I remember one spiritual writer commenting that one of the greatest maladies of the present age is "loss of soul”. Of course, one of the difficulties lies in defining exactly what we mean by the word ’soul’. The Cartesian dualism of body and soul is not always a helpful distinction, and we should be cautious about attributing such a simple definition to early biblical writers. There is some evidence that when the term is used in scripture, ’soul' is often a description of the whole person. Rather than getting caught up in abstract definitions, a more intuitive description might be to suggest that soul has to do with genuineness, authenticity and depth, which is probably what we mean when we say that music has soul, or a place is soulless. Indeed, it is perhaps rather unhelpful to describe the soul in terms of an abstraction - it is more often embodied in good conversation, the kindness of friends, experiences that are memorable or that touch the heart.

The ancients knew instinctively the importance of caring for the soul. Indeed, in ‘Philosophy as a Way of Life’ Pierre Hadot argued that philosophy in the ancient world was more bound up with the cultivation and development of ’spiritual exercises’ than the kind of analytical exercise that we associate with the word today. The enterprise of philosophy was bound up with a series of reflections and practices about what it means to live well. And the ’spiritual exercises’ of the Christian tradition were, in Hadot’s view, nothing but a Christian version of a Greco-Roman tradition. The practices enjoined in this tradition included things like reading, listening, paying attention, self-discipline, and the accomplishment of particular virtues. And yet, whatever one might say of these lists of exercises (with all their similarities and differences), there is one common feature that characterises all of them - the space and time for leisure.

The space and time for leisure is and should be the right of every worker. A bank holiday weekend is a good opportunity for us to think about how we use our leisure. We are increasingly programmed in contemporary culture to keep ‘busy’. Sometimes we are so overwhelmed by busyness that we do not know what to do with our leisure. We may find that one of the most significant things we can do to change our lives is to do nothing, simply to be, and to attend to the soul and to the things that make our lives worth living. One of the happy accidents of the word ‘holiday’ is that its origins lie in the notion of a ‘holy day’, and the church’s holy days were always days of rest and recreation, an opportunity to nurture and care for the soul.