Douglas Steere once wrote a pamphlet called Work and Contemplation that became a pocket-piece for the Quaker Work Camps, and was reprinted again and again. Later his Rauschenbusch Lectures were published under the same title. In both of these explorations he concluded that work tends to have its frame of meaning bled out of it and to become destructive unless this meaning is restored by contemplation. Contemplation, on the other hand, should be searched and tested by work, for only in action can thought, as Emerson suggests, be ripened into truth. It was the recognition of this deep mutuality that enabled the author to present both elements involved in a radically fresh and intimate fashion.
In the following essay he once more explores his radical interpretation of contemplation as a form of approach toward every facet of life. Using his rich gift for illustration, he convinces us that the inner core of leisure is not an empty block of time, nor a getting away from it all, but is essentially a mood which pervades all that we do which is basically contemplative.
