If you want to have a spiritual life you must unify your life. A life is either all spiritual or not spiritual at all. No man can serve two masters. Your life is shaped by the end you live for. You are made in the image of what you desire. To unify your life, unify your desires. To spiritualize your life, spiritualize your desires. To spiritualize your desires, desire to be without desire. To live in the spirit is to live for a God in Whom we believe, but Whom we cannot see. To desire this is therefore to renounce the desire of all that can be seen. To possess Him Who cannot be understood is to renounce all that can be understood. To rest in Him Who is beyond all created rest, we renounce the desire to rest in created things. By renouncing the world we conquer the world, rise above its multiplicity and recapitulate it in the simplicity of a love which finds all things in God. This is what Jesus meant when He said that any one who would save his life will lose it, and he who would lose his life, for the sake of God, would save it. The 28th chapter of Job (also of Baruch 3) tells us that the wisdom of God is hidden and impossible to find—and yet ends by assuming that it is easily found, for the fear of the Lord is wisdom. A monk must never look for wisdom outside his vocation. If he does, he will never find wisdom, because for him wisdom is in his vocation. Wisdom is the very life of the monk in his monastery. It is by living his life that the monk finds God, and not by adding something to his life which God has not put there. For wisdom is God Himself, living in us, revealing Himself to us. Life reveals itself to us only in so far as we live it. The monastic life is full of the mercy of God.
Everything the monk does is willed by God and ordered to the glory of God. In doing God’s will we receive the mercy of God, because it is only by a gift of His mercy that we can do His will with a pure and supernatural intention. And He gives us this intention as a grace which serves only as a means for us to obtain more grace, and more mercy, by enlarging our capacity to love Him. The greater our capacity to receive His mercy, the greater is our power to give Him glory, for He is glorified only by His own gifts, and He is most glorified by those in whom His mercy has produced the greatest love. “He loves little who has little forgiven him” (Luke 7:47).
Thoughts in Solitude
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