Uprooting the Attachment to Spiritual Consolations in Prayer (S10, EP08)

Is your prayer life more about seeking good feelings from God than seeking God Himself? Many of us fall into the subtle trap of spiritual gluttony, where our focus shifts from a loving conversation with our Creator to a self-centered quest for spiritual consolations. This attachment to feelings, rather than to God, can leave us feeling restless, frustrated, and ultimately stunt our spiritual growth.

In this episode, we explore the vices of spiritual avarice (the constant need for new devotions) and spiritual gluttony (the desire to consume good spiritual feelings). Using the powerful analogy of a human friendship, we break down how seeking the "consolations of God instead of the God of consolations" corrupts the purpose of prayer and prevents the deep, authentic relationship He desires to have with us.

In this episode, you will learn:

• The crucial difference between spiritual greed and spiritual gluttony, and how to spot them in your own life.
• Why chasing spiritual "highs" and good feelings ultimately leads to restlessness and frustration, not peace.
• How to transform your prayer from a self-centered pursuit into a genuine, loving conversation with God.
• A practical first step you can take this week to identify and uproot selfishness in your prayer, fostering a relationship built on faith, not feelings.

TRANSCRIPT

The Nature of Spiritual Greed and Gluttony

Hey everyone, welcome to this episode of Midnight Carmelite. In this episode we're going to tackle this core vice of spiritual gluttony. I think it goes hand in hand with spiritual avarice or greed, so let me talk about spiritual greed first and then we'll move into spiritual gluttony. Spiritual greed is essentially constantly needing new devotions, new books, new ways to pray. You're never settled. There's always more. Obviously, you could see the analogy with material greed. A materially greedy person would constantly be accumulating money. They would not share that money with anyone else. They would be simply focusing on what they want, in the sense of accumulating money just for the sake of money. So money becomes an end, not a means. You end up in a situation where the person never uses the money for the will of God in their life. It's like Scrooge McDuck; they just sit there piling and swimming in their money. What good is the money unless it's used for good?

I think it's important here with spiritual avarice, it's a spiritual vice that blocks us from achieving a set path to persevere on because we're treating the prayer, the devotions, the books, the method as the end, rather than our goal being God. We are focused on the consolations that the accumulation of those things in spiritual greed sets. We end up just spinning our wheels because you're not actually going anywhere, you're just concentrating on means, not going towards an end, a terminus.

With spiritual greed, as you're accumulating all these things, you're obviously restless because you're not going towards God, where our hearts are restless until they rest in him, as Augustine says. As you're accumulating these things in the greed sense, there are feelings associated with it. For example, maybe some particular devotion has certain feelings associated with it. When you don't have those feelings and there's an emotional dryness, you say, "I don't want to pray," or "I don't want to do this." Whatever the case may be, what ends up happening is you are attached to the consolations that these devotions, books, and methods are giving you, rather than to God. Again, you're seeking the consolations of God, not the God of consolations. This corrupts prayer. If you think about it like a conversation with a friend, let's say you're paying attention only to the gift the friend is bringing you, not to the friend himself or herself. Obviously, the friend is going to be like, "You don't really care about me. You just care about the gift."

Their Corrupting Influence on Prayer and Faith

Then it'll go further with how they make you feel. Maybe you're talking with a friend and they say something that cuts a little bit because it's true, and they say it in a charitable way, willing your good. They're not cutting to harm you or to be aggressive. As an aside, that's an important distinction: friendship is built on trust such that a friend will believe all things, hope all things, endure all things, as St. Paul says. If they hear a bad thing about their friend, they'll say, "I've known that person for a long time. I've never seen this. Let me go talk to them about this and see what's what." A spiritually gluttonous person may say in that case, "Well, that person's made me feel bad in the past about something, so therefore this person saying that person's bad..." Anyway, you can go into the whole social dynamics. The point is that in these person-to-person relationships, a spiritual glutton wants to feel good; they want to be affirmed for the wrong reasons. We all need affirmation as human beings in a community, but what I mean is it's an excess of it. That becomes the end, not the means. In other words, you don't really care about growing in virtue; you just care about the feelings. That's spiritual gluttony.

Ultimately, what is going on here is that spiritual gluttony is this self-centered desire to consume these good feelings from God rather than to give ourselves to him in pure faith, rather than to trust. Back to the friendship example: you heard something that doesn't give you good feelings. If you trust your friend, you're gonna say, "Hey, what's up?" and you'll stand by your friend if there's no reason to doubt them, even if the feelings aren't good, because your friendship transcends feeling. If it's simply about feeling good, it's a very shallow relationship. This attachment, in the case of God, corrupts prayer. It makes it about us. We're sitting there essentially moving past divine intimacy, past the real meat of prayer—the conversation with God in love—and you're kind of jumping over that and going to petition. "I want this, I want that," because that's really what this is. It's a warped petition. You want the good feelings that God gives. Now, this isn't to say that good feelings from God are bad. Obviously, they're not. But if the sole goal of prayer is the spiritual consolations, that's what we don't want.

There's another thing about this: making it about us causes frustration in our prayer. Even if someone says, "Well, I'll just go for the consolations," you're still going to be frustrated in the end because you don't have God. Again, our hearts are restless until we rest in him. We need to realize that just because it feels good doesn't mean that we're progressing in prayer if we are simply focused and attached to those feelings and not to the God of consolations. In other words, if he pulled them away from us, like in the dark night, do we still show up? Are we still good friends? Are we still faithful? Do we have that constancy? Do we have that determined determination?

The Remedy: Uprooting Selfishness in Prayer

We have to work on curing this, frankly, addiction because it's in all of us. Due to our fallen nature, it's very difficult to pull out of this without God's help and cooperating with him; we cannot pull out of this because our fallen nature makes it about ourselves. So this week, what we should be thinking about is trying to identify one place where you think you're seeking consolations over that loving conversation with God, where you're bringing a selfishness to prayer, so that you can uproot that and then move forward and grow in your relationship with God, not in how God makes you feel. I think this is super important. Thanks for listening and see you next time.