Strangers to the City

by Michael Casey

  1. Leisure as Silence

  Leisure is not idleness or the pursuit of recreational activities. It is, above all, being attentive to the present moment, open to all its implications, living it to the full. This implies a certain looseness in lifestyle that allows heart and mind to drift away from time to time. Monastic life is not a matter of shoehorning the maximum number of good works into a day. It is more important that monks and nuns do a few things well, being present to the tasks they undertake, leaving room for recuperation and reflection, and expecting the unexpected. Leisure allows openness to the present. It is the opposite of being enslaved by the past or living in some hazy anticipation of a desirable future. Leisure means being free from anything that would impede, color, or subvert the perception of reality. Far from being the headlong pursuit of escapist activities and having fun, authentic leisure is a very serious matter because it is the product of an attentive and listening attitude to life.

  Leisure is a form of silence which is the prerequisite of the apprehension of reality. Leisure is a receptive attitude of mind, a contemplative attitude, and it is not only the occasion but also the capacity for steeping oneself in the whole of creation.18

  Benedict’s monastery is a place of leisure because those who live there are committed to a life of mindfulness. Being attentive requires, first of all, that we renounce the desire to control what happens around us, to manipulate reality, to impose our will on events or on other people. We often think that those who try to keep control of everything around them are strong and domineering people, attempting to rule others and to mould them in their own likeness. Usually this is not so. Control-freaks are most often fearful people who are threatened by the prospect that events would be allowed to take an independent direction. Underneath the firm grip and the bluster is a wavering self-confidence that fears to face the unexpected. By constraining everything to squeeze itself into the hard shell of their expectations, they fail to read and respect the reality of the world around them. They are heedless of what is outside themselves because they are driven mercilessly by their own insecurity. Their life is a constant battle to prevent reality from asserting its independence. Their inner voices are shouting so loudly that they can hear nothing else.

  We all need to learn the art of silence, to still the clamor that comes from within as well as securing for ourselves a zone where outward noise is sometimes hushed. Above all we need to teach ourselves to become somewhat more silent, because it is through an undisciplined tongue that much of our personal and social disturbance comes. In a world where communication is huge, it takes a fair amount of resolution to create for oneself a sphere of silence, in which external urgencies are put on hold and words are weighed. Just as it is important for us to make “quality time” for people we love, so we need to reserve some moments—and more than moments—for coming to an understanding of what is happening within us and around us. We will never have a listening attitude to life unless we spend time listening. That means we stop talking and we stop engaging in consciousness-absorbing activities and start paying attention. If we do this often enough, it may become semi-habitual.

  Of course, such periods of silence and solitude have to be purchased at the expense of other activities, and that is what we do not like. We do not want to give up any of the elements that we have built into our lives, be they ever so trite and paltry. We have first to be convinced of the value of holy leisure. This is where a problem arises. Leisure is content-free; it is good in so far as it is filled with goodness, but it obviously has the capacity to be poisoned by malice. This is why there is, notably in Latin, a certain ambiguity about the term itself and a corresponding ambivalence towards the reality it describes. Leisure is empty space. We find it hard to make room for nothing in our crowded lives; like nature we abhor a vacuum. Better to do something useful, we say, than simply mope. A period of involuntary inactivity due to unforeseen circumstances we find very hard to endure.

  Silence, however, stands outside the world of profit and utility; it cannot be exploited for profit; you cannot get anything out of it. It is “unproductive.” Therefore it is regarded as valueless. Yet there is more help and healing in silence than in all the “useful things.” Purposeless, unexploitable silence suddenly appears at the side of the all-too-purposeful, and frightens us by its very purposelessness. It interferes with the regular flow of the purposeful. It strengthens the untouchable, it lessens the damage inflicted by exploitation. It makes things whole again, by taking them back from the world of dissipation into the world of wholeness. It gives something of its own holy uselessness, for that is what silence itself is: holy uselessness.19

  Attentiveness is acquired by most people through a habit of reflectiveness—learning to step back from experience to ponder its meaning. Most often meaning presents itself to a gently disengaged consciousness—fierce interrogation habitually yields nothing. As Archimedes discovered, insights often come at the most unlikely moment. Those who give a high priority to the pursuit of wisdom should, accordingly, try to structure their lives so that times of disengagement are multiplied. This is not necessarily a matter of scheduling in high-powered periods of concentration; at least this is not Benedict’s way. In the traditional ordering of the monastic day “intervals” were provided in which nothing much happened. Provision was made for the possibility of moving from one place or activity to another, for leaving aside a particular occupation and temporarily disengaging from its concerns. Leisure means living gently; it is the opposite of being driven or obsessed. It involves getting on with the job at hand and detaching oneself from it when it is time to move on to something else. To some extent leisure invites us to cultivate the virtue of inefficiency. We are far more likely to notice the scenery if we dawdle along the way than if we rocket along at mind-numbing speed. Leisure calls us to avoid the cumulative sense of incompletion that occurs when we find ourselves burdened with the weight of so many cares and unfinished tasks. It is a childlike concern only for the present. I suppose it was easier in a world not dominated by calendars and clocks simply to take each day as it comes. On the other hand, making the effort to overthrow the tyranny of time yields proportionately higher profits to those of us who try it sometimes. It is like a liberation. We have to realize, however, that the tyrant is inside us, not outside.

