Religious Exercises & asceticism – Spiritual exercises – Retreat days – Strength of character – Voluntary abstinence
Asceticism - Spiritual Exercises
Retreats are spiritual exercises that are intended to lead to intense reflection and encounter with a divine or absolute reality, removed from everyday life. Retreats can last from a few hours to several weeks or months. Basic elements include prayer, meditation, scripture, silence, contemplation (koan, hwadu) with the Zen master, and physical or artistic activity.
The holy sword (Logos, living word) is always in your hand: it brings death and gives life. It is there, it is here, giving and taking at the same time. If you want to hold on to it, you are free to hold on. If you want to let go, you are free to let go. Tell me what it will be like if you don't distinguish between host and guest, and you don't care what role you play?
Asceticism - Strength of Character
Asceticism is religious self-training. The goal is to acquire virtues (ease of doing good) or skills, self-control, and strengthen character. Ascetic training involves discipline both in terms of thought and will, as well as in terms of behavior.
- On the one hand, this includes the "positive" practice of the desired virtues or skills;
- on the other hand, the "negative" avoidance of everything that, in the ascetic's conviction, stands in the way of achieving their goal.
The starting point is the assumption that a disciplined way of life requires the control of thoughts and instincts. The most striking effect on everyday life is the voluntary renunciation of certain comforts and pleasures that the ascetic considers to be a hindrance and incompatible with their ideal of life. This renunciation usually primarily concerns the areas of stimulants and sexuality. In addition, there are measures for physical and mental fitness, and in some cases, exercises in enduring pain.
Asceticism is when voluntary abstinence is practiced in order to achieve a goal considered to be of higher value.
Prayer - Living Symbol
Those who think correctly will be surely led by reason to God. And those who have found God are naturally bound to the duty of prayer. For recognizing God as Lord, his justice, omnipotence, and goodness, is the deeper meaning of prayer. Or to put it another way: The foundation of every prayer is the confession of our dependence, inadequacy, and need for help before God. A rational creature cannot approach its Creator in any other way. But every praying person knows that this living relationship with God must be developed.
Prayerbook - Men in Prayer
A prayer book is meant to help. But it can't replace work and attention. You have to do it yourself. Purely verbal prayer is dead; it's irreverent toward God if your soul isn't involved. Exaltation to God. Being reverent means paying attention to the words or the meaning of what you say. Let's not forget the precious help in prayer: Jesus Christ himself. He told us to pray in his name. We should appeal to him before the heavenly Father, to his merits, because, according to St. Paul, he "always intercedes for us." He gives our prayer everything it lacks when it is offered with good will and in his name.
Worship - The Flow
But what does it mean when the Lord wants us to pray without ceasing? This can only mean that prayer and work, indeed, everything we do, should be worship, an uninterrupted communion with God. The good intention of making everything serve God also makes everything prayer in the broadest sense of the word. He is the right man who worships God in everything. His day is completely fulfilled, and his evening a rich harvest.
Meditation - Experience of Divine Reality
Mysticism is a special form of religiosity, a special form of devotion and contemplation. Characteristics of mystical experience are the striving for union with the supernatural, the divine, the turning away from the world of the senses and the purely intellectual, and the meditative contemplation of the soul within itself. Zen and mysticism are about religious experience and the living core of every religion, in which practice—the religious experience, the realization—is the only thing that matters.
And in the West, religious experience has the language of Christianity (the mother tongue of our soul) and in the East, the language of Buddhism. It is not about proofs of God but about experiences of God. Meditation and contemplation serve not the development of the ego and the cultivation of personality, but the revelation of the divine or absolute Self. In it, knowledge is not sought and attained, but rather certainty and wisdom.
Silence and stillness - The Eye Does Not See Itself!
The mystical marriage (unio mystica) is the immediate experience of God. But how can one communicate something that is not fixed in conceptual thought? It is only possible through paradox. The living and the lived, the loving and the beloved, disappear into the mystical being of absoluteness. One becomes one and still.