Cy Kellett: I imagine someone might say, well this is going to lead to a much less productive society in home, if I follow what Michael Naughton has to say about this.
Dr. Naughton: Right. So one of the things, when I talk to my students at St. Thomas and when I talk about leisure and the importance of leisure, there is this idea that, yeah, you know, that means we get to take time and smell the roses and take it easy and things of that sort. And that’s not the point, right. That’s not the point. It does mean that sometimes … actually one of the … what it does actually confront with my students, particularly it confronts them with how they spend their leisure.
Cy Kellett: Oh yes. Okay. Right.
Dr. Naughton: Listen, we are a leisure culture. I mean, we love to be entertained. We spend a lot of time playing video games. We spend a lot of time watching screens. We spent a lot of times, you know, college sports, pro Sports, whatever it might be. And the question is that that form of leisure, when it becomes overly done, right, it doesn’t mean that in and of itself it’s a problem, but it does mean that it doesn’t provide life. And so yes, it may mean that we may be working too much, but I actually think what it really means is how we look at our leisure. Because here’s the challenge, right. Ask people when you have free time, what do you default to? And most of the times they default to a screen. And they spend way too much time on it. So I think the leisure question is actually the question that will need kind of re-vision.
Cy Kellett: So in a weird way, you could be enslaved to your work, but you can also be enslaved to your leisure.
Dr. Naughton: Absolutely.
Cy Kellett: Okay. So what frees us from those things then? Is it prayer, is that what you’re-
Dr. Naughton: Right.
Cy Kellett: … leading us towards?
Dr. Naughton: So if you look at the question of leisure, we have a couple of different things that go along with it. One is we tend to see it as an amusement, right? There’s a great song by Billy Joel, The Piano Man. So “they know it’s been me they’ve been coming to see to forget about life for a while.” And so leisure is a form of escape. And so we escaped to Las Vegas, and we think that whatever happens in Vegas, will stay in Vegas. But we know whoever said that should be sued because it’s libel. The only thing that stays in Vegas is your money. Everything else comes right back with you, right? And that’s often … but that form of leisure, particularly how we often will look of living for the weekend also distorts our celebrations, right? So the commercialization of Christmas, the trivialization of Easter, the gluttony of St. Patrick’s Day and Mardi Gras. All those things start to distort leisure. And here’s the thing, people don’t get satisfied by it.
Cy Kellett: No. Right. It’s a kind of treadmill or something where you got to get more and more for less and less return.
Dr. Naughton: I’ll often ask my students, I say, “How do you feel when you watch those? How do you feel when you play the video games? And how do you feel when you watch the Netflix movie [inaudible 00:12:16] did you have there? And you know what they often say, they’ll say guilt. There’s a sense that did not provide the rest. And I actually probably know that that’s probably what I shouldn’t have been doing. So people are actually dissatisfied with the leisure. And one of the things you have to do is … but they just kind of keep going with it because it’s a default system. They just default into it. Their friends are doing it, they start to do it. It’s just the way you’re doing it. And if you can just get them to kind of raise up a little bit and say, well wait, maybe I ought not to do that. And then the question is, it does become more … instead of the amusement question, it’s about the contemplative dimension. That there’s a question of contemplation that’s occurring. That there’s an ability to receive.
Dr. Naughton: And then the question is, well, what does contemplation look like? And I would say there is a couple of habits. One is the habit of silence, right? That they can have … by the way, on our campus, and I think this is true everywhere you go on all these campuses, and I often jokingly, although maybe not jokingly, I say, “Listen, I’ll bring back smoking on campus if I can get rid of earbuds on campus.”
Cy Kellett: More poisonous.
Dr. Naughton: Exactly.
Cy Kellett: Because the social life certainly.
Dr. Naughton: Exactly. First of all, they’re all isolated. They all got this music going into their heads, right? And it’s all this noise, and they know that it’s not satisfactory. So the question is how do they get the silence, the ability to stop all the tapes that they have going on in their heads to hear the things that they’re supposed to hear.
Dr. Naughton: And this is why Lectio Divina is so important. And it’s an attempt to stop what one’s doing, create that form of silence, and then to receive God’s word and to see that’s what I need to hear now. Because I don’t know about you, but I got all these tapes going on in my head, right. I’m the unappreciated genius at Saint Thomas. You know, if they would just listen to me, I would get it, right. I have debates-
Cy Kellett: I’m sure that that’s true.
