As part of the mystagogy part of OCIA, I was asked to give a brief talk about our local Carmelite group that has their meetings at my parish. While I would have been quite happy to pitch Carmelite spirituality, I wanted to do something different along this line.
As a sponsor this year, one of my goals was not to influence or set someone on a path that mimicked my preferences for how to live out the Catholic faith. That my opinions on prudential matters should be their opinions. This is really hard to do, but it is worth attempting to separate out what the Church teaches and your own opinions on this. Partially, just being aware of your own biases is helpful, not that we can totally separate this out.
So for this 4-minute or so talk, I just wanted to pass on the importance of prayer and the devotional life. I started by quoting the Catechism paragraph 2744.
“Those who pray are certainly saved; those who do not pray are certainly damned.” St. Alphonsus Liguori.
I said there were certainly caveats regarding this, but I wanted a striking statement to start with on our fundamental need to pray. I went on to explain that we would have to discover for ourselves those practices that are helpful in growing closer to Jesus, from those that are helpful to others, but not for yourself. That some devotional practices might take a while for you to discern this. To be weary of fads in the spiritual life. That we’re all going to suffer and to experience a variety of pain in our life, from the spiritual to the physical. That prayer and our actual relationship with God, was going to help us through this. Despite the detraction we have in prayer and how inept we think our prayer life is, that we should not be harsh on ourselves for this.
I suspect I mostly got applause for this talk since I kept it short and to the point. There were points I wanted to make that I didn’t and those that I would have phrased better.
Thinking about this subject, I was also thinking about two aspects of my life that I spend some time with and my motives for them.
For me, my attraction to Carmelite spirituality was not because I am naturally contemplative, quite the opposite. Coming from a lifetime of zero prayer life, I knew I needed all the help I could get. I figured they have three “Doctors of the Church” and I needed all the doctors I could get on the spiritual life. While my prayer life is still dry and abstract, I also grew to fall in love with Carmelite spirituality. Sometimes, you find yourself drawn to something despite knowing that you lack the virtue you want. My atheistic prayer life and Carmelite spirituality were “opposites attract” kind of thing.
Another area I knew I lacked coming from atheism was gratitude. Thanksgiving and gratitude were rather perfunctory for me. I was glad when something went well, but it was just an accident of life or that I could just pat myself on the back. I had a sense of wonder, which was blunted by my materialism. When I first came across the line, “The worst moment for an atheist is when he is really thankful and has no one to thank.” it stunned me because it described my experience. People often credit G.K. Chesterton with the quote. It was actually GKC attributing Rossetti to the statement in his book on St. Francis of Assisi.
When I started reading Chesterton, it was his quotes on thanksgiving, gratitude, and wonder that were an aspiration for me. I wanted to feel this way since I saw this was the reality of how I should respond to God. An appreciation for things that exist that might not have existed. Gratitude was the proper response to life. How he charitably interacted and was friends with those whose viewpoints he opposed was another aspiration for me. These aspirations for what I desired for myself would lead me to love the man and his writings and to gain much more from them.
“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.” GKC
Considering this quote, I am rather surprised that I persevered aspirationally for things I found difficult with no natural inclination towards. Self-awareness is difficult when you suck. It’s like poking at stick at yourself and going “Ha, Ha!” The unexamined life might not be worth living, but the examined life is also pretty annoying.
Yet, know my many lacks made me at least aware enough to seek remedies and in the process to grow in love with the Carmelites and GKC, which in turned helps me to fall in love with Christ more.
