Father Gerald Vann is such a phenomenal spiritual director.  I want to post an entire paragraph from his book ‘The Divine Pity’.  For myself, he drives away from a focus upon a contemplative approach, hammering away at the intricacies of living an efficacious imitation of Christ.  I find I can only take his writing in small doses for the ideas presented take deep consideration, an exploration of why he would write the things he does, playing out examples and situations in my mind.  He properly advances spiritual thought from the accumulation of knowledge to the deepening of his reader’s faith.  It presents the potential for a penetrating self-examination for those advanced in years and experience pursuing a deeper faith. This paragraph swept me away.  Maybe it will mean nothing to you.

 …we shall not mediate as we should, we shall not spread the light in the world, unless we have ourselves first seen the light truly, learned the true faith and not a travesty of the faith.  We believe not in propositions but in the reality which is expressed by the propositions; we believe, not in a creed, but through a creed.  The expression of divine reality in human words is necessarily inadequate; the understanding of the divine reality by the human mind is necessarily groping, and we may well make mistakes.  It is possible to accept the formulas of the creeds and still to have a quite wrong idea of the nature of God and of His providence; it is possible to worship God and still to fall into a sort of practical idolatry.  If you turn your religion into magic: if you expect an immediate and literal answer to all your prayers, if you expect the grace of God to do for you by miracle what only demands a little hard work, you are misunderstanding the faith.  If you think of God in such a way as to project on to Him the human emotions of jealousy, anger, spite, you are misunderstanding the faith.  If you allow yourself to accept the assumptions of the pagan environment as far as conduct is concerned, and keep your faith in abstraction from practical affairs, you are betraying it.  And you are betraying it, too, if you think of it simply as something received from without, a static deposit, which you have only to accept and guard but without making it your own, without becoming it.  –Father Gerald Vann ‘The Divine Pity’