The Rhythm of Life

So long and so deeply has the mainstream American culture drunk from the poisoned well of Babylon, we assign a moral value to something which is purely cultural. And it's a bad culture, at that. Not merely a matter of what I normally term "prissy middle class culture" but something deeper, more rotten. We have to step back a bit to make sense of it.

In ancient times, the seasons and local climate dictated your activities. That is, most people were engaged in one or more agrarian pursuits, or work which supported that. If you were wealthy, you didn't work much, but hired others to do it for you. In the tribal communities of Bible times, this was all worked out pretty well. You worked during harvest and planting, or shearing or slaughter times, but most of the time there really wasn't that much hard work to do. You might stay occupied from dawn to dusk, but working hard was fairly rare.

That's what the human body is designed to handle. Do a little hard labor every day, but not all day. Take a frequent break to celebrate something and not do much work at all. The so-called "Puritan Work Ethic" is not remotely biblical. In more modern times, the idea of "full-time" is a violation of that ancient rhythm. Yet this is what we do across the whole of Western Civilization, and all too many other places. Creating a cultural situation which demands all day hard at work is oppression by another means.

We have developed this largely due to capitalism. It's more profitable if your consumer base demands more stuff, stuff they really don't need, so building a culture that chases higher pay instead of more leisure is the capitalists' dream. This is Babylon, trading in the hours of a man's life, building a system which locks him into consumption by necessity, by painting it with moral qualities. Worse, it is backed up by the entire regulatory and legal system. Judges have ruled against people simply because they failed to be greedy enough to work themselves into the ground.

Let it be known to all and sundry: The Puritans held a twisted theology. They served Mammon; they raged against the old Ancien Regime of feudalism not because it was actually oppressive, but on the grounds it did not let them prosper as much as they insisted their God intended. It was little more than Pharisaism modernized. This flavors our modern culture today, in the inculcation of dependency, insecurity and feelings of rivalry, competitive consumption for the purpose of briefly flaunting the fashion of the day, then quickly becoming bored and buying the next new useless toy.

It's not a sin to take a break, to work part-time, and to be satisfied with what you have. It's not a sin to decide the Lord owns more than 30 minutes of your day, and that you serve Him well by spending time directly and deeply involved in the people with whom you share your household. The only reason we have to get that job done, and the next one, and the next one, is because we have allowed things to drift into that mold. Our entire social structure is regimented on mass output. There is really very little in this world which simply has to be done.

Some day, I sincerely hope we can shed the failures of Western Civilization and rediscover the ancient ways God made us to hold.