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Spiritual Life
Formation pathways, guided devotions, and step-by-step checklists for growing in holiness.
Liturgy of the hours
The public prayer of the Church spread through the hours of the day — psalms, canticles, Scripture readings and intercessions — by which the whole course of the day and night is made holy. Bound on clergy and religious, it is warmly commended to every baptized Catholic.
Stations of the cross
A devotion that accompanies Jesus along the Way of the Cross through fourteen stations, from his condemnation to his burial, meditating on his redemptive Passion.
Spiritual reading
Taking the Scriptures of the day — the readings of the Mass — as the daily food of prayer, so that a Catholic's personal prayer is fed by the same Word the whole Church is hearing.
Penance
The habit of going to sacramental confession at a fixed interval — commonly once a month — rather than only when grave sin makes it necessary, so that the sacrament becomes a means of growth and not only of rescue.
Work
The offering and the doing of ordinary professional and domestic work as a path to holiness and a means of apostolate — the characteristic spirituality of the lay faithful, who are called to sanctify the world from within it.
Spiritual direction
The accompaniment of a soul on the path of the spiritual life by a wise and prudent guide.
Other
A friendship deliberately ordered to the holiness of both friends — one in which prayer, honesty and mutual accountability are part of the bond, and in which each wants the other's sanctity more than the other's approval.
Other
Keeping a brief written record of one's prayer — what was prayed with, what stirred, what was resisted — so that God's action can be recognized across weeks rather than judged in a single hour, and so that it can be brought to a director.
Spiritual reading
The steady, unhurried reading of the Fathers, the Doctors and proven spiritual writers as food for meditation and as a school of the interior life — distinct from lectio divina, which is the prayerful reading of Sacred Scripture itself.
Spiritual reading
Serious study undertaken as an act of worship and as a service to preaching — one of the pillars on which Dominican life rests, and summed up in the phrase contemplata aliis tradere: to hand on to others the fruits of contemplation.
Other
The practice of singing prayer rather than only saying it — in the liturgy first of all, where the Church's treasury of sacred music belongs, and then at home, where a small learned repertoire carries the faith through the seasons.
Mercy
The seven bodily services by which Christians meet Christ in the poor: to feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, visit the sick, visit the imprisoned, and bury the dead.
Other
The Salesian habit of offering each action to God at the moment of beginning it — a few words, repeated all day, by which ordinary occupations are consciously referred to him and the whole day becomes prayer.
Fasting
The abstention from food and drink required of anyone about to receive Holy Communion — a small bodily discipline by which the body itself says that this food is unlike other food.
Contemplative prayer
The practice of spending an hour in prayer before the Blessed Sacrament, keeping watch with the Lord as he asked of his disciples in the garden of Gethsemane: 'Could you not watch one hour with me?'
Contemplative prayer
The continual, rhythmic invocation of the holy Name of Jesus, a treasure of the Christian East: 'Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.'
Family
The daily blessing parents give their children — a sign of the cross traced on the forehead with a short invocation — by which the household's ordinary partings and bedtimes are placed under God's protection.
Silence
The deliberate making of room for quiet in an ordinary day — not as a technique but as the condition in which the Word of God can be heard and contemplative prayer becomes possible.
Silence
Withdrawing for a fixed period — a day, a weekend, a week or longer — into exterior and interior silence at a retreat house or monastery, under a director, in order to pray at length and to see one's life from a distance.
Other
A structured retreat in four Weeks composed by St Ignatius of Loyola, made either in thirty days of enclosed silence or, under his nineteenth annotation, spread over several months of daily prayer in the midst of ordinary life. Its purpose is to free the soul from disordered attachments and to seek and find God's will.
Mercy
The seven services rendered to the soul of one's neighbour: to counsel the doubtful, instruct the ignorant, admonish sinners, comfort the afflicted, forgive offences, bear patiently those who wrong us, and pray for the living and the dead.
Other
The month of prayer by which St Louis-Marie Grignion de Montfort prepares a soul to make the total consecration to Jesus Christ through the hands of Mary — twelve days of detachment from the spirit of the world, then three weeks of growing knowledge of self, of Mary, and of Jesus Christ.
Almsgiving
Giving a fixed and deliberate share of one's income to the Church and to the poor, decided in advance and given first rather than last — the ordinary form almsgiving takes in a wage economy.
Vocal prayer
Prayer made in words — spoken aloud or formed silently on the lips — in which body and soul together turn to God. The Catechism calls vocal prayer an essential element of the Christian life and the most accessible of the three expressions of prayer.
Vocation
The ordered process by which a Catholic seeks to know the state of life to which God calls them — marriage, priesthood, consecrated life, or the single life lived for the Kingdom — using prayer, direction, real information and the judgement of the Church.
