“If you don’t pray, we will know.”  When our novice master said that to us novices many years ago when I was just beginning my journey as a Jesuit, I thought at first he was saying he and his staff was checking up on us, even spying on us.  But instead, he was saying something profoundly true about the spiritual life:  if we do not do the work on the inside, it will show on the outside.  If we do not do our inner work, if we do not tend to the inner garden that is our heart and our soul, the consequences will be made known in external fruit:  how we treat people, our level of anger or calm, how patient we can be or not be, and our general approach to others and the world.

Our inner world, it seems, is what has God’s attention.  We see this in the gospel today.  “You shall not kil,” is the commandment.  Jesus says whoever is angry with his or her brother or sister is liable to judgement.  Obeying the letter of the law is not enough; we must also be attentive to the spirit.  In the first reading, we are invited to choose between life and death, good and evil.  To really pay attention to our inner life, to the ways God is working in the deepest parts of our hearts is to choose life.  

I have shared with you in these letters and in my homilies that in this time of angry speech that rejoices in the public display of cruelty (towards whom?  You name it it—immigrants, the poor, people of color, people who are gay, trans, etc.), I am making the decision to double-down on love.  Another way to put this, in light of these readings, is that we need to double down on caring for our souls—that innermost place where we meet and find God.  This takes time and space.  It takes a conscious decision each day to ask myself, “How is my heart today?”  It takes a conscious decision to await the answer.   It is in that space that we find ourselves, and we find God right there with us.  I repeat, it takes time.  There is no app that can do this for us.  Nor will AI help us.   In the spiritual life there are no shortcuts.  God is interested in what it’s inside.  We double down on God.