Vacation v. retreat

 Yesterday’s note brought up the idea of retreat, as a kind of counterpart to vacation.

A retreat can be a religious idea, but it doesn’t have to be.

The idea of a vacation is to relax. The idea of a retreat is to relax with a purpose. It’s a chance to sort yourself, your thinking and your work. 

The ancient Hebrews kept the Sabbath as a day of rest. They weren’t the only ones. As Robert Graves points out, the seventh day was sacred to Jehovah and therefore to some ancient Hebrews. But it also was sacred to the Titan Cronus, and therefore to some ancient Greeks. (Graves sees some family resemblance in the two immortals.)

But from the sacred comes the secular. From the Sabbath came sabbaticals. Scholars use the days of rest to sort their work and their thinking out. It usually means a book.

Creative work, some of which is dazzling, comes out of those periods of dedicated, focused rest.

I have an abiding interest in religion that I find hard to explain. But I might be able to suggest it with an analogy.

Astronomers are interested in galactic clouds, vast soupy mixtures of primal stuff out of which starts are born. Brilliant stars explode out of a mixture that is so formless we have a hard time defining it. (Where does a galactic cloud end?)

I think that the religious impulses that became part of human beings as we evolved, long before they were refined in the days of Jehovah and Cronus, are the galactic clouds out of which stars are being born today. If I were a graduate student looking at sources of creativity, I know where I’d start to look.

Then again, my friend the carpenter and I just finished replacing old siding on a house in South Texas in 100-degree heat. Maybe I just need a vacation.