Listen readily to holy reading, and devote yourself often to prayer. Every day, listen with tears and sighs confess your past sins to God in prayer and change from these evil ways in the future.
Joan Chittister says that the spiritual life is something we strive for. There are various ways and disciplines. No one spiritual discipline is better than the other per se. We have to seek for ourselves. But it is always a striving for and with God like Jacob and like Peter. It is both an act of obedience and a wrestling.
Life, Benedict implies, is a tapestry woven daily from yesterday's threads. The colors don't change, only the shapes we give them. Without the past to guide us, the future itself may succumb to it.
The Catholic religion is a house with many different kinds of rooms!
The obedience part - 'plugging away at the whole "disciple" thing' as a mutual online acquaintance put it recently - is to do with faith and morals. As for how we make that happen (working with God's grace of course) there's lots of latitude.
And to quote pop-psych writer Scott Peck, most of these practices are the learning aids, not the learning.
Posted by: The young fogey at September 21, 2006 06:37 PM