the religious observance would constitute a major part of the day’s celebration. There were more of these saints’ days and other festivals, too; especially in the lovely month of May when it’s so good to be able to take time off work and enjoy those days of late spring and early summer. Such times may have passed beyond recovery; but all of us could surely give more thought to God in the days we are free from work. We could spend time saying thank you, and enjoying the things God has given us to enjoy for free, in the things of nature. The rediscovered popularity of retreats and pilgrimages bears witness to a growing spiritual hunger for these things; but it would not be too difficult for us to give every holiday some of the flavour of a retreat and a pilgrimage.
The psalmist says to God, “My times are in your hand.” (Psalm 31.15) There is no better place that we could want them to be.
Published in the Marston Times, May 2009