How Do I Begin to Live the Spiritual Life?

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How Do I Begin to Live the Spiritual Life? (Getting to know and listen to God)

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How do I begin to live the spiritual life?
How did you learn to tie your shoes, feed yourself, say ‘please' and ‘thank you'?
You learned from someone else.

To begin the Spiritual Life, we need to do the same thing. That is what brings you here to this web page and that is what has been happening in the Spiritual Life for millennia.

The Spiritual Life is a relationship between us and an outside Spirit. It is a Spirit that is much more than our little spirits within us. It is a powerful life giving Spirit called ‘The Holy Spirit.' And although much joy may have been robbed from your previous introduction to the Holy Spirit, let us learn to tie our spiritual shoes one more time.

It is doing what does not come naturally to us that begins the spiritual life. We need to lose control of ourselves and focus on another. The spiritual life begins when we start to focus on God instead of ourselves. And since we have been consumed by our "information age" with talking to ourselves, how do we learn to talk with a powerful, mysterious and inward filling spirit like God?

We learn from those who have spoken to God before.
How do we do such a thing? We first begin to set aside a time everyday to listen to God. You already did that last week. You set aside a time for God. Then we begin to learn how God let others talk to him.

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Article Highlights

Begin a Spiritual Life by setting a time for God everyday.

Read a Psalm or portion of a Psalm and let it soak into us.

Pay attention to how the writer spoke to God.

Know that we can talk with God like this, too.

Assignment: Write down the phrase that stuck with you on a sheet of paper and carry it with you throughout the day. Look at it at 9am, 12n, 3pm, 6pm and 8pm for extra credit.

To learn more about the Psalms, click on the continued article link.

To learn about chanting/meditation click on the Dig Deeper link after the continued article.

The Psalms are a collection of song/prayers. I go through the Psalms every thirty days. For a beginner, just read as many or as much of one psalm you can a day. Begin your time with one psalm. Monks all over the world are chanting the psalms nearly every three hours during a day. And you can lose yourself in the feeling a psalm gives you. Read it slowly and reflect on the words that touch your heart.

These songs, in poem form, were given to us by people who had a long standing relationship with God. And they are filled with emotions that are similar to emotions we have everyday–we are double crossed by an enemy, we are rejoicing at a windfall of some kind, we are angry at those around us, we have settled a dispute, we are horribly misunderstood, we are in deep intimacy with God, we are lost and alone.

Because the Psalms are poetry, they speak mostly of how people feel when they are talking with God. They do not always reflect how God acts in the world. They mainly tell us how much latitude we have in speaking with the God who called us to ‘get spiritual'.

These poem songs are filled with emotions that are similar to emotions we have everyday–we are double crossed by an enemy, we are rejoicing at a windfall of some kind, we are angry at those around us, we have settled a dispute, we are horribly misunderstood, we are in deep intimacy with God, we are lost and alone.

So, for the second week we are going to begin to hand over control of our spiritual lives to God by reading as many Psalms or as much of a Psalm as our meditation time permits. We will read a Psalm and focus on a word or phrase which will see us through our day.

Assignment: The assignment is for you to read a Psalm, or a portion of a Psalm*, everyday at your time you set aside. Read slowly with purpose. Meditate on the phrase that expresses how you want to talk with God today. Write it on a slip of paper and carry it with you today. Look at it throughout the day.

Extra Credit: If you look at the phrase, word or whatever you wrote down at 9am, 12n, 3pm, 6pm and 8pm, you get extra credit. Check on Dig Deeper to find out why.

*Psalm 119, in particular, is a lot to read in one sitting. If you are up to it, go ahead, but remember we need to be patient with ourselves and take time to get into a Spiritual Life.

Dig Deeper

The Psalms contain 150 songs which were written by people who wanted to get spiritual by talking with God. They reflect a relationship with a being, a person. And to live a spiritual life, we need to get out of ourselves and focus on someone else: God.

God does have a name. Jesus Christ said, "When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth...for he will speak what he hears...he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All the Father has is mine...[the Spirit] will take what is mine and declare it to you." (The Gospel of St. John 16.12-15, be sure to read the whole passage for yourself). God's name is Father, Son and Holy Spirit: one name, one being, three persons. We can talk about that later, but the idea is to get to know God.

