Summer Holidays!
SUMMER HOLIDAY:- The school year finishes soon and for many it will be a holiday time, but we should take a moment to reflect on what holiday means! If we change the letter ‘I’ in ‘holiday’ for the letter ‘y’ then we get the real sense of the word, a holy day! We also talk of holidays as being a time of recreation, of being RE-created, which would suggest that we may have become ‘uncreated’ or more likely, pulled in a thousand directions by so many demands on our energies and time.
Holidays should therefore be an opportunity to be recreated to the image and likeness of God, to become, once again, children of God, and this will only happen if we make holy time in our holiday. The holidays should enable us to more readily make time for prayer, for being with God, for being in the presence of God and basking in the sunshine of His love.
The ancient understanding of prayer has been that it is ‘the raising of the mind and heart to God’, however, Pope St. John Paul II added ‘with joy!’ If we are to be recreated to our true image and likeness as children of God, we need to make time for prayer, for raising our minds and hearts to God with joy, and every family member, or whoever it is that we are having our holiday with, should be afforded the opportunity to pray.
So, young people, if you are on holiday, please do your bit to allow your parents /guardians the opportunity to have a holiday; help with the domestic chores, be on time for things, volunteer rather than waiting to be asked or presuming that someone else will do ‘it’! That way, others too can have a holiday because the workload is shared!
Parents/guardians, allow your children to help with the various tasks around the home, they may not do things in the same way as you do, or to your exacting standards, but at least things will be done, and it doesn’t really matter if the tea towels are not folded in exactly the way you want them done, or that the forks are in the knife section of the draw!
We should all decide on when is a good time for us to pray, whether together or perhaps individually, perhaps earlier in the day rather than later, which could mean going to bed a bit earlier the night before if a day trip is planned, in this way time can be given to prayer early in the day, before going off on the day trip, because everyone is up that little bit earlier for prayer.
