A Cautionary Opening

I feel like a hypocrite sitting down to write a reflection on leisure as I claw my way to the end of an overcommitted semester. I teach a seminar at Villanova University called “Shaping an Adult Life” in which I dedicate one-third of the course to the idea of leisure. I taught that course during both semesters this year, and I find myself having preached one thing and practiced something quite different.

This is a serious case of St. Paul’s “the good that I will to do, I do not do” (Rom. 7:19). Or perhaps worse: “the good that I teach my students, I do not do.” It is somehow a consolation to note that Thomas Aquinas thought teaching a gratuitous grace. In other words, it is a grace given for the sake of others, but one that does not necessarily transform the instructor’s interior life (ST I-II.111.4). Below, I offer reflections upon what I teach. Make no assumptions about how I live my life.

Classroom Moments

When I bring up leisure in a class, I am universally met with blank stares. Students don’t know how to spell “leisure,” let alone practice it. They come to campus having suffered the grind of the college admissions process. Trapped as they are in a productivity machine that measures achievements, they arrive having been promised that these will result in wealth, prestige and status. In this way, the college experience becomes yet another grind where the resume replaces the college application as the frame within which they walk through their experience.

This “resume frame” has turned even extracurriculars into work. It is not enough to join clubs. They need to run for the countless positions on club executive boards to show “leadership skills.” Classes generally end in the late afternoon, only to be replaced by student club meetings from 6-9pm. When students have free time, they’re bone tired. Going out to bars even feels like work, what with all the snapping of photos, the curating of photos, the posting of photos, and the liking of other people’s photos—this sounds more like a part-time job and less like a party. It’s no wonder they often stay home instead, doom scrolling on their phones, gaming, online sports gambling, or binge-watching Netflix. Or doing all four at the same time. And adults are making a lot of money on the backs of these students. One recently said to me, “Everywhere I turn, adults are trying to get me addicted.”

As they begin to reflect upon what true leisure could mean for them, many realize that recovering childhood activities is the way to begin to reclaim leisure. Some used to paint or write music. Others used to play pickup basketball or bake. I remember one student mentioning that she loved doing puzzles during the pandemic so she looked forward to going home where she could do a puzzle again. “Why not bring a puzzle to campus?” I asked. She looked at me like I had suggested she fly to the moon.

A Leisure Garden

Students need a new frame to replace the “resume frame.” I offer the metaphor of a leisure garden. Through entering into this image and reflecting upon it, through committing to practices to build this garden in accountability groups, students find themselves making small changes that have an outsized impact on their collegiate experience.

To turn a weedy patch of grass into a lovely leisure garden, pulling out unhealthy practices is a good start. And building a fence around the phone-super-predator is absolutely necessary. Students try different apps to help them curb phone use. They talk to each other about what to eliminate. A few apps work. Most don’t. I challenge them to go to a concert without taking photos. There is a lot of defensive talk and resistance during this stage. It takes one determined student to testify to the joys of deleting Instagram or TikTok for a week to give others the courage to do this. Some never go back. Others try and curb a device that is designed for addiction. These students become models for each other in how to prune and plant their interior garden.

Augustine knew about the power of a concrete model.

In Book Eight of the Confessions Augustine had come to recognize what his issues were.¹ He knew he had a problem with sex (this isn’t his only issue, of course—he’s also insanely arrogant and overly ambitious, but in Book Eight he zeros in on sex). It’s in this book that he famously says, “Give me chastity, but not yet!” By this point in his life, he knows he needs to reform his ways but he’s holding back.

Let’s look at the scene in chapter 11 of Book Eight in two parts. In part I, Augustine has already recognized that he’s torn up about what kind of life he should lead. He notes that even when we’re choosing between two good choices, each of the choices tug at us: “All are good, but they compete among themselves until one is chosen,” he writes.² How to choose? He finds himself “dislodged” and “hanging” at this point in his life.³ Augustine’s imagination is a powerful force in his movement from disordered to ordered love. He has some mistresses, tantalizing voices, tugging on his fleshly garments [paraphrasing here], “Are you sure you can do without us?” they ask. “Are you ready to give us up completely?” they say. “If you give us up forever, you’ll never, your whole life long be able to come back to us.” As he turns away from them, their voices recede and they begin to mutter behind his back, but they still pluck at him, trying to get him to look back. Augustine writes that “they did slow me down, for I could not bring myself to tear free and shake them off and leap across to that place whither I was summoned, while aggressive habit still taunted me: ‘Do you imagine you will be able to live without these things?’”⁴

These imaginative voices in our heads pluck at us, tugging on our fleshly garments. They tell us we can’t survive without social media, that silencing our phones will mean we’ll miss our mother’s emergency phone call. They tell us watching porn is harmless, that scrolling through Instagram will only take a minute.

