A Disciplined Life Supports Disciplined Prayer (S10EP09)

Do you ever sit down to pray, only to find your mind is restless, anxious, or pulled in a dozen different directions? In a world that offers instant gratification, it’s harder than ever to build the spiritual focus needed for deep prayer. We're told to "seek God," but our attachments often seek "consolations" instead.

This week, we dive into the practical and powerful Carmelite concept of mortification. Far from being an outdated practice, mortification is the spiritual equivalent of going to the gym. It’s the conscious, willed denial of our small, everyday attachments—from choosing the fruit snack you don't prefer to cutting off a "doom-scrolling" session. We explore how these tiny acts of self-denial build incredible spiritual muscle, killing self-will so you can become more docile and receptive to God in prayer.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• What mortification truly is (and what it isn't).
• Practical, small ways to practice mortification in your daily life.
• How building "spiritual muscle" directly combats distraction and agitation in your prayer time.
• Why a lack of mortification is often rooted in a deeper lack of hope in God, keeping us lukewarm.

Transcript

🎙️ Introduction: Building Spiritual Muscle

Hey everyone, welcome to this week's episode of Midnight Carmelite. This week we're going to be talking about how to seek God and not seek these consolations. We're to talk about a term called mortification and we're going to talk about what it is. And then we're going to talk about why you can integrate different mortifications in a small daily way that will help you build spiritual muscle. It's kind of like going to the gym. You're building spiritual muscle, and then how that helps you become focused and docile within prayer.

📖 What is Mortification?

So let's begin where we'll define mortification. Mortification simply is a conscious and willed denial of our appetites. And remember, appetites are things you have: certain types of food, certain types of entertainment, certain types of conversations, certain types of anything. Anything that's not God that you use for your own self-will outside of the will of God. So this would be an attachment and you want to mortify attachments.

🍇 A Practical Example: The Fruit Snacks

So, for example, let's say you have a bag of fruit snacks and in that bag of fruit snacks, there's blueberry flavor, strawberry flavor and mango flavor. Let's say that you like mango the least, you like strawberry the middle, you like blueberry the most. And let's say that you decide to do a small mortification. What could you do? What could you do for a small mortification with that type of situation when you like to snack on fruit snacks? Well, since you like blueberry the most, St. John of the Cross's advice is to always pick the least desirable rather than the most desirable. Go for the mango. Just take it for what it is and go for the mango.

🤔 Discerning Desires vs. Attachments

Pick the job that no one else wants to do. You don't even want to do. But do it. Consciously do it. And offer it to God. Because it's against what you want. Now you're going to say, "Doesn't God inspire my desires? Why should I always act against what I want?" Remember, there's a distinction between desires that spring from God that wouldn't lead to attachment, because God's willing you to do something, but then there's attachments which the origin of those desires is yourself and not God. So you have to be able, you have to discern that. No one can hand you a checklist and tell you what exactly is an attachment and what is a desire from God. That's a separate podcast that we can talk about how to distinguish that. And St. Ignatius is obviously helpful for that.

🎯 The Purpose: Freedom and Focus in Prayer

So this is an example of mortification. And so what mortification does is it'll build you up in such a way that you'll be able in prayer to not be distracted as much, not be as agitated and anxious because you've built up this muscle, for lack of a better term, of having the strength to go against what you want that stems from selfish desire rather than God's will. So when you're sitting in prayer loving God, your selfishness has been mortified, it has been killed, metaphorically speaking. Your self-will has died and then you are more free to love God and purely, so let him give you his love so that you may love him.

📱 Mortification in a Culture of Convenience

Mortification is challenging in today's society because we live in a place and time where it's very easy to get what we want. And when we say when we get what we want, we're saying it from a position of, "Why do I have to wait?" It's not good for mortification, the conditions. I'm not making the case that DoorDash is anti-spiritual life or grocery delivery or food delivery. I'm not saying that because they're not per se. However, they can due to their convenience be very easily subordinated to selfish desires. Same with using technology. Another modification would be to avoid doom scrolling. Use your phone in such a way or your tablet or your computer where you scroll through social media or websites you enjoy, cut it off, mortify it.

✝️ A Fundamental Necessity for Growth

This is something that is fundamental to growth in the spiritual life. There is no way around it. You cannot have a robust spiritual life without active mortification. They'll tell you, "You may"... no, there's no way around this metaphysically. There's no way around why, because think of it this way. Imagine, I'm a guy. If my wife ever asked me, Bishop Sheen talks about this, if my wife ever asked me, "How do I know that I'm the one woman for you? Why? How do I know that when you say you want to be with me forever and that I'm the woman for you, if you've never tried dating all the other women," I'd say it's simply because I chose you. See, by choosing her freely in love, there's a metaphysical negation of all the other possibilities. So back to the fruit snacks. By choosing mango, you have negated the possibility of choosing strawberry and blueberry, even though you may prefer blueberry. Or you may prefer another one. Obviously, this is a hypothetical example. You are choosing the least desired out of love for God.

🧘 The Mind of a Mortified Person

So just remember that this week when you're looking and thinking about mortifications, and a mortified person will have a mind that will not be accustomed to some sort of constant indulgence outside of prayer. So that when you are in prayer, you will be focused, docile, ready to learn from the Lord, recollected. It needs to be there.

💔 The Deeper Problem: A Lack of Hope

And finally, I want to say one more thing about mortification. This is probably in our culture, the hardest part of the spiritual life. It's almost absurd by cultural standards to say, "I'm going to willfully deny myself something that I can easily have reasonably in front of me that I want." And I think there's a deeper problem here that stems from—and get ready for this one—it stems from lack of hope in God.

🔥 The Danger of Being Lukewarm

So what do I mean by that? When you look at disagreements between people, and let's say, hypothetically, that on one side, there's a clear answer that one side is objectively correct and the other isn't. If the side that's wrong—and I understand, I want to just be clear, there are situations where it's both-and, like some sides have partial truths. Like I'm just trying to make an example here, so I just want to be clear. This is not generally applied. It's actually rare with fallen human nature, I would say. But let's for the sake of example continue. So you have one side that's standing on objective truth. It's true. It's thick. Yes, people may have feelings about that truth. They may not like it. They may think, "Well, I don't know if it's that." That's a separate question. We're simply making the claim that that side has objectively nailed the reality of it. The other side says, "No, I don't think that's the reality," despite the lack of objectivity, really the subjectivity, meaning they just don't like it that way. If in that battle, we'll call it, you say, "I'm going to side with the objective truth side part of the time, and then I'm going to side with the other side in order to conciliate, make them feel better," what you're doing is you're giving hope to the side that's wrong. In other words, what you're doing is you're saying, "They see you siding and it feeds the flames of what they hope for." But we've already established what they hope for is objectively wrong. So now you're in a conundrum. And so without going too far into this metaphor, this is what we deal with in the spiritual life. Every time you give into your attachments and you do not mortify them, you do not stop their hope of completion, you are pulling yourself away from God because God and sin are contraries as St. John of the Cross teaches. It's a fundamental reality of who we are, our reality, and what we're made for. We are made for God. And so if you give in some of the time and you don't give in some of the time, you're lukewarm by definition, because God can't be wrong. So giving into these attachments, it's lukewarm.

👋 Conclusion

OK, this has gone on longer than I anticipated. We will pick this up next time, two weeks from now. And I'll see you then. Take care.