Too often we practice Catholicism without its essence.
Its essence is seeing into the spiritual.
Those who do not are practicing ritual.
Ritual is good when it is coupled with mystical inclination — eyesight.
Otherwise, there is a falling off of the Faith.
And Faith is what keeps the enemy at bay.
Faith is what puts us in touch with God and being in touch with God is what it is all about — direct touch, direct communications. You need no intermediary but Christ. You need no thing or person of this earth to get you there. You need only your Will and the desire for direct entry into Heaven which is entry into His Presence.
We feel Him when we have laughter, when we have joy, when sorrow cleanses, when we are suddenly more aware and see what we had not seen before, when a new direction presents itself, when we are nudged through difficulties to change our course, to see with different eyes, to have more compassion.
“It’s more important to change the way you think than to perform the correct ritual,” says a man who sees into the supernatural.
And indeed this is hardly to dismiss the importance of ritual but to implore that it be coupled with prayer from the innermost being, from the essence of who we are and what we want to be, from our true selves.
This is where the direct line to Heaven is: in the deepest recesses of our souls and as our souls meld with our pure spiritual aspect — our “raw identities,” the individual God formed before — that God knitted in — the womb.
In short, life and religion are nothing if they don’t bring us closer to Him, and we waste precious time that could be spent in Adoration, in tgrue Communion, speaking to Him like the Father He is, like the Real Person He is, instead of flinging prayers upward and hoping they reach.
The goal is to know when they have reached Him and to listen — carefully, in quiet, with the television off, with Facebook out of sight, with the phone silent, without a keyboard — when He so sweetly and yet more powerfully responds.
True anointing comes with Faith and when there is Faith, the enemies of God turn into harmless puppets and deflate like a Macy’s Day Parade — once so looming, once so massive, once so above us, but now gone.
[resources: The Veil]