I’m lying in bed with the baby in the basinet beside me and my two- and four-year-olds in sleeping bags on the floor.  They’re all sick and clingy and claiming to be frightened.  The oldest has been having halloween-related nightmares.  Lovely, I know.

So, I’m lying here wondering if I’ll have the energy after they fall asleep to clean up the play dough that’s all over the dining room and which I should have made them clean up before we went upstairs but didn’t because I was imagining an easy bedtime after which I’d have some quiet time and a quick clean-up all by myself, big laugh.  There’s still the dishwasher to unload and reload and laundry to switch and laundry to fold.  And never mind catching up on any “real” cleaning.

Wait, what’s that I hear?  Deep breathing?  From all three?  Miracles still happen then, huh?

Sorry, I’m so late with this.  I was away visiting family.  I’m not sure I’ll be able to write anything cohesive, but maybe I’ll just shoot for coherent.

In this chapter Pieper enumerates three “movements” which have attempted to keep man from becoming a mere cog in the machine of society.  Those movements are “art for art’s sake,” calling upon tradition – specifically educational tradition, and humanism.

After questioning whether these movements and ones like them are able to make a difference, he leaps into an examination of the “proletariat.”  I don’t quite get the transition or connection.  I mean, I do, a little, but not completely.  Perhaps after I’ve read some of the thoughts of my fellow readers I’ll have a better understanding of this.

Pieper puts forward the idea that the way to solve class struggle, is not to classify everyone as a worker, but rather to make it possible for everyone to be at leisure.  Even the worker needs a sabbath.  (Again, the worker needs a rest not so he can return to work stronger, but rather so that he can remain “human.”)  He needs both the opportunity for rest and the internal ability for it.

If I understand correctly, there are three reasons why a person may be incapable of leisure.  One is that a person has no material possessions of his own, no land, no property and so the only thing he can trade on is his work.  I think of the huge debt that many people have and how they are enslaved by it.

The second reason is government compulsion to constant work and constant productivity.

The third reason is the saddest in my opinion:  ”the inner poverty of the person.”  This is a person who is satisfied with just work and “meaningful action that is not work is no longer possible or even imaginable.”  Being satisfied with one’s work seems like such a good thing, yet being satisfied with ONLY work is just so dull and sad.

The remedies to these three hinderances to leisure, are property ownership purchased with earned wages, a limited government and “overcoming internal poverty.”  (How?)  I find it interesting that Pieper seems to be saying that a free market economy is necessary for the arts to flourish.  I am ignorant in this area.  Is this true?  Does history bear this out?

Work must be seen to serve a specific purpose, to supply a specific need.  It is a means to an end, not the end itself.  If work is all there is, a human becomes narrow.

What the others are saying about this chapter.

World War II references aside, the method that Organizing Mommy, Jena, uses to accomplish a lot of housework in a little time really does work.  If the name makes you think of frantically running from room to room, silently hoping the timer doesn’t go off before you get the chairs back down from the kitchen table, this week is for you – this week is about a new kind of blitz – the plod.  :)

For several months while I was pregnant I could not be on my feet for very long, so housework got done in ten minute increments.  I just took my first blitz challenge however, and found that work which I thought would take hours, took only one.  I swept and mopped the kitchen, dining room and living room.  I put away tools and toys and books.  I washed a chair cover and tidied the mantle.

Check out more housework blitzes here.

This may be why I am not a philosopher:  I simply cannot think of these things without trying to break them down and understand them in a systematic, and sometimes, visual way.  Go ahead, laugh.

I was especially struck by Pieper’s last attribute of leisure – the idea that the purpose of leisure is not to refresh a person so that he can return to work with renewed strength, although it does do that, but that leisure is an end in itself.  Leisure in service to work, as demonstrated by the coffee break or two week vacation, is in opposition to the idea that “we are not-at-leisure in order to be at leisure.”

I want to start asking people, “What are you working for?”  “Is this all there is?”  As a Christian, there is so much more than empty toil and for an unbeliever it seems there should be even more of an imperative to enjoy the here and now.  If not for God, one might as well eat, drink and be merry.  Is this a digression on my part?  Sorry.  I’m getting fired up for some reason.

I also really liked this concept of knowing, experiencing in true stillness, that which has “not yet descended into words.”  I have, on occasion, felt a thought, and tried to capture it, to hold it in my head, to express it in words, but the very act of grasping seems to make the experience vanish.  It sounds like an acid trip to me even in my explanation.

Christmas is coming and I’m making these napkins for one of my sisters-in-law.  The fabric is a very inexpensive cotton blend.  The crocheted edge is one row of single crochet followed by one row of a simple shell stitch, done in cotton with a number ten steel hook.  I really like the effect.

