I'm partial to the lucky layabout.

What a sad pass we've come to, I thought one night last month while enjoying a local amateur company's production of Peter Coke's 45-year-old comedy about a cabal of fur-coat-purloining senior citizens, Breath of Spring. A number of times through the course of the evening, I was thankful to have attended the play alone. Whenever I tried to imagine any of my time-pressed, stressed-out friends in the seat beside me, I could only hear them sighing in impatient exasperation, or squirming in their seats, or nervously fidgeting with their fingers or their hair.

A three-act comedy of such utterly pointless whimsy as this one has become a kind of affront to the modern sensibility. Like having to wait for a bus, or properly steep a pot of tea instead of hastily pressing the bag against the side of the cup with your spoon, the prospect of giving so much time to so capricious an enterprise makes the modern temperament go a little panicky. Isn't there something more profitable or relevant that I should be doing right now?

Particularly in the hands of an amateur organization such as this one, a little patience is going to be required, and perhaps the application of a little extra will when it comes to "suspending your disbelief." Particularly during the opening scenes, you might have to endure an occasional longueur before the troupe quite captures their pace. Yes, the English accents being wielded by the players may thicken or thin out for no apparent reason, the closing of stage doors will never sound quite right, and the slightest impact with any section of the set will make entire walls shudder as if they were made of sculpted Jello. So what's your problem?

There were also delightful moments when this elaborate artifice suddenly took flight--just as it was originally designed and then carefully rehearsed to do. One of the chief thrills of going to the theatre is being present at such moments of lift-off. At first a little giddy, then more expansively confident, you could feel the cast's pleasure to be in control of this creaky and charming contraption.

Caitlin Flanagan had a wonderfully funny and insightful essay in a recent issue of the Atlantic Monthly about the perils of becoming so wired to our occupational and social responsibilities that we never give ourselves permission to even occasionally slip out of their grip. Flanagan wrote, "I recently sat on an otherwise deserted tropical beach, a few minutes after a spectacular sunrise, and watched a middle-aged American man march grimly through pellucid knee-high surf, barking commands on a cell phone."

The night before I saw Breath of Spring, my Christian reading group The Wrinklings was in session and we discussed Death on a Friday Afternoon, Father Richard John Neuhaus' reflections on Christ's last words from the cross that was first published a few years back (consider reading this for some nourishing Lenten/Easter reading). Neuhaus' discussion of Christ's 'Second Word' from the cross, delivered to 'the good thief' who is crucified beside him ("Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise") got us onto the whole idea of what any of us need to do in the course of our lives to earn or deserve salvation.

This naturally led to a quite heated discussion about the parable of the vineyard owner who employs all kinds of workers throughout the long day to help harvest his grapes, and then pays them all the same wage whether they worked for an 11 hour shift or ten minutes. As with that other, even more inexhaustibly rich parable about the prodigal son--telling of a wastrel who returns home and is lavished with paternal gifts in a way his more responsible and industrious brother never has been--Christ's moral lessons fly in the face of everything our culture teaches and professes to believe about equity and fairness.

As thinking Christian gentlemen--about half of us Catholic, and half of us inexorably drifting Rome-ward from the sinking ruins of Anglicanism/Protestantism--I know that the Wrinklings dismiss the fatuous premises of affirmative action initiatives which absurdly seek to tame the wild vicissitudes of fate and circumstance into something approximating a kindergarten teacher's system of rewards for good little pupils.

Sorry, but the Wrinklings usually understand that life doesn't work that way, neither here nor in the hereafter. So I was surprised to hear so many of the gents around our table admit that night that, at heart, the parable of the vineyard workers has always ticked them off a little. It's always been one of my supreme favourites, a source of abiding consolation.

How to explain this difference? Instinctively, it seems, some people identify with the 11-hour workers who feel shortchanged, while I--just as instinctively--have always identified with the lucky fellow who puts in ten minutes and hits the very same jackpot. By any objective measure, I think I work as hard at what I do as most people. But believing that life is a stupendous gift that none of us could earn if we worked flat out for the rest of our lives, I seem to have a higher tolerance for--and interest in--all those silly distractions and diversions along the way.

Herman Goodden writes from London, ON. His column appears every other month.