Dcerning Hearts.com in cooperation with the Oblates of the Virgin Mary presents

struggles in the spiritual life, their nature and their remedies with Father Timothy Gallagher.

Father Gallagher is the author of many best-selling books on the theology and spirituality of St.

Ignatius of Loyola. He holds the St. Ignatius' chair of spiritual

formation at St. John Theological Seminary in Denver, Colorado. Struggles in the spiritual life,

their nature and their remedies, with Father Timothy Gallagher. I'm your host, Chris McGregor.

Welcome back, Father Gallagher. Thank you, Chris.

As we move forward in this exploration of the struggles in the spiritual life, we have come across someone we've heard about before, a character that you have in the book named Paul, and who was an example of non-spiritual

desolation, but here we are once later, now he's experiencing something else.

So this allows us to move into another form of spiritual desolation, which overlaps a bit with the earlier one, that

darkness of soul that we saw in Julie.

So we approached Paul again and did six months after that meeting with Father Reed, and

things are going better now.

He has slowed down the pace of the studies for the masters, and he writes,

the masters will take longer, but I have recovered my love for teaching and matters in the family

are going better. It's been good also to look forward to prayer again, rather than just getting

through it because I was so tired. Then we learned in subsequent journal entries that Paul has begun to listen as an

audio book to St. Francis to Salle's introduction to the devout life.

And as he's reading this, he's really stirred by this, and he begins to understand in a completely new way that he's really called to

holiness and holiness is really possible in the lay vocation so there's great energy

there and then a month later in his journal he has now started going to confession

regularly and he really likes what's happening the The peace that he feels, he calls a

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