Catholic Absolutes for Our Interior and Exterior Life-Part 1

Fall has arrived. The air is crisper.  Pumpkins are showing up on people’s front steps and it’s time to pick apples.  I can almost smell the apple crisp cooking.

You may have noticed the world around us becoming quite a lively place.  To be sure, history has always dished up lively times for the inhabitants of the world; some were probably more pivotal, divisive, and potentially cataclysmic than our current cultural indigestion.  But there is no doubt that we are in a season of deep cultural upheaval that has been a long time coming.  And that is taking a toll within and without the Church.

When times get tough it is time to return to fundamental principles.  Fundamental principles we can count on as a guiding light, or bedrock to build from.  Here for your consideration is a list of such principles for our interior life.  Much of this will be familiar ground, but it’s useful to have it consolidated and to lay the groundwork for principles for our exterior life (part 2 of this series).

Our Interior Life

What, exactly, is our Interior Life?  In its most primitive form, our interior life is simply what takes place in our mind – thoughts, instincts, aspirations.

But that really isn’t life, that’s just interior.  Life is relationships (“it is not good for man to be alone”).  And simply living in our own heads isn’t relationships, it’s just ego – us talking to ourselves (or worse, the enemy smuggling lies and deception into our consciousness).

Fr. Garrigou-LaGrange (from The Three Ages of the Interior Life) offers keen insight into the interior life:

As soon as a man seriously seeks truth and goodness, this intimate conversation with himself tends to become a conversation with God.  Little by little, instead of seeking himself in everything, instead of tending more or less consciously to make himself a center, man tends to seek God in everything and to substitute for egoism love of God and of souls in Him.  This constitutes the interior life.  No sincere man will have any difficulty in recognizing it. The one thing necessary which Jesus spoke of to Martha and Mary consists of hearing the word of God and living by it… The interior life is precisely an elevation and a transformation of the intimate conversation that everyone has with himself as soon as it tends to become a conversation with God.

Our interior life is cultivated by communion with God – through prayer, grace, and our actions.

Principles For Our Interior Life

Mental Prayer

Our spiritual life is the lifeblood of our earthly life.  And mental prayer (Christian meditation and contemplation) is the lifeblood for our spiritual life.  See how that flows?  Daily time in mental prayer is a vital part of how we grow in relationship with God.  Without mental prayer, that relationship will tend to be sterile and two-dimensional, just as our relationships with other people would suffer if we didn’t spend quality time with them.  And, if our faith life (our relationship with God) becomes lifeless, all our other endeavors and relationships will suffer.

From Fr. Jordan Aumann:

Experience shows that there is absolutely nothing that can supply for the life of prayer, not even the daily reception of the Eucharist.  There are many persons who receive Communion every day, yet their spiritual life is mediocre and lukewarm.  The reason is none other than the lack of mental prayer…  We repeat that without prayer it is impossible to attain Christian perfection, no matter what our state of life or the occupation to which we dedicate ourselves (Spiritual Theology).

From St. Alphonsus Ligouri :

Moreover, without meditation, there is not strength to resist the temptations of our enemies, and to practice the virtues of the Gospel…. But man becomes docile and tender to the influence of grace which is communicated in mental prayer (The 12 Steps to Holiness and Salvation).

Worship and Sacraments

We’re familiar with grace provided by the Sacraments, which are an efficacious sign of grace, instituted by Christ and entrusted to the Church, by which divine life is dispensed to us through the word of the Holy Spirit (CCC Glossary).

But whereas grace is a familiar concept, “Divine Life” might not be.  For me it was certainly one of those terms that would slip right under my radar – I accepted that it was something that was sure nice to have, like a rubella inoculation, but I never gave much thought to what it actually was, like a rubella inoculation.

Divine Life is the Trinity.  God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in eternal self-contemplation and self-giving love.  That is what we tap into, in a supernatural way, through the Sacraments.  Those moments of deep consolation, those moments when we are inspired to give the best of ourselves without counting the cost, those moments when we heroically and humbly persevere through the trials of ordinary life – those are a share in Divine Life.  Jesus puts it this way,

“I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in me, and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.”  (John 15:5)

The Eucharist and Reconciliation stand at the center of the ongoing cultivation of our interior life.  Good confession (at least monthly) so that we worthily receive the Eucharist (at least weekly) – that is the indispensable recurring source of Sacramental fuel for our interior life.

