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leisure, holy leisure, Sabbath leisure, contemplative leisure,
has more to do with the quality of life and the depth of our
vision than it does with play and vacations. The rabbis taught
that the purpose of Sabbath was threefold. The first purpose
of Sabbath, the rabbis said, was to free the poor as well as
the rich for at least one day a week, and that included the animals,
too. Nobody had to take an order from anybody on the Sabbath.
The second purpose of Sabbath, the rabbis teach, is to give people
time to evaluate their work as God evaluated the work of creation,
to see if their work, too, is really life-giving. And finally,
the purpose of Sabbath leisure was to give people space, to contemplate
the real meaning of life. If anything has brought the modern
world to the brink of destruction, it must surely be the loss
of Sabbath. The
purpose of holy leisure is to bring this balance of being, not
a balance of time, back into lives gone askew, and to give people
time to live a thoughtful, a contemplative as well as a productive
life. … Holy leisure, in other words, is the foundation
of contemplation. And contemplation is the ability to see the
world as God sees the world. The
great Benedictine abbot, Dom Cuthbert Butler, wrote once, “It
is not the presence of activity that destroys the contemplative
life. It is the absence of contemplation.” You are as much
required, and I am as much required, to the contemplative life
as any cloistered monk or nun. Otherwise, how shall you explain
the union of Jesus with God the Creator as He walked from Galilee
to Jerusalem, taking animals out of ditches, raising women from
the dead, and curing lepers? In Benedictine spirituality, life
is not divided into parts, one holy and the other mundane. To
the Benedictine mind, all of life is holy. All of life’s
actions bear the scrutiny of all of life’s ideals and all
of life is to be held in anointed hands. No, personal comfort,
purposeless play, vacuous vacations, however rich, however powerful,
have not saved the world. Ask the Romans. We need the wisdom
of holy leisure now.
--Joan Chittister 
So
the young visionary Benedict required specified periods for manual
labor, as well as for prayer and prayerful reading. Benedict
was not about saccharine piety and theological niceties. Benedict
set out to save the world by putting creative work and meditation,
contemplation, on the very same level. To Benedict, work was
always to be done with that vision in mind. Laziness and irresponsibility,
oppression and exploitation, the oppressive, neurotic, insane
production of goods of massive, even global destruction, and
the ravishment of the planet are all, then, to the Benedictine
mind, forms of injustice and thievery because they set out to
tear the world down. They risk the tearing down of the world
rather than its building up. Work is our gift to the world. It’s
really work that ties us to the rest of humankind and binds us
to the future. It’s work that saves us from total self-centeredness
and leads to self-fulfillment at the same time. It’s work
that makes it possible to give back as much as we take from life. … The
goal of life is to work and work and work because the world is unfinished
and it is our responsibility to go on with it in creative ways.
No, profit-making has not saved us. We need the wisdom of creative
work now.
--Joan Chittister
'Getting
things done' is necessary to life, but it is only one part of the
experience of life. We need activity and accomplishment, but not
at the expense of the loss of our own inner identity or the neglect
of the relationships that are a part of making us more fully human,
more fully alive. We need awareness and the presence of mind to
keep
soul-making and task-making in a healthy balance. ... The problem
of being over-committed is not a time issue;it is a spiritual issue.
We find ourselves unable to step off the never-ending task treadmill
because we are trying to apply a work/business model to an issue
of the soul.
The dictionary definition of activity is: 'an exertion of energy.'
Every human being can identify with that understanding of activity.
We certainly know how we feel when we have exerted too much energy.
We become depleted and exhausted. We then scurry about trying to
find ways to create more energy in ourselves so that we can continue
to perform and produce activity at an acceptable level. The folly
of this strategy is that we never address the core issue of the
soul -- that of being participants in the great creative work of
God. Ideally, activity is not task-driven but inner directed. We
are invited to 'show up' at life and exert our energy in being astonished
at the wonder of God, in becoming fully human and fully alive, and
in being a part of the imaginative creative development of this
enterprise called life. In other words, we were not created simply
to complete tasks that could be checked off from a daily to-do list.
We were created to 'become' and to 'participate.'
-- Renee Miller,"Simplicity
of Activity: Tilling Soil … Reaping Wind"
Sometimes
our lives seem to get away from us. Our hearts get cluttered, sullied,
dispersed among the many attractions and distractions of life. We
lose our rhythm and order. We travel down roads that are unfamiliar,
even dangerous. And one day we realize our heart is not clean, our
spirit not right. Disease has overtaken us and the tempo of healthy
order has become a distant memory. We hear a longing in our souls--a
longing to 'come to ourselves' again. That longing is the beginning
of balance. It is the beginning of finding your soul clean and clear
again before God.
--Renee
Miller
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