The other day as I was running, I started thinking about
life and how, for some—for most in our society—the pursuit of pleasure is
extremely important. So important in
fact, that it is seen as being the highest goal of one’s life. Carpe Diem!
Seize the Day! But what exactly does this even mean? I thought how, if this was my
view, if I were to believe that life, this all too brief life, were all that
there is, then that would be extremely depressing. Our lives speed by in the
blink of an eye. One comment that
parents hear so very often is, “it goes by so fast.” It does, it all goes by so
very fast. Therefore, if this is it, if this is all that there is, then I
should be an extremely depressed individual because life is hard. Fortunately,
this is not what I believe.
This thought—how
glad I am that the pursuit of pleasure and my personal happiness is not the most
important thing in life—was running my though my head the other night at
dinner when I told Patrick that Sebastian had been complaining a bit about doing
school. Patrick turned to Sebastian and gave him one of the best little “pep
talks” that I have ever heard. I found it to be especially wonderful because it
was something that I also needed to hear. (When this conversation took place I
had just had several days of feeling extremely unmotivated and tired of doing
it all.) This is the gist of what he
said.
Work as gift!: work is the normal mode of life for most
people in most places, from youth to old age, and it always has been; and this
is appropriate. Work is one of the primary means God has given us to use the
gifts He has given us and to participators in His divine plan for creation.
Even in Paradise, there was work!: “The LORD
God then took the man and settled him in the garden of Eden, to cultivate and
care for it” (Gen. 2:15).
This does not mean that work is the highest mode of life.
Leisure, especially worship, the highest form of leisure, most perfectly
expresses our ultimate purpose and place in God’s order, but in this life we are
granted only small foretastes of this eternal bliss, in which our spirits will
rest finally and completely in our Lord.
The attitude that work is merely imposition, curse,
something ultimately to be gotten through (the assignment, the work day, the
work week, the semester) to attain the weekend, the next vacation, retirement—this
attitude is poisonous to earthly contentment, not only because it is contrary
to the spirit of gratitude that should characterize every Christian life, but
more basically because it runs counter to the normal mode of human existence.
Much of this attitude is rather implicit and subconscious
than it is explicit and actively cultivated. And it seems to me that a normal
childhood (even otherwise entirely healthy childhood) as part of a modern
first-world family (even a deeply Christian, culturally-traditional family) breeds
this sense of life-as-leisure almost unavoidably. Think of the families you
know whose children only read good books, who never watch TV, who spend time playing
and exploring outdoors, who are required to help around the house, etc., etc.
Quite healthy, to be sure, but even so, those children’s lives are still
dominated by leisure, by play—a few chores, a few hours of schoolwork, and the
remainder of the day free for play. Don’t believe it? Just compare the lives of
any child you know with the lives of children in most times and places—even to
the lives of my parents, who were raised on farms and from a very young age
were actively engaged in the daily rhythms of workaday life.
Now surely the freedom our children have now to learn
through play, through exploration, is a great gift in many respects. Who of us
would wish on our children the necessity of “growing up” before they have had
the chance to be children? But I work every day with 18- to 22-year-old
children from very sensible, even remarkable, families, children with a deep
devotion to our Lord and a basic desire to be and to do good. And these same
children are handicapped—just as I was and still am—by having lived the first
18 (and more) years of their lives largely in leisure or at least oriented
unrelentingly toward leisure (the end of the school day, the end of the school
week, etc.). One might think that six or seven hours spent in school and more spent
in extracurricular activities is hardly a life of leisure—and in many respects
it is not—but I don’t recall school being particularly challenging (quite the
opposite, and boring to boot); and my extracurricular activities were hardly
work, though they did require some measure of sacrifice.
The end result of all this, which is terribly exacerbated by
the typical college experience, even in “good” schools, is young people for
whom work is always something to be gotten through or around as quickly and
efficiently as possible so that the real business of life—being with friends, “vegging,”
partying, sleeping—can be gotten on with and maximized. And it is worth
emphasizing that for those persons who have this expectation about life,
precisely those who work hardest to maximize their leisure time, for them “leisure” is
the least substantial, and is characterized primarily by mere absence of any
obligation—we have all felt the call of a television at the end of the day,
that powerful attraction to a purely passive “relaxation.” Hence the statistic
that the average American watches something like four hours of television a
day. Brainless passivity is the highest form of relaxation as it is the furthest
from anything requiring work, physical or mental.
The inordinate desire for leisure breeds acedia, that deep existential boredom
which is also discouragement vis-à-vis
the normal patterns and routines of daily life; Aquinas-via-Pieper tells us
that acedia, which is not laziness
but is closely akin to it, is most fundamentally a sadness in the face of our high calling. He who suffers acedia, true sloth, “would prefer to be
less great in order thus to avoid the
obligation of greatness” (Faith,
Hope, Love, my emphasis).
Again, this is largely a subconscious orientation or
expectation about life, but all the more powerful for that. And it is difficult
to see how to combat it, if I am right about what I said above about even the
most well-structured childhood in our society. Awareness of the dangers seems
to be the first step toward counteracting this powerful psychological force.
Secondly, and most importantly, we must demonstrate to our children by our
example a healthy gratitude for and joy in work—even a certain ambition,
understood as magnanimity, a desire for great things in our normal routines of
work—and a concomitant appreciation of authentic leisure.