Theology of Leisure, Part 1
Rosalie de Rosset

LEISURE: A CONDITION OF SOUL
August 24, 2006

Nobody was bored on September 11, 2001. On that day and for several weeks afterward we were all transfixed by the terrible unfolding drama at the Twin Towers and at the Pentagon. The casts of Broadway shows wondered whether they should and could continue their performances. It felt wrong to go to a movie or a concert. For the first week after the attacks, many events were canceled or postponed. People stayed at home, afraid to take risks in the threatening world outside and remained glued to the news.
The culture of entertainment seemed to shrivel and become redundant overnight. [Even]David Letterman and Jay Leno were more serious than they had ever been. It was hard to laugh at much except a brief temporary relief from the hundreds of tragic stories that filled the news.

At first, people seemed more open to serious discussion about issues like good and evil, the meaning of life and the importance of spending time with family. Our cultural heroes changed within a few hours from entertainment and sports figures to firefighters and police officers.

BUT

It took only a few months until, we were used to the new realities and the entertainment industry had regained its stride.

With those words Richard Winter opens the introduction of his interesting book called
Still Bored in a Culture of Entertainment.

It’s a little like that isn’t it even on a lesser scale in our lives. We suffer a loss, a reverse, a disappointment. Suddenly much of the content of our lives seems insignificant, our choices mundane, and we cut to the chase of what is important.

Too quickly, however, in the words of Neil Postman, we’re back to entertaining ourselves to death. In his book which many of you have heard me refer to many times before, Amusing Ourselves To Death, an analysis of the culture of entertainment which we are presently in, a culture symbolized perfectly by the city of Las Vegas, Postman compares prophetic novelists who were looking at an age in the future.

Orwell: feared those banning books
Huxley: feared there would be no reason to ban books
because no one would be wanting to read.

Orwell: feared those who would deprive us of information
Huxley: feared we would be would be given so much information we would be reduced to passivity and egoism

Orwell: feared truth would be hidden
Huxley: feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance

Orwell: feared we would be a captive culture
Huxley: feared we would be a trivial culture preoccupied with feelings

Orwell: feared what we hate would ruin us
Huxley: feared what we love would ruin us

Orwell: In 1984, people were controlled by inflicting pain
Huxley: In Brave New World, people were controlled by inflicting pleasure.


As long ago as 1962, the following question was posed to a group of distinguished CBS-TV news commentators on an end-of-the-year roundup program.

WHAT IS THE GREATEST CRISIS FACING THE AMERICAN PEOPLE IN THE YEAR AHEAD?
One person suggested heightened cold war tensions.
Another thought Latin America and its fickle governments.
A third felt Berlin would provoke the gravest crisis.

Finally, Mr. Severeid, a well-known journalist at the time, spoke. He stated that he thought the most dangerous threat to American society was the rise of leisure and the fact that those who have the most leisure are the least equipped to make use of it.

I repeat, THOSE WHO HAVE THE MOST LEISURE ARE THE LEAST EQUIPPED TO MAKE USE OF IT.

That was 1962. ..when America was standing on the threshold of a revolution in leisure….when the most significant characteristic of the American scene, next to the abundance of things was the abundance of free time. A century ago the industrial work-week was 70 hours. Since then we have become a new leisured society.
Our busyness today is chosen…not essential to our survival. And…the concern becomes that the masses are over-indulging in stultifying, unedifying or moronic pastimes.

Far more seriously, the moral problem is that of drift, of a “group think” mentality which merely follows a leaderless crowd. It is one of forfeiting the right of choice, of emptiness in what should be life’s satisfactions. The problem is triviality but even more the great emptiness that haunts postmodern man as he or she drifts along by chance or by circumstance. The inner impoverishment of the individual in our age and the pervasiveness of boredom (ennui) are symptomatic of our inability to cope with leisure,
of our failure to think about it. Even for Christians.

While Christians have developed a sizeable body of literature to provide guidance with respect to work or vocation…we lack any such doctrine or direction for our leisure or avocation, almost any theology of leisure

We have
-a work ethic,
-a work morality which is a curious compound of Puritan and middle class values,
but when it comes to a morality or ethic of leisure, we face a vacuum.

