Jun 23 2008
The Mortified Life
From In Conversation with God, Volume 3, Seventh Week, Monday:
In our apostolate, we should be aware that often the great hindrance to many souls accepting the Faith, recognizing their vocation, or leading a consistent Christian life, is provided by personal sins unrepented of, disordered affections, and a lack of correspondence with divine grace. Man, influenced by his prejudices or stirred up by his passions or bad will, is not only able to deny the evidence of external signs plain to be seen before his very eyes, but can also resist and reject the high inspirations God infuses into his soul. If one is without the desire to believe and to do the will of God in everything, whatever the cost, one will simply not accept even what is glaringly evident. Thus, the person who lives shut up in his own egoism, who doesn’t seek the good but only his comfort and pleasure, will have a difficult time believing or understanding a noble ideal. And, in the case of a person who has already taken the step of giving himself to God, he will find within himself a growing resistance to the specific demands of his vocation.
There are three things that hinder us in our spiritual life:
- Unrepentant sins.
- Disordered affections.
- A lack of correspondence with divine grace.
The first, unrepentant sin, is pretty easy to define: One is not sorry for one’s actions. The second, disordered affections, simply means that we have bad desires — for food, for money, for sex, for comfort, for material things, and so forth. The third, a lack of correspondence with divine grace, means that we are not docile to God’s will. By way of summary, we could call these three things sinful actions, sinful desires, and sinful negligence.
The more I read and study — not to mention my own attempts to live the Christian life in a better way — the more convinced I am that the what people most need to hear nowadays is that intimacy with God is impossible without living a mortified life. One must die to one’s sinful action, sinful desires, and sinful negligence.
…well said. I’m often taken back by how generally slothful we’ve all become. The more we have, the more we take for granted, in all spheres of life. Rather than rejoicing that we can attend Mass daily, we find the liturgy dull; instead of praising God for loved ones to serve, we grow weary with the daily grind. The list goes on and on as we sink into a general malaise. God forgive us. Give us hearts bursting with gratitude and thirsting only for you!