Divine Collections
Louis Markos on the Transformative Power of Mere Hobbies
The Protestant work ethic, Max Weber famously argued, led directly to the spirit of capitalism. Though one can dispute Weber's cause-and-effect thesis, he is no doubt correct that America has been both blessed and cursed with a sometimes manic work ethic that produces personal and societal shame when it is not satisfied and recognized.
That shame often afflicts American Christians when they indulge in the kind of leisure activities that a far wiser German thinker (Joseph Pieper) celebrated as the true basis of culture. That is to say, though we are good at encouraging our fellow believers to make full use of their spiritual, God-given talents, we are often less eager to champion the exercise of their earthly, man-made hobbies.
Sadly, there are many Christians—especially those with a legalistic bent—who consider hobbies a waste of time, a symptom of bad stewardship that angers God and may even provoke his wrath. Such critics have a point. There are those who use their hobbies as an excuse for distancing themselves from their families, their communities, or their religious duties.
Still, I would suggest that for every one such person, there are many more whose hobbies make them fuller, richer human beings. Through participating in leisure activities that have no "practical" value—that are ends in themselves—they escape from what Pieper calls the "total world of work," from being proletarians whose existence has been reduced to that of a cog in the machine. Such activities have a sacramental quality that lifts the participant out of secular time into eternity. They are practiced, not for the sake of accruing wages, but for the purpose of celebration, contemplation, and illumination.
In the spirit of Pieper's Leisure as a Basis for Culture, I would like to offer a vigorous defense of hobbies as secular disciplines that can, in a limited way, strengthen and deepen our spiritual walk. Indeed, I would propose that hobbies, when properly used, can afford us echoes of Eden and glimpses of heaven that will endure when all that is mortal falls away.
There are, of course, some hobbies that are totally irredeemable and without a shred of heavenly value: pornography for one. That this is so is not only obvious on moral grounds, but can be proven as well by the fact that such hobbies are pursued in secret and "enjoyed" with shame. Have you ever heard anyone say to a person he just met: "Come up to my room; I'd like to show you my collection of pornographic videos. I'm quite proud of them." Enough said on that point.
Kinds of Hobbies
I suppose the least "heavenly" hobbies are collections of one sort or another. In many cases, collectors are like art-for-art's-sake artists: they care more for form than for content and take joy in the objects themselves rather than in any meaning or higher truth that might resonate through them.
Still, not all collectors are like this. Some seek through their hobby that special sense of unity and completion that comes when all the pieces of a puzzle fit together or the last nail of the barn is driven into place. Their collection is more a means to some higher end, that of order and wholeness, than an end in itself. Better yet, they may be seeking through their collection to gather together all the bits of some great but scattered whole, as God himself will some day gather all his people together on the heights of Mount Zion. These desires are but tiny seeds of what in heaven will be fruit and flower, but they are seeds nonetheless, and they just may cling to the sides of our pockets when we take our final journey.
Next come what might be called informational hobbies: trying to learn all one can about a sport or a famous person or a country or an ancient mystery. These hobbies are often marred a bit by pride, by our desire to impress everyone we see with our technical or esoteric knowledge. But they, too, have a seed of glory. "It is the glory of God to conceal a matter, / But the glory of kings is to search out a matter," says Proverbs 25:2, and indeed, God has planted in all our hearts a desire to search out knowledge and wisdom. To focus our efforts on a single subject and to try to see it from every possible angle is to gain discernment and to expand our vision.
The one who delves fully into his chosen topic, who struggles to strip away all facades and reach for the inner truth, acquires a valuable discipline, one that is in part spiritual. The facts and figures themselves have no eternal value, but the process and the determination through which they are reached just may. And so, though we will have to leave our Trivial Pursuit and Jeopardy games behind, it is altogether possible that the expansion of mind gained through our diligent researches on earth will follow us heavenward.
Third on the list are building hobbies: constructing model airplanes, carving boats and birdhouses, knitting socks and sweaters, and so forth. Though technically hobbies, these activities represent what are essentially non-professional uses of our God-given talents and, as such, belong in a different category altogether.
Finally, we move to those hobbies that are, I believe, most useful in preparing our souls for paradise. I refer to hobbies that engage us on a deep and passionate level, that touch some inner fountain of life and joy. This, of course, may be the case with collector and informational hobbies, but there is a vital difference. Collecting baseball cards or memorizing the batting averages of the top 100 players is one thing; entering into the life of the game, moving out of yourself to cheer on a team that has nothing really to do with you is another.
At their highest level, hobbies draw us out of our ego-shell and into a fusion with the flourish of an orchestral finale or the breathless excitement of a ballerina suspended for a moment above a wooden stage. Many of us, I believe, are drawn—initially, at least—to hobbies, not so much because we need to find a way to "blow off steam" as because we perceive in them a kind of life that will make us richer, fuller, and more human.
To hang on the notes of a Mozart symphony is to recapture that universal harmony—what used to be called the music of the spheres—that once accompanied the voice of the Lord God walking in the Garden and that will be heard again in the resounding choruses of heaven (Revelation 19:1–7). To lose ourselves in the beauty of the dance is to be lifted out of our mundane and seldom graceful world into a higher plane of existence where earth and air and the forces of gravity respond to our touch rather than dragging and beating us down.
