Contemplating our calling for labor, leisure and love

Having spent nearly a quarter century teaching on college campuses, I have learned that eighteen to twenty-two-year-olds have forever wrestled with three existential questions: “Who created me?” “For what purpose?” “How do I know?” These questions aren’t typically asked aloud. They do not explicitly come up in class.

But they envelop almost every interaction I have with students.

Parents of college-bound children might reasonably find this unsettling. On the one hand, their vulnerable sons and daughters are desperately searching for someone to offer direction and help to life’s most pressing questions. On the other hand, pronoun-wielding PhDs and administrators–many of whom have demonstrably proven themselves incapable of safeguarding their campuses from the onslaught of insanity this past decade–stand at the ready.

As a Catholic educator, I am grateful to offer my students the chance to reflect on the role of the Holy Spirit as they struggle with these questions, and I am deeply moved by the young Dominican Friars on my campus who do this with tremendous grace, wit, and love. When I started teaching, I would come away from these interactions surprised that I gained far more than anything I’d given my students. Over time, that surprise has diminished as I’ve become better at accepting and understanding that I had not given anything, but it was the Holy Spirit who had given, and all of us had received.

While Fr. Mike Schmitz does not teach at a Catholic institution, he is a chaplain at the University of Minnesota Duluth. His reach is far greater than that of the almost ten thousand students on his campus. His work with Ascension Press reaches millions of young people around the world; his “Bible in a Year” podcast has been downloaded over 700 million times and, along with his “Catechism in a Year” series, sits atop the Apple charts. Several years ago, Fr. Mike (as he invites his listeners to call him) shared his message to college students grappling with these types of questions. His advice is simple but powerful: each of us has been made for “labor, leisure, and love.” He explains that the first two books of Genesis reveal that God made us in His image and placed Adam and Eve in the Garden to be stewards over all His creation. That means we are to work the Garden, care for it, enjoy it, and love one another.

However, Genesis 3 also tells us that sin comes into the world and corrupts labor, leisure, and love. It distorts and disorders our relationship to these three things. As a result, we develop tendencies that are either work-phobic or too work-centered. Our leisure can devolve into sheer exhaustion, where we are too hungover from excessive work to enjoy doing anything, or it could be spent doing wasteful, depleting activities. Along the same lines, we can conflate love and lust or view love only as a feeling, rather than a choice and a virtue. While God creates us for well-ordered labor, leisure, and love, we often choose our own disordered version of each and end up with much less as a result.

Unsurprisingly, there is profound insight here for students, as well as for the rest of us. As we contemplate career paths, we should look to our God-given talents to shape the goals we set for ourselves. Doing this–as opposed to allowing our mere enjoyments to frame our professional pursuits—can be a difference-maker. Frequently, a young man who loves baseball and chases a business career around it often soon discovers both dissatisfaction on the work front and a diminution of love for the game.

But when we start not with ourselves, but with God–and the gifts that He has given us—we are less likely to confuse labor for leisure and leisure for labor and more likely to joyfully realize and live out our purpose. Beyond just figuring out what to do for work, learning to discern God’s calling for each of us is as important as figuring out how to go about our work. Approaching work tasks–even those that seem menial and insignificant–with humility and diligence can be transformative. Doing so prevents us from seeing work as drudgery, removes our focus from ourselves, and builds character, discipline, and virtue. In turn, these traits help us to contextualize work, enabling us to see work as part of our lives–a meaningful and worthy part–but part of a bigger vocation. which also includes leisure and love.

Balancing labor and leisure is a perennial battle that Dr. Andrew Abela, Dean of the Busch School of Business at Catholic University, addresses in his latest book, titled Super Habits (Sophia Institute Press, 2024). In a book covering many critical virtues of a well-ordered life, Abela offers readers the concept of Eutrapelia. It is a Greek word referring to the habit of playing well and serves as the “virtuous mean” between frivolity (too much playfulness) and mirthfulness (too little playfulness). In short, Eutrapelia means good leisure.

In our busy lives, good leisure is not aimed at achievement but produces joy, allowing our minds to rest and reset. It enables each of us to be our best selves, the human beings God designed us to be. Serving as a check against offensive play, playing at the wrong time or place, and non-virtuous play, Eutrapelia steers us toward less death scrolling and more family dinners. While we often complain of not having enough time, it’s probably more the case that we simply choose to spend the time we have poorly. In truth, we’ve likely all experienced Eutrapelia at some point in our lives, and Abela encourages us to re-order our leisure time with Eutrapelia in mind.

When it comes to love, despite all we hear about the hookup culture and the declining marriage rate, I do not see any diminution in the number of young people longing for authentic love. And by that, I mean that the overwhelming majority of my students aspire to enjoy traditional loving marriages. It is unquestionably clear to me that so many of my students not only want to marry but also to have children and raise families. And they are remarkably outspoken about it. Even the young men will say so openly and unashamedly. It is a beautiful thing to hear expressed. And I do not think they have trouble knowing what authentic love is when they see it and experience it.

The challenge they face, of course, is that they are living in a culture that denigrates real love, perverts it, and celebrates inauthentic love. Beyond having to navigate around ever-present temptation, young men and women will have to remain resilient in the face of efforts to convince them that real love does not exist in practice. Of course, these challenges are not specific to the young, unmarried college students I work with; all of us encounter them. The difference is that those of us who are happily married encounter these challenges from the seat of our loving marriages, whereas my college students think about these prospective challenges with considerably less firsthand affirmation.

Here again is why a Catholic college’s faith mission is so critical for student development. Very directly, curricular and extra-curricular coverage of concepts such as eros, philia, storge, and agape–central to a classical, Catholic education–is invaluable. Less directly but as importantly, Catholic college students benefit from a culture of Catholic role models on campus. Faculty and administrators who are in Catholic marriages and demonstrably raising Catholic families can affirm the resolve of Catholic students who aspire to live in a Catholic marriage and raise a Catholic family.