The Potential of Asceticism to Enrich Your Spiritual Life
In this episode, Peter and Mark delve into the heart of asceticism, exploring its surprising potential to enrich not just your spiritual life, but also your connections with others and the world around you. Through real-life anecdotes and insightful discussions, Peter and Mark uncover how to tame your desires, build your spiritual muscles, and strengthen your bonds with others.
Notes
- Asceticism Defined: Practice and exercise in properly directing one's life, derived from the Greek word "askesis."
- Challenges of Discussing Asceticism: Often associated with negative images and misunderstood as unnatural.
- Reframing Asceticism: Comparing it to the discipline and self-denial required in sports, leadership, and other areas.
- Different Branches of Asceticism: Business, legal, athletic, social, and spiritual, all requiring practice for proper living.
- Human vs. Animal Urges: Humans have a spiritual nature that elevates urges and requires asceticism to regulate them.
- Importance of Asceticism: Enables us to live as spiritual beings and provides inner strength to deal with challenges.
- Examples of Uncontrolled Urges: Domestic violence, addiction, suicide, corruption, etc.
- Benefits of Spiritual Asceticism: Inner strength and resilience, helping us fulfill potential and live meaningfully.
- The Danger of Extremes: Avoiding both excessive indulgence and extreme self-denial.
- Couch potato happiness: Pope Francis describes this as the pursuit of comfort and escapism through things like video games and sofas. He views it as a form of paralysis that can harm people, especially young people.
- Hierarchy of values: Guardini proposes a hierarchy of values, starting with material, then social, intellectual, and finally spiritual. Pope Benedict XVI argues that a healthy relationship with God is essential for good relationships with others.
- Training for virtue: Asceticism and spiritual practices are seen as ways to train ourselves to resist urges and desires that lead to short-term pleasure but ultimately self-destruction.
- Impacting others: Changing the world starts with changing the people around us. We shouldn't aim to control institutions but be a positive influence on those close to us.
- Asceticism as training: Ascetical practices are compared to training in any worthwhile field, requiring self-denial and pushing oneself.
- Spiritual change and faith: In the spiritual realm, asceticism requires faith and leads to a spiritual change, not just external improvement.
- Dull and empty marriages: Guardini discussed the problem of marriages becoming dull and empty, attributed to a lack of emphasis on building a spiritual life.
- Strengthening relationships: Building a strong spiritual life through activities like praying the rosary and reading spiritual books together is seen as key to strengthening marriages and other relationships.
- Spiritual foundation for society: Asceticism strengthens families, which are the breeding ground for vocations and ultimately the foundation of society.