Optional Memorial of Saint Paul of the Cross, priest

Lectionary: 475

Sin must not reign over your mortal bodies so that you obey their desires. And do not present the parts of your bodies to sin as weapons for wickedness, but present yourselves to God as raised from the dead to life and the parts of your bodies to God as weapons for righteousness. For sin is not to have any power over you, since you are not under the law but under grace.

Americans love to announce how free they are to do as they please. But that definition of freedom is a recipe for slavery as what they want binds them to insatiable addictions. Many alcoholics remember their first drink; they knew in that moment that was what they wanted. It was like coming home to a place they'd never been. Long before we discovered how to distill alcohol and multiply its intoxicating effects, Saint Paul witnessed the "reign of sin" over human bodies. Given that long history, it is ironic that many people still believe freedom is doing what their bodies want. 

Perhaps they equate leisure with freedom and work with enslavement. Josef Pieper, a Thomist philosopher writing in the wake of World War II, in his essay, "Leisure, the Basis of Culture," showed how Western society had surrendered to the "totalitarian regime of work." (As a German he knew about totalitarianism, and had seen the theory of total war enacted on the world-wide scale.)  "Total work" redefines leisure as the rest, (sleeping, eating, idleness, vacation, or retirement) one does when we're not "working." Occupations like reading, writing, prayer, and contemplation can be justified in the world of "total work" only as intellectual or spiritual labor. Otherwise, they are nonsense. 

However, just to be sure they are authentic, these "works" should be strenuous and productive. If they're regarded with some loathing, all the better! But everybody knows that real workers work with their hands and the sweat of their brow, and they produce real things like food, machinery, buildings, and weapons.  

With that mindset, we are free and enjoying leisure when no one is telling us what to do, when we have no duties to fulfill, when we're not straining, or when we do as we please. But they must be justified nonetheless; that is, freedom and leisure are good if they prepare one to go back to work. Or they are earned and deserved "rewards" for one's strenuous labor. 

Problems appear when, in those infrequent moments of "leisure," some people maximize the opportunity with cigarettes, alcohol, drugs, gambling, or sex. Of course those refreshments don't come cheap; they'll have to be compensated with more work! And, eventually, the loss of one's health.

And that leisure, by our definition, is freedom. But we never escaped the tyranny of work. In fact its power is made deeper and more destructive by the addictions we picked up in our leisure moments. Our minds are not free to think; our spirits, to create; our relationships, to grow; nor our bodies, to play. There is little room in that world of total work for the promises of salvation. We have no Sabbath rest; nor can we come to the feast of heaven and earth, come to the table of plenty. 

Pieper concludes his essay on leisure with the reminder that we must celebrate festivals. We must give God his due, as our religious traditions demand. The Hebrew slaves in Egypt had no respite; in the wilderness the Lord gave them a day of complete rest. They were freed even from the necessity of collecting manna since they had amassed a sufficient store on the previous day. 

Arriving in the promised land they were commanded to celebrate three huge festivals every  year in which everyone, slave and free, native and alien, able and disabled would enjoy superabundant consumption. None should be stored overnight for there would be plenty more where that came from! All they had to do was abide by the Law which Moses had given them and God would provide.

A post-Christian society sees what happens when the Sabbath rest is cancelled. A nation of workers and consumers enjoy no rest. Learning and education, which are leisure activities, cease as students cannot afford their schooling. Life expectancy declines since there is nothing to live for. When sin reigns over our mortal bodies, we obey their desires and die in lonely bondage.