Fides Quaerens Intellectum

In my years of working with college students–from freshmen to seniors–at least one thing is clear:  they usually don’t know what to do with their leisure time.  If  they’re not in class or working on a paper, then they’re probably plugged in to their ipods, or perhaps chatting or gaming on the internet.  Maybe even a game of cards every now and then when they can pull themselves away from their computer screens.  I’m not saying I always make the best use of my own leisure time.  But what is leisure time, really?  Is it in any sense related to work and/or our vocations?  Why even ask these questions?  Doesn’t everyone just assume that “leisure” is synonymous with “entertainment?” 

I can just hear it now–”Uh-huh. There goes Basie again, analyzing things too much.  Stop worrying and define leisure however you want.  You want leisure?  Take your wife to a movie.”  Certain friends of mine (not the true “bruthas,” of course!) would say that very thing.  But of course they would be falling into all the entrapments that Enlightenment modernist reductionism affords us, namely the unavoidable slippery slope into postmodern relativism where “man is the measure” in terms of his power to name the world as he sees fit (in utter isolation, of course, from community), in this case specifically where his own definition of leisure is concerned.  You go that route and you can just forget what Neil Postman warned us about 20 years ago in Amusing Ourselves to Death.

Surely there must be a better–and more true–understanding of leisure and how we should think about time that isn’t “work time.”  And indeed there is.  Leland Ryken, a professor at Wheaton College, has as a main goal of his book Redeeming the Time “to encourage readers to upgrade the quality of their leisure pursuits.”  He goes on to say that “We have a lamentable tendency to drift by default into mediocrity in our leisure lives instead of actively choosing the excellent.  When we define leisure in terms of human enrichment, it again emerges as the opposite, not only of work, but also of idleness” (28). 

Food for thought this Advent Season.  More to come on this subject.