Michael Ipgrave | May 4, 2010
‘Cease to do evil, learn to do good, seek justice, rescue the oppressed’, Isaiah tells the people of the city of his time. Some clear, and uncompromising, ethical challenges to place before us as a society as we prepare for a general election. And Jesus tells his friends, the church of his time: ‘Love one another as I have loved you’. A still more uncomfortable mandate for us as individuals, because we know we can never fulfil it however hard we try. Two different challenges – but one thing they have in common: we cannot quantify our success in meeting them, and to try to do that would be to miss their point. To set targets for ceasing to do evil and learning to do good, to formulate a service level agreement for loving as Jesus loves – that would be impossible to achieve and ridiculous to attempt. But our society, I believe, is seriously oppressed by a culture which insists that anything worthwhile must be quantifiable, and I also believe that it is our prophetic vocation to subvert that culture.
Almost 400 years ago, my church rather surprisingly acted in a prophetic way like that. The bishops of the Church of England did one of those things that makes me really proud to be an Anglican. They required their clergy to read from every pulpit a royal document called The Book of Sports. If they refused to do so, they would be deprived of their livings. This ‘book’ of James I rebuked the ‘Puritans and Precisians’ of the time for trying to bar traditional sports on Sundays. The king wrote that ‘after the end of divine service our good people be not disturbed, letted or discouraged from … dancing, archery, leaping, vaulting, or any other such harmless recreation, nor from having of May-games, Whitsun-ales, and Morris-dances; and the setting up of May-poles and other sports therewith used’. However, the king’s book did ‘account still as prohibited … bear and bull-baitings ... and at all times, bowling’.
That is a bit harsh on bowling clubs; but, that apart, it seems to me that we in our own time stand in need of a modern Book of Sports, for we are still grievously oppressed by a puritanism which insists that all activity should be serious, producing outcomes recognised as useful, far removed from any frivolous enjoyment. Most important of all, we should be able to measure the benefits produced by any activity.
Our modern Puritanism has largely lost religious justification, yet it lives with renewed secular force in the cult of quantifiable, enforceable and rewardable targets demanded in almost every sphere of human endeavour. Targets surely are among the great tyrannies of our time; whatever their original motivation, their effect on our lives is damaging as any tyranny is. The imposition of targets is premised on profound distrust: we cannot be relied on to do our work because we enjoy it, but must be always monitored to ensure productivity. In theory a sharp line is then drawn between ‘work’ and ‘leisure’; but in practice so-called ‘leisure’ itself becomes commodified and quantified: sport is divided between professionals and spectators, music between performers and listeners, and so on, and each has to meet their own targets. In every part of our lives we are pressed to be either producers meeting targets or consumers complaining that targets are unmet.
Where in all this is the sheer enjoyment of ‘leaping, vaulting or any other such harmless recreation’ which the Book of Sports commends? Our spirits groan under the new puritanism of targets which threaten to turn all our life into a wearisome, never-ending process of negotiation. And, rightly, we rebel – or, more often and more positively, we subvert: the human spirit finds ways around the culture of targets, thank God, and it does so because it has a natural affinity for freedom.
As the bishops rightly discerned four hundred years back, the longing for the freedom of true enjoyment is not the fruit of the human spirit only, but also of the Spirit of God. The target-driven world of negotiation is just that: neg-otium, the denial of otium. Otium is a lovely, big, rounded Latin word, which we rather lamely translate as ‘leisure’. But otium is more than ‘leisure’; it has a rich, theological sense. A great classic of monastic writing, the Golden Letter, states: ‘Otium is not idleness. Rather it is the activity of all activities.’ Why is that? Because it is a touching the eternal heart of God, whose otium of perfect repose is infinitely creative and active. So otium here and now is a foretaste of the future rest awaiting the people of God, a leisure which is not bored inactivity but perfect enjoyment.
Our images of heaven have become too pious and proper: we need to recover the sense of ‘leaping and vaulting’, or, in biblical imagery, the joy and laughter of the tipsy meals of which Jesus spoke – and the Puritans and Precisians of his time pursed their lips as they said: ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard’. On the night he was betrayed, the night he told them to love as he had loved them, Jesus spoke to his friends of sitting on thrones and of drinking the new wine of the Kingdom. And even in the heat, dust and pain of crucifixion he looked forward to future joy: ‘Today, with me in Paradise’ he promised the thief – Paradise, the walled garden of delight in the midst of the arid desert. He knew that he was going to glory.
We have become a bit coy as Christians about speaking with confidence of the hope we have grasped in these vivid, almost tactile images. It is not hard to see why. They seem too good to be true. They seem like a way of distracting attention from the hardships of the present by pointing to an imagined future. They seem ways of controlling or tranquillising people with a dubious promise, the ‘opiate of the people’. And so we go to the opposite extreme: ‘We believe in life before death’, we say – but does that alternative really have to be faced?
