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God Wants You to Take a Vacation May 29, 2005 The Reverend Roger Fritts Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church Bethesda, Maryland Here we are on the Sunday before Memorial Day, the time that I associate in my mind with the beginning of summer. The time when school gets out and vacation begins. What childhood memories do you have of Memorial Day? My earliest memory is of sitting in a hot car. My parents, my older sister and I, were making the two hour trip from Phoenix to Prescott, Arizona. We often spent vacation days in Prescott because it is always 10 degrees cooler than Phoenix. The car was hot, no air-conditioning. My dad would stop at a gas station and buy a chunk of dry ice that would slowly evaporate giving off a little cold as we drove north. The first thing we saw when we got to Prescott was the Veterans Cemetery. On Memorial Day weekend is covered with small American flags on each grave, the resting place of soldiers from the Spanish-America War and the First World War. After these reminders of human mortality I was ready for a vacation, ready to climb the granite rocks near the small cabin at which we stayed. I was ready to breathe in deeply the smell of the Ponderosa pines. Still, for me the smell of those pine trees says that it is time to relax, time to play, time for a vacation. Perhaps my memories stimulate your memories about summer vacations. Your mind may have already drifted off to recall your own memories of Memorial Day weekends. Perhaps for you a childhood vacation was a trip to the beach or a camping trip to a lake or a river to swim and fish. I hope you have positive memories of such times. Now however, if you are a working adult you will be back at work Tuesday. Employed adults in the United States on average will receive twelve vacation days during 2005. Twelve days comes to two weeks and two days. Employed adults in Canada on average will receive twenty-one vacation days this year—that is four weeks and one day. In Great Britain the average is twenty-three days. In the Netherlands the average is twenty-five vacation days, or five weeks. In Germany the average is twenty-seven vacation days. In France the average is thirty-nine days per year or nearly eight weeks of vacation this year. Why is the average number of vacation days in the United States so small compared with other countries? Historians who have studied this blame religion. In 1620 the Puritans arrived on this continent. They arrived in December, in Massachusetts, and they started to build shelters to keep themselves warm in the cold of winter. They came from England where they were disgusted with the behavior of people who drank too much alcohol and spent too little time doing the work that needed to be done. For them to survive that first winter it was necessary that they work incredibly hard and even then half of them died before the winter was over. To survive they developed a belief system about God. They told each other that God wanted them to work, to work hard. The Puritans told each other that hard labor, not play, was the key to success. Work was a means of glorifying God. In preforming daily productive labor they believed they were following God’s plan, doing God’s work. Puritan ministers exhorted their congregations to be disciplined. People should not waste God’s precious time. Cards, theater, and dancing were forbidden.
This Puritan work ethic, shaped by puritan theology, dominated America. Still, slowly a few people in America became wealthy and did not have to spend all their time working to survive. These people were wealthy merchants in New England and in the middle Atlantic states and plantation owners in the South. They could not take time off from work just for fun without violating the Puritan work ethic. However, they did figure out a way to take what we would now call a vacation and do it while staying within the rules of the Puritan work ethic. The wealthy merchants and plantation owners got medical doctors to recommend that they visit hot mineral springs and drink the waters or bathe in the hot water to improve their health. This was the beginning of American vacation resorts. Europeans had been traveling to various spas since the late Middle Ages to drink the waters and soak in the baths. Wealthy Americans followed this example. They went to places like Berkeley Springs, West Virginia on the advice of doctors who said that drinking the water was a way of improving their health. Some thought drinking water from mineral springs could cure almost anything. George Washington tried it. He arrived at Berkeley Springs in 1761. He slept in a tent that he had bought in Winchester, and drank and bathed in the hot mineral springs. A more direct challenge to the puritanical work ethic came from a 19th century Unitarian minister. Unitarians rejected the idea of original sin and argued in favor of the basic goodness of human nature. If we are good, the 19th century Unitarians argued, then it is not a sin to enjoy life. In the 1830s William Ellery Channing preached a sermon in which he declared that “man was made to enjoy as well as to labor, and the state of society should be adapted to this principle of human nature.” Channing told his congregation that God had “implanted a strong desire for recreation after labor” and had “made us for smiles more than for tears.” Play was important because it served to preserve moral order. Unless “innocent pleasures” were available, Channing warned, people would choose dangerous and even “criminal” pleasures. Channing said pleasures should “refresh, instead of exhausting the system” and not produce “boisterous mirth.” The Father of American Unitarianism approved of music, recitations, lectures, dancing, and theater, if the plays refined the taste and elevated the character of the people. Channing told his congregation that the right sorts of amusement would serve work instead of undermining it. They would “send us back to our daily duties invigorated in body and spirit.” A similar message came in the 1850s from the congregationalist minister, the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher. He preached that leisure and relaxation could be a route to God. Each summer Rev. Beecher and his family spent a two-month vacation in Lenox, Massachusetts. He wrote:
Thus to walk, to read now and then some noble passage of some great heart, to fall off again to musing, to read again half aloud or in a murmuring whisper some holy poetry, this is to be transcendently happy . . . It is after long labor that such periods of rest become doubly sweet. For unwearied hours one drifts about among gentle, joyous sensations or thoughts. The Reverend Beecher would have denied that idleness was his goal. He would have said that the purpose of his vacation was self-improvement and education. Still, he took off two months every summer to drift about among gentle, joyous sensations. As a middle class grew in America in the years after the civil war, so did the number of people who had paid vacations. The Federal Government allowed its white-collar workers a full month paid vacation each year. Most businesses only offered a week a year. Blue collar workers received no paid vacation until the 1920s. Methodists responded to the interest in vacations by building religious resorts in places like Rehoboth beach. They were inexpensive resorts with restrictions: no swimming on Sundays, no drinking, no gambling, no card playing, and no dancing. The religious resorts did offer educational programs for children and adults. The Unitarians and the Universalists copied the Methodist example, establishing summer resorts at places like Ferry Beach in Maine and Star Island off the coast of New Hampshire. A few people established educational resorts that were open to folks of different religions. Chautauqua in New York State was the most famous of these educational resorts. They played a critical role in easing the emerging middle-class into vacationing. At these places people felt safe from the temptations of alcohol or gambling, and safe from the unscrupulous people who might lurk at other resorts. The self-improvement resorts provided safety from that evil of idleness that was still associated with leisure. Many believed that they should not waste the time they had away from work, but should instead engage in purposeful pursuits such as hearing educational lectures, like this one. Tourism, travel to see things, also slowly became popular in the 19th century. At first the primary destination was Niagara Falls or the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Over time Washington, D.C. also became a popular sight seeing destination. Taking off from work to visit our National Capital was not considered an idle activity, because it instilled pride in our country. Tourists have responded to the puritan work ethic by giving vacations a purpose. Tourists visit natural wonders, old battle fields and museums to add to their stock of knowledge, experience and wisdom.
