Last year, I wrote about how much free time I had and how I wanted to take advantage of it by reading lots of spiritual works and praying more per day. Unfortunately, I must have forgot that I said this because my new schedule this year is crazy packed. I am in seven classes this semester, and they all have some sort of reading preparation. This isn't undergraduate level work anymore, so there is quite and abundance of academic reading that I now have to do. Now that my schedule is more squeezed than it has been since I got to seminary, I have had to take a hard look at what my priorities are.Until very recently, I was struggling to make time for any sort of spiritual reading, and I could quickly feel the effects of it. Any sort of awe and wonder was missing from my prayer, and my brain was quite tired from all of the homework that I had been doing. By this point last year, I would have finished 2-3 intense books and felt ever renewed. On top of this, because I have felt mentally exhausted, I have been turning back to my electronic devices for relief instead of Our Lord in the tabernacle down the hallway.

This past Friday, we had a spiritual direction conference about the necessity of spiritual reading in our prayer life that is outside of anything we are assigned for school work. We approach spiritual works differently when we have nothing to gain from them besides the truth itself. I find this to be true more specifically because I won't bother to skim a book if I am reading it for purely my own sake. I will take as much time as I need to digest it, but when I have to read hundreds of pages per week for classes, I will sacrifice the quality of my reading experience for the sake of getting the assignement done. 

Spiritual reading is particularly essential for me because I find that it is able to stir up the deep desires  of my heart like nothing else, even Scripture if I am being honest. I am not denying the importance of praying with Scripture. The reason that I find it to be more effective is that it can speak to my life in a particular way, and it can give me practical advice. I am currently diving into Soul of the Apostolate, and I have reawakened my desire to be a spiritual director one day. A decent section of the book is dedicated to raising up a small army of soldiers in each parish that will never abandon their mental prayer for the sake of doing more works. The key ways these soldiers are to be trained and maintained is weekly confession and monthly spiritual direction.

The author has a seminary like approach to it as well. Unlike FOCUS and SPO, they don't advocate that students always be on mission or trying to evangelize. He sets the bar very high for a soldier to be deployed. There should be almost no question that this soul will remain deeply in love with the Lord no matter what persecution they experience. This reminds me of the seminary because I initially was caught off guard by how much the seminary focuses on building up seminarians instead of sending us out on mission. They very much believe that a man must be given a strong, wide foundation of formation before he is to be entrusted with the Lord's great commissioning. 

The reason for this is that the author has no interest in relying on a human's own abilities to serve an apostolate. He believes that all of our efforts must be the result of our intimate lives of interior prayer. If we begin to send out souls who don't have an intimiate prayer life, they may succeed for a little while, but they will have no where near the level of fruit of somebody who does pray well. I am not saying that only trained clerics and religious should be doing the work of the Lord, but I am saying that in absolutely zero way should our prayer life be compromised by our apostolate work. There is something to be said about the rule of St. Benedict and putting down our prayer to welcome a guest, but rarely is our prayer disrupted by such emergencies. The author specifically says that we must do violence to our own schedules to ensure that our life of prayer is our top priority. 

Nothing I have presented is new for most of you who read this, but I am sure that the enemy has convinced a few of you, as well as myself, that prayer is a nice thing to have but not the absolute top priority. With a renewed zeal for reading and prayer, I am excited to see what the Lord has to speak into my life for the rest of this formation semester. I have quite a long way to go until perfection, so I am sure that He will have much to sting in my burning heart.