Going on a summer holyday

Most of the children who are by now impatient for the start of their long summer holiday are unaware that originally, far from being an opportunity for idleness, these weeks away from school were given so that even small children could labour from dawn to dusk getting in the harvest and helping to secure everything against the approaching winter. Indeed, long before industrialisation and technology began to break the link between people and nature, our way of life was established by time and season and agricultural necessity.

The baptizing of the calendar, through which the Pagan high points of Beltane, Samhain and so on received a Christian re-brand, established the year on a foundation of quarter-days, beginning with the Annunciation (Lady Day, March 25) with the Birth of John the Baptist on Midsummer Day (June 24), Michaelmas on September 29 and Christmas, of course, celebrating the coming of Christ the light in the darkest days of winter. On these days, rents were due, school terms began, and servants were hired and paid. Filling out these days, like a sort of diamond within a square, are the four additional days of Philip and James (May 1), Lammas (or Loaf Mass, August 1), All Saints (November 1) and Candlemas (February 2). The great festivals of Christ, the Virgin and the Saints, such as Epiphany (January 6), the Transfiguration (August 6), and the Assumption of Mary (August 15) augment the picture even more – along with the pivotal cycles of fasts and feasts of Advent and Christmas, and Lent and Easter.

Although these natural rhythms persisted (you can only harvest corn in the sunshine, after all), the very story of salvation was embedded in the heartbeat of land and people, and expressed through work and rest, and the food and drink appropriate to each season. Holidays were celebrated because they literally were holy days. Time itself was hallowed, each hour having its own proper prayers to be said and sung by the priest in his church and the monk in his quire. At 6 and 12 and 6 again, the Angelus bell rang out across the parish, reminding all who heard it that the Angel Gabriel brought good news to Mary; and the Word was made flesh.

Although the essentials of this structure were retained by the English Prayer Books of 1549 and its revisions up to 1662, the emerging Protestant mind had much less appetite for measuring out time through high days and holydays, for the chanting of the hours and the tolling of bells. With the march of modernity, a new calendar emerged, each day of equal value and a blank canvas to be filled not with the history of Salvation but with my own individual commitments.

Naturally, the secular world – as always, imitating the Christian – does still find itself highlighting certain days and seasons, not least in the aisles of supermarkets, which (with gyms and malls) stand as the commercial temples of our landscape, encouraging not prayer but purchase, not communion but consumption. Thus the New Year is followed quite quickly by Burns’ night (for the whisky sales, even in England). Saint Valentine is followed by Mother’s Day (chocolate, flowers, pub lunches), with St Patrick and St George (Guinness and flag-themed items) giving an excuse to party both sides of Easter (more chocolate), prior to the summer-long Barbecue season (meat, beer, prosecco), with international sporting occasions appearing at regular intervals (more beer). The winter begins with Halloween, now thoroughly Americanised (and a perfect opportunity to buy industrial quantities of plastic and sugar). The year staggers to a tipsy close with Christmas (more of everything), which orgy of retail rashness plunges the populace into debt, just in time for New Year, when the whole lunatic cycle can begin again.

‘What are days for?’ asks the Philip Larkin poem. ‘Ah, solving that question/Brings the priest and the doctor/In their long coats/Running over the fields.’

The 12th-century mystic, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, answers the question even more succinctly. ‘Life is only for love,’ he says. ‘Time is for finding God.’ As we wait with the schoolchildren for the slower weeks of summer, we might meditate on this simple but profound formula. Wherever we are and whatever we’re doing, every minute that ticks by is a generous gift from God, who wills that we should seek him out and build communities of love. Rather than spend every second shopping, we might more wisely imitate our medieval forebears by growing more aware of the Church Calendar, shaping our weeks and years with the story of our salvation, and playing our part in the building of his earthly Kingdom, day by holy day.