Seven Facets of the Interior Life
Clarity in the Pursuit of Holiness
The Doctors of the Church have left us an extraordinary inheritance. Many of them laid out great habits to follow and steps to take, along with tremendous insight into the nature of the spiritual life and how the soul grows in holiness.
But the sheer breadth of it, spread across centuries, languages, and formats, can make it difficult for an ordinary person to take it all in, let alone sort through it and know where to begin.
At least that’s been my challenge. I was taking in the teaching, doing the reading, trying to grow. Yet I still wasn’t making the progress I wanted to make. I knew I had to start doing something differently.
My professional background is in operations management. One thing I learned early on is that before you build any system or plan of action, you must identify the things that directly affect the outcome you’re working toward. Then narrow down to the things you can control, where intentional attention produces real results.
The goal we’re working toward here is clear — the perfection of the soul, becoming a saint. So the question I kept coming back to was: what are the areas of the interior life which most directly affect outcomes within my control? What demands my focused attention? What is my part in becoming holy?
We commonly get that question wrong in one of two ways. The first is to think it all depends on us. We try to white-knuckle our way toward holiness through sheer effort, and end up defeated, discouraged, and despairing when we inevitably fall short.
The second is to think it all depends on God. We conclude that if He wants us to be holy, He’ll make us holy, and our part is simply to wait.
Adolphe Tanquerey, a Sulpician priest whose monumental work on the spiritual life has formed priests and laypeople for over a century, names these as the twin errors of presumption and despair. (The Spiritual Life, n. 1200)
“We must be fully persuaded that in the work of our sanctification all depends on God; still, we must act as if all depended on ourselves.”
St. Augustine preached the same thing centuries earlier: “God created us without us: but he did not will to save us without us” (Sermon 169, 11, 13).
And St. Paul addressed this from another angle: “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for God is at work in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure” (Philippians 2:12-13).
God is working within us. And we must work with Him. This is an active exercise, not a passive one. So, if this is an active exercise, what exactly are the exercises that require our intentional action?
This is what I’ve been desperately trying to work out by immersing myself in the Doctors of the Church, the study of Scripture, and the teaching of Tradition. And what I kept noticing were the same areas appearing across the centuries of wisdom.
I’ve identified seven active fronts of the interior life that the spiritual masters have always pointed to, requiring our intentional engagement if we are serious about becoming a saint.
Deepening Prayer: growing in the proficiency of prayer and intimacy with God.
Cultivating Disposition: forming the interior posture with which we approach God, encounter Christ in the sacraments and liturgy, and engage every dimension of the spiritual life.
Building Virtue: the positive formation of character through the habitual practice of acts ordered toward the good.
Uprooting Attachments: the work of detachment from anything that competes with God as the soul’s final end.
Making Reparation: the work of satisfaction for the temporal consequences of sin, beyond the remission of guilt won for us by Christ on the cross.
Willing Forgiveness: consciously releasing others from the debt incurred by the harm they have caused us.
Cooperating with Grace: recognizing the movements and moments of grace and choosing to respond rather than resist or neglect them.
As I reflected on these, an image I was intimately familiar with came to me. The fifteen years I spent studying and selling diamonds gave me the perfect illustration for what this interior work is all about.
During that time I had the privilege of witnessing the entire process from the rough mineral pulled from the ground to the finished gem ready for its setting.
It begins with a deep examination of the stone. A craftsman will study the shape, the structure, and even the imperfections to determine exactly where to make the cuts and what shape will bring out the greatest beauty while yielding the largest finished gem.
That examination is critical. Cut into one of those inclusions at the wrong angle and the entire stone shatters.
Then every cut is calculated and measured because the precision of the work is the difference between a stone that looks like a piece of glass and one that dazzles with the brilliance of a thousand dancing suns.
And so it is with the soul. Like a rough diamond, the soul by virtue of Baptism already carries within it the seeds of divine life. The potential is already there.
The seven areas I’ve described are the facets. They are the cutting and the polishing, the patient and deliberate work of formation that reveals what grace has already placed within us.
Just as a diamond doesn’t generate its own light but receives it from an outside source and reflects and multiplies it outward, so it is with the grace God shines into us.
A rough, unpolished stone doesn’t allow much light in. What little enters gets lost or trapped inside, going nowhere and returning nothing.
But when the stone has been examined, shaped, and polished — when the facets have been cut to their correct angles through patient and careful work — what God pours into it is reflected outward in ways that would make the most valuable diamond in the world look like common river gravel.
In the writings to come, we’ll begin taking a closer look at each of these facets: what they are, why they matter, and what the saints and Scripture tell us to do with them.
This is the work of the interior life.