St Martha and The Dragon

Integrating work and leisure

“Leisure it must be understood, is a mental and spiritual attitude. It is not merely the result of external factors. It is not the inevitable result of spare time, holidays, vacation, or the weekend. It is in the first place an attitude of mind, a condition of the soul, and as such is utterly contrary to the ideal of worker.”

“Separated from the sphere of divine worship, of the cult of the divine, and from the power it radiates, leisure is as impossible as the celebration of a feast. Cut off from the worship of the divine, leisure becomes laziness and work inhuman.”

“Our effort has been to regain some space for true leisure, to bring back a fundamentally right possession of leisure, “active leisure”.”

“There is no doubt of one thing: the world of the “worker” is taking shape with dynamic force—with such a velocity that, rightly or wrongly, one is tempted to speak of demonic force in history.”

-Joseph Pieper, Leisure the Basis of Culture

Sometimes it's helpful to take the biggest step back from a binary debate, win-lose discourse, and the black-and-white issues of our day and take a look at the premise. What frameworks are we operating in, what assumptions are we making, and in what way are we limiting ourselves?

One such topic is the role of women, which is ongoing in our culture since at least the 60's. And as Mary Harrington has pointed out, it was not really so much the feminists that ushered women into the work force, as much as it was the invention of the industrial loom. Too often, modern cultural and moral questions are framed as just that, questions of culture when they are really questions better answered by inquiries into the world of finance.

“We men and women are ships upon the same sea, and we owe each other a terrible loyalty.” As the tides of trends are ever shifting, one can almost get whiplash by how quickly the girl boss of 2010 donned the sundress of 2022 and became a tradwife. This amidst larger debates- not between the right and the left, but within the right wing itself on “modern women”. We all know the 1950's housewife is a brief blip in history, one created more by a burgeoning media and inflated GDP than by some particular ethic. And this period of housewive's raised the boomers, so truly it is a history none of us are too keen on repeating.

The trouble of raising children really only began with the industrial age, when work was done in factories and as people moved off the land. An easy solution was simply to put the children to work themselves, but we have since abandoned such practices and reinvented a romantic vision of childhood, one free of work. This is as modern as feminism itself, however, we must stop and wonder if we invented this vision of childhood, not because we decided children must no longer work, but rather, we rightly perceived a lot of our relationship to work had become profaned.

Perhaps the question of women and work is not answered by calculating the amount of money a “chef, chauffer, maid, and nanny” is worth, or in decrying a village that doesn't exist to help you raise your kids, but in reexamining what the good life really is.

And a proper understanding of work requires understanding the proper ends of work, leisure.

Joseph Pieper wrote a book I found rather elusive but intriguing last summer, “Leisure the Basis of Culture”. In this book, he outlines how capitalism, and even Marxist notions of the worker were consuming the west and destroying true leisure. As people worked in exchange for pay, in order to fund an increasingly secular existence, and to pay for increasing distractions and conveniences, what was being eliminated was true leisure. And by leisure, he is careful to note, he does not mean dissipation. Not time to scroll your phone, not time to binge a streaming service, not time to browse target aisles for goods to consume into our bloviated existence. Not even time for brunching at the trendy new wine dive, or ordering a new Chinese convenience on Amazon. Leisure is found in silence, and not even physical silence per se. But in the quality of the silence of a soul, which can contemplate, consider the biggest questions of life, even experience religious devotion. Leisure is found anywhere the soul can be at peace, the mind can think, it often comes to us “as in sleep”, perhaps one day in a song, a poem, a bonfire, or in the holy liturgy and sacred rites.

He is careful to explain that optimization for its own sake is destroying culture. He is referring to hustle culture many years before the phrase came into being. We must always be optimizing our looks, our work, our investments, packing our days with work. All so we can have some time on the weekend off, to distract ourselves with mindless relaxation, in order to be better rested for work.

It makes sense that in such a world, one would value breaks, vacations, weekends. All this driving, gym time, time clocked in at the office, meal prep, and quick house resets can't sustain themselves forever. One needs to sit down, and turn the brain off.

His book is tricky for me, but I think this is sort of a key point to the whole concept. Leisure as the opposite of turning the brain off, but also, the opposite of work for work's sake. Leisure for its own sake.

Recently I watched a documentary series on Tudor England in the time of King Henry the 7th. It follows two archeologists and a historian who live a year as peasant tenets of a monastary, who at the time owned more land than the King.

