Spiritual Growth

A lot of people make resolutions to do better, overcome their addictions, help others, treat others with kindness, be charitable, love our enemies. They ask God to help them change their ways.  Yet they often give up and go back to their former ways. That’s usually considered human frailty. Then regret and shame fill their lives and make them feel like failures. 

We know Jesus promised to send us the Holy Spirit who would be with us all our days and teach us all we need to live a good life. In Romans 8, St. Paul reminds us: “If the Spirit of the one who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, the one who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also, through his Spirit that dwells in you.”

If the Spirit has been dwelling in us all our lives, why do we feel like we have made so little progress? Our culture may have conditioned us to feel like we are not good enough, that our faith has failed us.  According to Vinita Hampton Wright, “maybe the spiritual failure was this: My awareness of God’s work had been prevented by specific expectations and a perverted concept of humility.”  Some of us fall back to habitual feelings of “fear and condemnation.” We are blind to the Spirit working in our lives.  Our culture might make us feel it is prideful to see ourselves as transformed and that God is pleased with us.

Even if we acknowledge the indwelling of the Spirit, we are reluctant to celebrate something going well in our lives. We might think that it is God working in us, as if we had nothing to do with it. Yet the Spirit is always speaking to us, inspiring us, guiding us, helping us to be all we can be. We need to develop the confidence to see ourselves as a “holy work in progress.”

When we look at ourselves as spiritual failures, we insult the Holy Spirit. We are blind to how we have grown in goodness and wholeness.  We need to become more aware of our “interior re-creation.” 

Barbara Mayer, OSB