Seeking God Ten Times More: Desire, Finitude, and Prayer in Your State in Life

Show Notes:

In this episode of Midnight Carmelite, we continue exploring the interior architecture of the soul and what it means to cultivate the indwelling presence of God in our daily lives. Drawing upon the urgent prophetic exhortation of Baruch 4:28—"For as it was your mind to go astray from God: so, being returned, seek him ten times more"—we diagnose the inseparable link between human action and interior desire. What you do in your day-to-day existence is inexorably defined by what you truly desire. Just as our worldly commitments to physical fitness, financial security, or career ambition effortlessly command our time, focus, and energy, our desire for God will inevitably manifest in seeking His presence.

Yet a pervasive misconception plagues many sincere seekers: conflating the seeking of God with a rigid, uniform measure of clock-time or imposing monastic expectations onto every soul. We dismantle this spiritual trap by examining the reality of creaturely finitude and the theological concept of state in life (status vitae). The manner in which a soul seeks God must correspond to their vocation. While a Carmelite monk or nun devotes long hours to silent contemplation, a Dominican tertiary’s time is ordered toward the fruits of contemplation in preaching and teaching (contemplata aliis tradere). A parish priest or pastor carries the canonical obligation of chanting the Liturgy of the Hours amidst pastoral administration. In stark contrast, a mother herding young children from dawn to dusk cannot sit for an uninterrupted hour of quiet prayer; yet her fleeting arrow-prayers, cries of thanksgiving, and patient sacrifices throughout a chaotic day constitute authentic, sanctifying prayer.

Ultimately, the prophet’s call to seek God "ten times as hard" is not a legalistic burden to multiply hours beyond our human capacity, but a radical challenge to our priorities. In our fallen condition, we unthinkingly expend tenfold vigilance, ingenuity, and passion pursuing our self-will and creaturely comforts, leaving God only the exhausted leftovers of our day. The ten times is about priority: seeking to place God first within the unique duties and limitations of our state in life. By discerning where we invest our deepest energies, we learn to reorder our desires, transforming our daily obligations into an unceasing encounter with the living God.

Key Topics Discussed:

• Baruch 4:28 and the tenfold pursuit: redirecting the vigor once spent wandering toward seeking God.
• The metaphysics of desire: why what we spend our time on directly reveals what our heart treasures.
• The danger of spiritual comparison: why seeking God cannot be reduced to uniform duration or monastic quotas.
• Finitude and state in life (status vitae): contrasting the Carmelite cloister, Dominican active-contemplative charism, and pastoral ministry.
• Sanctity in the domestic trenches: why the brief, interrupted prayers of parents with young children are true prayer.
• The Liturgy of the Hours: canonical duty for clergy and religious versus prudent spiritual discernment for the laity.
• The "ten times" reordering: confronting the aggressive pursuit of worldly ambitions and placing God first in daily life.

TRANSCRIPT

Hello there, and welcome to this week's episode of Midnight Carmelite.

This week, I want to keep going on this notion of how we prepare and deal with God dwelling within us.

One of the things that stands out to me is in Baruch. It says something to the effect where God says, "You strayed from me by your own will. Now turn back to me and search ten times as hard," or something to that effect.

And if you look today at your own life, it's very easy to see that what you do—meaning your day-to-day daily life—is often defined by what you desire. What you spend your time on is what you desire.

For example, if you desire health, you'll spend time on dieting and exercise. I know this is an overused example, but it's an easy one. If you desire money, you'll spend a lot of time trying to make money. If you desire God, you'll spend a lot of time seeking after His presence.

Now, to be clear—and this is a common misconception—the depth in the sense of finitude that someone seeks God, or the actions that people do in seeking God, may be different for everyone else.

For example, I know someone who is discerning the Third Order Dominicans. I'm not a Third Order Dominican, but this person tells me they're in the aspirancy. This person was saying that they're called to preach and teach. So they don't do as much depth in the prayer life as, let's say, Carmelites do, because their finitude, their time, is called to preach and teach. In other words, from their prayer they preach and teach.

Now, that's a religious order—a third order religious, lay members of a religious order. But just for lay people, this is helpful, I think. Most lay people—let's say you're married or single, you have a job of some kind or some sort of work, you live somewhere, you have friends, and you have your family nearby or far away depending—you have to balance all these things. They have to come together in some way to unify.

And the same I would argue with pastors. You get assigned somewhere, you are meeting new people, you're trying to figure out the character and culture and what's going on in your parish. All these things involve seeking God. It's just a matter of how you order things that's going to tip the scales.

Let's use a lay example first. We are all called to pray. And if we truly desire God, we will spend time to pray. We will try and find Him. We always have time for some sort of prayer. Even the simple "Thank you" to God and you get back to work.

Mothers understand this, especially if you have young children. They are running around trying to "move the herd," so to speak, and they have people asking them for things all the time: "Mom, I need this. Mom, I need that. Mom, I need this. Mom, I need that." The mother doesn't have time to do one hour of contemplative prayer, maybe in the morning. A lot of saints throughout the Church advise praying early in the morning because you haven't started the day yet; you haven't accumulated the pains and problems and cares and those types of things. But even then, a mother needs to sleep and eat and rest, because they're human, right?

And so even small, little prayers in that woman's life with the kids is prayer. But they're obviously not going to be the same as a Carmelite monk or nun, right? But they're both praying.

My point with all this is: seeking after God, we tend to conflate seeking with time. We tend to say, "Well, if I don't spend a half an hour with God, I'm bad." Maybe, maybe not. It depends on your state in life.

For example, again, if you're a lay religious, or a pastor or a priest, you're bound to say the Liturgy of the Hours. You're bound. That's a time—you have to do that. But for a regular lay person, should you say the Liturgy of the Hours? That's your spiritual discernment. You have to figure that out. You have to figure it out with your spiritual director or on your own.

These are all things we need to think about because if our desire is for God, and as Baruch says, we should be seeking Him ten times as hard, we're often seeking ten times as hard other things that we want for ourselves. We're not seeking to get God in there first. That's the ten times.

And so I think this is really important, and it's worth meditating on the next two weeks. Sitting here saying: where am I putting the ten times the effort to seek God? Am I really doing that?

I think that's important. Anyway, see you next time.