This week, I lead off with one of my favorite sentences with which to begin a column: By the time you read this, I will be on vacation, kicking up my feet with a banjo in solitude. Over the next few days I will  be celebrating my ten-year
college reunion with friends, preparing for a close friend’s wedding, and then doing nothing more than participating in wholesome, authentic leisure.

The importance of leisure has never been missed more completely than it is in our current age, and for that reason it is more important than ever that we, especially as Catholics, reclaim it. The word leisure usually invokes a mental image of someone lounging around, idly wasting their time on something unimportant- perhaps
channel surfing or staring dead-eyed into the abyss of one’s smart phone screen. But for the German philosopher Josef Pieper, leisure is far more important and involved than that. In the 20 ^th century he wrote a very short philosophical tract called Leisure: The Basis of Culture where he details how time in solitude with the Creator and His creation is necessary for any culture to develop and focus on the most important things.
 
It seems conceited to write a bulletin column about how rest and recreation are the very foundation of Western Civilization just because I happen to be taking some time off. But I often find myself slipping into the utilitarian mindset of contemporary America, and I think that same risk is omnipresent in our lives. If we don’t take time to rest with ourselves, our family, and most importantly, Our Lord, then the rest of the work we do loses all meaning.

Pope St. John Paul II once said that work must always be followed by rest and
“re-creation” or else it slowly strips away our human dignity itself.
 
While I am away, know that my flock is at the very forefront of my prayers. I will be saying my office and offering Mass for you while I hide away in the mountains, and I ask that you keep me in prayer as well. I also encourage you to think and pray about how you can find true recreation as a family. Take some of the time that is eaten up by entertainment or mind-numbing activities and replace it with something that brings you into communion with your interior life and your God. Pray a rosary with your family. Invite friends and neighbors over to do nothing but sit on the deck.
Take a walk. Sit on the porch. Call timeout from the constant hustle and bustle to remember the eternal purpose for which God made you;
Heaven.
 
Prayers always,
Fr. McC
 
 
“Leisure cannot be achieved at all when
it is sought as a means to an end, even though that end be “the salvation of Western civilization”. Celebration of God in worship cannot be done unless it is done for its own sake. That most sublime form of affirmation of the world as a whole is the fountainhead of leisure.”
 
-Josef Pieper