Developing your prayer life can feel like a project to be planned and completed. Consider a different sense of what is happening when we get serious about prayer. When you begin to make prayer a serious focus of your life, you begin to follow a story.

The theology of St John of the Cross is focused on the necessity of self-discipline, but it begins and ends in love. This is not the dull path of obligation. It is an adventure, into a wild freedom.

Rather than the psychological models of the self propounded by Freud and Jung, we should learn from St. John of the Cross how to understand ourselves. Only then can we begin to be at peace with our clamoring appetites.