Rest and the Order of Love

The Question of Rest

What is rest, brethren, and what is it for? You tell me that many of you live in an unending week, that labour keeps its edge upon your needless hours, that a small bright device calls you back when you would be rid of care, and that when physicians speak of ‘burnout’ they bid you to find rest which you cannot find. I would first ask of you, as in my Confessions I asked of myself, What was loved in the things I loved? What was fled from and what was sought? Memory turned into prayer will teach us that the shape of our life is the proof of its love. O Lord, what is our heart weighted with?

I write not as one who kept a clock of the busy market, but as a man who has known both the desire for public work and the need of inward repose; not as one who had your device, but as one who often sat in the church or the garden and turned his heart to God. I am told your difficulty: the week has no margin, errands intrude upon a day that ought to be free, and the evening that remains is squandered in looking at the lives of others. Ask then whether this is rest or whether it is a new manner of unrest.

Use and Enjoyment

There is a rule that helps us here, and it is simple yet decisive: there are some things which we are to enjoy, and others which we are to use. "There are some things, then, which are to be enjoyed, others which are to be used, others still which enjoy and use." Make this your first distinction, for in it lies the remedy for much confusion. That which is to be enjoyed makes the soul rest; that which is to be used helps us on our journey toward the true object of enjoyment. If we take a thing that is for use and make it a thing to enjoy, we are detained on the road and do not reach the home for which we were created.

Rest as Reception, Not Mere Stopping

Observe how I define enjoyment and rest: "For to enjoy a thing is to rest with satisfaction in it for its own sake." This is not the same as stopping from work. A man who lays down his tools because he is driven out of breath, and then fills his mind with fretful thinking, has indeed stopped, but he has not rested. Rest is a satisfaction, an inward repose; it is the soul allowed to dwell in its proper object. Thus the Sabbath that God hallowed is not a mechanical cessation of labour, but a blessed repose that anticipates the end for which labour exists. "But God’s rest signifies the rest of those who rest in God, as the joy of a house means the joy of those in the house who rejoice, though not the house, but something else, causes the joy."

Hear me: rest is received. There is a rest which the soul may not by its own unaided will invent, for it is given when love is re-placed upon its proper good. Yet this does not render us idle in responsibility. The things of the world are given us to be used toward the enjoyment of the eternal. If we will not order our use, the world becomes an idol and there is no rest even in the cessation of task; if we order our use, even our labours can be sanctified and become channels of repose, because they issue from a right love.

Leisure, Idleness, and Distraction

You will say, ‘But what of leisure? Surely leisure may itself be an enemy if it is filled with distraction.’ Indeed: there is a leisure which is mere absence of labour and a leisure which is leisure of the soul. So often what men call leisure is a different kind of labour—labour of scattering attention, watching the movements of others, measuring oneself by them, and so letting the heart be plundered. Such diversion can be more wearisome than active toil, for it spreads the soul thin and makes it restless in its own memory and expectation. Consider whether your evening passings-about are uses or enjoyments. If they are used to repair the house of the heart, to visit a friend, to learn how to tend oneself and one’s neighbour, they are rightly used; if they are enjoyed as an end—if the pleasure is in the mirror of other men’s lives—then they are not rest but temptation.

I do not mean to say that every amusement is evil; there are lawful enjoyments which do the soul good when enjoyed rightly. The better part is to have leisure in which the soul may be turned toward abiding realities. The rest without evening that I sought in prayer is such a leisure: a stillness that knows God, a Sabbath that points beyond itself to the everlasting day. "But Thou, O Lord, ever workest, and art ever at rest." If God himself is at once action and repose, then our imitation of Him is not the opposition of labour and idleness but the ordering of activity under love.

Practical Ordering Without a Schedule

Because I am asked to speak to those who are not religious, let me be plain: this is not a prescription of hours. It is an invitation to the ordering of loves. If you cannot take a week at once, do one thing differently: keep something for which you are not responsible, and do it as an enjoyment rather than a means. Do not make every hour servile to a task. The man who uses the world rightly will give himself to a thing in such a way that he may, in that thing, rest for its own sake for a little while—and thereby be refreshed to return to use.

How will you do this inwardly? Turn your attention to what you love and ask by what rule you love it. Is your heart set upon a public opinion, upon the applause that makes a lighted instrument vibrate? Or is it set upon what is unchangeable? Take away, then, at some hour, the habit of looking outward and look within; give your memory a pause in which it shall not be troubled by desire, and let your expectation be shortened by a present consideration. By such acts the future will be consumed into the past in a manner that enlarges rather than scatters memory, and the soul will not be hollowed out by a thousand small attentions to other men’s lives but be filled with a solid peace.

Prayer and the Long Sabbath

I do not forget that our greatest rest is given. We look for an end to labour not to be idle but to be filled. We are pilgrim citizens who may use the gifts of this world, and yet our eyes are fixed upon the eternal city. The final Sabbath will be a rest without evening, when we shall behold and love without weariness. Until then we hope, and by hope we are made fit for repose. And so I say to you, with inward urgency: bring your life under the rule of love. Let the things that are for use be used; let the things to be enjoyed be enjoyed in God, that you may rest in Him even while you labour.

O Lord, grant that we may have this rest; teach us to order our days so that there be margins of recollection, hours not occupied with a thousand small solicitations, but reserved to remember Thee and our neighbour aright. We have work to do, and yet we are made for rest, and that rest is not the mere stopping of labour but the tranquillity of order of which men are capable only when their loves are rightly fixed.