Holy Leisure — A Waste of Time?
Like so many people, I grew up nourished by the maxim that “idle hands are the devil’s workshop.” My parents and teachers reinforced this whenever they could, and perhaps that’s why I internalized it so well. Anyway, by age thirty I had already compiled an impressive list of tasks accomplished. But I also knew that this sort of attitude about life brings its special problems. Specifically, for people like me and others I know, we can never really do enough. It was nice that we had managed to use most of our time wisely, but ultimately what we’d done in the past mattered little compared to the challenges yet to come. Before us stretched the years, and the potential to waste any or all of that time was something to fear at all costs.
For years I thought I had been pretty industrious in the use of my time, but then smart phones came along. Those little machines made me painfully aware of just how many minutes and seconds I had frittered away through the years. With a smart phone I could put my life on track, and I could wring every opportunity from every minute. With even modest diligence I could reduce wastage to mere seconds a day.
In a recent essay in The Week, managing editor Carolyn O’Hara describes her own discovery of how much time she had wasted before the advent of the smart phone. Like me she had learned early on about the inherent sinfulness of boredom and idleness, and she too discovered the exhilaration of filling every waking moment with work. For a while, then, the smart phone transformed her life. But then it happened. Eventually it dawned on her that non-stop business was not the virtue she had once assumed. In banishing quiet and empty time from her life, she had lost something very important: her creativity.
“Truly empty time is vitally important” she writes. “When not distracted, our brains are free to wander off on creative tangents, as feelings and thoughts bubble up in the silence; there’s a reason bright ideas and breakthroughs tend to come in the shower or on long walks.” (16 October, 2015, p. 3.)
It’s amazing how easy it has been for the smart phone to upend our lives. In fact, most of us have surrendered without much of a fight, on the assumption that this is the greatest thing since sliced bread. You see examples of this surrender in restaurants and on the streets, where people prefer to talk with a disembodied voice rather than with the flesh and blood human being in front of them. And I’ve seen a variant of this in many first-time visitors to the abbey. On arrival they are struck by the silence, both in the guesthouse and also in the abbey church. Many of them find the silence intimidating, because they’ve never really experienced silence in their lives. For them the big test comes especially during the recitation of the psalms at morning and evening prayer. We monks are accustomed to one full minute of silence between each psalm, but visitors find that one minute to be a novel experience. For a few it’s almost too much to bear. Those interludes seem to give new appreciation for the line from the psalm that reads “one day within your courts is like a thousand elsewhere.” In our choir many discover how infinitely long one minute of silence can seem, and for a few it is just too much. But if they keep it up, in time they discover how exhilarating it is when time seems to stand still.
Long ago we monks got used to these meditative pauses, and now I assume all of us savor the chance to sit, to be silent, and to indulge in what the world considers to be an idle waste of time. But idleness it is not. Nor is it a waste. With smart phones silenced and the absence of chatter, and with nothing else to do but sit there waiting for the next psalm, we experience the chance to listen to what God has to say. That’s when we experience the Spirit stirring within us.
When the movie Into the Great Silence made its debut, its portrait of life in a Carthusian monastery drew mixed responses. I fondly recall one reviewer from The Minneapolis StarTribune, who took umbrage at the absence of a sound track that could have carried the film through the slow parts. He didn’t go so far as to recommend an orchestral overture to introduce the movie, but he was moving in that direction. Obviously, however, he missed the point of the movie entirely. Granted, there was no musical background; and there was indeed a scarcity of words, But there was more than enough to listen to, because in their silence the monks heard things that most of us miss completely in our day-to-day craziness. .
The silence and holy leisure that allow us to listen is the point of monastic life, and of Christian life as well. Jesus often commented on how people had ears to hear but never seemed to hear anything. Echoing this, Saint Benedict urged his monks to listen, and in fact those are the first words in his Rule. Clearly he did not intend to banish sound from the monastery; rather, he preferred quality over the the quantity of sound.
Sadly, what makes listening so difficult these days is not the quality of the sound, but the quantity. Our world is inundated with noise, and smart phones compete furiously for whatever attention they can get. Not surprisingly, then, despite having ears to hear and more stuff to hear than ever before in human history, we generally miss out on what is truly important. We fail to pay attention to what really matters.
It’s never too late to make space in our day to be silent and to listen. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that it may even be good to silence our smart phones once in a while, just to better hear the ordinary stuff that’s been going on around us. Who knows what great things we’ve been missing? And if we run the risk of not hearing as much stuff as before, we might very well have those creative insights that will make for us all he difference in the world.
+On October 14 I presided at the Abbey Mass at Saint John’s. You can access my sermon, Did Jesus Have Bad Days? through this link.
+On October 15 I attended a reception for alumni of Saint John’s University, held in Dallas, TX
+On October 16-18 I gave a retreat to the Dallas/Houston area members of the Federal Association of the Order of Malta. We held the retreat at Montserrat Jesuit Retreat House, in Lake Dallas, TX. The members made for a wonderful time, and I look forward to meeting with them again someday. In my conferences I spoke on the spirituality of the Order of Malta.
+I took the photos in today’s post last week. At the end of the summer the prognosticators had promised an autumn filled with glorious color. We’ve had some, but not quite as much as what we had expected.