The common understanding of recreation is something done in one’s spare time for leisure or fun. But this isn’t where the roots of recreation come from. “Recreation” comes from the Latin word, “recreare” which means “to refresh, restore, make anew, revive, invigorate.” This is much different from mere fun or leisure activities. Recreation in its purest sense is meant to renew one’s spirit. To recharge your batteries, remake yourself better, to refresh and revitalize yourself. Funny enough, the root word “recreation” as it appears in Old French and Latin is also used in reference to the “curing of a person” and “recovery from illness.” Recreational activities are not just done for fun, but to cure oneself. To become refreshed, renewed, and full of life. — Myth & Metaphysics
Many Things done in our leisure time leave us feeling weak, tired, miserable and drained are the opposite of recreation. These activities don’t reinvigorate us. They don’t help us renew ourselves and feel refreshed to face life head-on. They do the opposite. Inadequate and counterproductive leisure activities often leave us feeling worse than before we engaged in them. As if we’re suffering from a disease of the spirit. If your leisure activities leave you feeling tired and drained, just wishing for one more day of your precious weekend so you can stay in bed and sleep, then these activities aren’t recreational.
To contemplate the mysteries of Christ and experience the rejuvenation of God’s love in the midst of the most exhausting and depressing of days may be the re-creation that’s required. Yet to experience that re-creation, it may be a natural phenomenon to bypass the desert of emptiness first before the water of re-creation appears to quench your thirst.
Our leisure time should enhance our life, not make us feel worse. Next time you’re considering a recreational activity for your leisure time, ask yourself, does it refresh, renew, and recreate yourself into something better? If the answer is no, then this activity is draining, not recreational.
Paradox is clear: Things we do in our leisure time for ‘re-creation’ go from being medicines to poison. What is once energising can now be draining. What is fulfilling one time is emptying the next. And then to know the power of re-creation, it seems that one must experience and know being depleted for re-creation to even be possible. As if knowing poison is the only way to empty yourself of its toxins to make way for the medicine on the other side.
So we Orthodox believe “no creation without Incarnation, no creation without Crucifixion of the Son of God, and no creation without re-creation.” Christ is the God-man, the Son of God who became human, and not only human but took on the curse and death of the world. St. Gregory the Theologian said, “One drop of His blood re-creates the whole creation.” But to get to the blood, the agony of death or the pain of things we call addiciton help the drop of Christ’s blood enter.
Its as if one must become so thirsty and parched of Christ’s love, for the person to find that love at the bottom of the barrel, in the middle of the desert, on the most barren of lands.
And Gregory of Nyssa, another Gregory who lived at the same time, said that the Church of Christ, the Church of the New Covenant, is the re-creation of creation. He followed Origen who said that the Church is the world of the world, cosmos tou cosmou. In other words, the Church as we know it, the Church in Christ, the re-creation, what we experience at worship; what we experience when we contemplate the Holy Scriptures; when we contemplate the Word of the Cross; when we participate in the Holy Mysteries of Christ, especially the Holy Eucharist when we participate in His broken Body and shed Blood, and the Holy Spirit comes upon us, and we have Communion with God, that is a foretaste of God’s coming Kingdom.