Dr. Naughton: I’m sure it’s true, right? I often think that, too. I have all these debates with my colleagues. I win every debate by the way, right? But all of those things, as good as they may sound, create a false image of who I actually am.
Cy Kellett: Okay. Yes. Right. Right. And if I just stay in there, in that world, I’m not going to get the … whatever, the feedback or whatever the word is, that I need to know my true self.
Dr. Naughton: Right. And you know what Jesus says, “Come to me all you who are weary and find life burdensome and I will give you rest.” Because I can’t give myself rest. I just exhaust myself through all the tapes. And that’s why the reality of prayer becomes that particular form of leisure that is kind of a bedrock. And now that’s on a personal level. On a collective level, I would say the second form of habit of leisure is the habit of celebration or the habit of Sabbath or the habit of the Lord’s Day. That we have a one full day, right? It’s one of the big 10 Commandments. We’re called to this. And when we violate that commandment, serious problems begin to occur.
Dr. Naughton: And all you have to do is look at the other commandments. What if I said, “You know, honey, I tried adultery this week and it didn’t quite work, you know, and I kind of fell into it. I’m sorry about that, but I’ll try next week.” I mean, what would happen to one’s marriage? But we tend to do that with the Sabbath.
Cy Kellett: And that is destructive of which relationship then? With ourselves, with God, with each other?
Dr. Naughton: I think everything. I think it has created a … you know, Bishop Barron has this great line. He says, “When we create false worship, we create false social relationships.” And what the Sabbath and what the Lord’s Day was always attempting to do is try to get at this idea of right worship, right relationships on a weekly basis. And I think what we need to do is retrieve, reclaim the Lord’s Day and reconceive it in terms of the habits that we have on that day.
Dr. Naughton: I don’t know about you, but for years, my wife and I … I was a young professor. We had no money. I had a lot of debt. We had an old dilapidated house, and Sunday was the mop-up day. We had five young kids who are trying to deal with things and Sunday was a different kind of day, but it wasn’t a special kind of day. And it was actually in 1999, we said, we’ve got to think of this in a different way because things are not going well. Things weren’t going well in our relationship. Things weren’t going well with the kids. Things were just kind of over … just too frenetic and too chaotic. And we decided to take the day more seriously.
Dr. Naughton: And every year we’ve had to renew it, but we’ve developed a way of saying when I wake up, I don’t do work. It’s a day of receptivity. And we have a whole series of practices that we try to implement in that day to make it a special kind of day.
Cy Kellett: When you talk about prayer and contemplation as leisure, many people I think will hear that and think, “Is he doing the same thing I’m doing because it’s work,” and I wonder if that’s because any kind of interiority is a bit painful for us when we have not done it or when we have not been … It’s almost like becoming acclimatized to it. If it’s not part of anything you’ve done, and I think there’s lots of young people who have had … they can get to their adulthood with virtually no interior experience because it was never necessary. There was always something outside of them that they could treat as an input and they didn’t ever have to meet themselves.
Cy Kellett: So it strikes me that a lot of people will say that is not leisure, Dr. Naughton, that’s work.
Dr. Naughton: Right. It’s kind of like, if you think about it, the piano play. If I’m going to learn how to play the piano, it is kind of awkward. It is a lot of work at the beginning. And it is uncomfortable. And so, you’re right, there’s particularly … you mentioned, and I think you’re absolutely right about this, that in this country we are heavily focused on the idea of achieving things. And probably one of the most difficult habits we have to kind of realize is that I have to learn how to not just simply achieve, but to receive. And so that habit of receptivity is a habit that for some of us is going to be harder than others. But we have to realize that we’d just gotten into a very bad habit.
Cy Kellett: But we’ve kind of been moralled into it, like that you’re morally better. The more achieving you’re doing, the more moral life you’re living.
Dr. Naughton: Exactly. You know, Josef Pieper in this book, Leisure, the Basis of Culture, chapter three, he talks about the sin of leisure and it’s called acedia. And this is … you were talking about the Middle Ages. Aquinas calls acedia the sin against the Sabbath. And what’s interesting is the sin is not … acedia, by the way, is translated from the Latin into the English sloth, laziness. But what Aquinas recognized is that the laziness is not a physical laziness, it’s a spiritual laziness. And the symptom of acedia is workaholism. Because the workaholism gets … it distracts you and it enables you not to confront the spiritual reality that you have … the interiority that you mentioned.
