Leisure, Faith, and the Moral Holiday

What justifies indifference in the face of need?  I dunno.  You won’t find answers here.  But maybe we can consider it together.  I’d like to start us on our way by looking at the words.

Leisure – I found it up a narrow stairway that was never really meant for the public.  It always reminded me of the back stairways in the biggest houses in our neighborhood in Detroit, the neighborhood where the live-in servants had quarters
on the third floor.  The back stairway led from the kitchen to their quarters up there.  By the time we discovered those stairways, the residents of those grand houses were not the magnates of the car companies who had had them built, but big catholic families with a dozen kids.  The oldest lived up on the third floor, where to their delight and the family’s relief, they could have a bit more privacy.

This particular narrow stairway that led me to leisure was a throwback to another time too, a time when only faculty was allowed to go into “the stacks” where the books were shelved.  Students filled out little slips of paper, call slips, the title, author, and Dewey Decimal System number of our desired book searched for and found in one of the hundreds of little drawers that literally filled a small room, lining the walls.  One day, (was it in the 70’s or 80’s?) it all changed, and the stacks were open to all of us.  By then I was working at the university, and delighted in the universe of books available to me.  The Dewey Decimal System organizes books by their topic, so if you liked a book, you might like the ones around it too.  I had enjoyed Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space, and that had in turn drawn me to three books by Max Picard (the Flight from God, the World of Silence, and the Human Face) but I had avoided again and again Josef Pieper’s Leisure the Basis of Culture.  

While I’d found the titles of Bachelard’s book and those of Picard alluring and enticing, I found the word leisure to be repulsive.  I’d mentioned that to a friend, that anti-Deweyan dissonance, being repulsed by a book that should have logically been similar to several I’d really liked.  He said that he’d read it, and said that I’d like it.  He was right.  It was because Pieper, like my philosophy professors in the 60’s, began by defining his terms, and helped me clear my mental block.  Leisure, he wrote, is a situation in life in which we are free to make decisions.

I think of my friend Phil, who I write about yesterday, whose first response to retirement was the freedom from pleasing a boss.  Now he was free to please himself, to look at what made him happy.  He was…at leisure.  He was not on a cruise ship or a golf course or in an exotic car showroom.  He was in a place where he could consider his true desire and move toward it, creating, according to Pieper’s premise, ripples of Phil-ness that began to impact the lives of those around him, the culture.  In Phil’s case, these ripples were caring, kind, compassionate, and peaceful. 

So the first word of this title, Leisure, Faith, and the Moral Holiday, is established.  The next one, Faith is similarly slippery.  In The Future of Faith author Harvey Cox follows the lead of his contemporaries by defining terms before he uses them.  And a key to the book is his distinction between Faith, Religion, and Belief, words we too often use indiscriminately, impacting our culture with negative ripples of confusion, misunderstanding, and sometimes intentional manipulation.  Using Christianity as an example, Cox clarified each of these three terms.

• Belief was what people had during the life of Jesus, and while they lived who had personally experienced him.  The believed that he was the son of God, gathered to remember him, to tell others about him.
• Religion was developed as those who did not know Jesus tried to get his story straight, so talking about him was consistent no matter who was speaking.  Dogmas, rituals, and laws were written and enforced, ligaments that bound together those who chose to follow.  While belief lasted only decades, religion lasted until now . . . barely.
• Faith is, according to Cox, the age into which we enter now, “ accepting as true something for which we have no proof” , similar, in my opinion, to the Scriptural definition referred to by Paul writing to the Hebrews: “Now faith is assurance of things hoped for, proof of things not seen.”   

 I’ll save William James’ term, moral holiday, for tomorrow.  It’s a lulu.

  

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.