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Last time I talked about how spontaneity fails, at least for me, as an approach to daily prayer. So what’s the alternative? If I’m not going to sit down and simply pray from my heart at the stated time, what am I going to do instead?

The answer is to cultivate a devotion: that is, a prayer that is meant to be said daily. Low-church Protestants sometimes have trouble with this kind of prayer; it smacks of “vain repetition”. But as I pointed out, trying to pray spontaneously every day led me to saying much the same thing every day anyway. Vain repetition isn’t simply reciting a pre-existing prayer; vain repetition is reciting the prayer without focussing on God, and expecting it to do any good.

Devotions have many advantages over spontaneous prayer, at least in this context. (As I said in the post linked above: if you feel moved to spontaneous prayer, springing from your heart, by all means go with it.) It’s hard for us to know how we’re doing in the interior life. Feelings are not a good guide. But when you’ve said a devotion, you know you’ve said it. You know you have devoted that time to God. That’s an objective fact, and doesn’t depend on feelings. Granted, you need to be trying to focus on God during that time, and if you’re like me you often won’t do that good a job of it. But again, choosing to focus on God is not a feeling, it’s an act of the will, and you can objectively ask, “Did I really try to focus on God, or was I going through the motions?”

Sometimes, going through the motions is all you can do. But even there, God knows that you could have done something else with that time; and He will honor that. He’ll be on the job while you are praying, even if you’re only half there.

The Catholic Church has oodles of devotions, most of which I’m not familiar with. The two that I have used most consistently are the Rosary and the Liturgy of the Hours (also known as the Divine Office). I’ll have more to say about them in future posts.

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So far in this series I’ve focussed on things that have worked for me in my pursuit of the interior life. Today, I’m going to talk about something that hasn’t worked for me: spontaneity.

Don’t get me wrong. Spontaneous prayer is a good thing. If you feel moved to pray, to tell God what’s going on, or to ask for help, or to rejoice at a sunrise or the face of your child, go to it! Knock yourself out. As I said, when you’re moved to pray, God’s calling. When it happens, go with it.

But I’ve also pointed out that ultimately we need to make regular time for prayer. And while spontaneous prayer is a great thing when you’re so moved, it really fails as a planned activity.

I have gone through the following cycle of events more times than I can count. I resolve to pray for a certain time every day. The first day I sit down, and spend time talking with God, spontaneously. Often I’ve tried to use the “ACTS” framework—adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication—but within those categories I use my own words. And it works! God wants us to pray, and He’ll help us to get started.

By the end of the week, I’ve settled down into a pattern. The words are still mine, but they tend to be more or less the same day after day.

By the end of a month (two or three at most) I am thoroughly bored with my own words, and I get tired of saying them over and over, and I am unutterably weary with being SPONTANEOUS.

And as soon as there’s a reasonable reason to skip my prayer time, I do; and soon I don’t have a regular prayer time anymore.

As I say, this has happened to me any number of times over the last thirty years. It lasted up until late 2007/early 2008, when I ditched planned spontaneity and tried something new…and by God’s grace, I’m still doing it today. I’ll talk about that next time.

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So you’ve begun to pursue the interior life. You’re learning to respond to the Lord’s nudges. Maybe you’ve even asked Him to help you hunger and thirst for righteousness. So what happens next?

It’s like this. There’s this person you’ve been bumping into. Maybe you meet them at the grocery store, or in the hallway at work, or at the gas station. And you find that when you bump into them, you have one of those neat conversations that just goes on and on, even though you both really need to be going. So what’s the next thing to do?

Well, if you want to be friends with this person you plan to get together with them on purpose instead of accidentally. You have them over for dinner, or you go see a movie, or you watch a football game together. You hang out.

And that’s the next thing to do with Jesus. You need to hang out with Him, spend time with Him, make it a point to spend part of each day with Him. It can be difficult to make the time; but it needs to be done. Here are some ways that I’ve found time for God.

First, I don’t usually turn on the music when I’m in the car by myself. Instead, I try to spend that time with God, sometimes praying a specific prayer, and sometimes just chewing over the day with Him.

Second, I get up a little early. This is hard, because you can’t burn the candle at both ends for long. Once you start getting up early, you’ll probably find that you need to go to bed earlier, too.

Third, there’s a church just around the corner from where I work; and most unusually for our area, it’s actually open during the day. I’ve gotten into the habit of stopping in for five or ten minutes on my way home.

Now, I’m not going to even try to tell you how to prioritize your schedule so as to make time to spend time with Jesus. That’s between you and Him…and by the way, asking Him for help in finding the right time is definitely indicated.

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A couple of days ago I compared the interior life to a kitchen remodel. You’ve got a skilled workman doing a complicated job, and while he’s responsible for the work, you still need to cooperate with him or the job won’t get done.

But there’s another way that the interior life is similar to a kitchen remodel: it’s not always obvious what’s going on. In fact, it’s usually not obvious what’s going on. Some weeks it seems like there’s a flurry of activity to no great effect. Other weeks, it seems like nothing is happening at all. Once in a while, you actually see signs of progress. Most of the work goes on while you aren’t looking, and many crucial details are hidden from view.

This is one of the reasons why feelings aren’t a reliable guide to your progress in the interior life: you simply don’t have enough insight into the process for your gut feel to be dependable.

And this is why it is useful to seek out the help of a skilled and knowledgeable spiritual director. (I am not a spiritual director. I’m just this guy with a blog.) He knows what to expect, and how to explain it, and which questions to ask to find out where you’re at, and what to suggest for you to do. Most especially, he can see when you’ve gotten wrapped around your own axle, help you unwrap yourself, and get you moving again.

