Leisure
Ponderings of a Priest by Fr. Mark
Earlier this year, my daughter Cecilia was visiting from college and was able to join me at All Saints for our 8:00am mass. Cecilia has always been a most honest critic of my work at the altar and after we finished she complimented me on the liturgy but said it seemed I was genuflecting much more slowly than she remembered.
In my defense, I did just turn 57 years old last month and certain actions (genuflecting?) do not come quite as easy as they used to. I am also approaching the end of my secular career and hope to retire sometime in the next 3 or 4 years. While in retirement I plan to devote more time to my priestly vocation, I do hope to enjoy a bit more leisure time. So, I have recently been pondering the question:
What is the right use of leisure for we Christians?
Archbishop Mark Haverland of the Anglican Catholic Church wrote an article a few years ago on marriage and family life where he pointed out that so many modern folk consider their jobs, their secular employment, to be at the very center of their life, making up the core of their identity.
He is not wrong.
If you doubt that, ask a dozen friends the definition of the word “leisure” and they will tell you – possibly without exception – that leisure is what we do when we are not at work.
For so many modern folk, work is an end unto itself, the normative condition of the modern man, with leisure just a way to recharge for work.
Psalm 46:10 gives us an alternative:
“Be still then, and know that I am God.”
Be still. Not idle, but still. And know...knowing being a verb, an action, an activity.
Most of our english translations of Psalm 46:10 are similar: be still and see, be silent and know, desist and know, return and know, stop fighting and know, cease striving and know.
One of my favorite translations of this verse is a loose one that comes from a German philosopher named Josef Pieper, who translated Psalm 46:10 in the opening page of a short book called Leisure: The Basis of Culture as:
“Be at leisure and know that I am God.”
Why did he choose the word leisure? Because leisure – if we can come to understand it rightly - points us towards God.
Pieper tells us in his book that the ancient Greeks and Romans – in whose culture our Faith took hold and grew – understood leisure as the normative condition of man. Not that we don’t have to work, most of us do, but work is not our end. He tells us the Latin and Greek words for work and business are negatives. Work or business is literally “not-leisure”. Leisure is the default, work the exception. He quotes Aristotle, who says in the Ethics:
“We are not-at-leisure so that we might be at-leisure.”
The earning of income is not the end of our existence. While business can be an amazing channel for human creativity, it can only reach such heights when informed by leisure. Business is not why we were created. Work is a means to another end not an end in itself. We are rational souls incarnate made in the image of our creator and we are for something else.
We are to be at leisure and know God.
What does it mean to be at leisure?
Pieper asserts, and I agree with him – as I believe the Church does too – that leisure is a form of active silence, of active stillness, of receptivity and not of passiveness. It is work restored to a time before the fall.
Leisure is active contemplation of the creation, it is what God meant for us in the Garden and in this fallen world so estranged from paradise, the ultimate act of leisure is worship, it is the liturgy, it is the daily cycle of prayer and Holy Scripture, it is the sacrifice of Holy Communion. Leisure is a feast and the Sabbath is its ultimate manifestation.
The Decalogue calls us to leisure when the priest says:
“Remember that thou keep holy the Sabbath-day. Six days shall thou labour, and do all that thou hast to do; but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God....”
Friends, observe that Sabbath, make time for leisure, and know that Christ is the word that was at the beginning, the word who through all things were made, and the word truly present in every tabernacle, on every altar, at every mass, in every moment of leisure we experience until we can live in eternal leisure.
Fr. Mark