To Leisure We are Called
As summer vacation approaches, it is fitting to consider why it is that only humans, among all God’s creations, enjoy leisure as a gift from Him.
God rested on the seventh day, and He invites us, His image bearers, to delight in that sabbath rest also (Gen 2:2-4; Is 58:13-14). We are frenetic people, though, consumed with devices and distractions, and resistant to reflection and a deliberately slow pace. Our work defines, divides, and devours us. We have a hard time not associating leisure either with idleness and laziness or with hedonistic escapism. As the old saw puts it, we work at our play and play at our work.
Yet to leisure we are called. In fact, according to philosopher Josef Pieper, leisure is the very underpinning of Western culture. Published in 1948, his book Leisure, the Basis of Culture is a neglected gem filled with profound wisdom and insight. Perhaps you will consider reading it and becoming more intentional about how you engage in leisure and attend to your soul during your vacation this summer.
As a prompt, here are some quotes from Pieper to reflect on:
The original meaning of the concept of “leisure” has practically been forgotten in today’s leisure-less culture of “total work”: in order to win our way to a real understanding of leisure, we must confront the contradiction that rises from our overemphasis on that world of work.
The very fact of this difference, of our inability to recover the original meaning of “leisure,” will strike us all the more when we realize how extensively the opposing idea of “work” has invaded and taken over the whole realm of human action and of human existence as a whole.
What is normal is work, and the normal day is the working day. But the question is this: can the world of man be exhausted in being “the working world”? Can the human being be satisfied with being a functionary, a “worker”? Can human existence be fulfilled in being exclusively a work-a-day existence?
Leisure, then, is a condition of the soul — (and we must firmly keep this assumption, since leisure is not necessarily present in all the external things like “breaks,” “time off,” “weekend,” “vacation,” and so on — it is a condition of the soul) — leisure is precisely the counterpoise to the image for the “worker.”
Against the exclusiveness of the paradigm of work as activity … there is leisure as “non-activity” — an inner absence of preoccupation, a calm, an ability to let things go, to be quiet.
Leisure is a form of that stillness that is necessary preparation for accepting reality; only the person who is still can hear, and whoever is not still, cannot hear. Such stillness is not mere soundlessness or a dead muteness; it means, rather, that the soul’s power, as real, of responding to the real — a co-respondence, eternally established in nature — has not yet descended into words. Leisure is the disposition of perceptive understanding, of contemplative beholding, and immersion — in the real.