Harry Blamires, writing as long ago as the 1950’s put it another way:
We no longer have a Christian mind. There is still, of course, a Christian ethic, a Christian practice, and a Christian spirituality. As a moral being, the modern Christian subscribes to a code other than that of the non-Christian.
As a member of the Church, he or she undertakes obligations and observations ignored by the non-Christian. As a spiritual being, he or she tries to cultivate a dimension of life unexplored by the non-Christian.
But…as a thinking being, the modern Christian has succumbed to secularization. He accepts religion—its morality, its spiritual culture, but he rejects the religious view of life, the view that sees all earthly things within the context of the eternal, the view that relates all human problems—social, political, cultural, [leisure] to the doctrinal foundations of the Christian Faith, the view which sees all things here below in terms of God’s supremacy and earth’s transitoriness. (3-4)

Nobody, he adds, is reading and reflecting on a book like Joseph Pieper’s classic Leisure, the Basis of a Culture. Preachers don’t preach about, teachers seldom talk about it.
He adds, There is no public pool of discourse fed by Christianly committed thought on the world we live in and what it is doing to us.- (13)
The thinking Christian is profoundly lonely after all is said and done (14).
The Christian mind, by cultivating the eternal perspective, will bring a totally different frame of reference to bear upon all that touches human life…all including our leisure.

I want to say to you with some emphasis that we cannot afford to be casual about the content of our lives…it is leading to a kind of distraughtness. The distraughtness that disturbs contemporary men and women is expressed in the revealing phrase “killing time” in discussing leisure. It implies that we find leisure difficult to face. To kill time is to kill leisure—ultimately as we shall see, to deny God. Killing time may lead to over work, escaping into a world of feverish activities or indulging in idleness in order to fill the void.

Some of the manifestations of idleness (television, movies, mass entertainments, thoughtless socializing, too much e-mail, too much Ipod, too much music listening, too many video games, too many movies, too much indirect contact with the world through things like facebook ) The fact is that. . . the endless electronic assault obviously leaves its marks all over us. …we grow up knowing that everything in the media is disposable. Everything on television is just for the moment…everything on computer is just for the moment…[we] have.devalued time giving ourselves the subtle sense that nothing matters (Winter 51).

But, before we go forward, I want to ask : What comes to mind when you think of the word leisure?
How do you define leisure?
And once you’ve defined it, what do you do with it as a Christian?

George Lundberg has defined leisure as follows:
The time we are free from the more obvious and formal duties which a paid job or other obligatory occupation imposes upon us.

QUESTION: Does that impress you as a very good definition? What is missing?

Not complete—

We gain a clue from the etymological derivation of the word. In Greek the term for leisure is skole and in Latin skola—from which we derive our word “school.”
Leisure thus conceived is an aspect of the educational or learning process.

The spirit of leisure is the spirit of learning, of self-cultivation. Leisure provides the climate for the growth of man’s whole being—for contemplation of man’s ultimate concerns, for activities
that enrich the mind,
strengthen the body,
restore the soul.

Like education, leisure takes
discipline,
training,
cultivation of habits and tastes,
discriminating judgments.

It is not something one drifts into- or dare I suggest, one becomes a drifter.

QUESTION: How much have we drifted in our lives? Into present-day culture?
Again, I ask? What do you do in your leisure?

Leisure is the time for discovery—or better—self-discovery. …the occasion for the development of broader and deeper perspectives and for renewing the mind, body, and spirit. ..a kind of self-learning and self-understanding which forms the basis of true selfhood and of the person’s involvement in society.

Joseph Pieper underscores this viewpoint in his important work, Leisure, The Basis of Culture. He maintains that leisure is a mental and spiritual attitude not simply the result of external factors, such as spare time, a holiday, a weekend, or a vacation.

Leisure is, in fact, the basis of a culture. If leisure goes wrong, everything goes wrong. It’s not seizing the day; it’s opening yourself to the day, it’s letting go of ourselves in an affirmation of our God-given lives. . .not something done for duty, profit, or by compulsion…but relaxing, in a way, into the delight of all God has given us to enjoy.

