Hobbies and Crafts

Hobbies are leisure or free-time activities that do not need to have a value to anyone other than to the person who engages in them, activities such as stamp collecting or raising tropical fish. Most hobbies fall into one of two categories: collecting or creating. Some hobbyists belong to hobby clubs, many of which are national in scope. Crafts, which overlap with hobbies but can be distinguished from them, are activities in which one makes something personally or with simple tools, not in a mass-produced way and usually as a solitary activity. In contrast to machine-made clothes, precooked foods and plastic toys, in pursuit of a craft we build, stitch, weave, carve and print with our own hands. In this article crafts and hobbies will be considered together because many hobbies involve the regular pursuit of a particular craft (see Quilting). Exceptions to this exist, such as gardening and cycling, which are not crafts but can be hobbies (see Recreation; Sports).

One obvious difference between crafts and hobbies is that some people pursue a craft as their major occupation, while in the nature of things a hobby is always something a person does alongside his or her primary occupation. Indeed, as Witold Rybczynski points out, hobbies allow people to compensate for the drudgery of their daily occupation by gaining competence and skills that make work more meaningful (p. 224). The person who spends all day doing data entry on a computer finds great joy in spending his or her evenings in the workshop restoring old pianos. It is tempting to speak of hobbies as “avocational” (and therefore more interesting), but, as we will see, hobbies are part of and caught up in our vocation or calling. In “Two Tramps in Mud Time” Robert Frost beautifully expressed this integration of leisure with work as seeing one thing with two eyes. So the fact that some people are able to sell the work they have made as hobbyists is incidental. Not to be missed, though, is the special value hobbies play in developing good work habits in children and helping people discover the kind of work they most enjoy. For many, pursuing hobbies is an experiential form of vocational guidance.

While there are some extrinsic values in hobbies, people begin them mainly for the sheer joy of doing them. Their value is intrinsic. Making money or supplying family needs is generally not the issue. Apart from the hobbyists’ lack of concern about profit, what further distinguishes hobbies is the exceptional passion devoted to them beyond what the activity itself deserves (Rybczynski, p. 198), not unlike the passion that people devote to recreation. My son and I climbed Mount Kenya in Africa. We stayed the night before the ascent in a tiny hotel at the start of the trail. The manager grilled us on what we were doing: “You white people come to climb the mountain. You usually get mountain sickness from the altitude. You come back six days later exhausted. You do not make any money doing it. In fact you spend money. Why do you do it?” G. K. Chesterton describes leisure as essentially a matter of freedom: not only freedom from work, but freedom to do something (to take up one’s chosen hobby), freedom to do anything (to climb a mountain just because it is there) and, best of all, freedom to do nothing (a kind of civilized loafing, to borrow H. A. Overstreet’s term). Hobbies and crafts fall into the first two categories of freedoms.

The History of Hobbies and Crafts

Rybczynski notes that the English word hobby has a curious history (p. 195). The medieval root hobbin was the affectionate name given to cart horses. So the original meaning of hobby was “a small horse or pony,” clearly associated with play rather than work. Figures of horse heads attached to sticks were used in pantomimes, and the Morris dancers attached figures of horses to their waists while they danced. Hobbyhorses were toy horses given to children. “Riding one’s hobbyhorse” became something adults did when they indulged in trivial pastimes—which is exactly what we do when we engage in hobbies. They serve no adequate purpose to justify the expenditure of time and money. They are a form of adult toy.

The list of hobbies (many of which are also crafts) enumerated in Reader’s Digest Crafts & Hobbies is overwhelming, though not exhaustive: leatherwork, macramé, decoupage, candlemaking, papermaking, basketry, spinning and dyeing, weaving, batik and tie-dyeing, stained glass, string art, origami, pottery, quilting, modeling, casting sculptures, drawing, painting, printmaking, printing on fabric, stenciling, collage, wood sculpture, metalworking, drying and preserving flowers, mosaics, lapidary, jewelry, woodworking, picture framing, preserving fruit, bread baking, winemaking, restoring furniture and bookbinding.

