The lost art of leisure

Hold those boulders

Austen Ivereigh

The Archbishop of Liverpool, Patrick Kelly, recently told his congregations he was off to Ohio for ten weeks to stare at corn. In the last of the series, our executive editor, who has a thing for rocks, salutes a fellow leisure seeker.

THEY are hard and bare and not much to look at. No one would want to paint or photograph them unless, perhaps, to catch the light bouncing off them. And it is not quite clear what they are for, lying along rivers and on sea shores, licked and scrubbed by the water. But God must love rocks very much, because he made so many of them. Scrambling over them is my favourite leisure activity.

It is called "bouldering" to be technical, but there is no technique, gear or skill necessary: just the offering of yourself, a certain dare-devil agility, and the day stretching out impassively like the sea itself. The best place for it I ever found was a Peruvian tropical river, coruscating in the sun as if loaded with swirling gems, that pounded through bouldered gullies under the bare sky of the mountains. But the nibbled coast of south-west England, where a million storms have wrestled the rocks from the cliffs, does fine. Wherever you choose, you must have below you, as you negotiate your way from rock to rock, a fast-flowing foamy river, or seaweed-infested pools - some small inferno that keeps you wanting to stay in paradise. Go alone, or with others happy to be alone, for you will soon separate.

Off you go: hop, jump, leap, scrabble - sometimes just with your feet, sometimes using both hands as well. (Do not, by the way, take dogs. They scamper eagerly to the top of a rock, but once there, sit wagging their tails, whimpering to be rescued; they are designed for forward motion, not the patient, often arachnid, contortions of the true boulderer.) Get well out from the bank or the shore, to those rocks which look really forbidding, the ones with thunder in them and shapes so inhospitable they cause you to shudder. Beyond are more rocks laid out in patterns you cannot yet see. Just reaching the next will require ingenious pondering - do you slide, or bounce? Jump with both feet, perhaps, or shift your balance, keeping one secure? Can you make it, or is this a boulder too far?

Sometimes you say: "Now what?" because you are hanging off a rock at an indecorous angle, legs splayed, fingers barely gripping, limpets pricking the soles of your feet; but there is just no way forward, and going back is out of the question. The whole world goes still at that moment, and you sit burning on the edge of it, unworried. You have what Keats called "negative capability" - that ability to be in uncertainty without grasping at solutions - stuck out on a boulder, slipping slowly into the water, with a big grin on your face.

This is leisure: the normal, proper, prelapsarian state of humankind, the state to which we are all born, and (usually) after which we die. In between we work and assume a thousand obligations: they are necessary, and can be noble and creative. But work itself is a consequence of the Fall; in true leisure, by contrast, we sample our Salvation. In case this sounds like Quietism, let me clarify: whereas a person without work is not necessarily doomed, a person without leisure surely is.

God created us in free time: not the freedom of lack of constraint, but the liberty for captives which Christ proclaimed, the liberty of God-givenness to which the proper response is gratitude. Humanity's first, and most damaging, no to God was its refusal of free time - free because it is given to us, and refused, sinfully, for the same reason.

The wise know this. Archbishop Patrick Kelly of Liverpool knows this. He recently penned a remarkable pastoral letter informing his flock he was off to Ohio for a 10-week "extended break", his first of such length in 30 years. "I know I need a break when I speak and think and act as if it all depended on me", Liverpool's congregations heard.

Then he added something very wise indeed. "When I'm asked why I go to Ohio, since all there is to see are miles and miles of cornfields and maize, my sincere reply is: exactly, there's nothing I need feel obliged to see or do. That's what I need."

He telescopes, in these few lines, all the essential elements of leisure. It is not a time for overloading with external stimuli; it is enough to gaze, unpossessively, at whatever patch of Eden has come your way. In leisure, less is more; the repetition of nature - of corn, of rocks - is holy. It assumes an ultimate force in the universe which is not just passive and changeless, but which acts on humanity, making it new.

Satan scores big when he makes this look boring.

Not for Archbishop Kelly the Pelagian lie that salvation is measured by effort, worth by industry, value by productivity - a temptation to which the Church, and spiritual people, are prone also to succumb. Archbishop Kelly knows that when they do, they dry up, and the salt loses its savour. "Once I fail to think, speak, live, decide as someone utterly convinced that we've all the resources we need to do what Our Lord wants, I'm no good as your bishop", he confessed. "A burdened, anxious, fearful bishop will himself become a burden, no longer a servant."

This can happen even in a monastery, that God-seeking facility which the American Trappist monk Thomas Merton told his novices was "geared to leisure in the best sense". But he knew this was hard. In 1959, after he read the book by Joseph Pieper which inspired this Tablet series, Merton lamented: "One thing is sure, we do not in this monastery have any faith in the value of otium sanctum, of 'holy leisure'. We believe only in the difficult and the unpleasant. That is why we, in practice, hate the contemplative life and destroy it with constant activity."

I find this hatred in me as soon as I wake up. It drives me to the radio and the newspapers with a hundred gnawing questions. What is happening in the world? What are the issues that must be grappled with today, and where do I stand on them? Give me, I seem to be asking, a list of tasks to distract me from the tree outside my window that is unfurling its leaves in leisure; give me, at least, a set of obligations to keep me from being part of the moment. And blessed art thou, e-mail, for endowing even my friendships with a novel sense of urgency.

If I turn to the Scriptures in this state of mind, I find I want to edit them.

But after a day on the rocks it all looks different. Rocks are a reality to be grasped, not a task to be performed. They tip me out of my head into the big, created world. Now I can receive, listen, relish.

If it is easy to fall into the dog-like forward motion of workaholism, the same is true of our spirituality. Without true leisure in our life with God, we risk scaling the seven-storey mountain on an escalator - which must be why St Benedict advised a monk who saw his brother trying to reach heaven under his own steam to pull him back down by his sandals.

It is a question of what the young black men where I live call attitood. Remember the Seventies forecast that the microchip would usher in a new age of leisure? It did not turn out that way. We just wanted to have more, produce more, burn up more forests in self-justification - and then to trigger the crisis that is furling eyebrows in Johannesburg. These days the West's twenty-somethings - the ones earmarked in the Seventies for lotus-eating - put in more work hours than any previous generation, and seek respite in idleness or expensive, wasteful, life-shortening oblivion. The Catholic economist E.F. Schumacher was never taken in. The amount of leisure people have, he observed in his book Small is Beautiful, is inversely proportional to the number of labour-saving devices available to them. The microchip cannot restore true leisure. You have to dig deeper.

The true meaning of leisure has been kidnapped by the utilitarian ethic; it is seen as entertainment, idleness, or an activity designed to ensure people work more energetically and effectively. But leisure is its own measure and justification. It cannot be "used" for some purpose outside itself such as "refreshment". Yet while leisure cannot be sought for its fruits, it has them in abundance. The juiciest, for me, is the surge of new life which writers and painters recognise as springing from the Genesis eternal.

Children of the Incarnation know that while they cannot always be at leisure, they must sometimes be, or they will die. We understand, with the ancients, that work is the means of life, leisure the end, and that we work in order to be at leisure. We know that the cure for the dis-ease of our neurotic world is leisure in its almost-lost, and most noble, sense. We are creatures who need our Creator. We must learn to be able to read the signs within - the stoniness of heart, the lack of sense of proportion, the harsh quality of not-being-able-to-receive - and realise when it is time to return to the rocks or the cornfields.

Archbishop Kelly, do not feel you must hurry back.

© The Tablet Publishing Company