Hello, my name is Father Gregory Pine, and I'm a Dominican friar of the

province of St Joseph. I teach at the Dominican House of Studies and I work for the

Tomistic Institute and this is Pines of the Quinas. In this episode I'd

like to talk about what it means to make progress in the spiritual life

because if we're honest it's not so easy to pin down or not so easy to identify in the midst of it

because there are all kinds of physical emotional

psychological factors that can make it difficult for us to sort out what it means to

make true progress and what it means to like think and feel progress. So let's identify some principles, let's work through some

arguments and let's get down to business and making sense of progress in the

spiritual life. Here we go.

Okay. Okay, so there are kind of two main ways in which we describe Christian maturation.

On the one hand, there's like the advancing from strength to strength kind of way.

So you'll hear people talk about the three ages of the spiritual life, you know as you go from

being a beginner to proficient to perfect or in other language from the

purgative way to the illuminative way to the unitive way and the sense there is that

you know you're moving beyond habitual sin and into a kind of life of heroic virtue and ultimately unto a life of infused contemplation and like the kind of predominance of the gifts of the Holy

Spirit which one might come to expect in the heights of Christian prayer.

So within this setting you get the idea that we're going to kind of keep ratcheting up and that there's going to be a kind of constant progress that we should be able to track.

Well, there's another factor at player. There's another theme that we often here mentioned in the literature,

and that's that of like remaining childlike or remaining dependent.

So there's an ongoing feature or an ever-present feature of our Christian life where we want to admit

our own incompetence, we want to rely upon the Lord, we want to follow the promptings of the Holy

...