Leisure, Contemplation, and Participation in Creation
Late last year, around the end of November, I found myself contemplating the state of society and the state of my own self. The pace of life is ever increasing. The market extracts more, more, more. The introduction of AI demands even more, even as it offloads the most primal human endeavors: art, discovery, thought itself. A relentless news cycle of sensationalist catnip. Doing, stressing, outraging, all to just keep the lights on and keep gas in the car.
This self-assessment led me to make a few commitments. First, we were physically moving to a different house to be closer to our parish, an opportunity to draw closer to the sacramental life of the Church. I also decided on some habits to intentionally disconnect. Some of these were old habits I'd let lapse: daily journaling, the practice of finding haiku in a moment, Ignatian spiritual intentions for the day, the daily examen. One was new. I picked up the practice of bonsai.
The instinct to disconnect is now widely shared. Touch grass has become a meme. The wellness industry has built an empire on digital detoxes, mindfulness apps, retreat weekends. I am sympathetic to all of it, and I think most of it misses the point. The dominant framing treats disconnection as recovery: rest as fuel for the next sprint, leisure as a productivity input, silence as a tool for sharper output on Monday morning. The vocabulary is therapeutic and the horizon is the same one we were trying to escape.
Pieper and Recreation
Josef Pieper diagnosed this in Leisure: The Basis of Culture, written shortly after the second world war. His argument is that the modern world has collapsed all human activity into one category: work. Useful activity. Servile labor in the older sense, activity ordered to some output beyond itself. Within that frame, even rest becomes a kind of work, because it is justified by what it contributes to further work. The weekend exists for the week.
What Pieper recovers, drawing on Aquinas and the older tradition, is the category of non-servile activity, activity that is its own end. Contemplation. Worship. The slow attention given to a thing for the sake of the thing itself. Leisure, in his sense, is not the absence of work but a different way of being: receptive rather than productive, ordered to the whole rather than to a deliverable.
I think this matters more than it first appears. A culture that cannot conceive of non-servile activity cannot really conceive of worship either, because worship is the clearest case of activity that exists for its own sake, or for God's sake, which is the same thing rightly understood. In the capitalist economy, the Mass produces nothing. It optimizes nothing. In the sacramental economy, it is the most important hour of the week. In the former, it is a waste of an hour. To lose leisure is finally to lose the capacity to receive what cannot be earned, and a soul that has lost that capacity has lost the ground on which grace stands.
This is why the wellness framing falls short, even when the practices themselves are good. Sitting on a porch in silence is not yet leisure if the silence is instrumentalized. Walking in the woods is not yet contemplation if the walk is logged in an app and counted toward a goal. The form of the activity matters less than the posture of the one performing it. And posture is formed somewhere, which is where the Sabbath comes in.
The Sabbath and the 8th Day
Pieper gives us the category. The Sabbath gives us the anchor.
In Dies Domini, St. John Paul II takes up the Sabbath not as a rule to be defended but as a reality to be entered. His argument moves through the creation account, through the Exodus, and arrives at something that the catechism also points to in §2174: the day Christians keep is not the seventh day but the eighth. The first creation finished on the seventh. The new creation began on the eighth, the day of the Resurrection, the day the disciples found the tomb empty (this is why many baptismals, including the one at our parish are 8 sided. The baptized enter into new creation). Sunday is not a Christian rebrand of the Jewish Sabbath. It is a different day, oriented toward a different reality.
This matters because it changes what the Sabbath is for. The seventh day is rest from creation. The eighth day is participation in the new creation. When we keep Sunday, we are not just stopping work. We are stepping into the time of the world being made new, the time inaugurated by the Resurrection, the time that will be fully revealed at the end. Sunday is a foretaste. Each one is a small eschaton.
I have come to think of the Mass this way, and I have tried to teach my children to think of it this way. When we walk into the nave, heaven is meeting earth. The reredos, the flowers, and the imagery and the candles are not decoration. They are pointing to a reality that is actually present. It is Eden restored. Jesus is here. Heaven is here. Behold, I am making all things new is happening, in this hour, on this altar. And then at the end the priest says the Mass is ended, go in peace, and we carry that newness back out into the week. The Sabbath is not a withdrawal from the world. It is the place where the world gets renewed, and we are sent out as the means of that renewal.
This is why losing the Sabbath is not just losing a day off. It is losing the day that orders all the others. Without Sunday, the rest of the week has no horizon. It is just a sequence of productive units, one after another, until you die. With Sunday, the week is oriented toward something. Each day is on its way to the eighth. The work of Monday is not opposed to the rest of Sunday; it is given its meaning by it.
Pieper said that leisure is the basis of culture. I think the Sabbath is the basis of leisure. It is the day that teaches us what non-servile activity actually is: not a productivity hack, not a recovery interval, but participation in the life of God, who rested on the seventh day and rose on the eighth. Every other form of leisure in a Christian life is shaped by what happens on Sunday. The Sabbath is the form; the rest of the week receives that form or fails to.
Which raises the question that Fagerberg has helped me think through: how does the form of the Sabbath get into the rest of the week? How does what happens at the altar shape what happens on the porch?