These are things, I believe, that build in us a desire for heaven, and it is only natural, then, to suppose that they will accompany us on that journey for which they helped prepare us.
Dimensions of My Movie Hobby
Such is my defense of earthly hobbies. And yet, I fear that in mounting that defense, I have spoken too much in the abstract. Let me conclude, then, by taking up one of my own hobbies and determining, as clearly and precisely as possible, what parts of that hobby will burn and what will endure.
The hobby I shall discuss is my life-long love of American movies, particularly those from the Golden Age of Hollywood (the 1930s and 1940s): Casablanca and Citizen Kane, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and It's a Wonderful Life, The Adventures of Robin Hood and The Mark of Zorro, The Wizard of Oz and Wuthering Heights, The Maltese Falcon and The Grapes of Wrath, The Philadelphia Story and Bringing up Baby.
I have scrutinized these films from every angle and watched them with great keenness and greater enjoyment. Though I do not discern in my cinematic pursuits anything vicious or carnal, there are certainly aspects of my hobby that are neither virtuous nor spiritual. The many hours I have spent memorizing the actors, directors, genres, iconic images, and famous lines from my favorite movies, not to mention my research into the history of the film industry and the techniques of filmmaking, have disciplined my mind and sharpened my ability to forge connections. But all of that, along with my carefully chosen collection of DVDs, will remain on earth when I have gone.
Still, though these things are finally mortal and temporal, there are at least five dimensions to my hobby that possess, I believe, a spark of eternal value. Here they are in ascending order of importance:
(1) Part of my hobby involves watching all the movies made by my favorite directors. I do this because I want to understand their cinematic vision, to get inside their unique way of perceiving the world. I believe in heaven we will be able to do something we cannot do on earth, no matter how empathetic we are: really see things from another person's point of view. If I am correct about this, then my struggles to grasp directorial visions will be developed and perfected in that new earth that Christ is preparing for us.
(2) One thing that draws me to movies is their ability to condense a character's entire life—with all its desires and fears, triumphs and failures, agonies and ecstasies—into the space of a couple of hours. Through experiencing some three thousand of these condensed lives, I have gained a special kind of wisdom: a wisdom that senses how futility and purpose are woven together in our world; a wisdom that comes when we understand the full implications of mortality and the synergy between our choices and our destinies, our abilities and our limitations. Movies have allowed me to begin to see as God sees, surely a kind of vision that will be developed in heaven.
(3) I cry a great deal when I watch old films, and not just at the sad parts. I find that in the presence of beauty, of elegance, of class, I am often moved to tears. When I watch a scene that is just so "right," it triggers something in me, a yearning for a sense of wholeness and proportion that comes, I believe, from my "memory" of that all-too-brief time we spent in the Garden. The Fall did more than usher death into the world; it muddled everything: our loves and our joys, our anger and our grief, the comedy and tragedy and pathos of our lives.
Literary critics as far back as Aristotle have argued that great art takes a world that is arbitrary and haphazard and molds and re-shapes it into a world that runs more perfectly in accordance with higher laws of balance and harmony and necessity. In the world of the classic film, everything—love and hate, life and death, cowardice and sacrifice—happens as it should. When I weep at movies, I am weeping for something that was there in the beginning, that appeared briefly in the middle, and that shall be there again in the end. I weep for a world that could and should have been, and I build, bit by bit, my desire for heaven. Though the actual plots and scenes may fade from view when I see my Savior face-to-face, that sense of rightness which the movies inspired in me will surely endure.
(4) I love the magic of movies, the way they break down time and space, now condensing, now expanding, now zeroing in on a face and then pulling back to encompass the horizon. Movies release us from the tyranny of the spatiotemporal limits that control our lives. The camera can go anywhere, see anything; it is not bound by geographical rigidity or historical progression. Will we not ourselves share in this freedom when the veil of mortality is lifted and we are born anew into marvelous bodies whose substance admits no impediment? Even now, the movies are preparing me for that higher life.
(5) If I had never seen Casablanca or Citizen Kane, The Grapes of Wrath or Wuthering Heights, I would be a different person: maybe not a lesser Christian in the strict sense of the word, but certainly a lesser human being. Those films have formed much of my character, have altered my perceptions, dreams, and desires in subtle ways. They are integral, indivisible parts of me, of that unique person Christ died to redeem and that, even more remarkably, he desires to have fellowship with for all eternity.
No, my extensive video library will not go with me, but that part of me that the movies helped to shape—how can that stay behind?
Louis Markos , Professor in English and Scholar in Residence at Houston Baptist University, holds the Robert H. Ray Chair in Humanities. His 19 books include Lewis Agonistes; Restoring Beauty: The Good, the True, and the Beautiful in the Writings of C. S. Lewis; On the Shoulders of Hobbits: The Road to Virtue with Tolkien and Lewis; and From A to Z to Narnia with C. S. Lewis.
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