It is in the first place an attitude of mind, a condition of the soul….Leisure implies an attitude of non-activity, of inward calm, of silence. The occasion and the capacity for steeping oneself in the whole of creation. Thus conceived leisure is concerned with the edification of one’s total being. It is not limited to intellectual cultivation, but embraces the mind, body, and the soul of a living person.

A CONDITION OF SOUL: Think about that.

Leisure is not idleness, just passing time, doing what you want to do.
Idleness is actually one of the seven capital sins….(capital meaning head…source)….
From idleness, so the old teaching goes, comes restlessness and an inability-for-lesiure which leads to despair. We can become rattled at doing what we think is relaxing.
Idleness leads to restlessness which leads to despair…an inability to have leisure.

John Piper in his book on fasting writes that the greatest enemy of hunger for God is not poison but apple pie. It is not the banquet of the wicked that dulls our appetite for heaven, but endless nibbling at the table of the world. It is not the X-rated video [because by that time one is on the way to a kind of ruin] but the prime-time dribble of triviality we drink in every night. For all the ill that Satan can do, when God describes what keeps us from the banquet table of his love, it is a piece of land a yoke of oxen….the everyday things of life. The most deadly appetites are not for the poison of evil, but for the simple pleasures of earth. For when these replace an appetite for God himself, the idolatry is scarcely recognizable and almost incurable (A Hunger for God, 14).

John Piper tells the following story:… he. called his people to fast for a 24 hour period once a week (breakfast and lunch on Wednesdays if possible) during the month of January prior to facing huge issues in leadership. He then got a note in the mail that read:

“I’m behind this. I think God is in it. But that kind of fasting doesn’t work for me. I believe there are a couple of things I need to fast from more than food. I thought not watching television for a week, or for a month, or a night of the week when I normally watch it, might be more of a fast than food. Instead of watching my favorite television program, I might spend the time talking and listening to God.”

The issue is not food per se…it is anything and everything that is, or can be, a substitute for God. It is a test to see what desires control us. What are our bottom-line passions?
As Richard Foster says, “We are prone to cover up what is inside of us…[we chase our demons with food, activities, obsessions.]
If you fast from those things controlling you, you are going to have to deal with the unhappiness or restlessness inside of you.

Leisure, then, is an inner absence of preoccupation, a calm, an ability to let things go, to be quiet. As Pieper puts it, leisure is a form of that stillness that is the necessary preparation for accepting reality.
Only the person who is STILL (think of that word still) can hear.
Whoever is not still, cannot hear, not mere soundlessness or a dead muteness but a dis-position of receptive understanding, of contemplative beholding and immersion which helps us be in touch with the history of the world, one who opens him or herself, who lets go.

In the Book of Job (35:10) we read, "God gives us songs in the middle of the night"
(not while we are doing face book, or surfing the net, or talking on the phone to whomever we are in heat with). The greatest, most blessed insights, the kind that could never be tracked down, come to us above all in the time of leisure, of letting go.

Leisure is the condition of considering things in a celebrating spirit. “And it is written in the Scriptures, God saw, when "he rested from all the works that He had made" that everything was good, very good (Genesis 1, 31)…so we too must have time to approve, linger…gaze on the reality of creation.

"As God, Who made things, did not rest in the things He made, but rested from them, in Himself…just so should we learn to rest not in our things or in His things, as if they were the goal, but rather in God Himself, in Whom our happiness consists. This is the reason why man should work for six days in His own works, in order to rest on the seventh day, and be free for the worship of God."

I want you to ask yourselves some important questions, ones any thoughtful Christian must deal with if he or she is to have life truly given to God.

QUESTIONS:

1. What is your theology of leisure? Do you have one? Based on what?
2. What philosophical or theological presupposition governs the way you use your free time?
3. What makes you decide whether or not you do the things the culture offers you so readily. Does prayer or consulting God or talking to wiser people or reading philosophical treatments figure into the equation? Some of the activities that seem benign are as follows.

Watch a movie (watch at all not to mention which movie)
Use Internet (how often, for what purpose)
Use e-mail (how often, for what purpose)
Use facebook (or similar venues) and for what purpose
Play video games (how often, for what purpose, what kind of game)
Listen to music (how often, what setting, for what purpose.