The Mundane Liturgy
David Fagerberg has spent his career arguing that liturgy is not one activity among others in the Christian life but the form of the Christian life itself. His phrase liturgical asceticism is meant to capture this: the formation that happens at the altar is not confined to the hour of the Mass. It reaches into the rest of the week and reorders it. The person who has been formed by the liturgy carries that formation into everything else: the way they eat, the way they work, the way they attend to the people and the creatures placed in front of them.
This is the answer to the question I left at the end of the last section. The Sabbath does not stay on Sunday. It forms a posture, and the posture is what gets carried into Monday. The work of liturgy is to make us into the kind of people for whom the rest of the week can become liturgical too, not in the sense that everything is a Mass, but in the sense that everything is now oriented toward the same God, received from the same source, returned in the same gratitude.
Fagerberg calls this the mundane liturgy. The word mundane is significant. It means of the world, the daily and the ordinary, not the boring. The mundane liturgy is what happens when a person formed at the altar washes the dishes, walks the dog, sits with a sick friend, tends a garden. The activity itself is not sacramental in the strict sense. But it is performed by someone who has been made sacramental, and so it participates, however faintly, in the same movement: creation received as gift, attended to with care, returned to God in the offering of a life.
This is where bonsai entered my own life. I did not pick up the practice as a spiritual discipline. I picked it up because I needed something slow, something that would resist optimization, something that would refuse to become a deliverable. But the practice has turned out to be more than that, and I think Fagerberg gives me the language for why.
A bonsai is not a project. It is a relationship that lasts decades. The tree I am working with now will not look like a finished bonsai for ten or fifteen years, and even then it will not be finished. It will simply be further along. The work is not building toward a deliverable. It is the ongoing, patient attention given to a creature whose own life proceeds at its own pace, indifferent to my schedule. I water it because it needs water. I prune it because the season calls for it. I sit with it in the morning because it is there and I am there and we are both, in our different ways, receiving the same sun.
This is non-servile activity in Pieper's sense. The tree produces nothing. It optimizes nothing. In the world's accounting, the hours I spend on the bench are wasted. But the hours are not for output. They are for the tree, and for me, and for the slow work of being made into a person who can attend to something other than himself for an hour without growing restless.
And it is mundane liturgy in Fagerberg's sense. The bonsai bench is not an altar and I am not pretending it is. This is a school of gratitude, not a substitute for worship. But the posture I bring to the bench has been formed at the altar. The capacity to receive the tree as a creature, as a particular life with its own integrity, comes from the same source as the capacity to receive the Eucharist as a gift rather than a thing I have earned. The Sunday formation reaches into the Tuesday morning. The eighth day reaches into all the others.
I have named each of my trees after saints. A bald cypress called Kateri. A winged elm called Miki. A persimmon called Therese. A tree with a name is no longer a specimen. It is a particular life I am accountable to, in a small way, and the saint whose name it carries reminds me that the tending is not finally about me. Caring for these trees patiently is itself a kind of formation. I am being shaped even as I disconnect. I guide the trees toward their telos. Reflecting on the Creator who gave them that telos is a small step toward my own.
Brother Tree, Sister Lake
It does not have to be bonsai.
The practice that has contributed to this reflection from me is unusual and most people will not take it up. The bonsai is the worked example, not the prescription. What matters is the shape of the practice: sustained, embodied, non-servile, attentive to creation on its own terms. The species of creature does not matter. The hobby itself is neutral. What matters is the posture you bring to it.
For some people it is a garden. For some it is a workshop, a palette and canvas, or a kitchen, or a lake they have walked to every Saturday for twenty years. For some it is birds, or bees, or stars, or the same trail in the same woods through the same four seasons. The medium is open. What is not open is the posture: the willingness to attend to something that is not yourself, in time that does not belong to the market, for reasons that cannot be defended on a spreadsheet.
Saint Francis gave us the form for this. Brother Sun. Sister Moon. Brother Wind. Sister Water. Mother Earth. Francis is not personifying nature in a sentimental way. He is addressing creatures as creatures: fellow members of the created order, each with its own integrity, each given by the same Creator. The praise is not for nature in the abstract but through the particular brother and sister creatures who, simply by being what they are, glorify God.
This is the move that the wellness framing cannot make. Touch grass treats the grass as a tool for human regulation. Francis treats the grass as a brother. The first uses creation; the second receives it. And only the second is finally compatible with what happens at the altar, where the Creator is received as gift through created things (bread, wine, water, oil, words) that are themselves brothers and sisters in the praise of God.
The medium of your disconnection, then, is finally a question of which creature you are being given to attend to. For me it has been trees. For you it may be something else. The shape of the practice is the same: receive the creature as a creature, attend to it on its own terms, give the time without expecting the time to produce anything, and let the attending become a small participation in the praise that all created things are already giving back to their Maker.
This is spiritual work in the strict sense. Not self-improvement. Not recovery. Not the production of a calmer, more focused version of yourself for use on Monday morning. Spiritual work: the slow ascesis of being made into a person who can receive the world as gift rather than seize it as resource. The world that AI and the market and the news cycle are training us to inhabit is one in which everything is for something else. The world the Mass trains us to inhabit is one in which everything, finally, is for God. Living in the world that we're sent out into from the Mass, equipped to receive it from the One who renews us there, is nothing other than a Sabbath, no matter the day of the week.