How do you Play?

We no longer know how to do nothing. We have mastered our work and now must master our leisure. “Yet those who would master their leisure merely manage to violate their own freedom. Freedom has a way of coming by itself to those who are open and receptive. Those who feel they must master it are destroying freedom even in their leisure.” - Moltmann (Theology of Play, 1972).

Hello, My name is _______ and I delight in ______.

“People in the United States define themselves by their work, says [a man from the Netherlands], who is self employed. ‘Europeans define themselves by hobbies and other things. Work is just a means.’... At parties in the US, he says, the first question is, ‘What do you do?’ In the Netherlands, the opening question is, ‘Where have you been on vacation?’ or ‘Where are you going on vacation?’”
Where I rest and what I do for pleasure reveals more about me than what I do "to pay the bills." I must derive my identity not from what I do, but from who I am. I discover who I am by listening to the voices of my community and paying attention to what brings me delight and causes life to flourish around me. My name must be separate from my utility- my name must come from Love.
Quote from Marilyn Gardner, "The Ascent of Hours on the Job," Christian Science Monitor 97, no. 110 (2005).

Time has Nothing to do With You

Lewis Mumford was an American historian and philosopher of technology and science- he wrote this in 1934: “The clock… is a piece of power-machinery whose ‘product’ is seconds and minutes: by its essential nature it dissociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequence: the special world of science.”

Rememberance as Anticipation

Walter Benjamin was a Jewish philosopher who wrote this in 1940 as a prisoner in a refugee camp in occupied France: “We know the Jews were prohibited from investigating the future. The Torah and the prayers instruct them in remembrance, however. This stripped the future of its magic, to which all those succumb who turn to the soothsayers for enlightenment. This does not imply, however, that for the Jews the future turned into homogeneous, empty time. For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.”

Time Turned Its Back on Me

We are all casualties of the mechanistic and militant advancement of purely linear conceptualizations of time. Franz Kafka articulates this sense of alienation and the impact of disembodied time upon all things (words, things, people, actions) as they loose their meaning in his stories. In a letter to his sister he wrote: “In fact the clock has certain personal relationships to me, like many things in the room, save that now… they seem to be beginning to turn their backs on me, above all the calendar… Lately it is as if it had been metamorphosed. Either it is absolutely uncommunicative- for example, you want its advice, you go up to it, but the only thing it says is ‘Feast of the Reformation’- which probably has a deeper significance, but who can discover it –or, on the contrary, it is nastily ironic.”

Communal Feasting

for the last 2 years, every tuesday night we have gathered with a group of amazing folks to feast with one another. i am always surprised by how that rhythm marks my week, carrying me in ways i don't fully understand. today is monday, it has been long and i have much work to do before bed. but tommorrow by this time, i will be feasting with family. this was indeed, the only appropriate visual.

the rhythm of the eschaton

Regarding the previous post, I think I've been articulating the question poorly. I want to shift from trying to think cyclically to thinking rhythmically about linear time. In Heschel's text I was drawn in by his vision of every moment being a window into eternity. Buber's text also talks about any one encounter having the potential of opening up the heavens in a meeting of Eternal Thou. Jewish mysticism is helpful in its emphasis on the rhythmic aspect of time (Sabbath) which fills each week with longing for the Day of Delight. In talking to a few Orthodox friends, I was pointed to Alexander Schmemann who talks about "Eucharistic Time"- the idea that the Eucharist is eschatological in the sense of "already, not yet." Every moment is filled with Christ's on-going death and resurrection and invites us to long for the ultimate day of his return. This is why we need the rhythms of the church calender to remind us of this reality that makes our sense of time deeper, richer, fuller...

A quote from Walter Benjamin: “We know the Jews were prohibited from investigating the future. The Torah and the prayers instruct them in remembrance. This stripped the future of its magic, to which all those succumb who turn to the soothsayers for enlightenment. This does not imply, however, that for the Jews the future turned into homogeneous, empty time. For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter."