Make the holidays more meaningful

HOLIDAYS are special, usually happy days, because they are occasions for some celebration that are either civil or religious in character. They afford us to take a pause, and together with it, a chance to reflect on the significance of the event celebrated.

They are necessary to us because as persons with multiple aspects, we need to nurture our sense of personal individuality that should be blended with our sense of being members of the family, society, the country, the Church and the world.

Otherwise, we can just become automatons, pushed here and there by merely shallow, unprocessed instincts and impulses, let alone, external factors and other social conditionings. We have to be more aware of this danger, because it is actually menacing us today, often without us knowing it.

We have to remember that holidays let us savor the deeper, wider and higher levels of our life that often are taken for granted in the ordinary flow of our daily concerns.

More specifically, they enable us to find more meaning in life, to develop a more wholistic and global outlook, and to form stronger and surer convictions. In short, they make us touch base again with God. We need to do these things, for they comprise our own perfection, our own maturity as persons.

That is why we have to take extreme care of how we spend our holidays. We just cannot go through them in a thoughtless way, plunging into random interests, and opening ourselves to all sorts of anomalies like frivolity, laziness, complacency, or just pure waste of time.

In fact, Pope Benedict warned us recently of the dangers of holidays that are not planned properly. To a gathering of families in Milan, Italy, he said:

“In our day, unfortunately, the conception of a holiday as an opportunity to escape and to consume commodities, contributes to dispersing the family and the community and spreading an individualistic lifestyle.”

He proposed the promotion of reflection and commitment aimed a recovering the true meaning of celebration, especially on Sundays, which in his words are “the day of the Lord and the day of man, the day of the family, of the community and of solidarity.”

These are words pregnant with meaning that we have to learn to appreciate, love and live. Holidays and celebrations just cannot be held captive by a culture of just having fun and nice food, having free time that can be spent in any way we want, but usually in pure self-seeking.

That kind of mentality deforms our humanity by feeding our senses with the wrong food while starving our spirit. It makes us to lose touch with our ultimate principle of life who is God. It creates a false world for us, a fantasy. We become alive only to the material world, but dead to the spiritual one.

Besides, it fosters disunity in us as individual persons, then in our families, in our communities, often in a beguiling, entertaining or fun way. It’s actually a sweet poison that we have to learn to wean ourselves from.

What we have to do is to make use of holidays to have more time with God, more time with our own selves, then with our family, before we launch out to spend time with the community and the rest of the world.

Holidays should help us recoup our energies, or go through a process of rest and renewal so as to go back to the daily routine with a clearer vision and sense of meaning and purpose. They should not just be some escape mechanism that breaks the unity between work and rest.

The way we spend our holidays should reflect that blessed rest God had at the end of the creation of the world and man. They should enable us to enjoy the fruits of our work by entering into the purpose of our work that should conform to God’s plan.

This is what it means by entering into communion with others and the world in general. It is making ourselves become more as a person and as the people and the family of God.

In the terminology used by Pope John Paul II, holidays should make us gain in being more than in having. That means we have to become better persons since we would could enter into closer, more intimate and meaningful relations with others and with God especially.

In practical terms, it means fewer things but more presence with others, less isolation but more encounter with others, less haste and more dialogue, etc.