4 Practical Steps To Improve Your Interior Life
By Michael Otuya
As a religious who has taken vows and has given up so many things in order to follow your order’s or congregation’s way of life so as to afford the world some spiritual stability, it is of great importance that prayer and the interior life be the centre your entire lifestyle and vocation. Even though this is supposed to be the case it doesn’t automatically mean that everything with regard to prayer and interior life is rosy, beautiful and easy for those who have taken these vows in order to be channels of God’s grace and beauty.
I would like to begin by pointing out the obvious; it is a dream for all of us to have a well-developed interior life similar to that of the saints where meditations easily flow into contemplations and we converse easily with God as often as we converse with human beings every day. This dream which is completely beautiful and lovely in itself seems to evade us almost as desperately as we try to achieve it.
So I will attempt to give my little contribution on the subject matter as the 4 practical things we can do to develop a much better spiritual interior life during this time of lent and even afterwards.
I would like to begin by pointing out something which we might not be familiar with and that is an unfamiliar categorisation of prayer. We already have categorisations of prayers in the church but what I wish to point out is something different, a categorisation that is the core of the spirituality of persons, societies, groups and congregations in the Catholic church. We would find that they are some groups who believe prayers must be rigid, patterned, structured and tedious and they emphasize that prayer is only of higher quality when these drills are as tedious as possible. And then we have other groups who believe that prayer even though there might be patterns and structures, prayer is simply a communication between us and God and that those who emphasized patterns and structures are really not praying in the true sense of prayer, and that our communication with God is supposed to reach the point of fluency in conversation, the level of talking to him as one would with a friend and just as easily and frequently. To this group, this is the only thing that is prayer itself.
From these two groups, we can see two categories of prayer. Though some people in the two camps may believe that those in the other are wrong, each group is right in a sense. The two categories of prayers are:
1)spiritual exercises and
2)pure communication
Now notice when we think of the interior life everyone who is familiar with this terminology is usually in the camp of the people who tend to believe that prayer at its best is fluent communication with God similar to the situation of talking with a friend, but I will be explaining why structured prayers which are spiritual exercises are still prayers while looking at the five points in this post.
Practical step one: Studying
Spiritual reading as some popular Catholic writers would call it is very important to us Catholics especially the religious since it is a part of the foundation on which the religious vocation itself is built. What I can tell you is the core importance of spiritual reading is this; we communicate grace from God as inspiration and motivation:
Inspiration in this sense means when we aspire to want to do the good things that we have seen other people do. On our own, as humans, we can only aspire to do good things according to our finite level of understanding which is often confused and misdirected.
Before Christ came our knowledge of what is good that people could do and the sacrifices that people could make for the good of other people was far limited but when we look at Christ now each and every one of us who is a Christian is inspired to want to lay down our lives because we have seen a life-changing model of how far we as humans can stretch himself for the good of others.
Motivation on the other hand is when God moves us, when God gives us gifts, or when God drives us to do what is good in such a way that we cannot fully explain why we did what we did or how we had the capacity to do it but we managed to do those good things, especially in situations where it was so difficult to do what is good or to make sacrifices for the good of others and we know that ordinarily, we will not be able to bring ourselves to make such type sacrifices for others.
In this context, inspiration seems ordinary and motivation feels extraordinary but they are both supernatural as they are forms of grace from God. Both of them are only situations that came about because God intervened and interacted with the human community.
And so with regards to inspiration, we always need to look to God and to the figures of faith he has made available to us throughout history; our mentors and elder brothers and sisters in this Christian journey whom God has inspired and motivated before us to show us models of sacrifice in love for the ultimate good of others. And the more that we see these models the more our memory is filled with the decisions and the actions they took in their different situations and from these, we are inspired and our memories can influence our intellect to form patterns of choices to make in different difficult situations for the good of others also. And from these patterns which form in our minds, we can bring our will to choose what is good when the time comes. So spiritual reading and spiritual studying are very important to building a spiritual backbone, a desire for perfection that is capable of human beings and a better relationship with God and our neighbour. Without it our memories would rather be flooded by things of the world, the news, social media and otherworldly models from which we will only be inspired to do worldly things and not things of God.
– To be very specific may I suggest; that you schedule reading or listening or watching a rich spiritual book, sermon or video for 20 minutes every day or an hour every other day. Make a schedule and keep it, if you lose the zeal to keep a particular schedule switch to another but don’t exceed a three-day schedule and never give up.
Practical step 2: Spiritual exercises
As mentioned earlier in this article this might come off as some new way of categorising prayers to you. I have been trying for quite a while to help people to have some clarity with regard to what prayer is and I have two categories of prayers; spiritual exercises and the other is pure communication.
