Dear Parishioners,

I spoke last week in my homily about building a relationship with the Holy Spirit in prayer. That is where we meet and get to know Him. So I want to encourage all of you to continue working in your spiritual endeavors to deepen your friendship with Him. I am sure that some of you have developed a good prayer life and are well on the way to building this relationship. Others may feel like their spiritual life is stagnant or insufficient for the task and still others may have never heard the terms “prayer life, spiritual life and/or interior life.”

Prayer is the greatest and most serious undertaking any human being can hope to do. We are embodied souls and most of our spiritual faculties (e.g. desire, love, ability to plan and foresee) are based upon our bodily senses (sight, taste, touch, smell and hearing). However, we do have some even higher faculties that do not depend on these: our will, memory, reason and intelligence. Our souls are our immaterial components that do not die when the body does. They live on, with all of their proper faculties. It is these “higher faculties” that we evoke for our spiritual endeavors. The first and foremost of these is prayer and the most important aspect of prayer is mental prayer or meditation. The recitation of vocal or wrote prayers at certain defined intervals during the day is a very good and beneficial thing, but to truly reach a wonderful state of perfection, we necessarily must incorporate mental prayer. It is the hardest thing for us to do as human beings, but also brings the greatest positive results to our lives and the lives of those around us. Therefore, we will begin in my next few articles to explore it and learn more about it.