Catholic Spirituality is Living the Adventure of Faith

Catholic Spirituality is Living the Adventure of Faith

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If you follow From the Abbey’s spiritual growth tutorials for any length of time, you’ll notice a number of repeated themes:

  • We need to put God at the center of our daily lives and conquer "external distractions" with the virtue of prudence.
  • We need a daily habit of focused, meaningful prayer.
  • Developing virtue is the best path to creating a "rule of life" for laypeople.
  • Our vocation is our "school of love" where we learn Christlike sacrificial love.
  • We are each equipped and called to serve the Kingdom of God in a unique way.
  • God calls us to cooperate with His grace and to participate in His divine life.
  • The moral life is a participation in the truth & goodness of God.

These key elements of Catholic spiritual growth touch every part of our lives. In this tutorial on Practical Prayer, we're going to apply the theme of living the adventure of the faith specifically to our prayer.

Prayer is Boring

Nobody wants to admit it. But it's a major obstacle to most of us. It's the "elephant in the room." Prayer can be boring. Sitting quietly is hard enough with the pressures of our lives pressing in around us. Add to that the repetitive nature of most of our prayer lives and you have the recipe for something that our brains just want to avoid.

But when prayer is part of a lived relationship, it becomes something else altogether! That's the message of Catholic spirituality. Prayer is not divorced from our life with God. Just as in any relationship, your communication with God will reflect how you're living the relationship.

Exciting Life Means Exciting Prayer

So embrace the adventure of faith and your prayer life will never be boring again.

-->If you are finding ways to use the gifts God has given you to serve God and His Family, you will have plenty to talk about when you approach God in prayer.

-->Being actively involved in the faith also gives you eyes for people in need. God invites you to participate in his love for those people through your prayer.

-->You will find your relationship with God getting more and more intense as you participate in his love and goodness through active service, making prayer much easier.

So get involved. Orient your life around serving others. Live your vocation and your mission consciously and actively. Then bring your efforts to prayer in thanksgiving, in petition, and most of all in a spirit of sharing with the one in whose mission you are participating. Your prayer will then much more likely become a personal conversation with God, and that is anything but boring.

Deep Conversion, Deep Prayer

Here's one final point for you to consider. As I hope you recognize in the Keys to Spiritual Growth, the Catholic spiritual life integrates prayer and conversion. Morality and virtue play an integral role in our spiritual life, as does prayer. It's all about our relationship with God.

Now I know it's true in my life. My prayer life is a struggle with distraction and boredom exactly because my heart is not with Jesus. I need a deeper conversion. Prayer and conversion go hand-in-hand. You and I will not experience deep conversion of our hearts without prayer. And we cannot grow in prayer without a deeper conversion of our hearts. We need to be working on both simultaneously.

So this tutorial is another great opportunity to perform an examination of conscience, to take advantage of the Sacrament of Reconciliation, and then to make a plan to cooperate with grace to change the elements of your life that are keeping you from loving Jesus as completely as you could. This is vitally important. And it's an ongoing process.

Here's a Great Resource for You!

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Father Thomas DuBay teaches the connection between prayer and morality. These are inseparable parts of an active relationship with Christ. Deeper prayer leads to deeper conversion of heart, and deeper conversion of heart (living the moral law more and more completely) leads to deeper prayer (greater intimacy with God).

Brought to you by Jeffrey S. Arrowood at From the Abbey, dedicated to helping you rediscover the JOY of learning and living your faith so you can grow in intimacy with God.

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1 Comment

  1. […] Evangelization is an important part of spiritual growth. Many Catholics are scared of evangelization. In their minds they picture standing at street corners and asking people if they are saved. But Catholic evangelization is much more natural and a lot less threatening than that. Catholic evangelization is really a matter of living the theological virtues, being a witness to the difference a relationship with God makes in our lives, and then “giving a reason for our hope” (1Peter 3:15). By building the theological virtue of hope, you have already started to evangelize! […]

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