What is ‘leisure’ and why is it important?

After more than three decades in continuous formal educational settings, much of my experience of the world is driven by the circannual rhythms of academia. To put it more simply, I experience life as an unending cycle of semesters. I cannot imagine what late August would feel like without preparing for classes, because the last time I experienced that I was 4 years old. I also can’t imagine late February without longing with every fiber of my being for spring break (and the four most beautiful words in the English language: “pitchers and catchers report.”)

While taking our Lenten journey seriously, such a time also provides us an opportunity to think theologically about such pauses from the monotony of our professional vocation, no matter how fulfilling and enjoyable they may be. What then is “leisure” and why is it important?

The most influential answer to this question was given in Josef Pieper’s classic “Leisure – The Basis of Culture,” written in Germany in 1948.

Leisure is not simply an absence of work. In fact, the Greek (skole) and Latin (schola) versions of the word are the root of our English “school,” for it is only in the space freed from the demands of manual labor that the life of the mind can take on greater forms of research, discourse and contemplation. This in no way demeans working with one’s hands, as Pope John Paul II famously credited physical labor with playing a transformative role in his life. But authentic leisure bears fruit only when planted in the soil of committed self- and world-examination, which requires the room and time to sprout. It can in many instances demand a tremendous and unique kind of effort from us to cultivate, nourish and prune that garden.

More than entertainment, “the essence of leisure is not to assure that we may function smoothly but rather to assure that we, embedded in our social function, are enabled to remain fully human. That we may not lose the ability to look beyond the limits of our social and functional station, to contemplate and celebrate the world as such, to become and be that person who is essentially oriented toward the whole of reality.”

Pieper gives great focus to the role of “festival” in this process of authentically understanding the ultimate question that is every life and of building authentic culture. It is not a lack of activity, and even less a thoughtless and frenzied revelry, but rather is “allowing one’s inner eye to dwell for a while upon the reality of Creation.”

I often tell people that Italians do not understand Americans, who seem to have the roles reversed in many cases. Here, many see leisure as a way to capitalize labor, a recharging of the interior batteries so we can get back to the real elements of life: working, making money, being productive.

In contrast, many Europeans (especially as you move further south!) often offer a startling reversal of priorities. For them, work exists for the sake of leisure, not the other way around. Family and friends and feasts are in many cases the “more real” realities than professional life. Very rarely is the first question posed there “Che lavoro fai?” (“What do you do for a living?”). They simply do not calibrate life on such a grid. Much more important is where one’s family is from — or if one has eaten!

Of course, globalization is changing much of this as the allure of Wall Street continues to reach everywhere. But the generalizations remain valid in my experience.

I feel blessed to have had the privilege (and I realize it is exactly that) first to go on for higher education at all, and second to study liberal arts at a number of Jesuit universities, where the emphasis is less on pre-professional credentialing in terms of diplomas as a means to employment, and more on fully developing the human person to flourish holistically, to wrestle with the social and moral ills of our times, and to live a life in service of others, while striving to find God in all things.

But as much as I sincerely love that atmosphere, and my students, colleagues, teaching, and publishing, I’m looking forward to enjoying the space for some prayerful, transformative and social leisure in the coming weeks. For I trust in him who once said not only that a worker deserves his just wages, but also encouraged us: “Come unto me all you who labor, and I will give you rest.”

Collingswood native Michael M. Canaris, PhD, Loyola University Chicago.