How do these activities limit other activities or relationships?
What would you do if they weren’t available?
How necessary have they become to your life? Can you live without them?
Can you defend your leisure theologically?
How much solitude or silence do you include in your life?


T.S. Eliot writes the following words in his essay on reading calle “Religion and Literature.” The principles certainly apply to all activities.
Now, do people in general hold a definite opinion, that is to say religious or anti-religious; and do they read novels, or poetry for that matter, with a separate compartment of their minds? The common ground between religion and fiction is behaviour. Our religion imposes our ethics, our judgment and criticism of ourselves and our behaviour toward our fellow men. The fiction that we read affects our behaviour towards our fellow men, affects our patterns of ourselves. When we read of human beings behaving in certain ways, with the approval of the author who gives him benediction to this behaviour by his attitude toward the result of the behaviour arranged by himself, we can be influenced towards behaving I the same way.

What we read does not concern merely something called our literary taste, but it affects directly. . . the whole of what we are.

We can be inundated by the personality [of what we do in our leisure…by the stronger personality of the culture] until we are completely taken over.

What we do “purely for pleasure” may have the greatest and least suspected influence upon us. It is [what we do] with the least effort that can have the easiest and most insidious influence up on us. Hence it is that the influence of popular novelists [popular past-times and cultural idioms] that requires to be scrutinized most closely.

His most thought-provoking words are as follows:

"It is our business, as readers of literature,[as choosers of activities] to know what we like. It is our business as Christians as well as readers of literature [or choosers of activities] to know what we ought to like.

It is our business as honest men and women not to assume that whatever we like is what we ought to like, and it is our business as honest Christians not to assume that we do like is what we ought to like."

American Protestants have negotiated a seemingly fundamental antipathy between their religious lives and their ever-expanding opportunities for leisure and recreation.

YET it has frequently been argued that religion is the mother of leisure pursuits in view of the inspiration it gave to the arts, drama, dance, music, and literature in the Middle Ages. Indeed, the influence of religion on leisure is clearly discernible in primitive man whose ritualistic festivities aimed at propitiating the gods through dance and music, contest and combat. Holidays…were originally all organized as holy days in the ancient world and were a chief source of leisure during the pre-industrial period.

Which brings us to the Sabbath. The Sabbath was set apart as the pivotal day of the week which gave meaning and purpose to the rest of the days. The holiness of the day of rest was a special reminder of the wholeness or integrity that characterizes all of life, of the necessity of ceasing…resting…letting go. It was to be a time of rest of heart. Sabbath keeping was and still is to be a preparation for the final rest of God’s reign, a foretaste of eternity, a way to stop our enslavement to Chronos, chronological time, and enter a bit of Kairos, the time of opportunity and fulfillment which will mark eternity, a genuine ceasing from the madness and frenzy of our society.
It is being present to the moment in the presence of God.

The great English Puritan, Richard Baxter, nearing his death wrote his famous book called The Saint’s Everlasting Rest on this very subject…on finding rest as a condition of soul in anticipation of eternity. But, he said, it was harder for God to give the children of Israel Sabbaths of rest than to make them believe they could overcome the enemy (16). He also contended that our liveliness in all duties, our enduring of tribulation, our honoring of God, the vigor of our love, thankfulness, and all our graces, yea, the very being of our religion and Christianity, depend on the believing, serious thoughts of our rest (17).

Our work, like our Creator’s, is crowned with God’s rest, and our chief end is not to labor but to enjoy God forever, what Marva Dawn calls a “royal waste of time” never to be confused with entertainment or even duty.

In the book of Proverbs we find Wisdom saying, “The Lord possessed me in the beginning. I was set up from eternity…I was with him forming all things: and was delighted every day, playing before him at all times; playing in the world (8:22-23, 30-1.)

Leisure cannot be empty time…it must be fulfilled and redeemed
Mortimer Adler says, “The Good life depends on labor but consists of leisure.”

