Eutrapelia—the habit of playing well, of having good leisure—is one way to practice rest by doing something that brings us delight. It prepares us for eternity. If we cannot learn to rest in something good here on earth, how will we be able to rest in heaven?
What would alien invaders make of watching a professional baseball game? They see thousands of spectators gathered around a field. There’s a lot of shouting. Everyone seems to be focused on ten people in strange outfits. Oddly enough, one of these people is repeatedly hurling hard objects at another person, who’s holding a long, blunt stick. The other eight people are waiting eagerly for the hard object to come towards them, as if that were something desirable. Mysteriously, at a random point during the game, everyone stands up and sings a song about going to the place where they are currently present.
The alien invaders would rightly wonder why anyone would ever do this. The answer? The deeply human virtue of eutrapelia!
In his recent book, Superhabits, Andrew Abela discusses the virtue of eutrapelia, which he summarizes as a way to deal “with the desire to have fun…. [It’s] the habit of playing well—of having good leisure” (p. 89). Eutrapelia is important because it allows us to rest. Not mere rest from manual labor, but rest of a spiritual nature: “To rest from physical exhaustion, all you have to do is stop moving…. But that doesn’t work for mental exhaustion. You can’t just stop your mind…. [Y]our mind rests doing pleasant activities, activities that you do for their own sake, the sorts of things we do during leisure time” (pp. 92–3).
It’s good to engage in a little bit of leisure every day. Just as we cannot engage in manual labor all the time and have a healthy body, neither can we engage in mental labors continuously and have a healthy soul. Thus, it’s a good and fruitful thing to let our minds rest. Watching a baseball game, for example, is refreshing. I even find it relaxing to read stories about old baseball players. And if among the student-brothers there’s a softball tournament I can participate in, you can bet money that I will be one of the first people to sign up!
But say you’re not as interested as I am in games involving fast moving spheres and scary blunt objects. Perhaps you’re even trying to decide whether some of the things you do are rest or work. How do you figure that out? Abela gives us a great thought experiment: “Do you remember the Staples advertising campaign where people pushed a large red button labelled ‘Easy’ and then the thing that they wanted done got done? If you had an Easy Button of your own, and pressing it would achieve the normal result of the activity you’re doing, would you press it? If so, then it’s not a leisure activity… [because] it’s not giving you mental rest” (p. 94). Leisure done well brings rest. But if you’re obsessing over whether something brings you a certain result, that indicates that it is in truth strenuous mental labor, not rest. Eutrapelia isn’t taxing—it’s a break.
This brings us to the most important reason why we should engage in eutrapelia: because it disposes us to restfully sit in the love of God for his own sake. God loves us with the purest love. He loves us for our own sake. God did not create us to get something out of us. Our creation in no way benefits him. He created us so that we may rest in him, he who is pure love and goodness. The best response we can give to God is to fulfill the purpose he has created for us by having a heartfelt gaze on our beloved Father. The beatific vision is loving God with the love that we have been given. Heaven is resting in the love of God for his own sake.
Eutrapelia is one way to practice this rest by doing something that brings us delight. It prepares us for eternity. If we cannot learn to rest in something good here on earth, how will we be able to rest in heaven? So, today, consider engaging in that authentic rest which brings delight to the soul. This leisure will prepare you for the life to come… even if it’s as simple as going to a baseball game!
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Republished with gracious permission from Dominicana (September 2025).
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