A lot of people have struggled with understanding what prayer really is about. Some have stressed patterns and structures as prayer itself others are at another extreme stressing only discussions with God and the saints as prayer itself. We could find this as the major points of several spiritualities within the Catholic church and each points to a specific part of the truth this led me to the categorisation of prayers as spiritual exercises and pure communication.
Prayers that are spiritual exercises just like normal physical exercises are tedious and are strict in a sense. These prayers communicate the principles of God to us and as I had expressed in another article on the principles of God that God the father is existence itself, that is true existence, God the Son is infinite truth, truth itself and God the holy spirit is goodness itself and these principles of God are communicated into the soul to inspire us to do good. So similar to spiritual readings, prayers that are spiritual exercises bring inspiration into the soul as they are communicating principles of God in his order as in existence itself, in infinite truth and in goodness. These principles which are communicated to us form our conscience, shape our intellect, help us form the image of Christ in us and help us discern the voice of God and what is right to do.
The other category of prayer is pure communication, where we simply focus on communicating with the personalities of God. Here we sit and wait to talk to God as one would talk to a friend we are truly interested in hearing from God as one would want to hear from a friend, this does not mean that this category of prayer is better than the other because it is God who made it so that certain things can only be communicated to us only through his principles and no other way. And so while we look for pure communication from God we must also be docile to what he chooses to communicate to us and the method he wishes to communicate to us. Prayers that are spiritual exercises are about us communicating with the principles of God while prayers that are pure communication are about us communicating with the personalities of God; the father, the son and the holy spirit.
It is something that we should note here that we cannot make headway in pure communication if we do not have the image of Christ built in our souls from communicating the principles of God into our souls from the truths that have been revealed. This way it is easier for us to discern the voice of God when he speaks to us in prayers because we are more in tune with discerning what truth he can be revealing and what is false.
– As a religious, you would already have daily spiritual exercises set and most times are done by the community, endeavors to make the most out of these, trying your sincere best to be fully engaged in these exercises and to remember important points being communicated in them. This ties into step three.
Practical step 3: Frequent aspirations
Aspiration in this sense means raising our thoughts to God and to the beautiful things that he has revealed or made available but only for a brief moment.
– Being very practical and straightforward with this point we can schedule times throughout the day to simply have a one-minute thought or 30-second thoughts about things of God, especially what we saw in the spiritual exercises of the day. This helps with two things;
1)it helps us to remain aware of the ever-presence of God which then allows us to seek his counsel in our decision-making and everyday activities and
2) it helps us to have a deeper knowledge and a stronger pattern of thought in our memory and intellect which will then affect our wills and help us to be firm in our resolutions and our choices to do good even when it is difficult. And these two things would easily translate when we come to prayer; we would have a much stronger foundation on top of which our life, our silence, our thoughts and our desires are built
Practical step 4: Having a good plan, keeping a schedule and documenting our resolutions in order to have a clear vision of what to execute every day
Truthfully speaking this is the place where it is most difficult for most of us to really keep a healthy interior life, we get caught up and overwhelmed in our daily activities and in the distractions of the day that we don’t have or keep a plan or at least we don’t have a clear vision of what we want to do and so when we come to prayer we are so disturbed, we are so distressed because there is so much that we have to do or that we think we have to do and there is so much distraction and most times we don’t have the peace to settle in prayer because there is supposedly something more for us to do, things that concern our means of earning a living or things that our social life depends on or is tied around. This article was written to help highlight why a planner as a spiritual resource can be really helpful to all of us but it is not the only reason, I really do wish for us to develop a more healthy spiritual life and I honestly know the importance of having a planner, a diary, or a journal. In fact, in some congregations, the importance of this document is a point of meditation on its own. All members are to keep journals, diaries or planners to help organise themselves, write out their contemplations, their plans with regard to their meditation and other things in order to help with clarity and to really execute effectively the duties of their state in life, having a planner where they can document the schedules of their mental prayers or aspirations, the questions they have to ask, the topics they wish to bring to meditations, the inspirations that they have gotten from our Lord with regards to situations and problems that they face in life, the beautiful things that God has given as a message to themselves or to others, a planner is a beautiful tool that can really help with this.
I suggest the life of purpose planner, it’s developed by a fellow Catholic to help out with this and she currently has an offer for religious communities and groups.
– Being very specific I suggest you get the planner or any other similar tool and actively document these and follow them through
1) plan of activities for the day
2) messages for others
3) contemplations
4) points for meditation
5) dreams and future goals
6) habits to work on
7) spiritual resources and exercises you’ll keep busy with
These are my 4 points from experience which I honestly believe would help build a better interior life.
“The best form of prayer is one that implants the clearest idea of God in the soul and thus makes space for the presence of God within us.” – St. Basil the Great
“Your prayer cannot stop at mere words. It has to lead to deeds and practical consequences.”
– St. Josemaria Escriva