In honor of Labor Day, Belmont Abbey students, faculty, and staff enjoyed a three-day weekend last week. I personally enjoyed this as a chance to embrace a little extra leisure in the midst of preparing for the Fall Semester. The gift of the extra day also made me consider the relationship between work and leisure, and how each informs our lives.
When I start to think about work, I often find myself looking at my hands, almost as extensions of my will and capacity. I can grasp, hold, or handle with them, all of which are also ways to characterize mental, as well as physical, responses. With my hands I can touch or form things, manipulate objects, gesture “hello.” We pray with our hands, talk with our hands, cook or clean, threaten, or soothe. And when we have nothing to do with them, sometimes it’s actually difficult to make them still.
Considering hands in this way, as metaphorical sites of work, I start to see that work itself entails not only this sense of active, often tactile engagement with the world around us, but also a reaching out, a giving property: not only hands clasped around a hammer or a pen, but also hands open and offering. Community, which depends on service to each other, provides a space where work takes on new meaning. Hands as symbols of care, generosity, and connection are linked (dare I say “go hand in hand”) with hands as symbols of labor.
This is not to say that those of us who live alone, or with physical challenges limiting our range of motion, have any less worth or any less potential for fulfilling work. As members of the body of Christ, we give, after all, not only in visible, but also invisible ways, and not only to others in our family, our parish, our neighborhood, but also to God in the intimacy of his dwelling with us, a precious community of its own. St. Benedict’s “Ora et Labora,” prayer and work, unify these things, rather than setting them in opposition.
It’s also occurred to me that leisure is not simply the absence of work. Just as community brings with it the idea of open hands, extended in generosity, it also reminds us of hands extended to receive. If work is a way of giving, leisure is that time in which we quiet ourselves to receive from God the rest we need. Both work and leisure require a kind of humility, a trust that God, who works and dwells in us always, holding us existence with the sheer force of His love, will bring about more than our human hands are capable of doing and refresh us in ways beyond our imagination.
As we end the weekend and begin a new work week, I’ll be praying that your hands are filled with God’s blessings and purpose!
