We always overestimate
ourselves when we imagine we are completely indispensable and that the world or
the Church depends on our frantic activity. Often it will be an act of real
humility and creaturely honesty to stop what we are doing, to acknowledge our
limits, to take time to draw breath and rest – as the creature, man, is
designed to do. I am not suggesting that sloth is a good thing, but I do want
to suggest that we revise our catalog of virtues, as it has developed in the
Western world, where activity alone is regarded as valid and where the
attitudes of beholding, wonder, recollection, and quiet are of no account, or
at least are felt to need some justification. This causes the atrophying of
certain essential human faculties. Pope Benedict XVI
Photograph by Brother Brian.
