Six Days Thou Shalt Labor, More or Less
Busyness and the Busines of Heaven
Karl E. Johnson
July 1, 2001
If you asked 20 good Christians today how they are doing, n19 of them would reply, busy. But if you asked almost any of the desert fathers, they would have told you that busyness is a sin. You see what has happened? A vice has become a virtue. The idea of busyness carries with it the suggestion not primarily of obedience, but of striving, as if our activity were more important than God's. Busyness, I would suggest, does not constitute a truly Christian work ethic. With apologies to C. S. Lewis, whose opening sentences in "The Weight of Glory" I have just adapted for my purposes, busyness is the best place to begin any consideration of leisure these days. Ever since it was predicted that modern machinery would make the twentieth century an age of unprecedented leisure, Americans have been busily searching for explanations for their lack of it. In his 1970 book The Harried Leisure Class, Staffan Linder challenged the notion that time equals money. More money, he said, means more shopping and therefore less time. More recently, Juliet Schor argued in The Overworked American that the American workweek has been getting longer since the 1950s-that we are a harried working class. In the same post-war period that saw Western Europeans parlay increased productivity into several additional weeks of vacation time, Americans chose to double the amount of goods and services we consume. As someone has said, we seem to have a vacation deficit disorder. Whether harried from working or from shopping, we buy our homes in the suburbs to "get away from it all," which increases our commute. As a reward for the long hours at work, we build homes that are on average twice as large as those built 50 years ago, only to find they require double the ...
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