On a recent short break to Crieff Hydro, that Victorian hang out for the well off, I spent a couple of hours in the winter gardens on rainy afternoons. Earl Grey tea, bakewell tart, and a book chunky with theology and New Testament exegesis, made for a surprisingly enjoyable interlude.
The interesting thing is the way the holiday mood easily elides into something altogether more serious. Maybe it's the intentional giving in to the desire for some peace, space, time and the expectation of a reader that when you read something worthwhile, there is a residual dividend of the mind stretched towards new ideas and previously settled thought is unsettled. And perhaps too it is the physical environment of comfort, low buzz conversation, excellent food and the irrelevance of the watch and the diary and the Iphone, that makes us more open and less defensive, more attentive and less preoccupied, more inclined to receptivity than productivity.
In any case, on holiday these occasional hours of serious reading while relaxed and out of the usual routines and context, can be times of fresh orientation, regained perspective, and even inner paradigm shifts in how we see our lives, "going forward". I don't actually like that cliche of the developmental mindset, "going forward". It often seems added on to remind us, or persuade us, that buying into whatever strategy or project will enable us to make real progress in our lives. But here I use the phrase to suggest the fruitfulness, and energy renewal, that can come from stopping with purpose. In my case a time to listen to my life, attend to what I am saying but often refusing to hear, and a time also to listen to a carefully chosen companion, another voice external and coming from another direction. And then to go forward.
I've always taken a book of chunky theology or history with me on holiday, along with the more usual and less demanding Lee Child, Henning Mankell, Anne Tyler, Kate Atkinson and various other peddlers of imaginative literature. Mind you, Eugene Peterson is convinced that the best way to understand the doctrine of sin is to read crime novels. Still from that first year in ministry in 1976, when we holidayed on Tiree, that beautiful island jewel set in a sapphire Atlantic as I remember, and I took Hans Kung's 800+ page On Being a Christian, I have always taken one substantial theology book with me on holiday. Friends and colleagues, family and anyone else who discovers my guilty secret, are less than convinced of the wisdom of going on holiday and taking work with me. But it's those occasional hours in the winter garden, or on the sea shore behind rocks or dunes, at the back door of the cottage, on the hotel balcony, in the corner of the bar, that we begin to listen to our lives, and our heart gets a word in edgeways.
At least so it has been for me. I have sat on the hotel balcony in Selva looking at the Dolomites illumined by sunrise, with Wittgenstein's Poker on my knee, and a deep sense of the mystery of how we come to know, and believe, and trust. I have lain on silver sand on Tiree reading Hans Kung's tour de force On Being a Christian, and finding myself moved to prayer by this Catholic priest's passion for truth. I have sat under a tree in a cottage garden near Goathland in Yorkshire reading Elie Weisel's autobiography, All Rivers Run to the Sea, his chapter on the trains so efficiently running to Auschwitz, and being hurled into the present as the Yorkshire steam train came through the bridge, its steam whistle coinciding with Weisel's description of the death trains. And in Mayerhoffen, late in the evening in the corner of the hotel bar, finishing Jurgen Moltmann's The Trinity and the Kingdom of God, knowing I could never think of God in the same way again.
So there it is. An apologia for some heavy reading on holiday. Not for everyone, I know. But for me alongside the fun and intrigue and sheer escapism of the novel, short cumulative interludes for deeper reflection, and at times openness to that even deeper work that God is always doing, mostly unnoticed, to work and to will his good pleasure.
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