As modern Americans, we have been conditioned to believe it is the “go-getter” who is virtuous. The person who shows up early, stays late, and puts in 40-plus hours a week at the office or factory is a first-world hero deserving of our admiration (Perhaps our real admiration is for the inevitable fat paycheck).
Even the “more righteous” who eschew the “worldliness” of pursuing the American Dream tend to admire activity as noble and inactivity as slothful. The busier we are, the better we are—or so we have been conditioned to believe. In other words, time for contemplation in the modern world is a rarity.
Robert Farrar Capon reminds us why we might want to reconsider when he writes,
Even now, the doctrine of justification by work is difficult to defend. Jobs are shorter and more boring than they used to be. It’s hard to believe that five hours a day at button-pushing and paper-shuffling are the heart and soul of human existence. Heaven help us, then, in the bright new day of the guaranteed income and the twenty-hour week. The grim old religion of salvation by rushing will go bankrupt altogether, and we shall go straight out of our minds—unless we learn to sit still. The habit of contemplation, therefore—the ability to sit down in front of something and care enough to let it speak for itself—cannot be acquired soon enough. Accordingly, I invite you to put your feet upon the stove. If some true believer in the gospel of haste comes along and asks why we are wasting our time, we shall tell him we are busy getting the seats of our pants properly shined up for the millennium. ((The Supper of the Lamb, 68)
Whether intentional or not, we have in fact been conditioned to be continually busy, always doing something or going somewhere. While there is nothing inherently wrong with activity, per se, because leisure is no longer the luxury of wealthy aristocrats, we democratic folk don’t usually know what to do with leisure time except to fill it with something democratic: like entertainment or more work.
Resting in the Lord