How to Keep Alive the Interior Life

Have you ever gone on a God Hunt? A God Hunt begins when you teach yourself to look for God’s hand at work in the everyday occurrences of your life. Here’s one of my personal God Hunt Sightings:



Every day I try to read a little from literature that is richly written and that stirs my soul. These last months I’ve been slowly perusing and underlining the book How to Read a Poem by Edward Hirsch. Poetry has always been a difficult genre for me to understand, but the author is a master teacher and suddenly, as I study his writing and the samples he includes, this world of literature is opening to me. Poems are becoming comprehensible, astounding, soul-shaking and renewing.

I’m halfway through Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman, for example, and I hear the thunder in the pages and have to close the volume. One can only stand so much ecstasy at a time. A new acquaintance loves and understands the work of Ranier Maria Rilke, so I have begun again to read the Duino Elegies; this is like reading another language, so I am going slowly, slowly, knowing that I can question my friend when I don’t understand (and there is much that I don’t understand).

This quote from Hirsch’s writing arrested me, and I’ve been asking myself the question in the days since I wrote it down in my prayer journal on April 3, 2012:

“The question poses itself as to how to keep alive the interior life in the face of our own and the world’s corruption.”

What a provocative inquiry. How do we (how do I) keep alive the interior life in the face of my own corruption as well as the world’s corruption?

I understand that God is often more a questioner than He is a forth-teller. So I am taking this disturbing question as something that has come my way because He wants me to chew on it.

First of all, what are my own corruptions? Where is the decay within me that pollutes the purity that an interior journey needs in order to sustain itself? I need to be still and let the Spirit whisper the answers to my heart.

Secondly, what are the corruptions of the world that compete with the maintenance of interiority? What is an interior life? Does everyone have an interior life? What must I give up? What must I clean out? What activities must I cease and what activities must I
establish in order to feed the soulish part of myself that is often starved by corruptions? How can I utilize the life that is given to me so that I can be fully alive?

Questions. Questions. Questions. There will be answers. The pathway lies ahead.

I spy God!