Free Time

Those of us in the contemporary world imagine that we are too busy to indulge in free time. Leisure and contemplation might have worked in past ages with their sleepy, bucolic landscapes and colorful peasants, but it won’t work in ours. But God commanded us, “Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy,” almost as though God did not understand that our work is too important to spare us.

With the First Things Intellectual Retreat coming up next weekend in Phoenix, those of us leading seminars have been poring over texts from Thucydides, St. Paul, Milton, Alexis de Tocqueville, Abraham Heschel, and Josef Pieper, thinking hard about the nature of freedom. In Milton’s Paradise Lost, for example, freedom could not be more central to the epic. God the Father explains to the Son that He made both angels and men free to choose Him or reject Him:

Freely they stood who stood and fell who fell.
Not free, what proof could they have given sincere
Of true allegiance, constant Faith or Love,
Where only what they needs must do appeared,
Not what they would? (III.102-6)

The risk is terrible. In fact, God foreknows that man will fall to temptation, but He refuses to take away man’s freedom to make the bad choice impossible.

Centuries later, Catherine Doherty writes about the same terrible risk in her book Poustinia, which is part of my Lenten reading: “It struck me, as I meditated on this freedom God gave us, that it was unlimited in the sense that we had the power to say ‘no’ to God as well as ‘yes.’ The more I pondered, the more I was awed that I did have this fantastic freedom of saying yes and no to God.” She exults in the freedom to say yes without compulsion, a freedom that requires “the power to say ‘no’ to God.” One of the ways this “no” appears in our own day is very subtle, in a sin perfectly disguised as the highest virtue of our age: constant work. As commentators have pointed out, it used to be the case that the “leisure class” distinguished itself from ordinary people by conspicuously not working. These days, the richest people show off their importance by working all the time—70 or 80 hours a week. And they freely choose to do it, for or less the same reason that the scribes and the Pharisees “widen their phylacteries and lengthen their tassels.”

Why is so much work a way “to say ‘no’ to God”? Because it reveals a deadness to the meaning of time and the neglect of truly healing leisure. A century ago, according to the Dutch writer Rutger Bregman, economists anticipated a 15-hour work week by the early 20th century. In fact, however, ordinary people (not just the tech elites) now work more than ever, so much so that “burnout” has become a major contemporary phenomenon. The World Health Organization lists the symptoms as “feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion; increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job; and reduced professional efficacy.”

We sometimes worry that students at Wyoming Catholic College are assigned too much reading, which might lead to the legendary “sophomore slump.” (This year’s sophomores claim to have avoided the phenomenon, by the way.) But burnout is a societal issue, so much so that it has its own literature. I recently read an article suggesting that burnout is really an affliction of “elites”—and actually less an affliction than a kind of refuge for “affluent professionals who fetishize overwork.” Being burned-out becomes an almost honorific condition, because it shows how hard you have been working: “self-declared burnout cases can congratulate themselves on their diligence while dodging the stigma of depression.” What’s more, if you are burned out, you can justify not working to the inner slave driver who wants status and wealth.

Burnout buys time: down time, time off—free time, let’s call it, assuming that “free” means the absence of obligations. Whenever people under stress are surveyed, they usually say that they want more free time, but then further studies and statistics show that, no, they are happier if they keep working. That’s probably because work distracts them from the deeper questions of what time is for and what God wants of us.

Here at Wyoming Catholic College, every student reads and discusses Josef Pieper’s famous book, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, in which Pieper compellingly argues that obsessive work is a form of acedia—that is, a spiritual evasion through busy-ness, a subtle form of the “no” to God. Real leisure for Pieper means more than the absence of obligations (even to oneself). It means, rather, freely observing the Sabbath and the holy days of the Church as a way of saying yes to God and, by putting aside all work, entering a new kind of freedom in the timeless rest of God. In an essay that we will discuss next weekend in our last session on “A Sabbath Freedom,” Pieper writes that true leisure gives us “the liberal breathing space that allows us, oblivious of life’s more basic necessities, to do what is meaningful in itself.… Wherever this attitude becomes entirely defunct, all endeavors to organize ‘relaxation’ surely turn into an even more hectic, even an outright desperate, form of work.”

Those of us in the contemporary world imagine that we are too busy to be free in this way. Leisure and contemplation might have worked in past ages with their sleepy, bucolic landscapes and colorful peasants, but it won’t work in ours. It’s perplexing, though, that right there in the commandments against adultery and murder and theft, there is one that says, “Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy,” almost as though it applied to us—as though God did not understand that our work is too important to spare us.

I cannot claim to have achieved an exemplary plane of true leisure, a point on which you might consult my wife. It is difficult to stop working, but there is also a time (once a week, in fact) when work can actually become—well, a sin. It’s revealing that God Himself must tell us to stop working and something of a paradox that we must be commanded to be free.

Republished with gracious permission from Wyoming Catholic College.

The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics—we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please consider donating now.

The featured image is courtesy of Pixabay.