What is True Leisure?

What do you do with your free time? What do you do with the precious minutes after work and before dinner? And what about the free moments of thought throughout the mundanities of the day: what do you think about when driving, vacuuming, making dinner, brushing your teeth?

As I have transitioned to a new job and a new home in the past few months, I have said goodbye to the slow mornings and wide-open afternoons I enjoyed as a recent graduate. I am glad for this loss, for through it I am able to teach at a classical Christian school and become involved in a new place. But I have thought often over the past few months about time – specifically free time and what it signifies. What we do in our free moments says something about us.

Clearly, our pastimes and hobbies pronounce something about our likes and dislikes. But the song we play upon entering the car, the app we habitually open at a stoplight, the concerns that blink through our heads in our last waking moments – these things declare something about what our minds are fixed on.

What should we be thinking about; what should we be doing in these passing moments?

Of course, Scripture calls us to love the Lord with our actions and our minds, not merely our words. Hence the prophet Isaiah writes, “You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you.” A mind fixed on God shows trust in God. Ultimately, even in moments free of other obligations, our thoughts and deeds ought to be constellated around God.

On a practical level, though, such fixation is difficult. To, in truth, fill our minds with what is good – or, as Paul famously puts it in Philippians, “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise” – is a difficult task. It is a task that requires a constant attitude of humble surrender to Christ.

I often discuss the “whatever is true” admonition with my students when they need a reminder to delight in what is good. I ask them to reflect about whether their words or actions show that they care about truth, or about their neighbor, or about respecting authority. As I have carried out such conversations recently, I have been struck with the fact that Paul does not tell us to merely speak or act in accordance with what is true, honorable, just, and so on, but to “think about such things.” Scripture commands us to give the attention of our hearts and minds – not merely our words and actions – to that which is right and lovely.

As an educator at a classical Christian school, I, alongside my colleagues, am trying to shape the hearts and minds of students to seek what is right and lovely. Because a good education shapes the human person, affecting the way he sees the world, a good education will have some say over what he enjoys. We who educate children in the classical Christian tradition aim to cultivate a love for Scripture and tradition in our students, as well as a love for the simple, countercultural pastimes that flow within a worldview shaped around right and lovely things.

Thus, a good school is not merely one in which true facts are taught, but in which true delights are imparted: a school community in which grammar-school boys go home not to revel in video games but in the excitements of nature, in which high-school girls bond not over TikTok dances but over in the intricacies of classic literature. A good school is one in which students learn to delight in what the Lord calls right and lovely.

In order teach and impart such things, we teachers must also be seeking what is right and lovely ourselves. Just as a teacher at a Christian school must himself be a Christian, so a teacher who wishes his students to spend their time on worthy pursuits must himself spend his time on worthy pursuits. If a teacher teaches students Scripture and the Great Books and then returns home and relaxes via Netflix, raunchy comedy, or even popular romance novels, something is amiss, askew, out of place. If a teacher wants his students to delight in what is good but himself delights in what is not good, he is a hypocrite.

This is true, of course, not only of teachers but of parents. If parents do not want their children to watch TV shows that center around self-seeking individuals and inappropriate relationships but themselves watch Game of Thrones or some similar show, they are acting as hypocrites.

And this extends even to those who are not parents. If we seek to love what is good and think about what is right and lovely through committing ourselves to church, to liberal arts education, and to conservative politics but do not allow love of the good to affect our pastimes and entertainments, we are acting as hypocrites. We are missing the full picture of what Paul has in mind when he says “think about such things.” All of us – whatever our vocation – ought to pursue pastimes and entertainments that align with our beliefs in the True, Good, and Beautiful.

Our pastimes, entertainments, and thoughts in passing moments fall under the category of “leisure.” Leisure has to do with what we delight in, what we give joy and attention to. Augustine’s idea of rightly-ordered loves – a much cited idea in the sphere of classical Christian education – extends to leisure.

In Josef Pieper’s classic study Leisure, Pieper draws the distinction between the twisted forms of leisure that our culture seeks after and true, “active,” leisure. Pastimes and entertainments that drive us to escape from the world into havens of consumption do not make up true leisure. Rather, pursuits that draw us deeper into what is still “very good” in God’s world constitute true leisure. As Pieper writes, “unless we substitute true leisure for our hectic amusements, we will destroy our culture—and ourselves.”

Pieper’s work points us away from activities characterized by consumption and towards activities characterized by reception. The distinction between consumption and reception may seem to be a fine one, but consumption has to do primarily with individual pleasure while reception has to do with self-surrender. Hence Pieper’s understanding that “Leisure is not the attitude of the one who intervenes but of the one who opens himself; not of someone who seizes but of one who lets go, who lets himself go.” The end of leisure is not oneself but something higher than oneself, something that requires the individual to release his self-interest.

An attitude of reception and self-surrender, nonetheless, can be best forged in pursuits that are indeed active, such as walking or gardening. Herein lies the intricacy of true leisure: even while requiring an attitude of reception, leisure is active, not passive.

Josh Gibbs, a frequent writer at the CiRCE Institute and author of Something They Will Not Forget and Love what Lasts, has written and spoken about the importance of developing classical leisure in classical schools. We all have pastimes, whatever our schedule, and thus, our pastimes as those interested in the true and beautiful should be true and beautiful. Gibbs writes in Love What Lasts that “the responsibility to love and enjoy beautiful things is a lifelong task which is not abrogated simply because we start late.”

Often, we moderns are apt to think that we have no time to enjoy beautiful things. I myself – amid the changes of my current season of life – often think that I have no time for such leisure. But there is indeed time in the little cracks and crevices of our schedules, more than we might think: there is time to wake earlier for prayer instead of sleeping in, there is time to listen to Bach while working instead of a vapid contemporary pop song, there is time to scribble a few words of poetry or start a quick sketch instead of scrolling through social media on the train, there is time to play an audiobook while cooking instead of mentally re-playing the mistakes of the day.

In order to clear out time for true leisure, each of us must re-evaluate what things we are thinking about and doing in the small, in-between, otherwise mindless moments of our lives. And, as Gibbs encourages us, it is not too late for us to begin this lifelong task of true leisure, of delight in the true and good.

True leisure is something that all can grow in, whether teacher or student, parent or young adult. And it is important for us all to grow in. For, as we have seen, “free time” is not as insignificant and morally neutral as our consumer-minded culture would have us believe. In our free time we are either shirking or submitting to Scripture’s instruction to think about the right and lovely. And, as Pieper reminds us, our conformity to Scripture’s instruction through practicing true leisure “is not a Sunday afternoon idyll” but represents “the preserve of freedom, of education and culture, and of that undiminished humanity which views the world as a whole.”

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