Pascal, Pensées

I have discovered that all human evil stems from one fact alone:
man's inability to sit still.
- Pascal, Pensées

I usually struggle finding a balance between work and the rest of life. I owe a lot to friends who said, "Let's do something fun," when I was thinking about finishing off another task. To put this little drama in context, I have to confess to being a very "Type A" personality. But leisure time is not about goofing off. Leisure is activity that is recreating, life giving, humanizing and divinizing; in a word, it leads to wholeness and healing.

On the other hand, if time - to say nothing of one's entire life - is a gift, then receiving it freely allows one to give it freely. Leisure can be a way of receiving time gratefully. In his book What Is a Feast? Joseph Pieper suggests making a "holocaust" of time, returning some of it to God much the way Deuteronomy 26 mandates the offering of unblemished first fruits of the field and flock, "wasting" it as one does a libation.

We fear that the thought of taking perfectly good and useful time - not just leftover time when I lack the energy to do anything else - and "wasting" it in celebration is enough to take the breath away from most red-blooded Americans. One test of this is our approach to liturgy. Who of us has never once complained because an Easter Vigil, Christmas Midnight Mass, or ordination "went too long"?

I think for many Americans their work is their first priority, and at best leisure fits into their lives if it helps their work. At worst, leisure is seen as the opposite of work, and work is what we are about. Leisure has connotations of being soft and focused on self, and we see ourselves as strong and forgetful of self.

There is more to the story. It is not just the way we can overemphasize one side of our spirituality, but also the way that our self-identity is embedded in American culture that makes leisure problematic. We live in a culture that values efficiency and productivity above all. Much of our identity and most of our self-worth come from what we do. In our culture generally, people are valued according to how productive they are, and their productivity is theoretically reflected in how much they earn. Even in times of high unemployment, a person without a job is seriously suspect. People who lose their jobs often lose their friends as well. When a job provides identity, what do you talk about with someone who has no job?

It is important to challenge the high value our culture puts on productivity, because of productivity is what gives people value, then the unemployed, the elderly, the sick, those with various physical, mental, or emotional disabilities lose value to the extent they cannot or do not work. And if productivity is what gives value, then the actions of caring for those people, time spent with friends and family, and even prayer itself have no value either.

The U.S. Catholic Bishops pick up this theme in their 1986 Pastoral Letter Economic Justice for All.

Leisure is connected to the whole of one's value system and influenced by the general culture one lives in. It can be trivialized into boredom and laziness, or end in nothing but a desire for greater consumption and waste. For disciples of Christ, the use of leisure may demand being countercultural. The Christian tradition sees in leisure time to build family and societal relationships and an opportunity for communal prayer and worship, for relaxed contemplation and enjoyment of God's creation, and for the cultivation of the arts which help fill the human longing for wholeness ¼ In the creation narrative God worked six days to create the world and rested on the seventh. We must take that image seriously and learn how to harmonize action and rest, work and leisure, so that both contribute to building up the person as well as the family and community.

We are called to find God in all things. It certainly seems appropriate to set aside time to celebrate that presence and the love which impels it.

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