“How many hours do you give daily to God?”
They asked the native of the jungle.
And he answered: “the whole day”.
“And how much time to work?”
“The whole day.”
“And to rest?”
“The whole day.”
To understand the native, we’ll have to try and see things as he sees them. He does not divide the day in business like time-tables. There is always, of course, for him as for all, a day and night which nature itself marks in its common course; but not for him the executive’s diary with fixed appointments by the secretary’s hand. The day is one, as life is one and the person is one, and it is the whole person that plunges as one into all that it does, and makes all it does into vital activity beyond all artificial divisions of work and leisure, or class and vacation. The work is done with joy, and so it gives rest; and it is done with commitment, and so it leads to god. No parceling of time.
When work and rest are reconciled, the person is reunited with God, and so the native can answer with truth that his whole day belongs to God and to work and to rest. No artificial boundaries. No opposition within the person’s activities. No rival claims on time. The totality of the person engaged in the totality of the activity. There are wafts of the breeze of the Garden of Eden in the existential innocence of these natives of contemporary history…..