Each hobby has a history. For example, collecting old things seems to have emerged in the Western world during the nineteenth century—thence the emergence of the museum as a Victorian passion. Wealthy people amassed collections of Japanese porcelain, prints and Asian exotica, while people of lesser means collected pressed flowers, matchboxes and stamps. The first written reference to stamp collecting occurs in 1842 (Reader’s Digest, p. 197). Today people collect bottles, matches from hotels, seashells, hockey and baseball cards, coffee mugs and, in my own case, oil lamps from as many centuries and countries as I can. Why? Why turn yet one more wooden bowl on a lathe, weave another mat, make another stained-glass lamp or purchase yet another model railroad magazine to read on the subway? Why climb a mountain? The question raised by the motel manager at the base of Mount Kenya issued from a survival culture; my son and I live in an identity culture.

As a relatively recent invention in human history, hobbies emerged along with affluence and have little place in survival cultures except among the few who are wealthy. Like everything else in the Western world, they have been commercialized. Industries that support them, however, are by and large a blessing; they do not take away from the essential experience of doing something for fun rather than profit. When a hobby turns into a business, it ceases to be a hobby. With crafts it is different. Throughout history crafts have been essentially occupational, though, as we will see, not exclusively so. Crafts can be done for profit or pleasure or both.

Crafts have a long history, as long as the human race. While we have no indication that Adam took up stone masonry or painting, making things by hand is implicit in the original mandate to “have dominion” over everything (Genesis 1:26 NRSV) and to “work [the world] and take care of it” (Genesis 2:15). Adam and Eve were world makers, culture makers and therefore the first craftspeople. They were commissioned to shape as well as use and appreciate the created order. They were the first landscape gardeners, the first builders and the very first collectors. They were the first persons to note that things are good in themselves and worth having for the simple enjoyment they provide.

The creation account notes that “the gold of that land [the land of Havilah, watered by the Eden river system] is good; aromatic resin and onyx are also there” (Genesis 2:12). Was Eve (or her descendant) the first jeweler, the first collector of beautiful ornaments, the first inventor of perfume, the first metalworker? It is difficult to imagine that everything in the garden was provided just for humankind to make a living. Occupations did soon begin to develop, including crafts (in the more formal sense): “Jabal . . . was the father of those who live in tents and raise livestock [signaling the transition from nomadic life to sedentary, with its attendant need for barter and trade]. His brother’s name was Jubal; he was the father of all who play the harp and flute. . . . Tubal-Cain . . . forged all kinds of tools out of bronze and iron” (Genesis 4:20-22). But crafts served the dual function of assisting in the business of living and allowing human beings to enjoy themselves and God’s creation.

The list of crafts noted in the Bible is impressive, as the old volume Occupations in the Bible amply shows. Even more impressive is the way the Bible shows that God is a craftsperson. In God the Worker Robert Banks expounds many of the metaphors for God in the Bible that are drawn from human activities, such as weaver, knitter, potter, musician, gardener, builder and metalworker, just to mention a few. Godlike people do godlike things. God works and enjoys making beautiful things and says, “It is good.” God, as Karl Barth said so profoundly, “is beautiful.” This craftwork is both holy work and holy play.

Inside Trivial Pursuits

The only person in the Old Testament specifically said to be filled with the Holy Spirit was a craftsperson: “I [God] have filled him [Bezalel] with the Spirit of God, with skill, ability and knowledge in all kinds of crafts—to make artistic designs for work in gold, silver and bronze, to cut and set stones, to work in wood, and to engage in all kinds of craftsmanship” (Exodus 31:3-5). Craftsmanship, whether for embellishing the tabernacle of God (as in the case of Bezalel) or embellishing one’s home (as I have seen in the simplest mud homes in Africa), is potentially a holy ministry.

We now concern ourselves with the place of hobbies and crafts in a theology and spirituality of everyday life (for a consideration of a theology and spirituality of crafts as a primary occupation, see Craftsmanship; Work). Can they be justified? Need they be? Can they be sanctified and become, as they were for Bezalel, holy ministries? To whom is the ministry? Can a ministry to oneself—the sheer pleasure of doing something enjoyable or making something beautiful—be a ministry? The answer must be approached along several lines.

