LUCID INTERVALS
By EDWARD SHILLITO
THE holiday season is meant to provide a lucid in- terval in the life of the Church, and of all other associations of serious people. It gives a pause in the action, and pauses are often the most significant moments in life. " We learn to skate in summer, and to swim in winter." When the tired members of a Church go for a holiday, they do not waste their time. If anyone needs a break in his life, such serious persons do. More indeed than other men the churchman needs a time in which he will be able to see the things upon which he is busy all the year round in their right proportions. He will distinguish between that which is living, and that which is kept alive by artificial respiration, and would be better dead. He will save time by his holidays, but he will be well advised not to take them for this reason. .
The serious person is in danger of being plagued by his conscience when the holiday comes. It is better that he should enjoy it as other men do, and not be troubled to give an apology for his flight from his post. Good people are tempted to be righteous overmuch. They must provide spiritual reasons for their actions. They are needlessly ashamed of being idle in a busy world, where there is so much to do, and so little time in which to do it. All such over-anxiety defeats the true purpose of a holiday. That end will be best fulfilled when it is least remembered.
If the preacher marks off on a calendar the Sundays before his holiday begins, as a schoolboy does near the end of term, he need not be ashamed of such rising spirits. He should enjoy himself freely and forget his pulpit, and not give any exalted reasons for his common- sense conduct. After becoming a spiritual man, he has to become natural again, no doubt on a higher point in the spiral, but still a natural being. When he comes back to his people he may have a new radiance in his sermons, but he had better not know this himself. Moses moist not that the skin of his face shone, when he came down from the Mount. If he had known it, would it have been so ?
The plain fact with which the desperately earnest man has to deal is that he will do better work in six days than in seven, and in eleven months than in twelve. It is true that he will produce less in volume—fewer sermons will be preached, fewer programmes prepared, or articles written—but quality counts more than volume. The preacher who believes himself indispensable to his society for every Sunday of the year is probably self- deceived. His people will bear up bravely. He is wise if he goes to the Highlands and fishes for salmon rather than for men, or to the mountains, or to some quiet bay
" where twice a day The purposeless glad ocean comes and goes. Under high cliffs and far from the huge town I sit me down.
For want of me the world's course will not rot."
For lack of this preacher or that the cause of the Christian Church will not be lost. Holidays are certainly useful in adjusting our minds to the true proportion of things. Holidays may prove to a man himself, what his death will one day show to others, that he is not indispensable. That holidays cure staleness and reduce vanity would be a good reason for taking them. There is more to be said than that. They are true to the character of man, who is a being with a rhythm in his activities. There are tides in his inner life, now ebbing, now rushing in with turbu- lence and storm. In him two worlds are found, and he is not treated justly if he is treated as a purely spiritual being. It is well that the eternal Lord "remembereth that • we are dust."
Those who turn to the Gospels for guidance in this matter will not find precise instructions, but they will discover that Our Lord deals with no fictitious being called Man, but with men as He found them and as he knew them. He knew that men could not bear an unbroken tension of mind or spirit. These were comfort- able words in the Gospels : Come ye yourselves apart and rest a while ; it was in such pauses in His busy mission that He gave to His disciples much of the spiritual guidance which they remembered afterwards. The Sermon on the Mount gathered up many Of the counsels given in such a time of withdrawal. It was in the parts of Caesarea Philippi that Simon listened to a voice that is not man's voice, and cried Thou art the Christ,. the Son of the Living God. On the Mount of Transfiguration the three disciples were prepared for the Cross, though all that the revelation meant they only knew afterwards. It was a vision remembered and interpreted when it was needed most. He who knew what was in man knew that in an interval between the acts there is a Power at work, unknown very largely to man himself. This Power gathers into one and intensifies all scattered memories and desires and thoughts. Much depends on the sensi- tiveness of the spirit of man. For that there is needed freedom and .leisure. In making provision for change of scene and for leisure Our Lord was not working against the grain of human nature, but entirely with it.
The ministry of Jesus was spent in places where there always seemed to be a crowd at hand. Galilee. was densely populated ; but there was an escape upon the Mountains, and in the Holy Land there was always the wilderness, which is not a symbol of deSolation, huf of the solitude where man is never alone.- The wilderness had an austere and bracing air, as prophets and seers knew from the beginning of the story of Israel. Balaam went not, it is written, as at other times, to seek for en- chantments, but he set his face toward the wilderness. It is not amid the crowds only we have to seek for our Lord, hut on the mountains and in the wilderness. The silence gives an interpretation to His words, the leisure to His activity. At once He taught men that the days work must be done on the day, for the night cometh when no man can work ; and that they must know how to withdraw from ,the.scenes of their work, and how to be at leisure in their spiritual life.
This, then, is the two-fold task before the holiday- maker. He must not be anxious overmuch, but let himself go ; he must not carry his burdens with him, but let them wait. his return. And at the same time, in the surrender of his own spirit to thenew scenes and the new voices which will come, he is exposed, though he may not know it at the time, to the mighty power' of the Spirit of God. Long after he is back again he will know what came to him during those weeks, in which he was disgracefully idle. Holidays have brought to him emotions remembered in activity. He will have a freshness and insight which would never hive been his, but for his retreat to the wilderness.
Without doubt all who are busy upon the work of the Christian Church should take their holidays without shame and without apology.
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