the Beatification . WEB
[The phrase] “Time on my hands” has far deeper significance than is generally envisaged. It could very well be that time is one of the greatest obstacles to happiness, and for two reasons.
Time makes the combination of pleasures impossible. Because we live in time we cannot simultaneously listen to Cicero, Demosthenes and Bossuet; because the clock of our life is wound but only once, we cannot at one and the same moment enjoy the snow of the Alps and the refreshing sunshine of the highlands of Kenya; because the heart beats out the lease on life, one cannot, despite the advertisements, “dine and dance” at the same time.
Because life does not end here, the closing of the doors of time and the burden of the years become bearable—because they lead to something better when properly utilized. That was why St. Paul said that for the sake of Christ he “gloried in his infirmities” and in his anxieties and in his sorrows.
As William James once wrote, “The sovereign cure for worry is religious faith. The turbulent billows of the fretful surface leave the deep parts of the ocean undisturbed, and to him who has a hold of vaster and more permanent realities, the hourly vicissitudes of his personal destiny seem relatively insignificant things.” It is only to the extent that timeless existence, or eternity, is brought to bear upon all of our actions in time, that we become liberated from that awful, frustrating anxiety of the temporal.
