When I reflect daily on the state of my soul, I may do a quick checklist of sins I may or may not have committed.
Yet I don't often pay attention to how much I've done that day to cultivate the life of God within my soul—to weed and water the garden of my heart to take the parable from today's Gospel even farther.
When I take stock of my heart, I often see so much spiritual clutter. There are heaps of other people's voices amidst the clutter: tweets with no explanations, articles defending or promoting whatever topic is currently trending, noise from the culture that doesn't want to admit God exists.
I let this clutter pile up and pile up just going about my daily life. For some reason I believe my soul has an infinite capacity for this spiritual noise and there's no need for me to clean it out!
But just like living in a house that's piled with junk on every surface and garbage stacked up by the back door, my soul can't really spread out and grow and live without space.
We need to make space for life within us, and true growth in holiness by cutting the clutter. We need to be conscious that we take in many different streams of information a day but not without a lasting effect. All the noise and spiritual clutter begins to grow as weeds within our souls.
What we take into our minds and hearts matters, even if it's in the form of a celebrity Instagram post.
We need to cut the clutter of these weeds, examine how much information we're taking in a day and from what sources. With the space we create our souls can experience silence to water the seeds of goodness. Silence not only allows us to hear God's voice, but also our own and its longing for intimacy with its Beloved.
When you glance at your phone today, download one of these five Catholic apps and make the time spent there more intentional, and hopefully spend less time on a screen overall.
Christy Isinger is a wife and mom to five lovely, loud children and lives in northern Canada. When not homeschooling, she is a devoted reader of English literature from Jane Austen to Agatha Christie. She writes about the beauty of faith, life, and the home at her blog and is the co-host of the Fountains of Carrots Podcast. You can find out more about her here. She is the author of our Blessed Conversations: The Ten Commandments study found here.
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