I came across a text by a sociologist: a study of our monastery in Iowa, an in-depth study that took several years. He devoted his career to an investigation of communities of all kinds, the monastic life one of them.¹

Describing community life, he came at one point to the matter of recreation. Recreation in common is found in any social group. His first monastic example of that: the monks drop what they are doing and go to choir seven times a day.

I've heard choir spoken of as song and dance, but I don't believe I've ever heard it considered recreation. Singing in groups, he wrote, is found everywhere as recreation. And with monks it has an added dimension of great meaning: what he calls the asceticism of it. By that he means the spiritual emphasis.

The monk not only sings as an enjoyable enterprise, but does so as love, as prayer, worship, as religion.

This is an interesting observation. The author goes on to note the numerous feasts and celebrations of the Church year: Easter and Christmas and all the rest, the mysteries of Jesus, His Mother, the saints. All considered as recreation.

Perhaps it is because recreation in our culture is so far removed from religious celebration that we find it odd to conceive it otherwise. But early European drama was the mystery play in the cathedral. And the feasts were celebrated not only with Mass and ritual, but also with food and drink, dance, market, commerce, procession. The link of religion and celebration was close. People traveled, but often enough on pilgrimage, not mere tourists. The spiritual overtone was significant. The pleasure was also pleasing to God.

Most of our culture's celebrations, our recreation, is far removed from faith and the expression of faith. There is a certain pathos in Louisville resorting to Pegasus as some sort of symbol of the city and the city's cult of the horse. And as a pagan mythical figure, at best rather weak. There is no aspect of prayer or worship involved with any of the Derby's doings. It is recreation, indeed, but recreation earth-bound and shallow.

There is more sadness in this than mere negative comment. It reveals an attitude, a frame of mind, that so flattens life, robs it of significance in the widest sense, barren of spirit and the transcendent quality that can so lift and inspire the human heart.

It has been noted by anyone who has known ethnic neighborhoods how fiestas of all sorts are part of the people's culture, feasts rooted in faith, but celebrated on earth in song and dance, food and drink, lights and banners.

How odd that a monastery should end up the healthiest enterprise around by way of its integral living; one foot in Heaven, another on earth. We refuse to be silly and superficial. If Heaven is not an aspect of earth, there is no truth in it. Then a barren culture turns to the moment of silence as the best it can come up with in terms of celebration. Akin to mute viewing at a wake. How sad.

For it is after all, recreation that we deal with. To renew the earth, to re-create it with God by returning it to its original purpose: the honor and glory of God.

We celebrate the earth in terms of Christ's return to it to save it, redeem it, glorify it. In prayer and rite, in feast and fast, in procession and in silence, in cowl and cloak, in choir and before the altar, we have the joy of celebrating the point of life. We return to creation and its original point, and re-create.

Can there be a greater contribution to a world so impoverished, so blind? Can there be a greater sorrow than being condemned to find the full meaning of life here and here alone? Can we do the world a greater good than opening it up to the transcendent, the immortal, and that by way of song and dance, rite and ritual, ceremony and act?

For there goes on all around us, in the military, in community festivals, in sports, what is called "recreation". And into that we plant the eternal note, the relation to God, to eternal Life, immortal union with God in our destiny, all of us. Truly a great call. A great call indeed. Amen.
 

1. "The Monastery: A Study in Freedom, Love and Community", by George Hillery, Jr. Praeger. Westport, CT, 1992.