The Center for Contemplative Practice
A Lay Cistercian Looks at Spiritual Reality
FIVE QUALITIES OF CONTEMPLATIVE PRACTICE.
If you want to convert yourself daily to be more like Christ and less and less like your false self (The seven Deadly Sins), then you are committed to doing what may seem impossible: to pray without ceasing. Before you go any further, I am not talking about being in Church all the time or even consciously praying this or that verbal or mental prayer, good as that is at times. I mean “Having in you the mind of Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 2:5).
The human condition has, among other competing priorities, a propensity for a minute-long (sometimes seconds-long) attention span. If we are not enthused about something, we tend to wander in that intellectual wasteland of rotating thinking or feeling, then on to the next, to the next, and so forth. We do this wandering in the desert of our imagination based on what makes us feel good, those pleasures and gratifications which our wounded nature seeks to prize. Notice that I didn’t say we choose those ideas or behaviors that give us pain or are uncomfortable to sustain in our minds (apologies to B. F. Skinner). Being human in our default of choice means we choose what is easy over what is uncomfortable.
No wonder youth (not age but the ability to choose what might seem absurd to reason and a fairy tale to the choices that make us always happy) choose what feels good over what might be uncomfortable for the mind or emotional fulfillment. One is being fulfilled as a human being, while the other lacks any relation to what is real or boring to do, or might be uncomfortable or cause mental pain.
Christianity, most especially Catholicism, on first glance seems to deny what it means to be human because of its insistence on “dying to self” so that we can rise with Christ to that next level of our evolution.
Yet, that is what Jesus invites all of us to do: to do what seems like “a stumbling block to the Jews, and folly for the Gentiles.” Doing Catholicism is to be vigilant to the point of longing to overcome those Seven Deadly Sins, replacing them with the Corporal and Spiritual Works of Mercy. It is the way of the cross in our lives. Not a Sado-Machistic need for pleasure through inflicted pain, but a way of everyday thinking so profound that it is a mindset, without thinking, without the need to be praying prayers that we think places us in the presence of Christ, without asking Jesus to give us the energy (grace) to move to and sustain our focus which is to “prefer nothing to the love of Christ.” The deeper we move through life, with the Catholic Church mediating us with The Mediator, Magister Noster, our only guide to become what evolution intended us to be before the Fall, the more mystical is our notion of being in the presence of Christ so that, like a person seduced by drugs, we can’t physically wait for the next encounter with Jesus. Our life is a prayer which we sustain only by being in the presence of Christ (this includes all the Lay Cistercian prayers and charisms) and daily converting ourselves from those mere human tendencies (good as they might be) to something more enduring for the fulfillment of our evolution. Jesus is the only way. It takes discipline, and sometimes choosing what our bodies tell us, even when it’s harsh and inconvenient to our human tendency to seek self-satisfaction as the default of our nature.
FIVE HABITS OF THE STRICT AND PENITENTIAL CATHOLIC.
Like any habit, I am rewarded by doing this or that behavior over and over. It lulls me into a schedule that fits my human tendencies to seek what is easy rather than what is right and difficult. Breaking that habit is like breaking a bone that needs to be reset. Painful? Quite! And yet, that is what Jesus calls me and you to do. Jesus knew breaking with the old traditions and ways of doing sacrifice of animals would be hard. Jesus warned each of us of the cost of discipleship. Listen to the following with the “ear of your heart.”
“Jesus: A Cause of Division.
34t “Do not think that I have come to bring peace upon the earth. I have come to bring not peace but the sword.
35For I have come to set
a man ‘against his father,
a daughter against her mother,
and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law;
36and one’s enemies will be those of his household.’
The Conditions of Discipleship.
37u “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me;
38and whoever does not take up his cross* and follow after me is not worthy of me.
39* v Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.
40“Whoever receives you receives me,* and whoever receives me receives the one who sent me.w
41* Whoever receives a prophet because he is a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward, and whoever receives a righteous man because he is righteous will receive a righteous man’s reward.
42And whoever gives only a cup of cold water to one of these little ones to drink because he is a disciple—amen, I say to you, he will surely not lose his reward.”x
To be a follower of Christ is to follow him in all things, as you understand it. To have in us the habit of “Having in us the mind of Christ Jesus” is not fun nor even reasonable to those who do not have the tools to see what cannot be seen, and to hear what cannot be heard. There is a way to become more like Christ, but it requires humility and obedience to Do What He Tells You.
To focus on Christ without ceasing requires me to make new wineskins each day. To long to be with the one whom I cannot do without. To use these five habits to make all things new in my life so that I allow Christ to speak to me and I listen “with the ear of the heart.” Here are five such reconstructed or rebroken habits that I must sustain with the energy of the Holy Spirit.
- With obsessive zeal, “prefer nothing to the love of Christ.” I am not talking about being so fanatical that you drive everything around you crazy with your verbal ranting about how you have Jesus and they don’t. In that upper room of your inner self, make new wineskins in silence and solitude. Let your good works shine among the anawin and the young so that they will see your good works and give glory to the Father because you took the time to give a “cup of water to someone in the name of Jesus.”
- Strive to love God with your whole mind, your whole heart, and all your strength. (Deuteronomy 6:5 and Matthew 22:38) We will never be perfect this side of Paradise, but we are bid to keep trying and make all things new. This is the mindset of the Catholic Penitential.
- Seek to be present to the Real Presence (Eucharist and Eucharistic Adoration) as you can. No one can maintain their spiritual equilibrium without the bread of life, the presence of Christ now, just as he was to his disciples all those years ago. Be an aggressive Catholic and not a pioneer who waits for Jesus to happen to you, and then maybe you will accept Him.
- Ask my friends to help me with prayers and good works. My four friends (the Mount Rushmore of my Faith) are Mary, Mother of God; St. Joseph, my guide on the ambiguities of life; St. Michael, who guards my Six; and Jesus, My Lord and My God. Plus, I continue to ask Holy Mother Mary and the saints, every day, to join me in my prayers of glory, honor, and praise to the Father, and to intercede for me with Jesus to have mercy on me and all those in Purgatory.
- Be Present to Jesus in the upper room of my inner self, sitting next to him in my sanctuary, being content to be next to the one I love and wait, without a precondition of this or that help.
Each of us walks a different road during our lifetimes. Sometimes, we fall off the road and can’t get back. Jesus is the roadside assistance that comes to us to haul us back onto the road so that we can continue to fall off it somewhere in the future with the same results. Without Christ, we are stuck in that ditch, perhaps forever. Although we have different roads (new wine skins) to follow, there is only one way, one truth, and one life that leads us beyond humanistic anticipations to become what our nature intended for our evolution.
DO WHAT HE TELLS YOU.
Copyright 2026. Michael F. Conrad, Ed.D., The Center for Contemplative Practice. All rights reserved.
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