First, personal creativity is implicit in the dignity of being a human being made in the image of God. As coworkers with God, we have a limited capacity for cocreativity. While we do not, as God does, create from nothing in the strict sense, we share godlikeness in creating things that are truly new. When I decided to make my own photographic enlarger out of an abandoned bellows camera, the end result was not as good as commercial enlargers, but I had designed it myself and made it with my own hands. Quite apart from whether anyone else notices and copies what we have made, which in this case actually happened, there is something profoundly satisfying in carrying out such a project. In an essay on art Dorothy Sayers maintains that the distinctive contribution of Christianity to the field of aesthetics is actually this move from art (and therefore crafts) as representing something that already exists to art as creating something new, something that had never existed before. It is godlike so to do and godlike to look at one’s finished craft and say, “It is good.” When such crafts are used as gifts to others, which is one good use to which they may be put, others may share this holy joy.

Second, the Christian life is essentially an amateur affair. In recent times we have witnessed the professionalizing of almost everything (see Professions/Professionalism), including housecleaning, pest control and, tragically, ministry (see Clergy; Laity). But the Christian person has an essentially amateur status, not in the common meaning of “second-class” and “untrained,” but in the original sense of the Latin word amator (lover). An amateur is someone who does something for love or simply because he or she loves to do it. The sum of our obligations to God, our neighbors, God’s creation and ourselves is simply to love. Loveless work, like loveless ministry, is a stench to God and dehumanizing for others. One service rendered by the so-called craft revolution and the passion people who invest in their hobbies is the recovery of love as the primary motive for doing anything worthwhile in this life or the next. Some Christians may find it a bitter pill indeed to swallow on the day of judgment when they hear that one person’s loving needlepoint was more pleasing to God than another’s dutiful but loveless committee work in the church (compare Luke 17:10).

Third, hobbies and crafts can be personally restorative, a valid form of recreation. Just as bird watching and gardening can restore the soul, so tumbling rocks in a grinder, working leather or poring over one’s pictures in an album can bring rest and renewal. It is sometimes argued that any human work that could be replaced by a machine was essentially dehumanizing anyway. There is some truth in this observation, especially when one thinks of the debilitating effect of routine, repetitive work on punch presses and assembly lines. I spent one whole summer making rivets by hand, the most uninspiring activity of my life. Such labor (for it is hard to call it work) can be somewhat redeemed by technology and robotics. On the other hand, many of these same “dehumanizing” jobs can and should be done by people as hobbies. This changes the character of the activity entirely—offering a chance to bring one’s own creativity to bear on it and to experience the satisfaction of putting a personal stamp on one’s work. My wife and I built a country cabin without power tools, without skill saw, power hammer, crane, cement mixer or bulldozer. There is a level of personal renewal that comes from such activities that would be lost if one had to mass-produce cabins for a living.

But like all other aspects of everyday life, hobbies and crafts contain implicit temptations. As noted above, one distinguishing mark of a hobby is simply that people invest in it a passion that is out of proportion to its apparent value. “Riding one’s hobbyhorse” involves indulging in trivial pastimes in a way that is quite out of proportion. At times this can verge on idolatry. Idolatry is simply making something One’s ultimate concern other than the one who is ultimate. Rybczynski notes that while we have the word workaholism (see Drivenness), we have no parallel word for someone who is possessed by play (p. 17). It is one thing to liberate recreation, hobbies and leisure from the paralysis of sheer duty (for example, playing golf because of the social obligation). It is quite another to liberate a person from living for her hobby, living for the weekend, living for the workroom. As with all other forms of work, leisure, sports and recreation, hobbies and crafts need to be purged by a more compelling passion, a transforming love for God above all other loves.

» See also: Clubs

» See also: Craftsmanship

» See also: Gardening

» See also: Leisure

» See also: Play

» See also: Quilting

» See also: Recreation

References and Resources

R. Banks, God the Worker: Journeys into the Mind, Heart and Imagination of God (Valley Forge, Penn.: Judson, 1994); R. F. Capon, An Offering of Uncles: The Priesthood of Adam and the Shape of the World (New York: Crossroad, 1982); W. Duckat, Beggar to King: All the Occupations of Biblical Times (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1968); L. Hardy, The Fabric of This World (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990); Reader’s Digest Crafts & Hobbies (Pleasantville, N.Y.: Reader’s Digest Association, 1989); W. Rybczynski, Waiting for the Weekend (New York: Viking Penguin, 1991); D. L. Sayers, Christian Letters to a Post-Christian World (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1969).

—R. Paul Stevens