The Life of Virtue

Several great spiritual masters (including St. Ignatius of Loyola and St. Francis de Sales) direct disciples of Jesus to begin their daily prayer exercises with adoration of God.  This direction is simple enough to obey and implement after a certain amount of practice.  It seems, however, that disciples easily forget to adore the Lord once a set of difficult circumstances arises, or if they simply do not feel like following the instruction on any given day. This has been the case in my life during recent days.  Extended travel, fatigue, and rowdy, ornery children have unsettled the usual routine.  On my own first assessment, adoration seems quite impossible.  So does joy, which is supposed to be a wonderful fruit of a robust spiritual life.  In the eyes of a witness, the demeanor that I carry during such periods very well might seem contradictory to the adoration and joy to which I call others through my work and writing.  That's right, ministers and...

In recent weeks, I have been conversing with young adults who are wrapping up their semester studies.  Despite the various institutions they attend and the various majors they have chosen, one common theme has shone itself through these conversations.  In the weeks leading up to final projects and exams, these students are quite tense and full of stress as they realize that they may not have learned all the necessary material in order to pass the test(s) and course(s).  They begin to wonder if they have procrastinated a bit longer than they should have, which elicits extra anxiety.  One young man even said to me, "I've learned how to re-learn an entire semester's material in a single afternoon so that I can pass the exam."  As I listen to these young people talk, I recall my own studies.  I freely admit that I did plenty of procrastinating and last-minute cramming during my college career.  Therefore, I know that procrastination and last-minute crammin...

This morning, my wife and I began a prayerful reading of Introduction to the Devout Life , together.  In the first sentence of the text, St. Francis de Sales defines devotion as "a virtue most pleasing to God's Majesty."  The saint undertook to write the treatise so that others could grow in this most important virtue, and it is for the same reason that my wife and I seek to read and pray through it. St. Francis introduced the virtue of devotion by noting that there is "only one true devotion," but that there are many "false and empty" counterfeits.  Yet, he continues, humans color devotion according to their own "passions and fancies."  In a scathing manner, he writes that "many persons clothe themselves with certain outward actions connected with holy devotion and the world believes that they are truly devout and spiritual whereas they are in fact nothing but copies and phantoms of devotion."  Ouch!  As I read that single para...