The fact is, that the most powerful and persistent spiritual expectations of enjoyment are borne out of contexts of slavery; and within those contexts they have often served not to create acquiescence but to express a longing for a better world, which will come both then and now. ‘There’s no rain to wet you / O, yes, I want to go home, / There’s no sun to burn you, / O, yes, I want to go home, / O, push along, believers, / O, yes, I want to go home, / There’s no whips a-crackin’ / O, yes, I want to go home’. In his classic survey of religion amongst the slaves of the antebellum Southern states, Albert Raboteau concludes: ‘That some slaves maintained their identity as persons, despite a system bent on reducing them to a subhuman level, was certainly due in part to their religious life. In the midst of slavery, religion was for slaves a space of meaning, freedom and transcendence’.
Of course, we cannot compare the irksomeness of our entrapment in a target-driven culture with the bitter sufferings of the slaves. But we can learn from their example that the human heart can find true freedom, real enjoyment when it rests in trust on the eternal heart of the God who brings all things into being solely to reflect his glory; when it is shaped by the Christ who told his friends to consider the lilies of the field, neither toiling nor spinning in anxiety yet exceeding Solomon in splendour; the human heart finds fulfilment when it becomes a spring pouring out the new life of the Spirit who fills us with joy in believing.
Jesus shows us the way to the freedom of pure enjoyment through his single-minded commitment to follow only his Father’s will, to have no anxiety about meeting any other expectations, and resolutely to submit to no judgement by any other standards. It is this purity of heart which wins him the freedom to enjoy the vision of God, and it is a like refusal to be distracted by artificially imposed targets which will win us the enjoyment of true freedom.
In the kingdom of pure otium to which the faithfulness of Christ opens the door, the values of our everyday world are not only not applied in a measurable way; they are also turned upside down – if we could apply targets to what Jesus set out to do and what he ended up doing, they would be negative scores in any conventional sense. This reversal of expectations is the sign that we are touching the reality of God’s action, for he wants our freedom so fervently that he surprises us constantly – and thereby gives us yet more unexpected enjoyment.
Isaiah sets before the people a tough challenge of justice, advocacy and liberation. But he also promises enjoyment: ‘You shall eat the good of the land’. Jesus sets before his disciples the even tougher challenge of unconditional love. But he also invites those who are carrying heavy burdens to come to him and find rest, those who are set unreasonable targets to come to him and find the freedom of otium. There remains yet a rest for the people of God, says the Letter to the Hebrews. And all we need to enter that rest as God’s people is to trust his promise and travel with him to the land of freedom. The vision that inspires us is evoked with a great depth of resonance by R S Thomas in his poem The Kingdom:
It’s a long way off, but inside it
There are quite different things going on:
Festivals at which the poor man
Is king and the consumptive is
Healed: mirrors in which the blind look
At themselves and love looks at them
Back: and industry is for mending
The bent bones and the minds fractured
By life. It’s a long way off, but to get
There takes no time and admission,
Is free, if you will purge yourself
Of desire and present yourself with
Your need only and the simple offering
Of your faith, green as a leaf.
Almost 400 years ago, my church rather surprisingly acted in a prophetic way like that. The bishops of the Church of England did one of those things that makes me really proud to be an Anglican. They required their clergy to read from every pulpit a royal document called The Book of Sports. If they refused to do so, they would be deprived of their livings. This ‘book’ of James I rebuked the ‘Puritans and Precisians’ of the time for trying to bar traditional sports on Sundays. The king wrote that ‘after the end of divine service our good people be not disturbed, letted or discouraged from … dancing, archery, leaping, vaulting, or any other such harmless recreation, nor from having of May-games, Whitsun-ales, and Morris-dances; and the setting up of May-poles and other sports therewith used’. However, the king’s book did ‘account still as prohibited … bear and bull-baitings ... and at all times, bowling’.
That is a bit harsh on bowling clubs; but, that apart, it seems to me that we in our own time stand in need of a modern Book of Sports, for we are still grievously oppressed by a puritanism which insists that all activity should be serious, producing outcomes recognised as useful, far removed from any frivolous enjoyment. Most important of all, we should be able to measure the benefits produced by any activity.
Our modern Puritanism has largely lost religious justification, yet it lives with renewed secular force in the cult of quantifiable, enforceable and rewardable targets demanded in almost every sphere of human endeavour. Targets surely are among the great tyrannies of our time; whatever their original motivation, their effect on our lives is damaging as any tyranny is. The imposition of targets is premised on profound distrust: we cannot be relied on to do our work because we enjoy it, but must be always monitored to ensure productivity. In theory a sharp line is then drawn between ‘work’ and ‘leisure’; but in practice so-called ‘leisure’ itself becomes commodified and quantified: sport is divided between professionals and spectators, music between performers and listeners, and so on, and each has to meet their own targets. In every part of our lives we are pressed to be either producers meeting targets or consumers complaining that targets are unmet.
Where in all this is the sheer enjoyment of ‘leaping, vaulting or any other such harmless recreation’ which the Book of Sports commends? Our spirits groan under the new puritanism of targets which threaten to turn all our life into a wearisome, never-ending process of negotiation. And, rightly, we rebel – or, more often and more positively, we subvert: the human spirit finds ways around the culture of targets, thank God, and it does so because it has a natural affinity for freedom.
