Part III of The Desert And The Pursuit of Holiness
True and false spirituality
![Benedictine Monks CD Released | [site:name] | National Review](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1c693181-4443-4eb8-aeab-f2a42a40f07e_788x460.jpeg "Benedictine Monks CD Released | [site:name] | National Review")
What does the “pursuit of holiness” really mean?
A few weeks ago, I published the first part of this short series on prayer. I’ve found in my various travels that a great many of us simply don’t know what the spiritual life, the “interior life,” actually is. “The pursuit of holiness” has become a popular catchphrase with homilists since Vatican II made it trendy. But when are we ever told what it means, never mind how to do it? If we hear of “mystical theology” we imagine we are talking about the lives of the saints; certainly nothing to do with ordinary us.
I approach this topic from the point of view of someone who is only barely beginning to learn and discover; the pure journalistic motive of having found something immensely important, even extraordinary, that I feel I must share.
And I’m encouraged by the responses I’ve received to think that this material is doing some good. People contact me and say they have also never heard of these aspects of our faith, never been told concretely what it means to “pray always” and to “pursue holiness”. All I am doing is exploring these things myself, and writing down what I am discovering, in the assumption that I’m not the only one in great need.
So, despite misgivings that I may be misconstrued, I’m going ahead, with cautions and caveats, because what I’m finding in my rummaging through these forgotten boxes of ancient things simply can’t be kept quiet.
Benedictine book club
Does the admonition of Christ to “be perfect as my Father in heaven is perfect” sound a bit of an unfair demand? What is “Christian perfection” anyway?
These big questions about what prayer is and how to achieve progress in the spiritual life are about the least talked-about in our western Christian world. We perhaps sometimes hear from the pulpit about our external adherence to the Church’s precepts, but rarely does anyone even mention the “interior life,” let alone what it is and how it relates to our daily lives or this whole business of the “pursuit of holiness”.
These are the subjects that we’re trying to tackle in our book group for paid subscribers right now. We’ve been working slowly through the Benedictine spiritual classic, “The Spiritual Life and Prayer According to Holy Scripture and Monastic Tradition” by the great 19th century abbess, Cecile Bruyere.
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At the start of each week I write some thoughts of my own related to the text, and send that out as an email with a link. Whenever you have a moment, you can click the link in the email, or go to the Substack home page and click on the chat icon and join in:
The following is a post for paid subscribers.
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