Tips on How to Be Spiritually Proactive
Breathe new life into your spirituality. It's too easy to rest on our spiritual laurels. Let's get practical and proactive about taking your spiritual life to the next level.
The video clip is from Episode #31 of The Catholic Experience, “Modern Arianism” originally recorded in June of 2024.
A healthy, vibrant spirituality involves more than just prayer. Spirituality is an ordering of the whole interior self to God and contact with His grace and power. It also involves a disposition of the “exterior self”—our daily life that is appropriately disciplined in thought and deed and receptive to the grace God wants to give us. But the challenge in all of this is that life moves too fast, and both our interior and exterior selves are constantly unsettled and unfocused on spiritual things in an effort to keep up with the thousand moving parts that constitute the complex machine of our day-to-day lives. Staying spiritually active can feel like a daunting task, and usually, it’s something we allow to get cut from the bloat of our day.
When we can bring ourselves to make just some small effort to keep our spiritual lives in good shape, we stick to routines and patterns that are essentially stagnant and flat.
If this doesn’t seem to apply to your experience, please call the Vatican and ask to speak to someone from the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, because they’ll really want to know about you.
We all fall into this spiritual holding pattern at some point, like that damned frog we keep hearing about who doesn’t know the water is getting hotter and is about to boil to death. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Here are a few practical tips for keeping your spirituality not just alive, but vibrant and growing. I’ll build a little on the tips I spoke about in the video.
St. Joseph’s Dream, by Francisco Goya.- Don’t let your guardian angel catch you sleeping on the job! If your spirituality needs a kick, ask your angel do help you to stay vigilant and diligent.
Pray Like You
Sometimes we stretch beyond what we can reach because our ambitions overshoot reality. We come to discover certain spiritual practices of the saints or become more familiar with the richness of Catholic spiritual and devotional traditions, and we begin to build our own spirituality from a blueprint that never gets reviewed by the Spiritual Architect (the Holy Spirit). I’d love to pray like St. Anthony of the Desert, but no matter how hard I’ve tried to copy his routine, I’m just not able to be consistent with it. Do you know why? Because I’m not St. Anthony of the Desert.
It’s important to “pray like you”—to pray the way you pray while gradually bringing it up a notch here and there. We want to avoid stagnation, but we don’t want to challenge ourselves beyond the realities of what we can actually manage. Pray the way you pray, and do it with unwavering consistency. Let God bring your prayer life higher. All you need is consistency (pray like you), a little extra effort (turn it up a notch), and a sincere desire to let God take your prayer life higher (or deeper). Bring those things to the Holy Spirit, and your prayer life will change.
Trust the Church
What does this have to do with spirituality? Don’t lose me—keep reading, and I’ll connect the dots.
Some Catholics view the magisterium of the Church as merely an advisory board—a very capable advisory board, but just a board of advisors applying ideas, concepts, and theories to compose teachings that may or may not be true, or even valid. But thinking that way is a very bad idea, and it’s dangerous to one’s spirituality.
The Church’s magisterium—the college of cardinals in union with the Pope—carries the teaching authority of Jesus Christ. As such, the magisterial body is guided and protected by the Holy Spirit from teaching error. It seems a bold and unrealistic statement, but to trust the Church is to trust God. It builds a spiritual virtue of docility, which is essential to spirituality.
Jesus rescued Peter, who was sinking because he paid attention to the wrong thing (the storm). Peter didn’t have no faith; Jesus said he had “little faith” because in that moment his fear caused his trust to fail. Fear and distrust diminish faith.
The Church’s teachings on faith and morals are authoritative and not at all haphazardly constituted. They’re always rooted in Scripture and supported—or supportable—by medical, natural, or human sciences. Something I’ve learned through honest critical analysis, and believe very firmly, is that the Church’s teachings are trustworthy; they are the Truth (not opinions) and they reflect reality.
“…we should understand that even a seemingly heterodox or heretical statement may only appear that way because of our own limited knowledge or understanding.”
We shouldn’t become unsettled by Bishop X, Cardinal Y, or Pope Z saying something that seems misaligned or in conflict with Church teaching (heterodox). Consider that what may seem to us to be a heterodox statement is usually a problem of our own limited knowledge or understanding. Church thought has developed over 2,000 years. It’s broad, it’s deep, and it goes beyond the basic, or even advanced catechesis that most Catholics have. This humble self-awareness, paired with faith and trust in Jesus’ authoritative teaching body, results in docility.
Jesus learned more than carpentry from St. Joseph. The spirituality of Jesus that we see in the Gospels was likely taught or shaped by Joseph and Mary during his formative years. More than obedience, we also see docility in that relationship.
In trusting the Church and the teachings of the magisterium, we are learning docility. Docility is a balance between an overconfident, prideful independence and a timid, overly submissive attitude in seeking out, accepting, and applying Wisdom. The prideful learn little, and the dead learn less. The correct attitude is in between those two extremes. In building an attitude of docility to the Church, we’re building an interior climate of tranquility and surrender to God. It’s in that climate that a healthy spirituality blossoms and grows. If it sounds far-fetched, put this guideline into practice and see for yourself.
Meditate on Scripture
I don’t have much more to offer on top of what I said in the video, but I do want to emphasize the importance of meditation. Meditation shouldn’t be considered a novelty of a modern age, influenced by eastern spirituality. That’s nonsense. Meditation is an application of the reason, imagination, or both, to sacred scripture, other spiritual books, or sacred art. The object is God, not emptiness or the self.
“…it’s clear that meditation is as essential to the spiritual life as breathing is essential to life of the body”
Please don’t look over this part of the video believing that medication is something only Catholic spirituality geeks do. From the examples of Moses, the prophets, Jesus, the Apostolic Fathers, the Early Church Fathers, and countless saints through Catholic history it’s clear that meditation is as essential to the spiritual life as breathing is essential to life of the body.
Starting soon I’ll make segments of my long-form essays available only to paid subscribers, and plan to offer other content and perks that provide a richer experience for paying subscribers, without killing the experience for free subscribers. Consider upgrading to paid.
I hope you invest an extra couple of minutes to check out the video because I offer some minor points to consider, and conclude with some heartfelt encouragement that can’t be duplicated in writing.
We weren’t made to tread water. We were made for greatness, not mediocrity (Pope Benedict XVI). When we recognize that our spirituality is on life support, as happens cyclically in the lifetime of a Catholic, let’s take the necessary steps to breathe new life into our spiritual lives. The guidelines I’ve offered here will help. And that, my friends, is as good a closing as I can muster after all this writing. Don’t hate me; I’m a broadcaster, not Flannery O’Connor.
With that in mind, please consider checking out my podcasts. The Catholic Experience, where this video came from, is the grand old man of my podcasting catalogue, with The Catholic Adventurer Podcast and Scripture Sessions following. The ‘Experience’ podcast is currently in hiatus, but I’m going to start producing new episodes for that catalogue soon.
Please consider subscribing if you’re not already subscribed. Toss me a Like or a comment/question if you enjoyed this piece. God bless and be with you!
Ave Maria, Virgo Fidelis!
