The spiritual life is an awakened life. Body, soul, mind, heart and spirit are elevated and transformed by living in the Divine Will. We must not substitute thought for living fully or ideas for action. Solitude is much more than the act of navel gazing, as the old saying goes.

In order to grow holistically, we must experience the new in the old, and the old in the new, making each moment a novel experience.

Prayer is an act of solitude, but is rendered moot if, at the moment of prayer, we have so little confidence in God’s will that we plan our own answer rather than surrendering to Divine Guidance. Surrender takes great courage, a leap into the unknown.

Deus caritas est. God is love. Jesus’s ministry rested on this leap of faith. The truth of these words can be perfected by gratitude, rejoicing in the experience of the reality that God is love and therefore so are you. The kingdom of God is within you and within me.

Indifference cannot coexist in the spiritual life, a coexistence between honest gratitude and mere pretending to love wholeheartedly all things in Gods creation.

These days, gratitude has become a mere mental exercise, a word formula with the promise of lifting us from the craziness of the world.

The love of God is in everything. The first and last breath and all breaths in between are gifts the divine has for us. Every moment is proof of the grace bestowed from sources only known to us through the practice of solitude.

Gratitude practice in this manner is never unresponsive, giving way to the wonders of goodness that surround us all. OM