Vacation!
Where will I go? Nowhere. What will I do? Nothing. Well, sort of.
While in the midst of preparations for Holy Week, I was informed that I had an incredible number of vacation days from 2009 that would soon disappear. Actually, I received a memo around March 25 informing me that I should take 10 days off before the end of the first quarter. Not only was that chronologically impossible, but it was completely impolitic and unhelpful.

This year the work associated with Holy Week, as with the work of Advent/Christmas 2009, took a lot out of me. Not physically strenuous, though staring at a computer and answering the phone all day has dull, unchallenging negative effect of its own. And not intellectually, either. As long as I pay a modicum of attention to the tasks at hand, my job is pretty much of a "no brainer." It only gains real notice if I screw it up. But there was this sort of mental ache beneath the surface of my thoughts. I would come home from work and shuffle through necessities and then retire to my room to read magazines and play games on my iPod. The reading and playing only happened after a requisite number of minutes lying on my bed and staring into space. Staring into space and maybe some sitcom reruns and episodes Hoarders. No blogging. No significant letter writing that needed to be done. No especially spiritual reading.

So it occured to me that maybe I do need a vacation. I have just enough sanity left to see that I am not so important to the operations of my local parish that I cannot take the vacation days that I have coming. I worked for seven years with no paid sick days or vacation days, which led me into the temptation to believe that I could not only be at the rectory five or six days a week throughout the year but that my presence was necessary to keep things going. (Yes, when I took two weeks off for hip surgery several years ago I returned after two weeks. I said two weeks was all I could afford to take off. That wasn't a lie, but, in truth, I think I really felt that two weeks was all they could muddle through without my presence. Tsk.)

I bitched about not having vacation days and now that I have them I didn't take them. I'm taking them now. [The business manager agreed that leaving during Holy Week wouldn't be a good idea and granted me permission to 'vacate' during April. Two days a week for three weeks. The other four? Who knows? I wish they were transferable to someone who needs them. ] On vacation with no other plans than to read, tidy up around the house, organize my bookshelves and attain the equilibrium that keeps me from thinking I am the integral component in the local Church though working in religion has not only taken the fun out of religion but also almost stolen the religion.