Dear Friends,
This past week we have had more snow and cold days than we had days of teaching in our schools. For a winter that was without snow days, we finally could use up some of those days that are built into the school calendar. January and February are some of the hardest teaching months of the year. Christmas is over and the weather is dark and cold. Spring still seems distant. But a snow day…can seem like spring when you are a child. At least that is how I remember them.
In the modern age, unlike the ancient time when I was young, snow days are more easily forecasted and anticipated than ever. This has robbed them of some of their glory but not all. While snow is no less exciting, it is more easily tracked. School districts can cancel the night before so that everyone can sleep in the next day. What is the fun in that? Anticipation, the unknown, is part of the delight. My siblings and I would get up for breakfast and engage in the usual fight over the bathroom while listening to the radio to see if school would be canceled that day. We could see the snow falling and the wind blowing but we did not know until the last minute whether we would have a whole day just to play at home.
I learned when I taught in school, that teachers like snow days just as much if not more than the students do. A snow day brings with it both play and rest; it literally quits the world. Snow brings play, and play is how we experiment. I learned in my philosophy classes that play is aimed at the supreme good, having no other end in mind than play itself. Snow days teach us, if we practice them rightly, a child-like pleasure that comes with using time for no practical purpose.
I am sure I have quoted from it before, but the writing of Josef Pieper in Leisure, the Basis of Culture, has greatly shaped my understanding of the Sabbath and liturgy. In the book he says, Leisure is a form of that stillness that is necessary preparation for accepting reality; only the person who is still can hear, and whoever is not still, cannot hear. Such stillness is not mere soundlessness or a dead muteness; it means, rather, that the soul’s power, as real, of responding to the real — a co-respondence, eternally established in nature — has not yet descended into words. Leisure is the disposition of perceptive understanding, of contemplative beholding, and immersion — in the real.
He also says, Against the exclusiveness of the paradigm of work as effort, leisure is the condition of considering things in a celebrating spirit. The inner joyfulness of the person who is celebrating belongs to the very core of what we mean by leisure… Leisure is only possible in the assumption that man is not only in harmony with himself … but also he is in agreement with the world and its meaning. Leisure lives on affirmation. It is not the same as the absence of activity; it is not the same thing as quiet, or even as an inner quiet. It is rather like the stillness in the conversation of lovers, which is fed by their oneness.
And, this is why the ability to be “at leisure” is one of the basic powers of the human soul. Like the gift of contemplative self-immersion in Being, and the ability to uplift one’s spirits in festivity, the power to be at leisure is the power to step beyond the working world and win contact with those superhuman, life-giving forces that can send us, renewed and alive again, into the busy world of work…
See what a snow day can bring us. Play helps us become more human and encounter the divine. Yay! To the snow day!
Or, here is a little bit of fun from Robert Frost
Dust of Snow
The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree
Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.
Peace,
Fr. Damian