The celebrated novelist Somerset Maugham said there were two keys to his success as a writer: getting up in the morning and going to bed at night. By virtue of this strategy he defeated laziness twice, by overcoming laziness in the morning and retiring at the proper time so that he would be ready to rise the next day.
We are all saddled with chronic laziness. E dolce far niente (it is sweet to do nothing), say the Italians. The Spanish go one step further and say, “It is sweet to do nothing and then rest afterwards.” We are all, at one time or another, deserving of the epithet, “lazy-bones.” And a “lazy good-for-nothing” is a virtual condemnation.
People look forward to the summer when being lazy becomes respectable. Or they may prefer the term, “indolent,” which seems to raise laziness to a higher level. Nonetheless, no one is proud of being lazy. We come to regret the oceans of time that were unproductive. There are no rewards to laziness. It’s not a crime, but it may be a terrible fault.
St. Thomas Aquinas treated laziness under the term acedia. It is “sorrow over . . . an internal and divine good [in us]” (ST II-II, q. 35, a, 2). It is, for Aquinas, a sin against charity since it fails to accept “friendship with God” and “the spiritual life that dwells within us.” The Angelic Doctor in this instance is referring to spiritual laziness, the most pernicious kind.
What he is saying is that God has endowed us with certain gifts (or talents). These gifts are to be used and developed as a form of gratitude. God wants us to appreciate the gifts He has given us and wants us to experience the joy that results when we put our gifts into practice. It is both unappreciative as well as irresponsible to allow these gifts to lie fallow. Therefore, spiritual laziness (acedia) is a sin against God. It is also a sin, though not as grievous, against others since it deprives them of enjoying the fruits of our labor.
In ST I, Aquinas stated that acedia “is a kind of sadness, whereby one becomes sluggish in spiritual exercises because they weary the body.” Here, he is offering a direct paraphrase of St. Augustine’s own definition of the vice.
God is not asking us to do more than we can. He does not want to overburden us. With this in mind, we read Matthew 11:28-30 with greater understanding:
Come all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble of heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden light.
Spiritual laziness, then, is our resistance to participating in the divine nature, to our friendship with God. It is a resistance to the burdens of commitment involved in that relationship. It is the preference to do nothing rather than to accept and cultivate the gifts that God has given us.
Spiritual laziness is hard to excuse. British novelist Anthony Burgess puts things into perspective when he remarks: “Wedged as we are between two eternities of idleness, there is no excuse for being idle now.” In the words of the American poet, John Greenleaf Whittier, “For of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: ‘It might have been!’” A person lives once and cannot go back and rectify his past mistakes. The dividends of laziness are sorrow and regret.
We are created by God but come from nothing. Therefore, there is a profound tendency for us to slip back into that eternal void from which we were rescued by God. We are caught in the pincers between grace and gravity. Laziness is surrendering to the gravitational impulse. God bids us to follow the path of grace. The mind is like a clock that is running down and continually needs to be rewound. We need inspiration to overcome laziness in addition to appreciating the gifts God has granted us.
Bishop Sheen has said that “mental laziness, above all, manifests itself in skepticism or the certitude that nothing is certain. The uncommitted mind is lazy because it never closes on anything.” It is a tragedy that moral issues of critical importance are lazily resolved by a single word. For abortion it is “choice,” for pornography it is “pleasure,” for euthanasia it is “dignity,” and for divorce it is “convenience.” The lazy mind is a danger to all humanity.
Some time ago when Dean Martin was about to retire from show business, he was asked what he planned to do in his retirement. “I plan to get pleasantly stoned each day,” was his response. The popular crooner was not being candid. He was pandering to an image the media had created for him and one that would please his legion of fans who admired the individual who could shed all responsibilities and just do what he wanted to do.
How, then, do we overcome laziness? We should be inspired by the energy of others who have left their wisdom in books, music, and various other arts. We should remind ourselves that God has given us talents, no matter how modest, that He wants us to develop. In this regard, we have been commissioned by God. Our future will be happier if we put into practice today what God has given us for a lifetime.