Emerson found in nature evidence of the existence of God. This help provide religious justification for another kind of vacation, the camping trip. In 1869 a Boston congregationalist minister, the Rev. William Murray, wrote a book called Adventures in the Wilderness, or Camp Life in the Adirondacks in which he claimed that camping in the Adirondacks could cure almost anything. Overworked men, he said, needed time away from home to renew themselves. Rev. Murray’s book sold well and set off a stampede of visitors. Many, unfortunately, found their experience in the wilderness less satisfying than the Rev. Murray had described. By the summer of 1870 newspapers and magazines reported stories of the mishaps and misadventures of what they called “Murray’s fools.” Still, the minister had made his point: Reverend Murray was suggesting that God wants us to go camping into the wilderness to improve our physical and spiritual health. In the 20th century middle class and working class vacationers continued to have ambivalent feelings about the benefits and pitfalls of vacations. By the 1930s some economists thought industry might alter the traditional balance between work and leisure. Where workers once labored long hours to fill the needs of an expanding economy, now Americans appeared to be producing too much. Production was outstripping demand. People needed to work less. Organized labor supported a 35-hour work week. However, President Roosevelt preferred to find ways to keep people at work in federally funded public works projects. The Second World War and the cold war that followed helped solve the problem of over production without giving people more time off. Following the end of the second world war we saw the invention of new ways to take a vacation. Organized crime constructed Los Vegas in the desert of Nevada. Disneyland was opened in 1955. In 1957 a book with the title Europe on Five Dollars a Day was published, suggesting that vacations to Europe were available to the middle class in America. Jet airplanes made travel cheaper and faster. Adventure travel was invented to appeal to those who wanted the adrenalin rush of hang gliding or mountain climbing. Nevertheless, the fear of idleness rooted in our Puritan past has survived into the 21st century. Americans continue to engage in a love hate battle with vacationing. We want to take them and we fear the consequences. Work, discipline, and industry are the virtues that built our nation and built much of our individual wealth. We fear that leisure and idleness are sources of moral, spiritual, financial and political danger. As a result, nearly five hundred years after the Puritans, employed adults in the United States only receive an average of about twelve days of vacation per year. Still, over the last two hundred years, some people have made strong arguments in favor of vacationing:
• Some have argued that vacations are a way to improve our health, by fresh water and air, by exercise, by rest from our labor, or by escaping the stress of normal life.
• Some have argued that vacations are a way to improve our selves, by learning a new skill, by hearing an inspiring lecture, or by visiting a museum, a historic site, or a natural wonder.
• Some have argued that vacations are a way of encountering God in nature, by walking in the woods, by watching the sun rise, by experiencing the miracle of life in the birds, and the animals. I like all these arguments. But my favorite justification for a vacation is William Ellery Channing’s. His view is rooted in a positive view of human nature. In the 1830s Channing argued that humans are good. He felt we can trust ourselves, trust our own desires and impulses. Therefore, Channing said, our wish for pleasure is a good thing, if that pleasure does not hurt others and is not self destructive. While physical and intellectual health are both desirable, I think a vacation should also be fun: living every second, cherishing the moment, letting things happen, swinging with the rhythms of the day. Vacations are a time to be playful and carefree, to give expression to the clown that exists in the heart of everyone. So the part of us that envies the French for their eight week vacations is not a devil inside us that we must defeat. It is a healthy desire for freedom to enjoy the fruits of our labors. I will not tell you what you should do on vacation—that is your choice. I will only say that as one of your ministers, I think God does want you to take a vacation. The spirit of life wants you take some time to enjoy yourself. Pleasure, if it does not harm others is a good thing. In this area the people over the ocean with eight weeks of vacation time are closer to God than the people of the United States. But if you cannot take off eight weeks, I still encourage you to take a vacation. Have fun. Enjoy yourself. On this Memorial Day, May God bless you and keep you, In your work and in your play, In your dreams and in your prayers. in your songs and in your poetry, in your pain and in your in joy, today and tomorrow and in all the moments of your precious lives. Amen. Sources: The International vacation stats are from Expedia.com. The history of vacations is from the book Working at Play: A History of Vacations in the United States, by Cindy S. Aron. |
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