Sight-Seeing With God
papal tips for a meaningful vacation
Posted by Rebecca Teti
in Faith
on Tuesday, July 26, 2011 12:00 PM
Benedict XVI is good about reminding us that our bodies and souls need periodic rest.
Here are three papal tips for a genuinely restorative vacation.
1. Use vacation time to restore and renew your relationships, especially your relationship with God. Be with each other as a family, and take the time to be with God in prayer.
2. Consult the two “books” of revelation. Tuck a Bible into your luggage and use it for quiet reflection during your “down” time. Even if you don’t pack spiritual reading, however, the “book” of Creation is always available to be read. A walk along the shore or a hike in the mountains is a perfect opportunity to contemplate the Author of all creation, Beauty, and the gift that creation is to us.
3. Engage your intellect by visiting historical and cultural monuments, especially cathedrals and abbeys, where you can sense God’s presence and be inspired by beauty.
To flesh out what the Holy Father has in mind with respect to the latter point, it might be useful to read the speech he gave to politicians on his visit to Croatia last month.
He was speaking to politicians about the cultural underpinnings of liberty and the role of conscience in resisting tyranny:
the great achievements of the modern age – the recognition and guarantee of freedom of conscience, of human rights, of the freedom of science and hence of a free society – should be confirmed and developed while keeping reason and freedom open to their transcendent foundation, so as to ensure that these achievements are not undone, as unfortunately happens in not a few cases. The quality of social and civil life and the quality of democracy depend in large measure on this “critical” point – conscience, on the way it is understood and the way it is informed. If, in keeping with the prevailing modern idea, conscience is reduced to the subjective field to which religion and morality have been banished, then the crisis of the West has no remedy and Europe is destined to collapse in on itself. If, on the other hand, conscience is rediscovered as the place in which to listen to truth and good, the place of responsibility before God and before fellow human beings – in other words, the bulwark against all forms of tyranny – then there is hope for the future.
Then he makes this fascinating remark:
I am grateful to Professor Zurak for reminding us of the Christian roots of many of the cultural and academic institutions of this country, as indeed all over the European Continent. We need to be reminded of these origins, not least for the sake of historical truth, and it is important that we understand these roots properly, so that they can feed the present day too. It is crucial to grasp the inner dynamic of an event such as the birth of a university, of an artistic movement, or of a hospital. It is necessary to understand the why and the how of what took place, in order to recognize the value of this dynamic in the present day, as a spiritual reality that takes on a cultural and therefore a social dimension.
See what he’s getting at? He hopes if we visit a cathedral or an historical monument we might give some thought not only to the fact that it exists, but why it does.
I relate his observation to a moving visit my family made a few years ago to the battlefield at Yorktown. There’s a live re-enacted encampment on site, and may I just say that no history-book description of the conditions of deprivation under which Washington’s men labored can possibly convey what you see there?
We were there on a bright Winter day with our Gore-tex coats and insulated boots and I was still cold and thinking about the boot-less, penniless (Congress dithered about paying them), shivering men in bare-ground tents, surviving on a ration of beans and bread each day, their women trailing in encampments behind them. I found myself wondering what could have motivated them to persevere, and in a kind of awe that they did. I also found myself hard-pressed to think my own generation—or I myself—would make such sacrifices just for the privilege of self-government. Was life under George that bad? What kind of people would we have to be to equal them for valor and commitment to a liberty they seemed unlikely to win and might die without ever enjoying themselves?
I didn’t know it at the time, but that experience of pondering how and why certain achievements came about is exactly the kind of the kind of experience the pope wants us to have if we’re not to squander our culture and civilization. The Holy Father continues:
At the heart of all these institutions are men and women, persons, consciences, moved by the power of truth and good.
Connecting ourselves to our own culture—in part through simple acts like visiting the great artistic, religious and cultural achievements—is an important part of conscience formation it turns out, if we allow ourselves to see more than artifacts. It begins in the family and develops outward:
As well as paying tribute, however, we must learn to appreciate the method, the mental openness of these great men. This brings us back to conscience as the keystone on which to base a culture and build up the common good. It is by forming consciences that the Church makes her most specific and valuable contribution to society. It is a contribution that begins in the family and is strongly reinforced in the parish, where infants, children and young people learn to deepen their knowledge of the sacred Scriptures, the “great codex” of European culture; at the same time they learn what it means for a community to be built upon gift, not upon economic interests or ideology, but upon love, “the principal driving force behind the authentic development of every person and of all humanity.” )
This logic of gratuitousness, learnt in infancy and adolescence, is then lived out in every area of life, in games, in sport, in interpersonal relations, in art, in voluntary service to the poor and the suffering, and once it has been assimilated it can be applied to the most complex areas of political and economic life so as to build up a polis that is welcoming and hospitable, but at the same time not empty, not falsely neutral, but rich in humanity, with a strongly ethical dimension. It is here that the lay faithful are called to give generously of the formation they have received, guided by the principles of the Church’s Social Doctrine, for the sake of authentic secularism, social justice, the defence of life and of the family, freedom of religion and education.
Wow. Bet you didn’t know your summer sight-seeing was a little brick in the edifice of civilization, did you? You thought you were just having fun.
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