Holy Leisure is the Key!
The Holy Leisure Trilogy was almost finished when I published Souls at Play. The first two volumes needed a bit of updating, and now the series is officially complete! For the third edition of Souls at Rest, I added some material from talks I gave long after the first edition was published. “Sabbath is a Woman,” the new chapter, makes me very happy! The second edition of Souls at Work benefits from the addition of a tiny-but-mighty essay on the intellectual formation needed to resist the push toward totalitarian control - a new theme (in the U.S. at least) since the first edition.
What delights me about waiting upon God for the timing of this completion is that the intervening (interrupting?) years actually improved the final books and rewarded my trust that God can be relied on to impede my creative work creatively! All my work is consecrated to Mary, and I turn to her again and again to lead me to whatever is next. After Souls at Work, when I felt ready to begin immediately on Souls at Play, she turned me in the direction of the Freedom Trilogy. No writing, no project could have been more different! At every step from there, to Catholics Communicate Christ, and then to Sabbath Simplified, I longed for the book that would bring a sigh of fulfillment to the leisure series.
Somewhere along that path, though, I realized the Freedom Trilogy corresponds perfectly, innately, to the leisure series. The search for one’s own interior ‘tone’ and the Sabbath’s focus on the freedom of the human person inform both You,Free and Souls at Rest. The cultivation of capacity for tension-bearing, and the weaving of sufficient infrastructural support for the becoming of the human person inform both Souls at Work and Full Spectrum Freedom. The concern for the fully dimensional development and the radical specificity of the generative human person informs both Souls at Play and 3D Freedom. While I thought I wasn’t writing it, God was writing Souls at Play in my life, and in my other books! In the strangest twist, I found myself citing the unpublished Souls at Play in Catholics Communicate Christ, where the discussion of “ironic detachment” speaks volumes about how well the Church lives as a community, invested in the reality of unique, unrepeatable human beings.
The series has aged well, if I may say so myself! What I found myself saying over and over again in formal talks and informal conversations, long before it was realized fully in the books, was that “Holy leisure is the key to human being, freedom/flourishing, and creativity/generativity!!!” I imagine I’ll keep trying to say that (more loudly? more pithily? more clearly?) for the rest of my life, as I’m sure I’ve not yet plumbed the depths of it. I pray my books will help others discover what, for me, has been an invitation to live hugely in the adventure of God’s playground.
