Read the following this morning in the book The Holy Longing and really rang true for me in terms of what gets in the way of my faith - simple stuff, that is on the surface not bad:
To have a living faith today one must at some point in his or her life make a deep, private act of faith. That act, which [Karl Rahner] equates with becoming a mystic, is unfortunately itself very difficult because the very forces that have helped erode our cultural, communal faith also work against us making this private act of faith.Tags: ,
What are these anti-faith forces? They are not the product of some conscious conspiracy by godlessness. They are, instead, all of those things, good and bad, within us and around us that tempt us away from prayer, from self-sacrifice, from being more communal, from being willing to sweat blood in a garden in order to keep our integrity and commitments, and from mustering up the time and courage to enter deeply into our own souls. Hence they are not abstract, foreign forces. They live in the house with us and are as comfortable to us as a well-worn shoe. What blocks faith is that myriad of innocent things within our ordinary, normal lives which precisely make our lives comfortable: our laziness, our self-indulgence, our ambition, our restlessness, our envy, our refusal to live in tension, our consumerism, our greed for things and experience, our need to have a certain lifestyle, our busyness and overextension, our perpetual tiredness, and our obsession with celebrities, and our perpetual distraction with sports, sit-coms and talk shows. These are the anti-mystical forces of our time.
--Fr Ronald Rolheiser
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