Unleisure

The rising sun was shining on the new snow when I went for my walk this morning.  On the way back this view caught my eye.
My morning walk is part of the leisure that I enjoy here since I retired seven and a half years ago.  I've had several conversations recently with and about people who are reluctant to retire because "I don't know what I'd do with myself."  Leisure has left the building.  Too many of us think that we live to work.  I tend to think that this goes all the way back to the Puritans who have left a terrible stamp on our culture in too many ways.  The primary importance given to work is one of them.
I've written here before about Josef Pieper's Leisure: the Basis of Culture.   I am reminded of it again by Gregory Wolfe in his thought provoking editorial in No.77 of his fine quarterly Image.  Pieper notes that the Greek word for "leisure" is skole, the origin of our English word "school," which we associate with work rather than leisure.  The Greeks did not have a word for the more utilitarian notion of work.  The would say "we are unleisurely so that we can have leisure." 
Pieper points out that our notion that learning takes a lot of work is foreign to ancient ways of thinking.  Thomas Aquinas said, "The essence of virtue consists in the good rather than in the difficult."  Pieper says, "The highest moral good is characterized by effortlessness--because it springs from love."
The leisure that God gives me here has made contemplation richer.  Contemplation is an effortless kind of prayer in which we simply receive what God offers in the depths of our self and in the beauty of nature and of the arts.
(Wolfe wrote the book Beauty Will Save the World that has enriched my life since I read it two years ago.)