Spiritual life
Based on practice
April 8th 2013
The spiritual life does not require the amassing of a large amount of knowledge. The main thing in the spiritual life is practice. It is not good to read and study without ever trying to achieve anything or give concrete expression to it. Obviously, without sufficient knowledge, any practice is poor, empty. But once certain ideas and truths have been acquired, you must concentrate on a few exercises you repeat every day.
In life you meet very simple people who only possess a few sheets of paper on which they noted a few essential truths they strive to apply, and you sense that they are inhabited by the spirit, by light. And you meet others, learned people, who have in their library all of humankind’s sacred books; they quote from them, but they themselves emanate nothing spiritual. The main thing is to have a little knowledge and to build something with it. We can call this construction our future, or our temple. And in fact this was the temple St. Paul had in mind when, in The Second Letter to the Corinthians, he wrote, ‘We are the temple of the living God’.