  2. Room to Breathe

  Acommunity that embraces the ideal of leisure gives its members room to breathe. It is a gift of time and space. Time for oneself; time for one another; time to listen, encourage, and support; time to step back and discern, to assess the quality of actions; time to develop culture and ritual and good liturgy. Space for people to grow, space for different gifts, space for the stranger, space to pass through crises. A community that prizes leisure is more interested in persons than in the accomplishment of tasks; community activities are more about subjective meanings than simply a matter of getting work done. Leisure is, as Pope John Paul II has often insisted, about building a culture of humanization.

  Any group that takes seriously the advantages of providing for its members an appropriate measure of freedom will stand out clearly in our purpose-driven world. The disciplined asceticism of the community is not designed to shepherd everybody into well-worn tracks and keep them there. It is intended to safeguard the integrity of each so that subjective forays into creativity are both true to self and harmonious within the communal setting. Leisure is one of the effects of an asceticism dedicated to promoting a fully human way of life. It deliberately moderates the inflow of external demands so that what is interior and personal is not swamped. This sounds great. It is not so easy to implement. We soon discover that the possibilities of escape from fully personal living are legion and attractive, and that it requires persevering effort to maintain mindfulness in a world that constantly summons us to distraction.

  3. The Enemies of Leisure

  The enemies of leisure attack from both sides. On the one hand we may be tempted to be more diligent and hard-wor
king, on the other to take things easy and allow ourselves to drift at the behest of whatever influence dominates a particular moment. We are all familiar with persons who work too hard, who are obsessive, ambitious, or hyper-diligent, who take on too many jobs and never seem to reach a point when they are not preoccupied with what has to be done next. Such people experience little leisure. Other strangers to leisure are less visible. These are the slothful, those who lack commitment, those who seek means to insulate themselves from the demands of the present moment and, if possible, to escape from them. Such activities as they consent to do expand to fill all available time; there is never any possibility of undertaking anything extra. To the casual observer it may appear that the lazy person leads a more leisured life but, in reality, such a vacuous existence falls far short of the true meaning of leisure, because in their own minds there is never any room for an unexpected adventure.

  Monks are often imagined to be lazy creatures. Mostly this is not true. More often than not their temptations come from the opposite direction. Consider this wonderful picture of an overworking monk in John Cassian’s ninth conference.

  A certain very experienced elder once happened to be passing by the cell of a brother who was afflicted by an illness of the soul which caused him to toil at constructing and repairing buildings every day, far beyond what was necessary. From a distance the elder watched him breaking hard rock with a heavy hammer. Then he noticed an Ethiopian standing beside him also grasping the hammer as he hit the rock, and who kept urging him on with fiery promptings to work harder.

  The elder stood still for a long time, amazed at the sight of such a baleful demon, and at the extent of the deception being inflicted. When the brother became tired and had no energy left and wanted to put an end to the work and rest, then at the prompting of this spirit he was persuaded to take up the hammer again and encouraged not to desist from what he had intended to do when he began. The brother was so moved by these urgings that his tiredness left him and so he resumed the heavy work, and yet he felt no pain.

  The elder saw what the hard-working brother did not: that his labors were not dictated by a reasoned judgment, but by the secret connivance of the demon. He was not a free man; he was a slave of the demon of overwork. The elder decided to intervene.

  The elder was so disturbed by this performance on the part of the dread demon that he turned aside to the brother’s cell and greeted him. “Brother, what is this work that you are doing,” he asked. And the brother answered, “We are working on this very hard rock and it is only with great difficulty that we are able to make any impression on it.” At this the old man replied, “It is well that you say ‘We,’ since you are not alone when you are working on the rock. There was another with you whom you did not see, who has been less a helper than a most oppressive taskmaster in this work.”20

  Cassian diagnoses the monk’s problem as being “worldly ambition,” which he defines curiously as “whatever contributes to our power,” whatever makes us think that we can accomplish things by our own ingenuity and strength. There is, in other words, a connection between the spirit of leisure and the deliberate renunciation of power.

  Despite appearances, compulsive overwork is more likely to be the outcome of vice than of virtue. Motivation is crucial. In the case of Cassian’s monk, as with most good people like ourselves, unworthy motivations are usually hidden from us, but perfectly visible to others. More often than not, we do too much because we are afraid of being judged as failures, we do not trust others to do their share, we wish to exclude alternative approaches, or we want to ensure that we remain unchallenged in the driver’s seat. Mostly, our perceptions are distorted. We have not taken time to see clearly. “Such a hard worker!” others say; but nobody thinks to ask why. All we know is that we feel good when we are on top of things; when projects slip away from our control we feel bad.

