Interior Life (Catholic Theology)
Interior life is a life which seeks God in everything, a life of prayer and the practice of living in the presence of God. It connotes intimate, friendly conversation with him, and a determined focus on internal prayer versus external actions, while these latter are transformed into means of prayer.
According to John Paul II, Jesus' statement "without me you can do nothing" (cf. Jn 15:5) is a truth that "constantly reminds us of the primacy of Christ and, in union with him, the primacy of the interior life and of holiness."
In his first encyclical Deus Caritas Est, Benedict XVI emphasized that man "cannot always give, he must also receive," and pointed to the urgency and importance of experiencing in prayer that God is Love. He taught the Christian's dialogue with God "allows God to work" for God is "the only One who can make the world both good and happy."
Read more about Interior Life (Catholic Theology): Biblical Basis, Thomas A Kempis: Imitation of Christ, Garrigou-Lagrange: Three Ages of The Interior Life, Dom Chautard: Soul of The Apostolate, Josef Pieper, Josemaria Escriva: The Way, John Paul II: Novo Millennio Ineunte, Benedict XVI: Deus Caritas Est
Famous quotes containing the words interior and/or life:
“An absolute can only be given in an intuition, while all the rest has to do with analysis. We call intuition here the sympathy by which one is transported into the interior of an object in order to coincide with what there is unique and consequently inexpressible in it. Analysis, on the contrary, is the operation which reduces the object to elements already known.”
—Henri Bergson (1859–1941)
“There is a relation between the hours of our life and the centuries of time. As the air I breathe is drawn from the great repositories of nature, as the light on my book is yielded by a star a hundred millions of miles distant, as the poise of my body depends on the equilibrium of centrifugal and centripetal forces, so the hours should be instructed by the ages and the ages explained by the hours.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)