Category: Spiritual Exercises
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Grades of Prayer
1. The lowest grade is that of petitionary prayer for material benefits. One asks for mundane benefits whether for oneself, or, as in the case of intercessionary prayer, for another. In its crassest forms it borders on idolatry and superstition. A skier who prays for snow, for example, makes of God a supplier of mundane…
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Control Your Mind!
A thought arises. Interrogate it: Whither? To what purpose? The climber tests each foothold before putting his weight on it. So should we test each thought before living in it and losing ourselves in it. Why? Because the seed of word and deed is in the thought. To control thought is to control the seed…
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Dis-tracted
We are pulled towards the world, towards property, progeny, position, power, popularity, pleasure. But in some of us the pull toward the spirit is stronger and will triumph — in the end. Meanwhile we are pulled apart, dis-tracted, torn between lust for the world and love of the spirit. This is 'par for the course'…
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Great Minds and Small Matters
A great mind is not upset by a small matter. But it is only with difficulty that we avoid the vexation of the petty. The inference that our minds are paltry seems inescapable. Those who have had a glimpse of the mind's depth-dimension know that there is something wrong with remaining on the plane of…
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Gratitude: A Thanksgiving Homily
We need spiritual exercises just as we need physical, mental, and moral exercises. A good spiritual exercise, and easy to boot, is daily recollection of just how good one has it, just how rich and full one's life is, just how much is going right despite annoyances and setbacks which for the most part are…
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Faith and Prayer: The Case of Ron Franz
One of the minor characters of Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild is the old man to whom Krakauer gave the name 'Ron Franz.' He was 80 years old when his and Christopher McCandless's paths crossed. McCandless made indelible impressions on the people he met, but he affected Franz more than anyone else, so much so…
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Milton Munitz on Boundless Existence, Cosmic Spirituality, and the Meaning of Life
The last book Milton K Munitz published before his death in 1995 is entitled Does Life Have a Meaning? (Prometheus, 1993). It is a fitting capstone to his distinguished career and exemplifies the traits for which I admire him: he is clear and precise like a good analytic philosopher, but he evinces the spiritual depth…
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On Repetition
Anyone can see the need for repetition in physical training. One push-up is as good as none. But one hundred per day, every day, will do your upper body a world of good. People are less likely to appreciate the necessity of repetition in mental and spiritual training. Thus liberals often foolishly rail against 'rote…
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Blogging as Exercitium Spirituale
And you thought blogging could only be a shameless expression of vanity? But a quotidian assembling in this newfangled medium of reminders, admonitions, maxims and the like, performed in the right spirit, is no less a spiritual exercise than the daily jottings of a Marcus Aurelius.
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Philo Judaeus’ List of Spiritual Exercises Amended
1. Research (zetesis)2. Thorough investigation (skepsis)3. Reading (anagnosis)4. Listening (akroasis)5. Attention (prosoche)6. Self-mastery (enkrateia)7. Indifference to indifferent things.8. Blogging. List taken, except for #8, from Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life (Basil Blackwell, 1995), p. 84.