If you continue to pursue the interior life (and we all should!) you’re going to want to find a director—if only to have someone to talk to, who understands what you’re experiencing and won’t look at you funny. But keep beavering away in the meantime; don’t wait until you find one. You’re learning to love Jesus Christ, who died for you and through whom all things were created. He will see that you get any help you need.

See all posts in this series. When you embark on the interior life, you’ll find that feelings come with it. Sometimes you’ll feel that God is so close you can practically touch him. Sometimes (alas) you’ll feel so bored you’d rather do anything else—almost. Sometimes even more than almost.

The thing is, the interior life isn’t about feelings; it’s about an objective relationship with Jesus Christ. It’s about knowing Christ and loving Christ, which is to say it’s a matter of the intellect and of the will. It’s about choosing to pursue a relationship with Jesus even when you don’t feel like it. It’s about choosing to love Jesus more than the (admittedly delightful) feelings of unity and closeness that He sends us.

And if you want to truly be so close to Jesus that you can touch Him, all you need to do is go to Mass. He’ll be waiting.

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Looked at one way, the interior life is a long series of repairs. We are broken people in so many ways, we fall so far short of the perfection God has in mind for us; and as we grow in the interior life these things slowly get fixed.

We currently are in the middle of a long kitchen remodel; and perhaps not coincidentally, it occurred to me this week that growing in the interior life is less like being a handyman and playing Mr. Fix-It in your own home, and more like hiring a contractor to remodel your kitchen. There’s so much to do, and so much of it has to be done just right, and anyway I’ve got a full-time job of my own. Better to hire someone who knows what they are doing, and let them get on with it while I go to work.

The contractor, of course, is God. He knows what needs to be done, and he’ll take care of it for you. By His grace, amazing things will happen while you’re not paying attention. The thing is, you need to cooperate with him.

When you’re having your kitchen remodeled, there are many ways in which the contractor needs your help. You have to pick out counter tops. You have to pick out cupboard doors and plumbing fixtures and tile and colors of stain and cabinet hardware and appliances, and on and on and on. If you don’t do these things, work stops. Nothing happens. And, of course, you have to keeping paying him, or he can’t afford to pay his workers or buy the raw materials. If you don’t cooperate, the kitchen doesn’t get done.

Similarly, you have to cooperate with God’s grace, or nothing will happen. And really, that’s what these series of posts is all about: ways to cooperate with God’s grace that have worked for me, and might work for you. Ways to keep construction moving forward.

There is one major difference between remodeling your kitchen and the interior life: the remodel only seems like it’s going to last forever.

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Pursuing the interior life—a life of holiness—is not easy, but fortunately God doesn’t leave us to our own resources. As I noted a couple of days ago, when we think of God that means that God’s calling us. More than that, He gives us the help we need in the form of grace…which term basically means “the help that we need that God gives us.”

To put it another way, you can’t get to know God on your own; He’s got to be part of the process.

God is free to give grace to anyone He pleases, and He does; if he didn’t, no unbelievers would ever come to Him. But for those of us in the Church He provides special means of grace that we should be eager to take advantage of: the sacraments. It’s not that we can force Him to give us grace; it’s that He has promised that if we make use of the sacraments, He will always give it to us. And not only will He give it to us, because of His promise we can know for sure that we’re getting it.

There’s a small catch. I gather (I am not a professional theologian) that to receive the full benefit you need to expect to receive His grace, and to make use of it. Cooperation is key. (But that’s a post for another day.) So be eager to attend mass and receive Jesus in the Eucharist; and be just as eager to go to confession on a regular basis; and expect it to make a difference.

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I do not often resemble the following scriptures:

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.
—Matt 5:6

O God, thou art my God, I seek thee,
my soul thirsts for thee;
my flesh faints for thee,
as in a dry and weary land where no water is.
—Ps 63:1

And this is a problem for the interior life, because the interior life is a life of learning to love God more than anything else, to put God before all else. And since we cannot really achieve that in this life (which is why “hope” is one of the theological virtues), the interior life is precisely a life of hungering and thirsting for God.

It’s kind of a double-bind. If you aren’t hungry and thirsty for God, you won’t seek him; so how can you seek him if you aren’t hungry and thirsty for Him? How can you get the interior life moving?

It reminds me of something my eldest said when he was quite young, and was asked why he hadn’t done something or other:

I can’t want to.

When it comes to loving God, sometimes I can’t want to, either.

And yet, I find, when I think about it, that I want to want to. And that’s all that’s necessary. As C.S. Lewis had George MacDonald say in The Great Divorce,

If there’s one wee spark under all those ashes, we’ll blow it till the whole pile is red and clear.

Just pray: “Lord Jesus, I want to hunger and thirst for you as I ought.” Pray it whenever you happen to think about, because it’s a prayer that I believe Jesus will always answer. It might take awhile. In my case, I think it took years before I noticed that the prayer was being answered.

(Years? Really? Years? Well, yeah. The interior life is a long-term thing.)

Perhaps you can’t want to. But if you can want to want to, you’ll get there in the end.

See all posts in this series.

The first thing to do in pursuing the interior life might also be the easiest, and that is simply to respond. If you find yourself thinking about God, for any reason, that’s a sign that God’s calling you to attend to Him. So do that.

I’m not suggesting that every time you think about God, you drop everything and rush off to some private place to pray. St. Paul tells us to pray constantly (1 Thess 5:17), but one has to eat and work and so forth. If we are to pray constantly, then, we need to be able to pray while doing these other things.

So if you happen to think about God, pray something simple. It can be something as simple as “Thank you for being with me.” It can be something more formal, like the Jesus prayer:

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Whatever you want to say is fine. The point is that you’re responding to God’s call….and over time, you’re building up the habit of responding to God’s call wherever you are and whatever you are doing. You’re also learning to recognize His presence in your day-to-day activities. It’s all good.