Practicing Before Feeling—Recovering the Catholic Way of Spiritual Formation
The Catholic spiritual tradition insists that the road to God begins not with a mood, and not even with an idea, but with what you actually do with your body at nine in the morning on a Sunday. This is deeply annoying to the modern limbic system, which would prefer to feel inspired first, perhaps with a latte in hand, and only later consider the radical adventure of getting in the car and going to Mass. Yet the Church, in her maddening, motherly way, keeps saying what your grandmother said about thank you notes and what your dentist says about flossing: do it, and eventually you might even feel like doing it.
The central claim, that we have reversed the spiritual order of things, is almost embarrassingly simple. Contemporary people often assume that authenticity means strong religious feelings first, clear belief second, and only then some hesitant practice if no one looks at us funny. The Christian tradition instead proposes that you begin by doing what believers do, and in so doing you slowly come to believe, and in due time you sometimes feel, and on some days you do not feel at all and God is just as real.
The great spiritual teachers talk about marriage, that great sacrament where you sometimes feel like kissing your beloved and sometimes feel like throwing the remote, and yet you still take out the garbage, apologize, show up, and make the soup. Arthur C. Brooks (a personal favorite of mine) would even suggest that the tentative soul should “go back to Mass and sit in the back,” which is one of the finest pieces of Catholic spiritual direction in centuries: no heroic fireworks, only the modest heroism of showing up bodily to the place where God has promised to be.
Catholic spiritual writers have been quietly shouting this for a long time, though usually without microphones. St John of the Cross insists that dryness and lack of sweetness in prayer are not signs that you are failing but ordinary stages in which God purifies your desire, so that you will love Him rather than your own consolations, which is an outrageously kind thing to say to people who feel like they are praying into a sock. He writes that God actually values your inclination to endure aridity for love of Him more than floods of devout feelings.
St Teresa of Ávila frankly admits that there are days when a person does not feel like praying at all, yet she counsels perseverance in the discipline of prayer, for growth comes from the fidelity, not from the thrill. The Desert Fathers and Mothers went out into the wilderness with no worship band and no scented candles, only the stubborn belief that if they kept fasting, keeping vigil, reciting the psalms, and confessing their sins, God would slowly teach their hearts to recognize His presence in everything.
Brother Lawrence, a clumsy seventeenth-century lay brother assigned to the kitchen, discovered that he could become holy by flipping omelets and scrubbing pots while talking to God, and called this “practicing the presence of God.” He learned to “place himself as a worshipper” before God throughout the day, deliberately recalling the Lord’s presence whenever his mind wandered, and he did this so steadily that his soul was reshaped by the habit, hope slowly seeping into his bones as naturally as the smell of onions into his robe.
St Francis de Sales adds his gentle voice, speaking of daily “exercises of devotion,” simple and steady practices that, over time, engrave in the heart a deep conviction of God’s love more reliable than any emotional surge.
For the modern Catholic wandering back into a church after many years, the saints’ message can feel strangely kind. You do not need to gin up emotions or manufacture certainty before you kneel. Ignatius of Loyola, who mapped the landscape of consolation and desolation, teaches that when you are in spiritual desolation you should not change previous good resolutions but continue the chosen practices, because desolation is precisely when you are tempted to quit; in that persevering practice, the will is exercised, and the soul learns that God is not the same thing as the weather of your feelings.
Julian of Norwich, writing in a time of plague and social chaos, kept repeating that “all shall be well” not because she felt serene every Tuesday, but because she learned to trust the steady character of God through many shifts of interior weather. Practice leads to belief because embodied habits tutor the mind, and belief then clarifies and steadies the heart, while feelings arrive as guests, not tyrants, welcomed when they come and gently shown to their seat when they are noisy.
John of the Cross, Brother Lawrence, and Ignatius each offer a different angle on this same pattern. John insists that the soul must walk by a kind of night, continuing prayer and sacramental life when everything tastes of dust, trusting that this seeming nothing is actually the hidden work of God enlarging the heart. Brother Lawrence shows that this practice can be tender and almost playful, a running conversation with God carried through the rattling of pots and the clatter of human life, so that the line between “prayer time” and “real life” slowly dissolves. Ignatius, with his firm counsel not to change good decisions in desolation, anchors the whole project in wise stubbornness, suggesting that one can, in fact, live a Christian life without being yanked around by the latest interior storm.
Moral and spiritual virtues train the emotions so that, over time, one feels more readily what is good and less drawn to what is destructive, without erasing emotion itself. The Catechism describes emotions as natural movements that can be educated and ordered by reason and grace, so that they support, rather than sabotage, a good life.
To “manage your feelings so they do not manage you” is simply to grow in prudence, temperance, and fortitude. It is to notice the storm in the limbic system, the flare of anxiety or boredom or resentment, and to choose to keep the appointment with God anyway, whether that appointment is Mass, a few tired minutes of night prayer, or a small act of charity you scheduled in a moment of lucidity; this is not emotional repression but training, the repeated choice that gradually teaches the passions to serve love rather than derail it.
Neuroscientists note that habits carve ruts in the brain, shaping how attention and emotion flow; virtue theory says something similar, only it adds the Holy Spirit. Regular sacramental practice confesses to the body that there is a larger truth than the survival instincts of the limbic system: you get up, you go to Mass, you stand, sit, kneel, you open your hands, you receive the Eucharist, and your nervous system is quietly catechized by repetition and grace. The confessional, that strange little clinic of mercy, asks you to name your sins out loud, which engages memory, speech, and shame, and then bathes them in absolution, reeducating the deep layers that expect only rejection.
Virtue centered therapists point out that when the nervous system is retrained toward calm and trust, people can respond more freely rather than react out of fear, which harmonizes with the old Catholic claim that grace builds on nature and lifts it toward freedom. In this light, steady sacramental and spiritual practices are not sentimental rituals but slow liberation from the tyranny of impulse, a long tutoring of the body and brain to expect redemption rather than disaster, to look for a Father instead of a judge behind the next door.
All of this sounds wonderfully impractical until you imagine one person, perhaps you, shuffling into the back pew of a parish after years away. The thesis, if one could dress it in a tie for an oral exam, would sound like this: Catholic spirituality proposes that authentic life with God begins with acts of embodied fidelity, which, through the slow alchemy of grace, form conviction in the mind and eventually a rightly ordered heart; feelings are honored but dethroned, practice and belief are yoked together and sent out to plow the stubborn soil of habit, while the Holy Spirit waters what seems dry and nothing and hidden.
The saints insist that if you will keep doing the small, concrete things of the faith, especially in seasons when you feel nothing and know little, you are already inside the miracle. You are learning to love God the way spouses learn to love each other after the honeymoon, through breakfasts cooked and bills paid and hands held in waiting rooms, an embodied, earthy, very Catholic way of holiness in which practice comes first, belief grows steady, and feelings, like shy birds, sometimes land on your shoulder when you least expect it.
