Why Vacation Restlessness Is a Spiritual Diagnosis, Not a Personal Failing

You're on the fifth day of a well-earned vacation. The setting is objectively pleasant: open water, unhurried mornings, no inbox. And yet, somewhere beneath the quiet, an unresolved interior pressure persists. The scenery changed; the ache did not. Most people attribute this to poor planning, insufficient activity, or the wrong destination. The Catholic Christian tradition reads it differently, and that reading has considerable anthropological weight.

Thomas Griffin, writing recently in the National Catholic Register, put the underlying claim in a single line: "The truth of human nature is that we will not find rest until we rest in the heart of God."[^1] Griffin's own reflection stays close to devotional ground, but the line itself names something the theological tradition has argued with real precision: not a mood, but a structural condition of the person that Augustine of Hippo identified sixteen centuries earlier.

Augustine's Confessions records the experience in terms that resist paraphrase: "restless is our heart until it comes to find rest in You." Elsewhere in the same work he describes the pre-conversion soul tossing from side to side in search of a comfort no position can provide, unable to settle because the bed itself is not the problem.[^2] The image of a person shifting in search of a rest the mattress cannot supply is not a metaphor for spiritual dissatisfaction in general. It describes an appetite ordered toward a specific object, frustrated by every substitute, incapable of settling until it reaches what it was made for.

The invitation in Mark 6

The Gospel scene that recurs in summer liturgies puts a face on this restlessness. In Mark 6:31, after a day of teaching that left the disciples no leisure even to eat, Jesus says: "Come away to a deserted place and rest awhile." A Regnum Christi meditation on the parallel storm narrative in Mark reframes the invitation from geography to relationship: what matters is intimate company with Christ, the God who became human in order to spend time with us.[^3]

That reading doesn't dismiss the vacation impulse; it reframes it. The desire to withdraw from routine and find a quieter place tracks something real in the person's need for rest. The problem is assuming the destination itself will supply what the departure promises. When it does not, the usual response is to plan a better trip. The Markan invitation proposes a different correction: the person has been addressing the wrong subject of the verb. The rest that vacation approximates belongs to an encounter, not a location.

What the will is actually after

Thomas Aquinas supplies the philosophical account of why this keeps happening. As Gabriel Zanotti summarizes Aquinas's position, the will's proper object is the universal good, and any particular good that falls short of that completeness leaves a remainder of desire, because every partial good, lacking something of the good, can also be read as a non-good from the standpoint of what it fails to supply.[^4] A beach holiday is a genuine good. It is also, by definition, a finite one. The remainder it leaves is the will functioning exactly as it should, still oriented toward the only object that would close the gap, not ingratitude.

Teresa of Ávila maps the interior consequences of this with particular precision. In El Castillo Interior (The Interior Castle), written in 1577, she describes the soul as a castle of seven rooms, with the deepest room the site of encounter with Christ.[^5] Habitual distraction, in her account, keeps the soul circling the outer rooms even when external conditions permit quiet. Vacation creates the external conditions for entering the inner rooms. On its own, it does not move anyone through the door.

What detachment actually does

John of the Cross gives the most precise account of what that movement inward requires. In the Ascent of Mount Carmel, his argument is that detachment from created goods redirects desire rather than suppressing it, freeing the appetites to receive what they were ordered toward from the beginning.[^6] The common misreading treats detachment as self-denial for its own sake. His actual claim runs the opposite direction: the appetites cling to finite objects not because those objects satisfy them, but because, absent their true object, finite goods become the only available currency. Loosening that grip leaves the appetites free to move toward what they were always seeking, not emptier.

Summer, unexpectedly, is a favorable condition for this. The reduction in routine's noise removes the distractions that ordinarily muffle the gap between what finite goods deliver and what the will continues to want. What remains when a full schedule and a professional identity are suspended is the ache itself, and the ache is accurate information, not a failure of the holiday.

Accepting the standing invitation

The disciples in Mark 6 had been exhausted by a day of sustained ministry before Jesus issued the invitation to come away.[^3] The crossing of the Galilee was an offer extended to people already spent, already beyond their own resources, not a reward for adequate performance. The pattern is consistent with how the tradition reads the spiritual life more broadly: the invitation precedes the capacity, and the unhurried hours of summer may be the closest most people come, in an ordinary year, to the conditions the invitation assumes.

The Catholic Christian understanding of the person treats the Created state as one in which the appetite for God is structural, not optional, and not something wellness practices or leisure activities replace. When summer opens a space in the schedule, the question it raises is whether that space will be filled immediately with substitute activity or left available for the encounter it was designed to allow. Sitting quietly in Christ's presence requires no technique beyond the willingness to remain, and the unhurried hours of vacation are precisely the opportunity that willingness needs.

References

[^1]: Griffin, T. (2026, July 11). Make this summer a summer of prayer: Sit quietly with Christ, even on vacation. National Catholic Register. https://www.ncregister.com/blog/summertime-spiritual-life

[^2]: Augustine of Hippo. (397–400/1955). The confessions of St. Augustine (A. C. Outler, Trans.). Westminster Press. Book I, Ch. I, 1; Book VI.

[^3]: Regnum Christi. (n.d.). Daily meditation: Coming away with Jesus. Regnum Christi.

[^4]: Zanotti, G. (2018). Judeocristianismo, civilización occidental y libertad. Instituto Acton. (Citing Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q. 82–83, on the will's object as the universal good.)

[^5]: Teresa of Ávila. (1577/1979). The interior castle (K. Kavanaugh & O. Rodriguez, Trans.). Paulist Press.

[^6]: John of the Cross. (1990). Ascent of Mount Carmel (K. Kavanaugh & O. Rodriguez, Trans.). ICS Publications. Book I, Chs. I–V.