This brings us to worship.  As with mental prayer and the Sacraments, there is nothing else that can supply for worship, particularly in the Sacrifice of the Mass.

The liturgy then is rightly seen as an exercise of the priestly office of Jesus Christ. It involves the presentation of man’s sanctification under the guise of signs perceptible by the senses and its accomplishment in ways appropriate to each of these signs. In it full public worship is performed by the Mystical Body of Jesus Christ, that is, by the Head and his members. From this, it follows that every liturgical celebration, because it is an action of Christ the priest and of his Body which is the Church, is a sacred action surpassing all others. No other action of the Church can equal its efficacy by the same title and to the same degree (CCC 1070).

Practicing Virtue and Asceticism

When we remain close to the Lord in prayer and receive Him in the Sacraments, we receive grace (a share in divine life).  But that’s only the first act of the story.  The exciting second act is what we do with that grace.

The key is for that grace to be transformed into glory.  Glory is something of a mysterious word.  Theologians wrestle to craft a concise meaning of it.  So I’m going to simply focus on this one aspect:  Glory is the manifestation of God.  And manifestation is “an event that clearly shows or embodies something”.   In Exodus, Moses gets plucky enough to ask God to show himself

Then Moses said, “Please let me see your glory!”  The LORD answered: I will make all my goodness pass before you, and I will proclaim my name, “LORD,” before you; I who show favor to whom I will, I who grant mercy to whom I will.  But you cannot see my face, for no one can see me and live.  Here, continued the LORD, is a place near me where you shall station yourself on the rock.  When my glory passes I will set you in the cleft of the rock and will cover you with my hand until I have passed by”” (Ex 33:18-23).

Grace is turned to glory when we act on it – when we make God present in the world.

If I had a penny for every time I received grace  (from a Sacrament, or in a prompting from the Spirit, or in God acting through others…) and didn’t act on it – by following that gentle prompting, reaching out to someone, stretching a little outside my comfort zone – well, the neighbors would all be wondering why Steve has a strange habit of building lawn sculptures out of pennies.  When we say yes to grace, it becomes glory, and we grow in holiness (and often welcome some surprises into our life).

But when we say yes to grace amazing things happen.  New growth, new relationships, new possibilities, new depth in our relationship with God.  This is the practice of virtue in its most organic form, the configuring of our life to Christ so that grace flows through us and blesses the world.  When we do that, He will certainly lead us to growth in specific virtues such as faith and prudence, and humility.

Filling ourselves with God and practicing virtue is one side of the coin.

Emptying ourselves of selfishness is the other.  This is also grace in action – the grace to overcome our fallen nature.  This is the role of asceticism – self-mastery, and mortification (we say with the Baptist, “I must decrease that He might increase”).  In most general terms, asceticism is the “science of spiritual perfection” (A. Tanquerey, The Spiritual Life).  The Catechism defines asceticism as “the practice of penance, mortification, and self-denial to promote greater self-mastery and to foster the way of perfection by embracing the way of the cross.”  The beautiful thing about the school asceticism is that the doors are always open.  We say “no” to little cravings.  We have an itch and don’t scratch it but rather offer up the discomfort.  We say a generous “yes” to something we really don’t want to do.  We rent “Ishtar” and watch all 1 hour and 47 minutes of it – think of the souls released from purgatory!

Closing

Our relationship with God is rooted in the time spent with Him in mental prayer.  It is sustained by grace from the Sacraments and worship.  And we pour that grace out into the world through the practice of virtue and asceticism.   The better we cultivate our interior life in this way, the better equipped we are to enter into the messiness of the world (part 2 of this series).

Here’s how the Catechism sums it all up:

It is not easy for man, wounded by sin, to maintain moral balance.  Christ’s gift of salvation offers us the grace necessary to persevere in the pursuit of the virtues.  Everyone should always ask for this grace of light and strength, frequent the sacraments, cooperate with the Holy Spirit, and follow his calls to love what is good and shun evil (CCC 1811).