Time and space to pause and reflect need to be preserved on Anzac morning, at Easter and on other special days, writes Peter Matheson.
A chortlesome aspect of the drive by Jacqui Dean (Waitaki MP) and her cohorts to allow businesses to open over Easter was the radiant good conscience on display.
"Get real, New Zealand," they cried! Tourists, visitors, shoppers need to have their legitimate needs met, for goodness' sake! Shops, struggling with narrowing margins, have to find some way to stay afloat. Surely nothing stands in the way of opening up the doors but the usual trade union obstructivism and some antiquarian superstition about holy days. Who could doubt that blasting all this outdated nonsense open is the progressive, liberal way to go?
I must confess that I am baffled. On the whole we have become a reasonably tolerant and respectful society, more so than in the past at least.
But the totalitarian intolerance of these market enthusiasts is something else. It beats anything I ever encountered in Communist East Germany. A total clean slate is to be created. Not a single day in the year can be allowed to have a different profile.
But doesn't the growing popularity and thoughtfulness of Anzac Day celebrations seem to point in a different direction? Maybe there is an aware-ness abroad among young and old that setting time and energy apart for reflection on pasts and futures is a good investment.
We need to draw breath, to get things into proportion. The current vogue for meditation practices is another straw in the wind.
As a child I grew up in an Edinburgh where on Sunday the swings in the parks were padlocked to prevent any desecration of the Sabbath.
Utter hypocrisy, of course, quite apart from anything else. And of course there were similar restrictions in this country.
Is the campaign to make Good Friday and Christmas Day like any other shopping day a reaction against this type of religious bullying or hegemony? Maybe, but I doubt it.
Rather we seem to be flocking to worship at a new altar, to have found ourselves a spanking new religion, one whose prophets show a swingeing Savonarolan intolerance for anything that stands in their way.
In Savonarola's Florence, late 15th century, they threw on to the "Bonfire of the Vanities" all manner of fripperies and luxuries and danced around the spectacle in an ecstasy of puritanical enthusiasm.
Today's enthusiasts for the shopping malls would consign to the bonfire any respect for the family time of shop workers, any respect for the faith of others, anything that stands in the way of our buying more and ever more fripperies. Shopping as the total anaesthetic!
Nietzsche used to say that what constitutes a true culture is a sense of style. (He was pillorying the excesses of Prussian jingoism after the Franco-Prussian War.) We seem well on the way to losing any trace of a sense of style in this country.
Is the morning of Anzac Day the next hurdle in the sights of our "reformers" to be toppled?
We are short enough as it is, aren't we, of a sense of rhythm to life? Of a pattern that makes sense of things, of feasts and festivals, of time and space to pause and reflect? The much-abused Middle Ages could teach us a thing or two there.
After all, it's conceivable that there may be more to life than work and shopping. The ancient Jewish Sabbath and the Jubilee Year, when outstanding debts were forgiven, were quite deliberate interruptions of normal trade practices and values.
Keeping time free over Christmas and Easter, over Anzac Day, or as some suggest, on a Parihaka Day, is neither selfish nor anachronistic. We should have a good conscience about it. It is a small step in the right direction of looking after ourselves, to getting things back into proportion, to attending to our corporate wellbeing.
• Peter Matheson is a fellow of the department of theology and religious studies at the University of Otago.
