“Dad, can we play catch?”
“...” [No response.]
“Dad?”
I was on my phone, busy with an inconsequential email. The older kids were at school and my wife had the baby at an appointment. It was just me and the boy, whose requests I’d been batting away all morning. I was distracted, my attention split between pacifying my son, while handling house chores and juggling work demands remotely.
Without looking up, I said, “Um…yeah. Yeah, go get the gloves.”
He hunted for mitts, which bought me enough time to send the email.
When he returned, I put down the phone and we went into the yard for a catch. I put on my glove. Its worn leather hugged my hand. He situated his and heaved a crooked throw. I plucked it out of the sky and reciprocated, the scuffed ball grating across my fingertips with the toss. My son's smile was speckled with sunlight, and his giggle was with excited nerves.
I’m not sure how much time passed. I lost track.
There’s nothing like having a catch with your son. Playing catch is a waste of time, when you think about it, especially with a three-year-old who can’t catch. It serves no practical purpose. In our pragmatic, utilitarian lens, it is utterly unproductive. Heck, the amount of time the ball was on the ground proves it wasn’t even an effective game of catch. But, it’s a delightful waste of time.
Later that day, it occurred to me that I’d experienced a moment of true leisure, leisure in the form of a game of catch.
Leisure is not having free time, doing nothing, or “vegging out.” It’s not binge-watching, drinking after a long week, or doomscrolling on social media. It’s not the weekend or vacation, though one can enter into leisure on the weekend or vacation. It’s certainly not utilitarian — resting for the sake of working again.
Instead, leisure is an attitude. A mental and spiritual one. It’s an interior reality and not a circumstantial one, though circumstances can help. Leisure is stillness. It’s a disposition, an interior silence that is actively open to reality — to life as it really is. Josef Pieper, the great German philosopher of the 20th century, says that:
Leisure is a form of that stillness that is necessary preparation for accepting reality; only the person who is still can hear, and whoever is not still, cannot hear. Such stillness is not mere soundlessness…Leisure is the disposition of perceptive understanding, of contemplative beholding, and immersion — in the real.
Leisure is a state of being. It is stillness, an interior silence (which doesn’t mean everything around you is perfectly still or silent). This kind of interior stillness opens me to receive what is really real in an increasingly artificial world. It allows me to accept myself, to be at one with myself, with my place in life. It allows me to acquiesce in my own being. And such acquiescence is rest.
Ironically, we have to work for leisure. Our interior lives are often disheveled, our hearts hectic. There is work involved in putting things in order, stilling ourselves. Think of the game of catch above. I had to work to put the phone down, put on the glove, and engage in the game. Catch with a three-year-old who insists on using a hard ball is hard work. Yet focusing through this one activity stilled my heart and allowed me to receive the realest thing in front of me all day — my relationship with my son. Not only did I receive it, but I enjoyed it.
Liturgy is similar. Liturgy is work leading to leisure, stillness, all for the sake of encountering the God who is really real, indeed, reality itself. This is why Mass is the pinnacle of leisure, and why praying the Mass is hard, but worth it.
Leisure connects us with the real, not by escaping it, but by penetrating it. By entering deeply into life and time in this way, we get a foretaste of eternity, those moments where time seems to stand still or you find yourself saying, “It seemed like just five minutes had passed, but it was an hour.” This can happen at Mass, on vacation, or when you’re having a classic, midsummer catch with your son.
This article originally appeared in the St. Gertrude Church bulletin on June 23. It has been reprinted here with permission.