It is incredibly motivating when we make the tiniest of life changes and start to transform the way we live and think. Good habits are all the rage. James Clear’s international bestseller, Atomic Habits, has been used by go-getters in every realm of society for the better part of a decade. And for good reason.
One such habit-building tool is to “stack habits.” For example, before checking your phone in the morning, you need to pray for 20 minutes. Or, before your morning coffee, you need to go for a walk. These little rhythms seem unassuming, but once established, they can be life-changing.
The ideas presented in Atomic Habits can certainly help us to form good prayer habits by way of building a launchpad of sorts.
By all means, start being aware and in tune with all of the little amendments and tweaks you can make at the “atomic” level to set yourself up for spiritual success, but ultimately, remember that the growth and the change do not come from us.
“So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow.” (1 Cor 1:3-7)
Fostering holiness is much like tidying your house for guests. The fact that the house is tidy and a visit is expected does not make the visit happen. The visit itself is completely dependent on the visitors’ schedules and plans. A messy house does not mean there will be no visit, but we all know how much better it feels to receive guests when you’re ready for them.
The psalms speak of the powerlessness of humans when it comes to the ways of God. “In vain is your earlier rising, your going later to rest…. You who toil for the bread you eat while the Lord pours gifts on his beloved while they slumber” (Ps 127:2).
One of the main reasons that we can’t engineer our own holiness or virtue is that we don’t know what the finished product is supposed to look like. In his book, In the School of the Holy Spirit, celebrated Catholic author Fr. Jacques Phillippe writes about how each person is a unique and unrepeatable messenger of God’s love for the world.
“No individual knows what his own holiness consists of,” he writes. “Holiness is only revealed to us by degrees, as we journey on, and it is often something very different from what we imagine, so much so that the greatest obstacle on the path to holiness may be to cling too closely to the image we have of our own perfection.”
Many of us have grown up reading the lives of the saints, and we try to map our lives onto their blueprints. It’s hard to imagine that our sainthood will be unlike any other saint we’ve encountered! We are each an exciting new creation and articulation of God’s love.
“What God wants is always different, always disconcerting; but ultimately it is infinitely more beautiful,” Fr. Phillippe writes, “because only God is capable of creating totally unique masterpieces, while we humans can only imitate.”
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