ST MARY’S CATHEDRAL, SYDNEY, 15 MARCH 2026
In late 2011, economist Steve Hanke and astrophysicist, Richard Conn Henry, produced a new calendar for the modern world. Like the French Revolutionaries of the eighteenth century, their intention was to jettison the Gregorian calendar with its movable feasts and leap years, replacing it with a more ‘rational’ year of 364 days.
In the Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar, we’d still have seven-day weeks and twelve-month years, but Christmas and New Year would always fall on a Sunday and other dates like our birthdays on the same day of the week each year. School and uni terms would fall on the same dates every time. Each quarter would be identical, which would please paymasters, and most public holidays fall on the weekend, delighting corporate bosses. This calendar could save the US economy north of $150 billion in penalty rates and days off alone!
But there’s a catch. Instead of the occasional leap day at the end of February, this calendar would require a leap week every five or six years to align us with the solar year! Moveable feasts like Easter, Passover and Eid would have to be set on a particular day every year, ignoring ancient traditions and celestial cycles. Even secular holidays would mostly fall on weekends and not bleed into Monday, which plan would not endear itself to Australia, land of the long weekend!
We should be wary, I think, of theorists, businesspeople, or sports promoters who would like to colonise the whole of reality—turning our homes into workstations, requiring us to be permanently available on-line, or requiring family, leisure, even religion always to play second fiddle to profit. There are in fact other things that matter as much or more…
G.K. Chesterton used to say that, for the Christian, play is at least as important as work, indeed more important.[1] After all, heaven is more playground than factory: there our innocence is so secure that we can juggle with the moon and stars and “treat everything as a joke”. Were we really holy, he thought, we would already “regard the universe as a lark”. Play is after all what we are for!
That might sound unserious, self-indulgent, even childish. Yet Chesterton was by no means the only great thinker to suggest it. Aristotle argued that the end of life is not work but leisure, not action but contemplation.[2] We work to play: to relax, recharge, recover purpose, contemplate higher things. Some recent thinkers have likewise attended to the links between recreation, virtue and happiness—especially as experienced in sport, religion, travel, literature, music and more.[3]
The 1994 film Shawkshank Redemption is set in a tough 1940s prison in which inmates are brutalised.[4] But in one scene, our hero breaks into the warden’s office and broadcasts a duet from the Marriage of Figaro over the prison loudspeakers. As the voices soar above the prison, the prisoners stand still and gaze upwards, their faces transfigured. The message is plain: music frees the human soul; music turns our minds from routine, stress and suffering; music points us to the sublime.[5]
Christians contemplate the sublime God in the play of nature, liturgy, words and music; in communion with others or alone with their thoughts. To this end, we must make times each day for quiet, recollection, prayer; times each week, for Sunday worship and more; a time each month for Confession; times each year for holydays and holidays. Only in this way can we attend to God and enable our relationship with Him to deepen.
So, our Psalmist today celebrates being led “near restful waters… to revive my drooping spirit” (Ps 22/23). Paul calls his Ephesians to look beyond passing adult works to eternal divine realities (Eph 5:8-14). And Jesus says that, for all our daylight labours, “the night is coming when none can work” (Jn 9:1-41), so we should focus on the ultimate calendar, even more than our daily rhythm of work and weekly rhythm of rest.
It is estimated that in the High Middle Ages labourers enjoyed about 80 days of rest each year, 52 Sundays and 28 more feast days![6] Work stopped from midday Saturday until Monday morning and there was no children’s sport to be driven to, no weekend trading to tickle our purses! Added to this were many half-day holidays so people could get to Mass on Ash Wednesday, All Souls, Childermas (Holy Innocents) and the like. Altogether, most workers had three months’ rest spread across the year. On the big feast days, after a long sung Liturgy (with an especially long homily!) there would be mystery plays and fun activities for all the family. If the mediævals were serious about fasting in times like Lent, they were even more serious about feasting thereafter. And their feasts could last for many days: Easter and Christmas had their official octaves, but Christmas was stretched for twelve days till Epiphany, and Easter for fifty days to Pentecost. They knew how to party!
