The empty time of the holidays calls for spiritual commitment, and this terrifies us

In summer, particularly in August, one ought to have far more free time than during most of the year. This is, in fact, the period when one is on ‘holiday’, although the idea of a holiday as a time of emptiness seems to me to be the most apt definition. A holiday is, in theory, the epitome of a break, a suspension of ordinary life – in short, the realisation of free time. Then, of course, it’s never quite like that because we almost always fill our holidays in an even more hectic way than our ordinary working days. But we all know that. We have to cram into them all the repressed desires – which, in practice, aren’t even that much desired – that we’ve had to stifle, postpone or put on hold during the year, as if we believed that on holiday we’re more in control of our time than when we’re spending it on work.

Be that as it may, the idea of being master of one’s own time is one of humanity’s principal obsessions. This possibility is, in fact, regarded as synonymous with freedom. If one is master of one’s own time, one is, ultimately, master of life itself. After all, what is life made of, if not time? But we know that too.

What comes to mind, rather, in this August – which marks the end of summer’s obsessive beauty, and at the same time its jubilant yet deadly climax – is that we have somewhat forgotten two specific and essential ways of experiencing time: one Greek, the other Christian. Both these ways have to do with waiting. Not a passive, static, submissive waiting. Far from it. An active waiting, a waiting that invites what is awaited, that opens up spaces in which what is awaited can manifest itself.

One of these two ways is kairòs, the opportune moment, the essential moment – it can be translated in many ways. It is something so important that the Greeks, to emphasise it as only they knew how, even made it into a deity. It is time understood as an ‘event’, as that which pierces the linearity of chronos, of ‘ordinary’ time, or merely quantitative time, to give history a jolt – but not only, and not so much, to ‘grand history’, but rather to the history of each individual. However, if, as is the case today, everything becomes ‘an event’, if everything that happens to us is worthy of being considered a ‘trauma’ or a ‘turning point’, where does the real exception lie? Where is that which is truly worth waiting for? Where can we identify kairòs if everything is an event? What can we actively await as the exception that breaks the ordinary?

The other way of relating to time is the eschatological one, which is splendidly illustrated by two almost identical quotations. The first is from the Gospel of Matthew: “Keep watch, therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming. Consider this: if the master of the house knew at what hour of the night the thief was coming, he would keep watch and not let his house be broken into. Therefore, you too must be ready, for at an hour you do not expect, the Son of Man will come.” The other is from St Paul, in the First Letter to the Thessalonians: “As for the times and the moments, brothers and sisters, you do not need me to write to you; for you know very well that, just as a thief comes in the night, so will the Day of the Lord come.”

The image of the thief in the night, used to illustrate how the Lord’s coming might take place at the moment when all things are to be fulfilled, is a very powerful, almost violent image – anything but idyllic! Yet it places a formidable emphasis on being on one’s guard, on being active whilst waiting. It is an extraordinary image of how one might live: with a radical desire to live each day as if it were not ‘the day one dies’, but the Day of the Lord – that is, the holiest day, the most important day. A day on which one must devote oneself entirely to the quest for what we might call fulfilment. An urgency for fulfilment that is not a waiting for death, but rather a quest to find the most incandescent core of our lives. Therein lies fulfilment, and the task.

All this is, of course, the opposite of a holiday. In part, however, it has to do with its etymology, with the ‘vacuity’ mentioned at the beginning. A time that is not ‘free’ but empty of commitments is, in fact, a time of commitment, one that demands its own meaning. This is another reason why empty time is a time that terrifies us. We are assailed by the anguish of meaning, which can be nothing other than a mission for which each of us is personally responsible.