Here we see that the Spirit, who is God, will take what he hears from the Father (who is God), which is given through the Son (who is God) and proclaim it to you. Cool! It is a community with one substance: God. This mystical community speaks as one and works as one.

The Spirit has been calling you to start a spiritual relationship with God in a spiritual community. The Spiritual Community is a collection of the people who wrote the Psalms and who chant them today. Yes, I said "chant"! (See below) And that Spiritual Community can teach you how to speak with God simply by reading the Psalms.

God has given you a way to talk with him: the Psalms.

The Psalms teach us how to talk to God. And they are very free in their speaking. So we talk with the Spirit in ways that are really very free. And they are free because God is not canned.

The one thing we often deny in our United States version of religion is that life can really stink sometimes, even for the faithful. It seems if we cannot smile all of the time, then we are not being 'positive.' And people then shy away from us. Not so with those who wrote the Psalms!

Sometimes life is hard. And the people who wrote the Psalms tell us that they let God know about it:
Psalm 22: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?" These are not the words of someone who has just had a happy experience. Of course, God is not far from this person, it just feels like he is. And when we cannot hear God, we often think he is far away. But the fact that God called you to start a Spiritual Life is a sign that even when you didn't know him fully, he called you.

And these people also expressed other aspects of their relationship with God through the Psalms:

Psalm 8: "When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?" This is a guy who has just looked out the window, had a cup of hot coffee (tea or whatever), took a deep breath and realized, "Wow! I've have really got it made! God, how is it that you have come to bless me so!" (See Psalm 103, too.)

Psalm 89 recounts the deeds that God has done for the people of the Psalms. I want you to know that since you recognized that you needed to ‘get spiritual', you are now a part of the wonderful history that the writer recounts in this Psalm. This history is now becoming your history.

Here is an outline from Claus Westermann's wonderful thick thinkers book The Living Psalms to guide you. So, dig into the Psalms and begin talking with God throughout the day.

Psalms of Praise (Thanksgiving Psalms): 30, 31:7-8 (19-24), 40:1-11, 66, 116, 138, 113, 33, 145, 29, 103, 104, 19, 148, 8, 139

Psalms of Trust: (Psalm number only) 123, 126, 124, 4, 23, 73, 27.1-6, 62, 90, 46

Psalms of God's Kingship: 72

Psalms of Lament: 80, 44, 74, 79, 89, 83, 13, 6, 22, 51, 77, 102, 103

Psalms of the Liturgy (Worship): 118, 24, 122

Psalms of Blessing and Wisdom: 121, 1, 119

A Little Trip to Kentucky...

(To purchase CDs of what monastic chanting sounds like and to begin using chanting in your church, click on the MySpiritualAdvisor.com's Music Page)

When I was writing a paper in Seminary, a strange twist of events led me to the monastery, Abbey Gethsemani, at Bardstown, KY. It is known as the place Thomas Merton, the great spiritual writer, lived and worked. But I think it is even better because of the sermons Fr. Matthew gives.

Anyway, the monks get up and sing at 3 am, 6 am, 9 am, 12n, 3 pm, 6 pm and 8 pm. Lights out right away then. You have to really love God to get up at three in the morning to sing the Psalms to him.

Did I say sing? I sure did. And I will get to that in a moment.

The monastic movement was a reform movement in the church. Whenever the church got too worldly, a community of people who wanted to radically follow Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit would spring up. These communities are radical. The center of their existence is to worship Father, Son and Holy Spirit through Jesus Christ.

These folks, men and women, get up at a set time everyday. For those at Abbey Gethsemani, it is near 3 am. And they then sing the Psalms, pray together, worship together, listen to scripture being read, and then balance that with a life of work and self giving. More and more the monasteries are pushing their monks and nuns outside the walls to do the daily work required of them.

But we are going to adopt their daily pattern of prayer which causes them to fulfill the scriptures to "Pray without ceasing." And praying on the daily hours of three, six, nine, twelve, etc. helps them to do that. They pray on these hours because of their deep and abiding love for God. It may seem that they are giving more than getting, but their lives are a testimony to what a Spiritual Life is worth.

Now, those of us with families find it hard to leave them behind (and we shouldn't!). But we can incorporate these hours of prayer in little bits into our lives. So, those who do the extra credit will find that they are following a cycle of prayer called "The Daily Office".

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