In this world you work from sun up to sundown, but a life of plowing, making tallow over an open fire, beating barley, making sheep cheese, looming linen, and shaving sheep did not preclude this particular notion of leisure.

No, during seasons of down time, say following the harvest, many such tenets joined guilds, guilds that built beautiful churches, illuminated manuscripts, or put together plays. Life was interspersed and defined by the many holy days and feasts, days and weeks of communal merrymaking. And it is necessary for culture to have these offbeats, silence, celebrations, to truly become creative.

When our lives are punctuated by fifteen minute breaks at work, we pull out our phones to wile away the time. After an eight hour work day, we want to grab dinner out so we can rest before going back to work again.

I feel like it is one of the biggest shames that being a stay at home mom, or a tradwife, or whatever other title, has become a subject for… Economic analysis of all things. For example, a mother has worked all day caring for the children just like the father has worked an eight hour day, so she deserves to split chores and breaktime with him. While I agree both the husband and wife should work together on the project of their households and facilitate time for each other's hobbies, social life, health, and religious devotion, something feels so wrong and uninspiring about turning the SAHM, a last group of privileged women somewhat free from the confines and demands of capitalism, into another proletariat suffering under the weight of another “job”.

In Tudor England as in most times, women worked and sold cheeses and wool, they ran households and carried their children with them. One could argue raising children without these other arduous demands is itself unnatural, and to be quite frank, maybe it is stripping away the other duties and tasks that have made the children themselves… appear as burdens, just on their own.

Motherhood is a wonderful opportunity to practice integrating work and leisure and to live life outside the paradigm of hustle culture/distraction. It would be unfortunate if we are allowed to do privileged and meaningful work, like raising children, cooking food, and keeping a clean environment, and complained for a lack of of alone time to turn our brains off and consume distraction.

I'm not arguing that mothers should never have a break, I am simply wondering if embracing the burden of the work itself, and owning it entirely, would foster a life so good we don't even know how good it could get.

If we take total ownership for what we can take ownership for, which looks different for everyone, instead of blaming the village, or trying to change men (they cannot be changed), or hiring out more of our work than makes sense for us (this looks different for everyone), we can bring true peace and leisure into our own homes, and help restore culture.

The monastic life is one of routines around prayer and work, the stay at home mom has an opportunity to create rhythms in her home that creates true peace, inner silence, even in a home full of children. To make life at home liturgical and sacred, starting and ending the day with prayer, celebrating the feasts and fasts throughout, gathering people to mark these occasions with bonfires, dinner parties, and if you are as lucky as me, priests to play Irish folk music in the backyard (lucky neighbors).

It's an opportunity to create beautiful things, and to contemplate the spiritual world. It is something between a tenet farmer and a hermit nun. Maybe social media has turned our eyes towards worker's rights in motherhood, but I think that is a very low and dim view to take of such a sacred opportunity.

My ideas here aren't to advise on particulars because all of us have very different situations that are unique. Rather just as a reminder to how truly good and lofty this thing really is, and to find our rest in contemplation, not distraction, to work not with productivity and spreadsheets in mind, but to work hard for the peace a clean house, healthy meals, and well regulated children can bring, not to just us but to the world. Leisure of this kind is the basis of all culture.

It was the feast day of one of my favorite saints on Monday, and her story is a fitting example of the integration of leisure and work. St Martha is the patron saint of servants, waitresses, entertaining, and housewives. She of course begins frazzled, working hard to entertain her divine houseguest in Bethany. She looks around to blame someone for this hard work, and sees her sister is goofing off, listening meditatively to the words of Our Lord.

She is met with the reminder that she is anxious and troubled about many things, but only one thing is needful (communion with God). When her brother dies later in the gospel, while her daydreaming sister is inconsolable, she says straightforwardly, “Lord if you had been here our brother would not have died,” demonstrating her faith, her movement towards understanding the divine.

Later, Christian legend has it she tamed a dragon, and became a great saint. She would have remember how Abraham entertained angels unaware, and worked hard hosting the incarnate God himself while he dwelled among us. And received the lesson to integrate true leisure, the contemplation of heavenly things, in with her work. And fittingly she tamed the dragon, as in allegories of old. Or as Jordan Peterson says, clean your room, bucko, and then you know, slay the dragon of chaos before he comes to your village.

May our homes be places where work and leisure are found in the true sense of both words. And the dragons of modernity slayed.