Course II - Teaching 2: Tedium

A man may possess all, enjoy all goods of life and a perfect health, and travel from on point to another on the Earth; however, at certain time of the day, an importune visitor will come to him: it is sorrow of human tedium; tiredness of fleeting hours; a vague sensation of something lost for ever; a hidden sense of an unknown evil that may happen at any moment. Who did not experience this feeling? Even a Saint is unable to overcome this deadly enemy: tedium and inner tiredness. To flee from it is to encounter it; to disguise it, to seek crowds and entertainment is to hold on to it. There is only one remedy to overcome tedium, and this remedy is the Sacrifice of going toward it, of looking at it squarely in the eye, or of studying, analyzing and knowing it.
A great mystic said, “My life is continuously open to God, but every day there is a hour when everything becomes darkness around me, when divine consolation and infuse understandings seem to be so far way as if I had not ever known them. In the beginning, this hour is really frightful; but since I have understood that it is the opposite pole of my spiritual life, because I am based upon it to fly higher and higher, I expect it with joy, and at this hour of darkness I enjoy the same pleasure I experience in more glorious hours of light”.