Time

You greatly need certain free hours to be given to prayer and recollection. Try to steal some such hours, and be sure that such little pairings of time will be your best treasures. Above all, try to save your mornings; defend them like a besieged city! Make vigorous sallies upon all intruders, clear out the trenches, and then shut yourself up within your keep! Even the afternoon is too long a period to let go by without taking a breath.

Recollection is the only cure for your haughtiness, the sharpness of your contemptuous criticism, the onslaughts of your imagination, your impatience with inferiors, your love of pleasure, and all your other faults. It is an excellent remedy, but it needs frequent repetition. You are like a good watch that needs constant winding. Read again the books that moved you: they will do so again, and with greater profit than the first time. Bear with yourself, avoiding both self- deception and discouragement. This is a medium that is rarely attained. Either people look complacently on themselves and their good intentions, or they despair utterly. Expect nothing of yourself, but expect all things of God. Knowledge of our own hopeless, incorrigible weakness, with unreserved confidence in God’s power— these are the true foundations of all spiritual life.

If you do not have much time at your own disposal, do not fail to make good use of every moment you have. It does not require long hours to love God, to renew the consciousness of his presence, to lift up the heart to him or worship him, to offer him all we do or bear. This is the true kingdom of God within us, which nothing can disturb.