Dr. Naughton: And so you’re exactly right. These are the kind of distractions. Again, but we now see acedia as physical laziness. You know, what do they say? The idle hands are the workshop of the devil. Get busy, right? Because if you have idleness, you’re going to fall into sin. And this is what Pieper says, this is the modern kind of corruption that’s occurred. We’ve actually reversed the sin. Because it’s not physical laziness, it’s spiritual laziness.
Cy Kellett: I wonder what the relationship in your mind then is to leisure properly spent and maturity. Because the other consequence, it seems to me, of this lack of interiority, this constant input, is an immaturity. We don’t seem to be growing up as … like adulthood is delayed later and later. Marriage and family delayed, if embraced at all. Is there something stunting about this inability to be at ease and receive and be receptive?
Dr. Naughton: No, I think you’re right. Again, it’s kind of an amusement culture that we’re dealing with. There is a sense that people, like any have … I mean, I smoked for 20 years and, and I knew that smoking was not a good thing. I didn’t want to give it up, right? Like all our fixations, and there is, within the culture, these types of habits of amusements that people think that they just can’t quite give up. And thus they’re not ready to take full responsibilities of particular things. And thus the guys still want to hang out with the guys, you know, and they may live with the girl, but they don’t want to get married because they don’t want children, they don’t want to … because somehow, you know, but what happens is they’re living in a culture that’s fostering it.
Dr. Naughton: We lived in a culture that was actually encouraging us to be men, to get married, to take responsibilities. But I think we’re now increasingly living in a culture that’s just the opposite. And thus we increasingly find people disconnected from institution, disconnected from the church, disconnected from the family, and even disconnected to work institutions. They disconnect-
Cy Kellett: [crosstalk 00:22:41] economy kind of thing?
Dr. Naughton: Well, some of that, but it’s also, it’s a thin relationship they have. They’re not committed to those organizations. And they’re always looking for something else to go to if something’s better and they’re ready to opt out and ready to go to that area. So I do think you’re right. There’s a sense that leisure is to foster a greater interiority, a greater sense of who I am. And what I am is, of course, that first of all, I’m a first of all, a child of God. I’ve been created for something. I’ve been created for a work. I’ve been created for a purpose. And part of that is found within the purpose of the family, if that’s where I’m called in terms of the lay life. It could be in a religious life or priestly life. And then, but I’m also called to a work, And that is also something that needs to be done as well. But leisure is that which fosters those things and that deep sense of one’s vocation.
Cy Kellett: The book, you said about a month it would be out?
Dr. Naughton: About that, yeah.
Cy Kellett: Getting Work Right: Labor and Leisure in a Fragmented World from Dr. Michael Naughton. That would be the first thing to do to start getting work right. So someone says to you, look, you’re describing me, this is my life. I am addicted to the screens and the ear buds, and I have tons of leisure, but I feel I’m guilty cause I’m wasting my time. What are the first steps you suggest to people in a practical sense?
Dr. Naughton: Right. You know, everyone obviously is a little different in these types of things. It will depend, but I would say I have found the reclaiming of the Lord’s Day very powerful in my life. I think sometimes you have to start with the commandments, and if you want to say-
Cy Kellett: Sometimes?
Dr. Naughton: Yeah, right. You know, if I am cheating on my wife and I want to have a better relationship with my life and my wife, I’ve got to stop the cheating. And I would say reclaim that Lord’s Day. And I think in part that’s where you can find the silence. I mean that’s when, by the way, I love this phrase, right? Become a techno Sabbatarian.
Cy Kellett: Oh, take a break from all that.
Dr. Naughton: Take a break from the technology. And I think for a lot of folks … and here’s the thing, try it for an hour. And if you can’t do it for an hour, it owns you and you don’t own it. And you got a problem. But if you recognize the problem, you’re just one step closer to where you need to go. And that day is a day that I think has a way of having an impact on the rest of the week. So my one thesis in the book is if we don’t get leisure right, we won’t get work, right? If we don’t get Sunday right, we’re not going to get Monday right.
Cy Kellett: All right.
Dr. Naughton: And Sunday is the first … we can think about it in one sense as the first day of the week, but it’s also the eighth day. It’s the kind of internal day, but it’s a way of … instead of seeing Sunday as the last day of the week, the mop-up day, see it as the day that actually helps us to move into the rest of the week. And I think the idea of disconnecting … because the Jews … you know there’s a wonderful conservative Jewish rabbi, Abraham Joshua Heschel, wrote a book called The Sabbath. It’s a beautiful book. And he says the Jews would be detached from consumption and production not because they were bad, but they did not define the core of who I was.
