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Fasting

Grace and Strength, Personal Growth, Spiritual Fitness

How to Practice Mortification in Everyday Life

how-to-practice-mortification-in-everyday-life

The ability to make sacrifices in service of a greater good is the hallmark of maturity. – Jordan Peterson

Despite the horrors and negative connotations connected with its name, all mortification means is simply that one chooses what is right over how they “feel”. It means choosing to put the good of any given person, event, or outcome above what you “want”. To mortify oneself is to choose to do something hard or in order to prepare yourself to make the even harder choices later, even when you feel like you’d “rather die” than do it.

We practice mortification when we don’t allow our fear of pain to overcome our love of truth, and when we quell our fight or flight instinct in order to act with intelligence and intentionality.

It is a beautiful thing.

It’s what superheroes are made of!

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Personal Growth, Spiritual Fitness, When life is Hard

What is Mortification? – Archaic Masochism or Indispensable Spiritual Discipline

The word mortification is a terrifying one. It literally comes from the Latin mortificare that means “to put to death”, specifically, in traditional understanding, “the desires of the flesh”. It was considered essential for salvation back in the day and it conjures images of self-flagellation, monks in hair shirts holding skulls, and all manner of other creepy and unpleasant things. The thought of it has almost single handedly fueled the rampant hatred of traditional Religion. To 99% of the population it seems to suggest that mankind is bad, God’s gifts should be rejected, and that the world and this life are evil. Such a view of mortification fuels a vision of God who is cruel and bloodthirsty rather than a gentle and loving good shepherd. We all know the vision of an egotistical and masochistic God couldn’t be farther from the truth, therefore, it “stands to reason” that we should also reject everything that supports this vision – hence the word has become all but taboo, and anyone who dares contemplate it is automatically considered crazy, even by themselves.

But what if mortification is more than this? What if we’ve rotundly rejected an essential spiritual practice because of misunderstanding, and rediscovering it might be the forgotten secret to the spiritual vibrancy we can only dream about.

Grace and Strength, Personal Growth, Relationship with God

5 Essential Practices for a Vibrant Spiritual Life

I was talking to a friend the other day.  “What should I do if I just feel blah about God?”, she asked, “I’m just not growing any more – not motivated, not changing – it’s tempting to just give up on God’s even being real at all. Where is the excitement, the joy, and the passion people say should be part of the spiritual life? Why does “everyone else” seem to find prayer so rewarding while I sit over here at a loss?”

She was asking me different questions but really they all boil down to the same crux of the matter. How does one bring a stagnant spiritual life back to life?

Grace and Strength, Relationship with God

5 Key Sources of Grace – GraceFilled Life Series

Sources of Grace – Christian Life of Grace Series Continued…

In my last post in this series we talked about what Grace really is (and how it has been distorted), and that while it is all around us, much like oxygen, we still need to tap into it ever more fully and more deeply in order to truly use it to its full potential. Just as an athlete learns to breathe, we need to learn how to recognize, and respond to Grace in order to run this race and at the end be able to say with St. Paul,

I have fought the good fight; I have finished the race; I have kept the faith.  – 2 Timothy 4:7-8

Fasting, Personal Growth, Relationship with God, Seasonal Reflections

11 Effective Ways to Fast without Giving up Food

How to fast without giving up food? Is that even possible? Isn’t fasting by definition, “the foregoing of food” (literally: “to abstain from all or some kinds of food or drink especially as a religious observance” (Oxford Languages)?

But ever since Social Media has been a thing, I’ve heard of people giving it up and calling it a fast… It’s obviously a “thing”, so maybe we need to look at the purpose of fasting beyond the words on the page and see if there might be other ways we can reap the rewards.

If you can’t fast (because of age or health, for example) or have been “fasting” but without much success, this post is for you.

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