When your spiritual "effort" becomes a form of thrashing that only deepens the exhaustion.

We often mistake spiritual activity for spiritual progress. When the sensible consolations of prayer vanish, our natural human instinct is to "panic-buy" our way back into God’s presence through more rosaries, more retreats, and more mental strain. However, this is not a lack of effort; it is a misunderstanding of the metaphysics of the Light. By virtue of your Baptism, you are already in the Light—but an "Excess of Light" can feel like total darkness. The resentment you feel toward a "broken contract" with God is the signal that you are trying to navigate a new landscape with an old, broken map.

  • The Myth of Spiritual Volume: Why adding more vocal prayers during a period of dryness is often a defense mechanism against the actual surgery God is performing.
  • The Metaphysics of Baptism: Understanding your permanent mark as an adopted child of God and why you cannot "fall out" of His light, even when it feels blinding or absent.
  • Productive vs. Unproductive Mortification: How to stop "spiritual thrashing" and pivot toward disciplined detachment from specific habits (like doom-scrolling) rather than mental exhaustion in prayer.
  • The Unique Dialogue: Why universal prescriptions often fail and the necessity of returning to the life of Christ in the Gospels as the "Final Word" of your direction.

You have the concepts, but you need the tool. When the audio ends and the silence returns, don't go back to "trying harder." Use the "5-Minute Prayer Reset" to stabilize your interior life and prepare for the Divine Physician.

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TRANSCRIPT

Hey everyone, welcome to this week's episode of Midnight Carmelite. This week, I want to talk about the myth of trying harder in prayer and the metaphysics of it. What I mean by that is why, when you try harder, does it not feel like you're getting the result you're looking for? I want to start first with the normal feelings we have when we're praying or trying to grow in the spiritual life. We feel exhaustion, resentment, and a feeling that God has broken the deal or a contract. It's just how we feel as human beings. So then we react, and that leads to these results, kind of like a feedback loop. When we don't have the sensible consolation, good feelings, or easy focus, we panic. We say, "Oh my gosh, I'm doing it wrong," and so we add more rosaries, buy more books, and attend more retreats. We intensify our mental efforts, trying to will our way back into the light of God.

By virtue of baptism, you are permanently marked. We renew our baptismal promises every year and need to recognize that baptism involves being brought into the life of Christ as adopted sons and daughters of God. This means you're always in the light, but what you desire or what you're pointing yourself at can make that light blinding and painful, or it can be such an excess that you experience it as darkness. The problem is that if you follow this kind of spiritual thrashing where you're flailing around, you're going to be exhausted and feel resentment. To understand the dark night and the metaphysics of the spiritual life, we have to remember that there are two aspects: there's what you do, and then there's what God does to you. At the beginning, what you do—such as mortification—is what you need to do to get the ball rolling because there are things you're attached to that are keeping you from growing in union with God.

It is not simply a binary where there is all sin or no sin, or all God and no God. You have entered the life of grace by virtue of baptism, but now you need to live out those promises by disciplining yourself. You may end up in this thrashing where you think activity equals good, but that's not necessarily true. The key is to focus on where your attachments are and then try hard on those. Look for possible areas of mortification, like one fewer snack a day, skipping a TV show for spiritual reading, or avoiding doom scrolling on the internet. These things discipline you. There is nothing wrong with a TV per se, but we are responsible for the use of these instruments.

God is always trying to bring you to him to grow in union with him, so you have to identify those spiritual things you believe God is calling you to. It depends on where you are. For example, some people have trouble with imaginative prayer. Ignatius of Loyola isn't giving a universal prescription because prayer is a conversation with God. Just as you interact differently with different friends because the relationship is unique, God calls each person to something distinct based on their vocation. You may not be called to attend more retreats; you may be called to focus on a specific spiritual practice. If you don't have a spiritual director, follow the life of Christ in the Gospels, as John of the Cross suggests. That is the final Word of God. That concludes this dialogue about spiritual thrashing. I'm going to branch out a bit in the next one, and I'll see you next time.