Have you seen the current sci-fi movie Hail Mary? The movie is based on the book by Andy Weir. Wier is a celebrated contemporary author, but one writer set the gold standard of science fiction in the 1950s and 1960s. His name was Ray Bradbury and one of his books changed my life.
Survey any student who attended high school from 1960 – 1980 and you’ll discover one title that was uniformly read in most English classes — Fahrenheit 451 by Bradbury. In Bradbury’s imagined future, books and the homes of book owners are burned by firemen (my home would go up in a flash!). Only a few people kept the act of reading alive by hiding books, hoping to escape the firemen.
People typically cite Bradbury’s book as a caution against censoring books. Each year public libraries publish and display censored books as a warning against the concern of parents or governments. The images of totalitarian governments burning books in the public square are pushed into our faces. If you look beyond the political overtones, Bradbury is saying something more profound than simply banning objectionable materials. His profound insight has enriched and re-structured my life.
But let’s first ask the obvious: why were books feared and burned?
When the fireman Montag quizzed a book owner on this question, the bibliophile answered that it was because of leisure. “Oh, but we’ve plenty of off hours,” was the fireman’s reply. The distraught but wise book owner countered by saying:
Off hours, yes. But time to think? If you’ve not driving a hundred miles an hour, at a clip where you can’t think of anything isle but the danger, then you’re playing some game or sitting in some room where you can’t argue with the four- wall televisor. Why? The televisor is ‘real.’ It is immediate, it has dimension. It tells you what to think and blasts it in. . . . It rushes you on so quickly to its own conclusion your mind hasn’t time to protest, ‘What nonsense!’
Welcome to life today!
We are a speed obsessed culture — whether it’s a speeding car, a cell phone, or wi-fi connection, we love speed. We love our big-screen televisions which take up entire walls in our homes. We’re a danger seeking culture. Whether it’s “extreme sports” or the thrill of exploring trails and mountains that are highly dangerous, our bored culture finds enjoys the scent of danger. What about the gamer culture? We live in hidden worlds of on-line players submerged in a culture of video games.
All of these experiences rush at us so fast that our minds haven’t time to protest or process. We need leisure and that’s what reading supplies. We must step out of life’s sprint and stop to read. Leisure becomes a subversive activity.
What is so subversive about leisure? Leisure slows us down to reflect and think. As a book owner in Fahrenheit says, “Leisure gives us time to digest books.” The Chinese character for “leisure” is made up of “space” and “sunshine.” It denotes the pause the attitude of relaxation that creates a gap in life so that the sun can shine through. In contrast, the Chinese ideogram “busy” is made up of two characters, “heart” and “killing.”
When I practice leisure time, I’m not heading for the hammock in the back yard or an afternoon watching the NBA playoffs. Leisure becomes an opportunity to think, and reading is the classic leisure activity. I must pause to digest what I’m reading and this pausing from the world’s rhythms and routines is sometimes a subversive action.
Disciplemaking is a thoughtful enterprise requiring leisure. Pastor and author John Piper writes that “knowing and thinking exist for the sake of love — for the sake of building people up in the faith.” We pay attention to and think about those things that we love. If we love people, we will think about them and this happens when we practice leisure.
Thinking is often described as “musing,” a word derived from the Old French to “ponder” or “loiter.” To ponder something is to consider it carefully; loitering is delaying an activity with what appears to be idle stops and pauses.
Thinking, then, is the activity of the mind that slows down to explore, analyze, critique, create, and correlate. Thinking is something that I stop to do; it demands “loitering” — idly stopping to pause and think. Thinking marks us as God’s image-bearers.
“God made man in his own image, and one of the noblest features of the divine likeness in man is his capacity to think,” writes theologian John Stott. Thinking is so important to our Lord that the renewal of our minds is a mark of the new-birth (Eph. 4:23; Romans 12:2). Disciples are thinkers; disciplemaking is a thoughtful enterprise. Thinking happens when we practice leisure.
My practice of leisure takes place in small bites and with intentional ways. I discipline myself to do some of the following little practices:
- read a chapter a day in a book
- think about and record thoughts in a journal
- memorize a current passage of Scripture
- have conversations that challenge my thinking and assumptions
Ray Bradbury taught me the importance of leisure in a life.
At the end of the book, the exiled fireman Montag discovers bands of homeless people roaming the countryside. These men and women were former book owners who voluntarily burned their books after memorizing one of them. “Thousands on the roads, the abandoned rail tracks, tonight, bums on the outside, libraries inside. It wasn’t planned at first. Each man had a book he wanted to remember, and did.”
Entire libraries were secured in the memories of these men and women. They were walking books, a flesh and blood reminder about the importance of leisure — the value of thinking — in a culture. We don’t have to burn books to understand leisure; we just need to read them. A good place to start is Fahrenheit 451.
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