Think of your spiritual life in terms of a cross. A cross has a vertical bar, and our spiritual life must ascend vertically to God. A cross also has a horizontal bar and our spiritual life must spread out horizontally to express love of neighbor, to do God's will here and now in this world. The Holy Spirit invades and transforms all our activities, even those we may think of as practical and unspiritual. Ordinary everyday life is a mixture of home and work, car and truck, TV and cinema, Internet and telephone.
Ordinary life is a tangle of problems and suggestions and demands.
We all know that it is easier to preach about the spiritual life, than to live it. It has often been pointed out that our real religion is what decides how we behave. Our real religion, that is to say our personal convictions and attitudes, decide the books we read, the TV programs we watch, the way we vote, the way we act every day of our lives. The challenge is to make God our real religion. For though we may renounce the world, We still must accept the world as that place where we cooperate with Spirit, and do the Will of God.