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The Lament of a Heroic Prayer Warrior

Often when we are busy, we regret that we lack the time to do all the things we would like, including to pray as much as we’d like. I found the passage below, from Blessed Paul Giustiniani (1476-1528), an abbot and hermit of the Camaldolese Order, to be one of the most consoling things I’ve read in a while. Not even those who have been called from the world to a life of solitude and prayer, whose work is to pray most of the book of Psalms daily, find that they have enough hours in the day. It can remind us that in this life, weighed down by our bodies and their infirmities, the best we can do is not all that we would like to do. We can only offer to God what we have, however poor it may seem, and not all that we’d like to offer to Him.

Those who have never practiced the occupations of religious leisure imagine that a solitary is constantly overwhelmed by inactivity and idleness, bored stiff, full of regrets, like a sleepy man or an irrational animal that lets the time pass doing nothing. But, my Lord God, I in my solitude speak to You. How it enchants me to speak to You, and when I speak to You I cannot lie... It seems to me that in this, more than in any other way of life, occupations are both lacking and superabundant. No indeed, the life of solitaries is not what some may imagine, inactive and idle. More than any other life, it is active and laborious…

How it is with other solitaries, I do not know. But I can easily believe that each of them manages the leisure of his solitude better than I. As for me, You know, Lord, and You can see that the more solitary I am, the more tasks occur that I ought to do and want to do. But unfortunately through lack of time I must put aside some projects, as if I wanted to save them for another occasion. Those that I do undertake must often, alas, be left uncompleted, because I lack time to finish them as I should, or at least as best I could with God’s help. How often in the leisure of solitude I have postponed prayer because I desired and took pleasure in reading! My application to prayer, weak and cold as it is, keeps me from reading. How often the effort to write down a few thoughts for my own sake or that of others has hindered me from giving due time to prayer and reading! How often, because of one of these occupations, I have put off my next meal or deprived my body, as right now, of the hours of needed rest! I would like to do more; each task seems necessary, each attracts me strongly. Yet I do none perfectly, or even as well as I might with divine help, if I had enough time and if I thought of only one at a time. Some may believe and say that solitaries are inactive and idle, but I shall never cease thinking and saying that no other life is as active and toilsome as that of God’s servant, the hermit. For a time, longer than I would have wished, I experienced worldly affairs and the worries of governing a congregation. In these matters I always seemed impeded more by lack of ability, solicitude, and diligence than by lack of time. With the business of the active life, the more I do, the less there is to do. But in matters of the solitary life, the more ability, solicitude, and diligence I muster, the more I always find to do and the less time to do it. In the exercises of solitary leisure, that is, the contemplative life, the more I do, the more I see to be done. In the active life it is generally enough to prepare and arrange matters well, and then to entrust the execution to others. But the business of the solitary life must all, with God’s help, be arranged and executed by ourselves. The former can, for the most part, be arranged and executed while eating or walking about. The latter is of such nature that each matter requires an entirely free mind and absorbs the whole self...

But returning to myself: now that by Your grace, Lord, I am more solitary than ever before, I know that I cannot find time to do all I should do and would like to do in Your service…. Oh, how much reading I would like to do, were it not for lack of time and the demands of other duties! Not that I yearn to reread the books of pagan philosophers and poets, for I regret and repent having devoted more time than I should have to such study. But I would like to read many writings that would reveal the hidden and spiritual sense of Your holy Scriptures, many works that might spur my soul to devotion and compunction, much that would help me to distinguish, so to speak, one leprosy from another, one sin from another. Oh, how I wish I could carry Your holy Gospels ever in my hand next to my heart, as we read of the holy virgin Saint Cecilia, that I might never interrupt day or night that divine reading! You know, Lord, that I have often intended to do so; but either I lacked time or my soul was occupied with other things. Not only would I like to read, but I need to apply myself earnestly to understand what is read, to commit to memory the meaning rather than the words, to compare the opinions of several doctors, or several passages of one of them, and to do other similar things, that only those who study can understand…. To read and to write are truly the easiest tasks, the least absorbing and the most imperfect of the solitary’s life…. But he must also meditate, pray, and ascend as much as possible to the contemplation of heavenly realities; think over with bitter regret the ill-used days of his life; examine, describe, dispose, regulate, moderate the passions of the present day; commit the future to God’s service; think of death and prepare for it.

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