The Only Metric That Matters: Is Your Prayer Changing How You Love? (S10, EP07)

Do you ever wonder if you're actually growing spiritually, or just going through the motions? It's easy to rely on good feelings in prayer as a sign of progress, but what happens when those feelings disappear? How can you be certain you're making real progress in your relationship with God when your interior life feels dry?

In this episode, we tackle one of the most crucial questions in the spiritual life: What is the one true metric for holiness? Moving beyond the unreliable measure of emotions, we explore the timeless wisdom of St. Teresa of Avila to uncover a practical, observable standard for your spiritual growth. Discover why your daily interactions with others are the most accurate reflection of your love for God and learn how to begin assessing your spiritual health with honesty and hope, rather than self-condemnation.

In this episode, you will learn:

• Why feelings are a deceptive measure of holiness and what you should focus on instead.
• How St. Teresa of Avila's teaching on charity provides a clear, actionable metric for your spiritual life.
• Practical, diagnostic questions you can ask yourself to establish a "spiritual baseline" and identify concrete areas for growth.
• How to reframe your faults not as signs of failure, but as essential data that reveals a clear path forward in loving God and neighbor.

TRANSCRIPT

The Only Metric That Matters

Hey everyone, welcome to this episode of Midnight Carmelite. In this episode, we're going to talk about the only metric that matters. As a quick review, we established in the previous episode that you can't rely on good feelings as a measure of your holiness. So then how do you know that you're actually growing spiritually? What's the only metric that matters? Before I answer that question, let's just think it through a little bit. When you're dealing with God, who is infinite, and you sit down to pray, you can begin to gain self-knowledge by examining yourself. Gratitude is an easy example. You could have someone who says, "Well, thank goodness I was here," which is obviously wrong; you're just making it about yourself. You could have a second person who says, "Thank goodness I prayed to God and it turned out the way I wanted." In this case, God's involved, but it's also really about what you wanted, treating God like a gumball machine.

Now, that doesn't mean that when you pray to God for what you want and God gives it to you, you're necessarily inserting yourself. It could be a desire that God wants you to put in front of him. Jesus does say, "Ask and you shall receive, seek and you will find," and to bring petitions before the Father. But what we're trying to see here is that your petitions, when you're really spiritually mature, are ultimately not about you. They are going to be about God, God's will, and his providence. You're going to say, "I'm just happy God is known and loved through what I prayed for, not what I wanted." That's a key distinction here.

Understanding Charity and Love of Neighbor

So what's the measure of God being known and loved? Well, it's charity. But where do we enact our charity? Mostly, we do it with God in prayer. That's the whole contemplative life—the life of prayer. It's loving God, thinking on God, and nourishing that love of God in our prayer time and over the course of our day. The key is that we're looking for the authenticity of your love. What's an easy way for you to see it? St. Teresa of Avila gives us the answer: love of neighbor. Now, here comes another qualification. There are ways that people love their neighbor where they flatten it; it's horizontal without the vertical. It's a kind of worldly thing where they take, for example, the Gospel's teaching on loving the poor, but they do it in a way that doesn't actually come from a proper interior disposition in relation to the virtue of charity and their relationship with God.

There's a famous clip on William F. Buckley's Firing Line where Mother Teresa is there, and Buckley asks how people can give money to the sisters. Mother Teresa says, "I don't want you to give money. I want you to come and touch the poor." There's this back and forth, and she insists, "I want you to share the joy of loving and to touch the poor." That clip always speaks to me because that's what it is. Loving your neighbor is sharing the joy of loving with them from your relationship with God, to bring God to them to be known and loved for their good and that alone. When you give to the poor, that will be the informing framework.

Establishing a Baseline for Spiritual Growth

How do you actually measure that in your own life? This is the exact reason I created the 5-minute prayer reset; it's a simple framework to help you establish that baseline. When you take that five minutes of silence, you can ask yourself, "Am I more patient with my family?" Whoever you deal with—your spouse, family, people at work, friends—are you being patient with them? Another question is, "Do you serve people without seeking recognition?" In other words, are you making a big deal about what you do, wanting to make sure people know that you were the source? Do you hold your tongue when you're tempted to gossip? You start to see these sins and imperfections and can see which ones are habitual. That's where you're going to tell how you're growing. The key is we're establishing a baseline right now. We're not here to beat ourselves up and say, "I'm a failure, I'm going to hell."

When you take that time in prayer, you're going to sit there and say, "Okay, this is my baseline," which is a good thing because it means you finally know where you are. You have some data to say, "Okay, I haven't been that patient with my family in these ways. I haven't been serving without recognition here. I haven't been holding my tongue with gossip here." That's good. It's not a time to beat yourself up; it's a massive victory because now you know. You have a metric to move away from how you feel as the measure of your holiness and toward the difficult daily work of charity. This is about making God known and loved by loving your neighbor, because that's something you can see. That's the other reason St. Teresa of Avila talked about it. The questions I mentioned are not exclusive. Ask yourself tons of questions. For example, were you angry at your children or your spouse? Do you desire to teach not because you believe God is calling you to it, but because you want the recognition of the position? This reframing is going to be so great to help us because now we have something that allows us to grow.

All these things you're doing where you're failing in love of neighbor are really attachments to yourself. You have to mortify them—i.e., get rid of them. You have to say, "All right, I need to go in the opposite direction of what I normally do," and that's going to train you to be better. Any small attachment is super harmful to your progress in virtue because you'll be engaging in vicious behavior, which is not conducive to growing in virtue.

So that's where we're at. And again, just remember that you're not bad; we're establishing a baseline. That's the key. With this baseline, now you know. Now you have a clear path to grow. We'll explore this more next time. See you then.