As the bishops rightly discerned four hundred years back, the longing for the freedom of true enjoyment is not the fruit of the human spirit only, but also of the Spirit of God. The target-driven world of negotiation is just that: neg-otium, the denial of otium. Otium is a lovely, big, rounded Latin word, which we rather lamely translate as ‘leisure’. But otium is more than ‘leisure’; it has a rich, theological sense. A great classic of monastic writing, the Golden Letter, states: ‘Otium is not idleness. Rather it is the activity of all activities.’ Why is that? Because it is a touching the eternal heart of God, whose otium of perfect repose is infinitely creative and active. So otium here and now is a foretaste of the future rest awaiting the people of God, a leisure which is not bored inactivity but perfect enjoyment.
Our images of heaven have become too pious and proper: we need to recover the sense of ‘leaping and vaulting’, or, in biblical imagery, the joy and laughter of the tipsy meals of which Jesus spoke – and the Puritans and Precisians of his time pursed their lips as they said: ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard’. On the night he was betrayed, the night he told them to love as he had loved them, Jesus spoke to his friends of sitting on thrones and of drinking the new wine of the Kingdom. And even in the heat, dust and pain of crucifixion he looked forward to future joy: ‘Today, with me in Paradise’ he promised the thief – Paradise, the walled garden of delight in the midst of the arid desert. He knew that he was going to glory.
We have become a bit coy as Christians about speaking with confidence of the hope we have grasped in these vivid, almost tactile images. It is not hard to see why. They seem too good to be true. They seem like a way of distracting attention from the hardships of the present by pointing to an imagined future. They seem ways of controlling or tranquillising people with a dubious promise, the ‘opiate of the people’. And so we go to the opposite extreme: ‘We believe in life before death’, we say – but does that alternative really have to be faced?
The fact is, that the most powerful and persistent spiritual expectations of enjoyment are borne out of contexts of slavery; and within those contexts they have often served not to create acquiescence but to express a longing for a better world, which will come both then and now. ‘There’s no rain to wet you / O, yes, I want to go home, / There’s no sun to burn you, / O, yes, I want to go home, / O, push along, believers, / O, yes, I want to go home, / There’s no whips a-crackin’ / O, yes, I want to go home’. In his classic survey of religion amongst the slaves of the antebellum Southern states, Albert Raboteau concludes: ‘That some slaves maintained their identity as persons, despite a system bent on reducing them to a subhuman level, was certainly due in part to their religious life. In the midst of slavery, religion was for slaves a space of meaning, freedom and transcendence’.
Of course, we cannot compare the irksomeness of our entrapment in a target-driven culture with the bitter sufferings of the slaves. But we can learn from their example that the human heart can find true freedom, real enjoyment when it rests in trust on the eternal heart of the God who brings all things into being solely to reflect his glory; when it is shaped by the Christ who told his friends to consider the lilies of the field, neither toiling nor spinning in anxiety yet exceeding Solomon in splendour; the human heart finds fulfilment when it becomes a spring pouring out the new life of the Spirit who fills us with joy in believing.
Jesus shows us the way to the freedom of pure enjoyment through his single-minded commitment to follow only his Father’s will, to have no anxiety about meeting any other expectations, and resolutely to submit to no judgement by any other standards. It is this purity of heart which wins him the freedom to enjoy the vision of God, and it is a like refusal to be distracted by artificially imposed targets which will win us the enjoyment of true freedom.
In the kingdom of pure otium to which the faithfulness of Christ opens the door, the values of our everyday world are not only not applied in a measurable way; they are also turned upside down – if we could apply targets to what Jesus set out to do and what he ended up doing, they would be negative scores in any conventional sense. This reversal of expectations is the sign that we are touching the reality of God’s action, for he wants our freedom so fervently that he surprises us constantly – and thereby gives us yet more unexpected enjoyment.
Isaiah sets before the people a tough challenge of justice, advocacy and liberation. But he also promises enjoyment: ‘You shall eat the good of the land’. Jesus sets before his disciples the even tougher challenge of unconditional love. But he also invites those who are carrying heavy burdens to come to him and find rest, those who are set unreasonable targets to come to him and find the freedom of otium. There remains yet a rest for the people of God, says the Letter to the Hebrews. And all we need to enter that rest as God’s people is to trust his promise and travel with him to the land of freedom. The vision that inspires us is evoked with a great depth of resonance by R S Thomas in his poem The Kingdom:
It’s a long way off, but inside it
There are quite different things going on:
Festivals at which the poor man
Is king and the consumptive is
Healed: mirrors in which the blind look
At themselves and love looks at them
Back: and industry is for mending
The bent bones and the minds fractured
By life. It’s a long way off, but to get
There takes no time and admission,
Is free, if you will purge yourself
Of desire and present yourself with
Your need only and the simple offering
Of your faith, green as a leaf.