  Potency is often delusional in that the euphoria it generates blinds us to anything but our own contribution to a task, our own importance in the general scheme of things. Meanwhile others may be unjustly exploited or undervalued. Power always works for its own benefit and increase. Smitten with blind ambition to expand into the realm of omnipotence, it never rests. There is no time to be still and admire, no time to wonder and be intrigued by paradox. It cannot afford to be surprised and to break out in cries of celebration. Language is tortured out of shape to prevent reality obtruding, sequential logic is lost, and the songs of poetry are stilled by the onrush of relentless self-serving verbiage.

  A leisurely mind consists in being open to the wildness of universal reality. This means being content not to be in control—not seeking to stamp my trademark on everything around, permitting others to exercise autonomy in the imagination and execution of tasks. The result of this detachment is underemployment. We accomplish less than we could. But it is the disengaged mind that has the liberty to see alternatives—to hear the whispers to which a harried and hurried world is insensitive. Leaving our conscious mind somewhat vacant is an invitation for matter hitherto hidden in unconsciousness to assert its presence. Most thinkers and writers have experience of revelations and solutions coming at the most unlikely moment. Whether we are in the bath, almost asleep, pausing at the corner of the stairs, or just goofing off, suddenly the clouds may part and the sun shines through. The novelist Don De Lillo describes the process in this way:

  A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it…. One’s personality and vision are shaped by other writers, by movies, by paintings, by music. But the work itself, you know—sentence by sentence, page by page—it’s much too intimate, much too private, to come from anywhere but deep within the writer himself. It comes out of all the time a writer wastes. We stand around, look out the window, walk down the hall, come back to the page, and, in those intervals, something subterranean is forming, a literal dream that comes out of day-dreaming. It’s too deep to be attributed to clear sources.21

  Our best accomplishments derive from all the time we have wasted. What an idea! How odd this sentiment seems to those who embrace a work ethic. What it is saying is that our most creative moments come when we are responsive to the promptings of the unspeaking universe. The true artist is one who gives hand, heart, or tongue to the service of a tradition that has been received and assimilated, and now finds sparkling expression in something never seen or heard before. In the work of creation, the tradition comes alive. For this to happen the artist must have learned how to be silent, to become a disciple, to be formed. Without this only a degenerate self-expression results that is of interest to no one.

  We were made to be creative, and if this natural propensity is blocked, whether by overwork or by idleness, we become irritable disturbers of the peace in whatever community we live and work. As we have already noted, the key to understanding leisure is to see it as a means of giving a high priority to the present moment. We have to seize the opportunities that this day offers. Beyond the external discipline that keeps us constant in the performance of our task, a certain mental vigilance is required. This means that we do not allow ourselves to be dominated and determined by thoughts and feelings from the past; we have to cast off these shackles. Nor can we reduce present opportunities to wishful thinking about the future. Daydreaming can never be a substitute for action. We are all familiar with stories of those who have become reconciled with a terminal disease that leaves them but a short time to live. They make up their minds to live every day to the full—not to postpone the good that is today within their reach, not to fail to exploit the potential richness of every hour. What a blessing if we could live in like manner.

  There are two happy outcomes to a satisfactory resolution of the issue of leisure: mindfulness and patience. Mindfulness comes from having learned to listen to reality and not reducing it to echoes of what is happening inside ourselves. We put aside our heedless habits and begin to pay serious attention to the world outside. Today matters. This is the d
ay the Lord has made; it is the only one that we have. From this we have also come to realize that before we act, we need to accept that there is a season for everything under the sun (Eccl. 3:1). Leisure teaches us to recognize that everything is to be done at the opportune time, as Benedict insists (31:18, 68:2). We have learned to read the signs of the times as a means of ensuring that our action is called forth by the objective needs of the situation and not by our own subjective need to act. In many cases we need space and time to consider at what moment our contribution will bear the fairest fruit. In the final analysis, leisure is a school of wisdom.

  4 Reading

  They are free for reading.

  RB 48:4

  The silent attentiveness of true leisure enables us to find meaning in our lives. We need space to step back from issues to assess their significance more surely. There is an apt saying of Seneca to the effect that leisure without reading is meaningless. The two activities go hand in hand. That is why Benedict uses the expression vacare lectioni. Reading, especially lectio divina, is not to be reduced to a task that somehow must be fitted in alongside other necessary occupations. To read well one must be at leisure. Disinterested reading involves moving into a different zone that permits placid reflection. A good book, like good wine, cannot be savored in hurry. It needs room to breathe. A mind cluttered with many preoccupations is not free for reading, nor is a body that cannot sit still and let the world go by without it.

  1. Escape from Meaning

  Creating an empty space is one of the most daunting challenges we face. Nature abhors a vacuum. There are always many activities and non-activities that clamor for our attention, seeping into a disengaged mind and quickly filling it. We can have some sympathy, I suppose, when the invaders represent real necessities or positive advantages to others. More often than not, however, it will be a case of tasks multiplying to consume whatever time is available, manufactured urgencies that present themselves only when we attempt to be still.