A Way of Life: The Humility to Love

Introduction

Members of Prayerbuddy have chosen to follow an interior way of life, one that seeks to form the habits of humility that free a person to love. Members work to form these habits through the practice of timeless, classical spiritual disciplines that are exercised daily in community.

The life of a member of Prayerbuddy is thus focused on the heart, and his or her principle labor is interior discernment of spirits. But the Spirit sought by a member of Prayerbuddy isn't an ordinary spirit; rather, it's that which gently breathes the most radical kind of love -- the love by which creation has being -- and which we know by faith to name Christ Jesus.

Principles:

The Good I Will, I Also Abhor

The love we seek is at home in poverty, humiliation and meekness: a home the world abhors.

Christianity true is Christianity abhorrent: at least to worldly tastes. And thus to us, perhaps especially. Except for something not at all ours: a faint glimmer of grace.

Love is A Habit, Not A Feeling.

A feeling may or may not accompany love, but the love that we pursue is not itself a feeling, as though its object were me. No, this love is radically different: it's not about me at all. This love is an act of the will whose object is the good of another person.

Therefore, wanting to be cooperative with grace, indeed docile before grace, so that love finds us welcoming -- habitually welcoming -- even when we may not want to be, we have adopted wise spiritual practices proven through the ages; and we form our hearts into a habit of love by doing these things over and over and over again. Even, or perhaps especially, when we don't want to.

We use technology -- radical, bleeding edge technology -- to enable anew and enhance these classical practices.

  • The Liturgy of the Hours: Prayer 6 times daily, in community.
  • Life Blogs: Reading/Writing One Another's Lives in the Community
  • Lectio Divina: Meditative spiritual reading.
  • Spiritual Direction: Someone to listen with you for God's call.
  • Spiritual Conferences: Regular face-to-face spiritual conference and community gathering.
  • Way of Life: Participation in composing this living document of the community's way of life.

Freedom to Love Comes Through Commitment.

In order to make these practices fruitful -- to make them habits of love serving not me, but a person outside of myself -- we do them in the context of commitment: an act of will to give oneself to the good that is God, and to that good for another.

Our commitments follow a timeless, wise form -- codified in a monastic context by St. Benedict about the year 530, who in turn drew from even more ancient wisdom that preceded him -- that has been proven fruitful through 1,500 years of trial and experience.

  • We Commit to Listen to God and Neighbor: Discipline.
  • We Commit to a Spiritual Community: Stability.
  • We Commit to Reform Our Ways.

The Pursuit of Radical Christian Virtue.

In Summary: You die with Christ; Christ dwells within your heart; you then love as God asks you. In this you touch freedom and joy.

  • Humility
  • The model of a contemplative heart: The Mother of God.
  • The Beatitudes
  • Theological Virtues
  • Cardinal Virtues

We Do This In Everyday Life.

We live these practices in real life. Not with material perfection -- because then we would fail humility! -- but aided by grace, with perfection of desire.

Our practices:

  • Amidst Family Life
  • In Marriage
  • In The Workplace
  • As A Single Person