The lost art of leisure

Listening with the heart

Martin Browne

The regulated life of a monastery might not seem to offer much chance of learning about the art of leisure. Yet our former Dublin correspondent has achieved a new understanding since he became a Benedictine novice. He explains his discoveries.

Nine months into my twelve-month novitiate, I learned that the American Trappist Thomas Merton had told his novices at Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky that "the monastic life is ordered to leisure in the best sense". This was news to me.

Leisure certainly has not figured much, if at all, in the various talks, classes and conferences of my novitiate programme. I have heard lots about asceticism, renunciation, detachment, and plenty about the importance of prayer, study and manual work. I have heard a bit about penance too. But when even the smallest decisions - about rising, eating, praying and meeting - are regulated by an unforgiving dictatorial bell, it is hard to conceive of one's life as being ordered towards leisure. Even less so for me as a novice, because I have to be a few minutes ahead of schedule in order to ring the bell.

Until recently I took it for granted that leisure was as our culture defines it: what one does, or does not do, outside of work time. At one end of the spectrum we have the so-called "leisure industry" and the sweat-shops perversely known as "leisure centres"; at the other end is leisure as idleness and inertia. Until I came to ponder Merton's remark, I never thought of leisure as anything other than "spare" time.

Attempting to reconcile Merton's statement about monasticism and leisure with my limited experience of life inside the cloister drove me to the library. Hopping from one book to another, with quotations begging further quotations, it was a mind-blowing experience. I discovered a whole tradition of esteem for leisure as something good, dynamic and wholesome - even holy. I found that some church fathers referred to otium sanctum - holy leisure. I read that Aristotle saw work as oriented towards leisure, something to be done in order to facilitate the real business of being at leisure, and that for St Augustine the purpose of leisure was the pursuit of the knowledge of the truth. I also found that the monastic life is built on the older concept of the vita contemplativa - the higher art of leisure.

But I still was not clear how this fitted into my life since I arrived in the monastery. If Merton was right, but my life is not oriented towards leisure, then is there something wrong either with life in my monastery, or with the way I am living it?

This question sent me scurrying to the Rule of St Benedict. I did not have to go very far: the first word is "Listen". It is no accident that the first psalm of the many sung in the monastery each day is Psalm 94, with its admonition: "Oh that today you would listen to his voice!" Attentive listening must be at the heart of the monastic calling. That invitation in the Rule, echoing the psalmist - to listen - had been a powerful text for me during the time I spent loitering with intent around the monastery before applying to be received into the novitiate. It continues to be a powerful word - not just an invitation, but also an instruction, a reminder, a warning and often a rebuke.

I found myself getting back to Augustine's view of leisure as pursuit of the knowledge of the truth, and linking it with this idea of listening. It began to fit together. What is Benedict's order to "incline the ear of your heart" but an invitation to be a true seeker of leisure? The classic definition of the vocation of a monk - to seek God - seems to accord with this interpretation of leisure, as a state which allows God to find you.

The pursuit of leisure, I realised, is the essence of monasticism. All the structures and traditions that have become part of life in a Benedictine cloister - including the Liturgy of the Hours, or "Work of God", personal prayer, and study - exist to facilitate the quest for God. Benedict built a lot of time for such leisure-seeking into his Rule. He laid down that the monks "should be occupied at certain times in manual labour, and again at fixed hours in sacred reading". Though his timetable changed at different times of the year, and time was measured differently then, on average there would have been about three hours set aside for this sacred reading - lectio divina - each day. This was separate from the times of common prayer and the personal meditation periods that followed them. This lectio, a prayerful reading of the scriptures or patristic writings, is not so much studious reading seeking knowledge, as reflective reading seeking wisdom. It is not stretching the point too much to call this leisure. The time devoted to lectio was to be a complement to the time devoted to manual work and prayer in choir.

This was no excuse for inactivity. Such was its importance that Benedict ordered that one or two senior monks should go about the monastery during the period allotted to lectio, in order to make sure that nobody was idle or getting up to mischief. This reflective leisure time was not optional, nor could the time be simply frittered away. It was a holy duty.

Monks have got softer since St Benedict's day, and in my house at least we spend less than his recommended quota of time at just about everything except speaking, eating and sleeping. It is not that we are idle; most of us are very busy; even novices, whose time is protected more than most other people's, have many jobs to do - sometimes too many.

So now I am converted to Merton's view that monasticism is orientated towards leisure in its best sense. Without time for true leisure - reflective and recreative time - our search for God will be along bumpy and foggy paths. If behind our high walls we just ape the modern canonisation of neg-otium over holy otium, we have little to offer the world.

It all makes sense. I was never one of those creatures whose idea of a good break was a fortnight's back-breaking, muscle-straining cycling in the Pyrenees, or heading off to Ibiza for a fortnight's debauchery and calling it a holiday. My instincts were for something which would be more creative and life-giving for me. Without having the words for it, I was, in the truest sense, a leisure-seeker. And now monastic life is helping me to find it. I pray that it may long continue to do so.

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