In modernity, on the other hand, the more affluent we get, the more labour-saving technologies we have, the more talk there is about “work-life balance”, the longer and more demanding our hours of work become. Many workplaces would willingly take our whole day, week, year if we allowed it. But Christians should have a different approach to time. Over the last few days and next, we have Laetare Sunday, St Patrick’s Day, St Joseph’s Day, the Annunciation—and the Archbishop’s birthday—more than enough excuses for taking off the purple of penance and donning the rose of rejoicing.
Not that life is all ‘bread and circuses’. The death toll from the Middle Eastern conflict keeps rising, while longer-standing wars in Ukraine, Myanmar and Sudan have claimed far more lives. There are other grounds, too, for lament, contrition, penance. We live by the sweat of our brows and work out our salvation in fear and trembling… Yet however hard, even mournful, our lives are at times, our faith looks beyond Lent to Easter and Eternity. Laetare Sunday says that rejoicing should mark our every day, week, year. For Christ is our light shining in every darkness. Even as we grope our way like the blindman in our Gospel, we foresee the Easter fire, the Paschal Candle, the light that awaken even the dead from sleep. Repent and return to the Lord, therefore, but rejoice also, and be refreshed!
[1] E.g. G.K. Chesterton, “Oxford from Without,” in All Things Considered (1908): “It is not only possible to say a great deal in praise of play; it is really possible to say the highest things in praise of it. It might reasonably be maintained that the true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground. To be at last in such secure innocence that one can juggle with the universe and the stars, to be so good that one can treat everything as a joke—that may be, perhaps, the real end and final holiday of human souls. When we are really holy we may regard the Universe as a lark.” See also: R. Scott Kretchmar and Nick Watson, “Chesterton on play, work, paradox, and Christian orthodoxy,” Sport Ethics and Philosophy, 12(1) (2017): 70-80; Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture (transl. G. Malsbary, St Augustine’s Press, 1998).
[2] Both in the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics. Cf. Jane Hurly, “Philosophical chemistry: What the alchemy of Gadamer and Aristitle brings to leisure studies,” Leisure Studies 40(5) (2021): 730-739; Jack Maden, “Aristotle on why leisure defines us more than work,” Philosophy Break November 2022.
[3] See Hayden Ramsay, Reclaiming Leisure: Art, Sport and Philosophy (Springer, 2005) and sources therein.
[4] The Shawshank Redemption (1994) drama directed by Franch Darabont , based on a 1982 Stephen King novella, and starring Tim Robbins, Morgan Freeman and Bob Gunton.
[5] Ramsay, “Playing in tune,” Reclaiming Leisure, 125-146.
[6] See Anthony Bale, A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages (Penguin, 2024); Frances Giles, Life in a Medieval Village (HarperCollins, 2016).
INTRODUCTION TO MASS FOR THE 4TH SUNDAY OF LENT (LAETARE SUNDAY), YEAR A
ST MARY’S CATHEDRAL, SYDNEY, 15 MARCH 2026
Welcome to St Mary’s Cathedral for the Solemn Mass of the Fourth Sunday of Lent, known as Lætare or Rejoicing Sunday after our entrance antiphon from the Prophet Isaiah: “Rejoice with Jerusalem and be glad for her, all you who love her. Rejoice greatly with her, all you who mourn over her.” (Isa 66:10) At a time of mourning for the whole Middle East this is especially poignant, as we ask the Prince of Peace to bring that peace the world cannot give (Jn 14:27). And amidst the purple penance of Lent the Church looks forward with rosy joy to Easter.
Concelebrating with me today is my Maltese Dominican brother, Fr Christopher Caruana OP, who is a visiting lecturer at the University of Notre Dame.
Today I have the great joy of admitting four young choristers to the St Mary’s Cathedral Choir: Maddy, Pearl, Sophia and Sylvie. I welcome them, along with their families and fellow choristers. That we might be ready to rise rosy and golden with Christ at Easter, let us first go down with Him into the black and purple of the tomb confessing our sins…
