Leisure and Work

So, we again enter the month of August, that pleasant summer lull we all look forward to since it provides a real sense of natural rhythm in the course of the year.  The schools are off and many families find the time to go away on holiday.  The roads are quieter, at least in the mornings and late afternoons.  There is a sense in us that we actually need this period of comparative down-time; it seems right and natural.

There is a natural rhythm built into every week.  We have the five working days and then the weekend; and for those who have to work at weekends, there are days off elsewhere. We know we can’t and mustn’t work every single day.  As Christians, we acknowledge Sunday as a particular day of rest, instituted by our Creator and insisted upon by Holy Mother Church.  We are called to dedicate Sunday not to work (if we’re able) but to the worship of God and our own spiritual, mental and physical renewal.  It is to be a day, literally, of re-creation for ourselves.  We must not neglect it.  On top of all this, every twenty-four hour period has its own rhythm, when we must be both active and find restful sleep.

The problem is that, in our culture, we have forgotten to honour the principle of leisure for its own sake.  We justify leisure in terms of work.  So, we speak of going on holiday in order to ‘re-charge our batteries’, with the implication that we shall then return better able to work efficiently and well.  Holidays should, of course, enable us to work better; but surely leisure has more to it than that?

The question raised is this: do we live to work, or work to live?  I remember an article written by the Bristol University academic, Fernando Cervantes, back in 2002 (I can’t find it now), in which he argued that ‘the best ideas are in the bath’; he said that we have ‘lost the art’ of leisure.  His argument was that leisure time is more than simply a break from work, justifiable only by means of giving us the rest we need so that we can come back and work better; he argued that leisure time provides space for true creativity.  Endless frantic work gets certain kinds of jobs done, but stifles creativity because there is no time to think or use our imagination.  So easily, we lapse into a shallow utilitarianism which undervalues anything which is of no apparent and immediate use. 

There are several and various problems with this, once it becomes embedded in a nation’s culture, as it has in ours.  Working people are pressed increasingly hard by employers concerned only with the bottom line; it’s certainly arguable that our employment practices are going backwards in such a way that more and more people appear to be oppressed in their workplaces by rapacious employers.  The so-called humanities subjects (such as history and geography) and the arts (music, art and drama) are squeezed in school timetables and in our universities (where many theology, philosophy, music and classics departments have been closed down), in favour of more ‘useful’ subjects, (such as maths, information technology, science and, of course business studies and ‘management’).  This is having a de-humanising effect upon our society already, as our cultural life becomes more impoverished.  There is also an increasing sense that people do not know how to be quiet, or to behave appropriately in different contexts.  People often feel guilty about ‘doing nothing’ and about being still even when they are tired out.

In his article, Cervantes argues that leisure, far from being justified by reference to work, is actually our natural state.  He says that most of the really valuable things in life come to us without any effort on our part: our very existence and life, the love of other people and of God himself.  Yes, certain kinds of work can help us to flourish, but much of the work that people have to do has a negative effect on their flourishing.  This suggests that, as a matter of principle, we do not live in order to work; we work in order to live.

Our sacred rest, whether we are talking of Sunday or our annual period of holiday, is justified, therefore, without reference to work.  It is justified in itself.  It is important for our spiritual, physical and mental well-being.  It is the state of being which is our God-given default.  It is summed up by our Lord himself in the Gospel:

The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath; so the Son of Man is master even of the Sabbath (Mark 2: 27-28)