Summer Vacation: Good Use of Time
By Ruth Pakaluk
My topic is summer vacation and especially: What are we to do with our free time and times of recreation? How do we make good use of the summer?
I thank God that I had a happy childhood. This is very important, one’s memory of a happy childhood. One of the best things you can do for a child is to reinforce his or her innate sense that life is full of wonder and beauty.
Children see something magical in nature. As kids become teenagers or college students, they often lose this sense of the mystery of nature, the sense that the beauty of nature signifies something. Many people think this is a sign of maturity, but it isn’t: it is a sign of obtuseness; sin deadens intuition.
We intuitively know that nature means something. Think of a gorgeous sunset, or a harvest moon rise. Atheists and materialists dismiss this intuition as wishful thinking or an illusion, but it is in reality a deep insight into what creation is all about. As mature Christians, we should be deepening our sense of what the beauty of nature, the change of the season, and so on, tell us about God, about heaven, and about what we are supposed to be doing.
Some signs in nature are easy to interpret. Resurrection is represented by Spring: new life miraculously springing from grey and brown dead earth. Nature in this case reinforces the belief that God is the Lord of Life and has conquered death. Again, mountains signify the awe-inspiring majesty of God, His timelessness, the unchanging endurance of His promise, and so on.
So what does summer signify? Summer signifies eternal bliss in heaven. (No doubt, all the school children readily agree with this.)
What is it that is so beautiful about summer? The long, long days, with evening stretching out well into what really should be considered night. The hot lazy days with blazing sun in a deep blue sky and huge cumulus clouds sailing across the sky. There is a sense of the infinite expanse of time, the fullness of beauty. No deadlines, no final exams—all the effort and struggle is over and we’re just meant to bask in the sun, smelling the fragrance from rose bushes in full bloom. Or gazing at the endless ocean listening to the never-ending sound of the surf. And so on.
This is something like what heaven is going to be like. And it is good for us to get good at doing the things we are intended by God to do for eternity. And it is good for us to help our children and grandchildren acquire the conviction that they were meant for that kind of eternal beatitude.
What with the world being fallen and all, summer often doesn’t keep its heavenly aspect right straight through to the end of August. Timelessness has a way of degenerating into chaos and ennui. So what can we do to make this summer more like a foretaste of heaven?
Summer is a time for recreation, the meaning of which word has been trivialized into ‘killing time’, that is, doing something amusing that distracts you from the boring grind of ‘real’ life. But in its origin, the word ‘recreation’ has religious significance: literally, it is re-creation, a restoring and improving upon creation.
Rest and relaxation should not mean vegging out doing nothing. How many summers have we lived through, at the end of which we think about all the interesting and appealing places or people we could have visited but somehow the summer just slipped away without anything getting done?
Blessed Josemaria has this nice saying: “To rest is not to do nothing: it is to relax with activities that require less effort.” (The Way. 357). It is important not to view free time as empty time. Another apt Blessed Josemaria saying: “People engaged in worldly business say that time is money. That means little to me. For us who are engaged in the business of souls, time is glory!” (The Way, 355).
And sometimes recreation doesn’t have to be less effort, but merely a different kind of effort—for instance, sports you don’t normally have time for. Hiking is a lot more effort than lugging the laundry up three flights of stairs, but somehow it is rewarding and relaxing in a way that laundry never can be. Or just think about how much effort goes into traveling to see historical sites or cultural events. Or applying yourself to read worthwhile books: “An hour of study, for a modern apostle, is an hour of prayer” (The Way, 335). “You frequent the sacraments, you pray, you are chaste, but you don’t study. Don’t tell me you’re good; you’re only ‘goodish” (The Way, 337).
For mothers with school-age children, having everyone at home actually may land you with less free time, but then it’s your job to see to it that your children make good use of their free time. Don’t let them drift aimlessly through summer or they’ll end up like this: “Dissipation. You slake your senses and faculties at whatever puddle you meet on the way. And then you experience the results: unsettled purpose, scattered attention, deadened will, aroused concupiscence. Subject yourself again seriously to a plan that will make you lead a Christian life” (The Way, 375). Plan of life!!!!
Think realistically about how to fit prayer, Mass, the Rosary, etc. into your day. Don’t go along thinking everything will work out: summer will be three-quarters over before you admit you have to change your routine.
Some practical tips to conclude. Put your interior life first: perhaps get out of the house early, before everyone is awake, to go to Mass or to pray. Try going for a walk to say the Rosary. Post a list of topics to study or books to read. Find a friend or two to read them with and discuss them. Make a list of trips you want to make, people you want to see. Post it on the fridge and see how many you can cross off in the course of the summer. Make the children stick to some kind of schedule. Don’t let them sleep until noon. Make them do some reading and devote themselves to some educational activities. Maybe also make a list of some movies you’ve always wanted to see, and watch them all together. But don’t overdo it.
Here is something very pertinent. In his encyclical, The Gospel of Life, after laying out how bleak everything is and how much work has to be done to re-Christianize culture, the Holy Father says: “…we need first of all to foster, in ourselves and in others, a contemplative outlook. Such an outlook arises from faith in the God of life, who has created every individual as a ‘wonder’ (cf. Ps. 139:14). It is the outlook of those who see life in its deeper meaning, who grasp its utter gratuitousness, its beauty and its invitation to freedom and responsibility. It is the outlook of those who do not presume to take possession of reality but instead accept it as a gift, discovering in all things the reflection of the Creator and seeing in every person his living image (cf. Gen 1:27; Ps. 8:5). . . . Inspired by this contemplative outlook, the new people of the redeemed cannot but respond with songs of joy, praise and thanksgiving for the priceless gift of life, for the mystery of every individual’s call to share through Christ in the life of grace and in an existence of unending communion with God our Creator and Father” (n. 83).