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In the writing of this book I came upon a period of frustration or writer’s block. I had reached an impasse and as the days turned into weeks I reached the conclusion that I should abandon the project and leave it unfinished. No matter how I tried to seek inspiration or a helpful answered prayer, I was left with nothing and a small voice kept telling me to be wise and walk away from such a foolish enterprise.

It was at the point where I seriously considered consigning all to the trash bin that I saw the analogy with the spiritual journey we are all on in life. It can be so tempting to fall away from all our efforts to draw close to God when things are tough, answers few and possibly even a great sense of emptiness is our daily experience, staring into a seemingly empty void. It isn’t always to do with church but this is as good an illustration as any, I often spoke to people who for various reasons had fallen away from attending. They felt it had been so long since they had attended that the barrier to returning to the fold seemed insurmountable. I never found an easy solution to their problem except to encourage them to climb the mountain of embarrassment and strangeness and cross the threshold. The crossing of any threshold is hard for many people.

Sometimes the pressures of life, work, and social and family circumstances can make it very hard to hold on to making progress in the spiritual life. If the road we are on was easy we would have little need to make great efforts. It is hard and there are so many reasons so many ways we can convince ourselves that it isn’t worth the effort.

As our western societies move to ever more secular positions we find ourselves not only swimming against the tide but having to live in a separate culture. There is little around us in the world that lends us support on our spiritual journey, in fact most of what lies around us is designed to do the exact opposite. It leads to a consuming need to fill every moment of our lives with “things”.

A generation with its head bowed before a phone, tablet or glued to a screen of any sort, finds it hard to shake off the need for instant gratification and take the slower, quieter, meditative path in life. How seldom we experience quiet, solitude or find time to take in the world around us. We have to make a supreme effort to create even a  small period of calm. Fortunately as St Benedict tells us in his rule, prayer is to be short and to the point, we are not to run away with words and pleadings. So there is no excuse for prayer passing away from our grasp. No matter how chaotic our lives we can still progress in our spiritual lives by being constantly mindful that we are in the presence of God and how easy once the habit is attained it becomes to stay in that prayerful place, that secret room through out the day.

There is an old prayer I use daily, “Sweet heart of Jesus, I implore the grace to love you more and more.” It runs in my own head like the song you can’t get rid of, I think I heard that once described as an ear worm. Ear worm prayers are good.

So if there is a simple moral to this chapter it’s this “Don’t give up!” Like Bruce’s spider try, try, and try again.