Practical Signs: Rising Spiritual Life and Growing Maturity

I started my career in quality measurement. One of the fundamental maxims of the field is to set SMART goals that help you and your team know which direction your plans, projects, and programs are really going. 

From MOBE, LLC ("Put your goals within reach")

Advancing spiritually isn't so cut and dry. People of good will experience periods of both consolation and desolation, closeness to God and separation, ecstasy and trials. The three-fold path that St. John of the Cross pioneered includes a repeating cycle with purgative, illuminative, and unitive phases.

The work of the Holy Spirit rising in your life is often accompanied by the following practical, discernable signs (adapted from Eastern Wisdom for Western Minds by Victor M. Parachin):

• Looking and asking for guidance concerning spiritual growth.
• Finding an appropriate church community
• Reading inspirational or challenging Christian books
• Learning from gifted spiritual teachers, including a regular confessor, spiritual director, trusted friend, and saints who model heroic virtue in ways that speak to your life and unique personal mission 
• Experiencing the "condition of peace and joy" and bringing it to the troubled, distressed, and hurting (i.e., spiritual and corporal works of mercy)
• Living and acting more from interior convictions than to gain the approval of others. (This will be easier for "Questioner" personality types than "Obligers" in Gretchen Rubin's 4 Tendencies framework). See below. 

The "4 Tendencies" Personality Types
Created by Gretchen Rubin

• Forgiving others more easily when they hurt you -- a spouse, a parent, a friend, a co-worker
• Self-discipline in matters small and large
• Waking up many days feeling grateful--even very, very grateful--for no reason other than the opportunity to enjoy another day. 

Sunrise for the Restless Child

No Closed Doors

In one daily homily in March 2015, (Pope) Francis pointedly asked Christians who do not act mercifully toward brethren who have fallen away but want to reenter the Church community who they think they are. "Who are you who shuts the door of your heart to a man, a woman who wants to improve, to return back to the people of God, because the Holy Spirit has stirred his or her heart?" the pontiff asked.

The Church, he said, is "the home of Jesus and Jesus welcomes--but not only welcomes, (he) goes to find people." 

Joshua J. McElwee

10 Things Pope Francis Wants You to Know about the Family

 

Our Brothers' Keeper,
Southern Illinois

From Magnificat Year of Mercy Companion, Jubilee Holy Doors

• The Door to Our Hearts: Calls us to open our heart to Christ. Like Mary, who bore him deep within her body, Christ gives us the grace to open our hearts to the conversion, unity, and justice of the Kingdom of God.
• The Door to Our Homes: (C)hallenge(s) (us) to find ways to open the doors of our homes to our families, our friends, and all who need us.
• The Door to the Churches: The silent witness to all the moments of our lives. It is the door welcoming the new born child who years later is married by the priest and finally the witness at the end of life as the body of the deceased Christian is received into the Church. The Church door is the door to salvation, the portal of the Kingdom of God. Christ himself told us that He is the door to the Kingdom of Heaven.

Christ not only invites us to enter the Kingdom of Heaven through Him, He even leaves the keys to his Apostles, assuring them that “whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven (Mt. 16:19).”