Re-creation, holy leisure, is the mainstay of the contemplative soul, and the theology of Sabbath is its cornerstone. “On the seventh day,” scripture says, “God rested.”

Life is about more than work. When we stop the race to nowhere, when we get off the carousel of productivity long enough to finally recognize that it is going in a circle, we reclaim a piece of our own humanity.

The purpose of recreation is to create a Sabbath of the soul. We need time to access the impact of our daily work on the lives of those around us. We must ask ourselves whether what we are doing with our lives and the way we are doing it is really worth the expenditure of a life, either our own or the lives of those with whom we come in contact. Only recreation gives me the chance to step back and think, to open up and be made new, to walk through life with eyes and heart open, to expand the human parts of my human experience.

Life is not meant to be dismal. Life is not an endurance test. Life is life, if we make it that. How do we know for sure that life is meant to be an excursion into joy? Because there is simply too much to enjoy: fishing water in a back bay, the view from the mountaintop, wild berries on the hill, a street dance in the neighborhood, a good book, the parish bazaar, the city culture, the family reunion.

Religious traditions that refuse to enjoy life, reject life. But religion that rejects life is no religion at all. It fails to connect the sacred now with the sacred beyond. To be a contemplative we must bring ourselves to life so that all of life can mediate God to us.

--from Illuminated Life by Joan Chittister (Orbis)