In a fascinating short story called “The World the Children Made,” written almost 90 years ago, Ray Bradbury presents a chilling scenario of a family who has let technology invade their lives just because it happens to be available. An upwardly mobile family, the Hadleys, have built a “Happylife Home,” a house which clothes, feeds, comforts and rocks them to sleep. Lights go on and off as they come near rooms; the house is sensitive to their wants. In the house, they have built a nursery, forty by forty by thirty, a nursery that has cost them half again as much as their house but “nothing’s too good for our children,” they tell themselves. The nursery or children’s playroom brings their son’s and daughter’s fantasies to life, a virtual technological paradise, full of changing scenery, elements of weather, sounds and odors, the result of whatever the children think and imagine.

Mr. and Mrs. Hadley, however, are bitterly unhappy and increasingly terrified of the images of the African veldt complete with screaming prides of lions and the smell of meat coming from the lions’ panting, dripping mouths that the nursery seems to display consistently.

One day, overwhelmed by the too-real texture of this virtual nursery, they decide to turn the whole house off for awhile, do their own cooking and spend time together as a family. They realize how nervous they have become. They also see that their children have become secretive, that they deny the images the parents have seen in the nursery.

In fact, when the parents lock up the nursery, the son turns deadly cold and says to his father, “I don’t want to do anything but look and listen and smell…what else is there to do?” The father finally gives in but consults a psychologist about the problem, one who agrees that the “nursery doesn’t feel good,” also warning the parents that “You’ve let this room and this house replace you and your wife in your children’s affections. This room is their mother and father, far more important than you….so if you change it…there will be hatred.”

In desperation, the parents switch off the room and decide to move away. On the day of the move, however, they allow their children to enter the nursery once more. After a little while, the children call the parents to come in the nursery. Upon entering, the door locks behind the parents, and they are alone in an African veldt with lions surrounding them threateningly.

The story ends with the children calmly eating a picnic lunch in the middle of the veldt…the lions feeding in a corner. When the movers ask where their parents are, they say, with innocent smiles, “Oh, they’ll be here soon.”

This is a dark vision of the world we may be making for ourselves by truncating our lives, by not thinking, by not developing a theology of leisure. We too, may be eaten alive by the lions of our culture or cause others to be eaten alive. John Piper is right—the first thing we may just have to do is to begin fasting, fasting from the things that bind us, that seduce us, that delight us, that keep us, finally from leisure as a condition of our souls.
Isaiah 58: 13-14 reads:
If you keep your feet from breaking the Sabbath and from doing as you please on my holy day,
if you call the Sabbath a delight
and the Lord’s holy day honourable,
and if you honour it by not going your own way
and not doing as you please or speaking idle words,
then you will find your joy in the Lord,
and I will cause you to ride on the heights of the land. . .

In the words of the Confession of Sin from The Book of Common Prayer:

Almighty and most merciful Father,
we have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep,
we have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts,
we have offended against thy holy laws,
we have left undone those things which we ought to have done,
and we have done those things which we ought not to have done,
But thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us,
spare thou those who confess their faults,
restore thou those who are penitent,
according to thy promises declared unto mankind
in Christ Jesus our Lord;
and grant, O most merciful Father, for his sake,
that we may hereafter live a godly, righteous, and sober life,
to the glory of thy holy Name.

Amen

___________________________________________________
Works Cited

Baxter, Richard. The Saint’s Everlasting Rest. Grand Rapids: Baker Book House,
1978.

The Bible. New International Version.

Blamires, Harry. The Christian Mind. Ann Arbor: Servant Publications, 1978.

Bradbury, Ray. “The World the Children Made.” In The Complex Vision Eds Kytle and
Kytle. Chicago: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1972: 248-260.
[Story is sometimes entitled “The Veldt”]

Gabler, Neal. Life: The Movie How Entertainment Conquered Reality. New York:
Vintage Books, 1998.

Pieper, Josef. Leisure The Basis of Culture. South Bend: Saint Augustine Press, 1998.

Piper, John. A Hunger for God. Wheaton, Il.: Crossway Books, 1997.

Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves To Death. New York: Viking Penguin, 1986.

Winter, Richard. Still Bored in a Culture of Entertainment. Downers Grove:
Intervarsity Press, 2002.