We were given four sentences describing two children playing in a sandbox when it begins to rain.  The assignment was to finish the story.*    Here is what my four-year-old son dictated to me.

“The rain made the road wet  The trees fell down.  The houses fell down.  The buildings fell down.  The skyscrapers fell down.

They made a stream.  Train stations got wet and the stream got flooded.

They went inside.  They took off their shoes.  They washed their hands.  They ate supper.

Then they took a shower.  Then they got dressed for bed.  Then they got read to.  Then they got lied down with.  Then they went to sleep.  Then their mother cleaned the kitchen.

Then it was morning.  They got up.  They ate breakfast.  They went outside to play again.  Then it started to snow.  The trees got covered in snow.  The buildings got covered in snow.  Everything got covered in snow.  The streams got made into ice.

The End”

*an assignment from week fifteen of the language arts section in Sonlight’s kindergarten curriculum.

I have NOT finished this chapter.  I have seven pages to go.  I must read this very slowly, with a pencil in my hand, to let it sink in.  I’ll be back perhaps tonight or tomorrow morning with the rest of my thoughts.  In the meanwhile, hop over to Ordo Amoris to check what the smart folks are saying.  :)

There are two ways of looking at understanding.  One is that it can only be acquired by hard work and by reason and if it is not acquired by direct effort,then it is not truly known or understood.  Additionally, the harder one works for the knowledge, the more valuable it is.

The second belief is that there is an additional way to gain knowledge , one without effort, one of intuition, one of simply taking in or receiving.  I don’t completely understand how this is different from “grace in the strict sense” but that may be because I view pretty much everything as a grace.  If I simply know something, it is because I was made to know it.

Though knowing does not necessarily come from effort, effort is often a  pre-curser to or preparation for  knowing.  I imagined a scientist laboring for years who finally has an aha! almost unrelated to the work she has done, yet her mind was prepared by the effort and the sudden understanding can be proven or bolstered by the work that was done.  ”Hunch” is a great word.  Turning the soil does not cause the seed to grow, yet the soil must be prepared.

The prevailing attitude around me is that enjoyment, pleasure, delight in one’s life is a bad thing.  Maybe this is because today pleasure is so often connected with vice or at least idleness?  As I was reading, I felt supported in my belief that people in general, and mothers in particular, and especially stay at home mothers, seem to like complaining about how busy they are.  I’m pretty sure that for many, this is not complaining as much as it is bragging.  ”See how hard I’m working?  My work is valuable because it is very difficult and because I don’t derive pleasure from it.”

The tendency of man to most value that which he has worked for and to be suspicious of any free gift is perhaps what makes the Gospel so much harder to grasp than legalism.  It is pure gift and without Divine revelation it is foolishness and a stumbling block.

My good friend, Dawn, is in the final days of what is likely her final pregnancy.  She will be giving birth in three days.  Here she reflects on holding on and letting go and enjoying these precious mommy moments.  It’s a sweet read and serves to remind me of how fleeting these days are.

The baby swings

while the toddler climbs,

the little boy builds a paper mill

and the cat thinks he’s going somewhere.

Cindy of Ordo Amoris (formerly Dominion Family) is hosting another of her reading groups and I am joining them for the first time.  The book is Leisure:  The Basis of Culture by Josef Pieper.  What follows are some of my thoughts after reading the first chapter.

I like the idea of work being a means to an end rather than the end itself.  I would not have defined that end as leisure, given my modern understanding of the word and I am not clear on exactly what Pieper’s definition of leisure is.  I hope that will become clear as I continue to read.  That is one of the problems of using original meanings rather than the current evolved definitions – it can potentially inhibit communication.  Of course, it also gives a greater nuance to communication once definitions are understood.

“We are not-at-leisure in order to be-at-leisure” makes sense to me.  I have always thought that if a person can enjoy his work, then that is a good thing.  And if he cannot, then he should work so that he can enjoy the other parts of his life.  But I am not sure if those other parts of life could necessarily be called leisure.

The apostle Paul worked as a tent-maker when he wasn’t spreading the Gospel.  Does evangelism fall under the heading of leisure, I wonder?  Maybe it does.  If leisure is a kind of institution of learning then maybe it is…

Is homemaking a life of leisure?!  Maybe it is.  It certainly has aspects of it.  And parts of it are just hard work too.  Maybe the life of a housewife is a beautiful balance of both labor and leisure.

I am coming at this as a person who has great respect for work.  There is something noble to me about a person who puts his back into his work without complaint.  Of course, the Bible tells me work is good too.  (1 Cor. 4:12; Eph 4:28; 1 Thes 4:11 among others)

This is so much fun!