Contemplation and Leisure

Douglas V. Steere was a Quaker philosopher who taught at Haverford College for decades, and he wrote Contemplation and Leisure in 1975 as a Pendle Hill pamphlet, one of the short, carefully argued publications through which Pendle Hill, the Quaker center for study and contemplation near Philadelphia, addressed questions of the inner life. Its occasion is a modern condition Steere saw all around him: a culture of ceaseless activity and busyness in which attention is fragmented and even rest is organized as another form of consumption. He wrote as someone who had spent his career translating the traditions of contemplative prayer for ordinary Protestant readers, and the essay is a compact statement of what that tradition has to say to people who feel they have no time.

Steere's central move is to recover leisure as something other than idleness or a break from work. Drawing on the philosopher Josef Pieper's argument that leisure is a receptive condition of the soul and not merely time off, he sets this against the restless activism that treats every hour as a resource to be spent. Leisure in this sense is the capacity to be still enough to receive: to attend to God, to other persons, and to the world as gift rather than as material to be managed. Contemplation, for Steere, is not a specialized practice reserved for monks but the mature form of such attention, and he argues that it needs the spaciousness leisure provides. He keeps the argument practical, concerned with how people actually make room for it amid family, vocation, and obligation, and he writes in the warm, unhurried voice of a Quaker teacher who trusts that readers can recognize in their own experience what he describes.

The essay has endured because the pressures it names have only intensified. Its diagnosis of distraction and over-scheduling reads as more urgent in an age of constant connectivity, and its remedy is free of both pietistic escapism and technique-driven self-improvement. It also stands as an accessible entry point to a wider body of Steere's work on prayer and attentiveness, and to the Quaker conviction that stillness is a form of obedience, not a retreat from it.

Who should read this: busy pastors, caregivers, and lay people who sense that their activity has outrun their attention and want a short, serious reflection rather than a program. It is also a good fit for anyone new to contemplative thought who wants an unintimidating place to begin. It is not for readers seeking step-by-step methods of meditation or a scholarly treatment of the history of contemplation; Steere offers an invitation and an argument, not a manual.