Brad East, in the course of encouraging pastors to read fiction and poetry, describes how such reading is, in fact, a species of leisure—of Sabbath:
In a word, reading partakes of the Sabbath because reading is non-utilitarian. Like poetry, in Auden’s line, it “makes nothing happen.” It is the opposite of activism. It is a mortal threat to the anxious soul of the busybody, the savior of his parish, the CEO of his congregation, the leader without whom the world would fall to pieces.
It won’t. The world will keep spinning long after you’re dead, and it will keep spinning now, while you sit in your study and make your way through Dante. In fact, both your faith and your church will benefit far more from your having journeyed through hell and up the mountain into paradise than from your having responded to every email in your inbox. (In writing this, you understand I am chiefly addressing myself.)
The closer one’s reading habits are to the utilitarian—mining for sermon illustrations, shoring up biblical backgrounds, cribbing ideas for self-help—the further they are from the Sabbath. Pastors should already be in the ninety-ninth percentile of readers, setting aside multiple hours per day. That goes without saying: it’s right there in the job description. The question is what their diet should consist of. Francis is right that it should include fiction and poetry, the uselessness of which is precisely the uselessness of the seventh day.
A hearty Amen to the whole piece. Surely, though, Brad knows that pastors are not in the ninety-ninth percentile of readers and are not setting aside multiple hours a day for reading. Anecdotally, the pastors I’ve encountered did their reading in seminary and, once settled in a church, read perhaps a few hours a week, mostly commentaries on the text to be preached or online articles. Forget fiction or poetry; most pastors don’t read Biblical Studies or Theology. Perhaps that needs to be remedied first before moving on to these—how should we say it?—leisurely pursuits?