In part II of this scene, Augustine encounters a vision of a lady who is chaste. This chaste woman he calls “Lady Continence.” In his imagination he encounters a woman who, while not sexually active or seductive, is attractive. She’s fruitful. She’s happy. She has a calm demeanor and coaxes him with welcoming hands to come towards her. Surrounding her are many boys and girls, people of every age, widows and women “grown old in their virginity.” This vision comes as somewhat of a shock to him because he’d never imagined that refraining from sex could be an attractive way of life. Up to this point he’d only seen refraining from illicit sexual experiences as a negative, as a bodily addiction to deny. But here he sees the alternative as actually appealing. Lady Continence smiles at Augustine and asks, “Can’t you do what these women and men have done?” He stands there, bitterly ashamed, because he could still hear the murmurs of those voices in his head. He stands there in suspense, hanging back. She gently appeals to him a second time, urging him to close his ears to those voices. He is finally able to say to himself that he wants to be like her.
What’s really crucial about this second part of the scene is that it is not until Augustine has an imaginative encounter with Lady Continence, an encounter that is appealing to him, that he’s able to decide to move away from disordered love. It’s not until he recognizes that Lady Continence isn’t barren, but rather that she’s fruitful and a fully satisfied lover of the Lord, that he is able to embrace a different life. He bursts into tears at this point and goes outside so as not to cry in front of his friend. This is where he has the famous tolle lege moment: he hears a voice to pick up scripture and read it. He lights upon chapter 13 of the Book of Romans that tells him (literally) to stop “messing” around and turn toward the Lord Jesus Christ.

He writes, “No sooner had I reached the end of the verse than the light of certainty flooded my heart and all dark shades of doubt fled away.”

This experience gives him the courage to leave the city and move to the countryside to live among friends who are friends with God. This last detail is crucial to our reflection on leisure. He chooses friends with whom he can spend true otium, true leisure, and retires to the country. It’s important not only to become “leisure ambassadors” to each other, acting as concrete models of what true leisure looks like. It’s also crucial to build leisure habits together. Friendship, community, is at the heart of a healthy approach to leisure. Notice that in his imagination with Lady Continence, Augustine encounters a whole community of people living chastely and fruitfully. Together, my students learn how to plant a leisure garden. Weeding is a crucial first step. But planting is just as important.

Liturgical Leisure

Building a leisure garden isn’t just about doing stuff, even doing stuff together. Leisure activities can easily become just one more thing to add to our “to do” lists. To guard against this, we turn inward. True leisure demands a pretty radical interior reorientation. We are used to leisure being what is left over after work is done. But as Rabbi Abraham Heschel reminds us, the workweek should be oriented toward the sabbath, not the sabbath toward the work week.⁸ The sabbath is a time to enjoy leisure for its own sake, not as simply a way to recharge our work batteries. It’s a “realm in time where the goal is not to have, but to be, not to own, but to give, not to control, but to share, not to subdue, but to be in accord.”⁹ Cultivating an interior centeredness helps to put guardrails around work and to let leisure breath in our lives.

Since many students may wake up on Sundays with the “Sunday scaries,” weighed down by all the work they face during the upcoming week, I suggest practicing the sabbath on Saturdays, or—ideally—also carving out mini-sabbath practices on a daily basis. These result in stronger mental, physical, and spiritual health. But these leisure practices aren’t just instrumental to such health, they become essential habits of living. Once they become knitted into the patterns of our lives, they encourage a different rhythm altogether.

Worship is the deepest root of leisure, Josef Pieper reminds us, because in worship we see the world as it is and approve of it as such.¹⁰ Just as it’s impossible to love someone “in order to” or “for the purpose of,” we don’t worship in order to gain to something else.¹¹ To worship is to express gratitude for the gift of creation. To worship is to rest in this gift. Leisure practices throughout the week ideally cultivate this inner rest, an inner silence that prepares us to become receptive to creation. Sabbath liturgies accentuate that receptivity and reorient our whole week toward that receptivity.

It’s time for me to turn away to the voices tugging at my own fleshly garments and start practicing at home what I preach in the classroom.