In the last century, during the excavations of the buried Roman world in North Africa, there was discovered in the marketplace of Fimgad in Algeria an inscription from the second or third century that bore the words: “Hunt, Bathe, Play, Laugh – that is life”. This inscription comes to my mind every year when the streams of tourists begin to head south – in search of life. In some future age, when the posters of our holiday undertakings are unearthed, they will reveal a similar portrayal of life. Obviously, most of us experience the year spent in the office, in the factory, or in some other workplace as a kind of non-life. During vacation, we leave all that behind in order at last to be free, to live. Bathe, Play, Laugh, that is life.
This hope of finding relaxation , freedom, release from the pressures of daily life is extremely human; given the bustling activity of the technological world, such pauses for breath are simply necessary. Granted all that, we must nevertheless admit that we have our problems with regard to our freedom, with regard to the freedom of our free time. We suddenly realize that we really do not know how to live. We discover that life is not just bathing, playing, laughing. The question of what to do with our holidays, with our free time, is beginningto become a science in its own right.
In this context, I recall that Saint Thomas Aquinas wrote a specific treatise on the means of overcoming sadness. It is typical of his realism that he, too, names bathing, sleeping, playing, as suitable means to this end. Even more emphatically, however, he adds that the company of friends, which disperse the loneliness that is the foundation of our unhappiness, should be included among the means of dispelling sadness: free time should be above all a time to be with other people. Thomas, insists, however, that the most indispensable means of dispelling sadness is association with truth, that is, with God – contemplation in which we come into contact with true life.
If we exclude it from our vacation schedule, then our free time will continue to be non-free time.; then our search for the life we have lost will certainly not end in success. The search for God id the most exciting mountain trip, the most refreshing bath that a man can find. Bathe, Play, Sleep – all these have their place in our vacation plans. But, like Thomas Aquinas, we must also include in them the encounter with God to which our beautiful churches and God’s beautiful world invite us.
From: Bavarian radio broadcast, 08/02/1980
