Saturday, March 05, 2005
Loss of leisure time, loss of faith
A puzzling paradox of our time is that leisure continues to shrink even as "labor-saving devices" spread everywhere, performing more and more human tasks like banking, collecting tolls and answering phones.
Three powerful and dangerous trends operate here.
First, working hours slowly but steadily increase. According to a study by Professor Juliet Schor of Harvard, the average person now works 164 hours more per year than he or she did 20 years ago. This means that nearly a full month of additional work has been crammed into people’s lives.
Another study discovered that 30 percent of employees skip at least part of their allotted vacation days. In just one year, 415 million vacation days went unused. Rather than relaxing, people felt compelled to work.
Worse still, some long-established laws and regulations that discouraged excessive work have been weakened, repealed or simply gone unenforced.
Second, technology has allowed work to invade every inch of space and every moment of time. For many people, work has become a seamless experience that knows no boundaries. Work inexorably spills over into "home space" and "free time."
Third, many leisure activities, especially for children and teenagers, have become hyper-organized, brutally competitive, and driven by the hope of eventual financial reward, specifically the snaring of scarce athletic scholarships. Everything is now tightly scheduled, governed by intricate rule books and increasingly competitive. Rather than being an end in itself, play has become "marketized," valued primarily for its potential economic payoff. Play, when deprived of spontaneity, just becomes another form of work.
These three pervasive trends have devastating consequences for communities of faith. After all, common worship necessarily requires leisure time; personal spirituality needs at least some mental territory that is entirely "work free." Without a generous amount of leisure, the spiritual dies. And when this happens, faith communities become lifeless museums used for "holy days."
Judaism, more than any other religion, has long understood the essential connection between leisure and religious experience, whether communal or personal. The passionate protection of the Sabbath - a full day devoid of labor - flowed from the notion that the human person is primarily a child of God, not a worker. Unless people rest and enjoy leisure, they foster the blasphemous notion that they are self-created and self-sustained. This obliterates the constant awareness of the creative love and power of God, an awareness that evokes worship.
Who defends leisure? In recent times the strongest resistance to longer working hours has come from the political Left, the very ones accused of secularism. In France, for example, the crowning achievement of Francoise Mitterand’s Socialist Party was the law creating a 35-hour work week, a law now under fierce attack. And in Germany, opposition to Sunday commerce came primarily from the Social Democrats and the trade unions. Amazingly, they won, and a common day of leisure has been preserved, at least for now.
Paul Tillich, the great Protestant theologian, once remarked that God’s work is sometimes done unwittingly by those who seem indifferent - or even hostile - toward religion. In light of Tillich’s view, any social force that resists the smothering of life in an avalanche of work and hyper-organization is truly protecting the territory of the Holy.
By Rev. Fr. Michael Kerper
s.jameschurch@ comcast.net
The Rev. Fr. Michael Kerper is pastor of St. James Catholic Church in Portsmouth.
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