Spiritual Reading and the Interior Life of Legionaries

One of the most precious, profound and practical sections of the Handbook is the one on the interior life of legionaries. It is a rock solid blueprint of the way to authentic holiness. It is, in fact, a very good summary of Frank Duff’s booklet entitled “Can We Be Saints?” What do we mean by the interior life? It means that our thoughts, desires and affections converge on Jesus Christ. He is the centre of our lives, the ultimate motive behind our whole way of living down to the smallest details. The interior life means the lifelong effort to so live our lives that we can say with St. Paul: ‘I live now not I but Christ lives in me’. Mary is our inspiration and model of the interior life. She is totally centred on Jesus and there is nothing in her that is not related to him. To be truly united to her inevitably leads us to be united to Jesus. Mary is a magnificent gift of God to us for uniting us to Jesus in this life and for all eternity. She is the Mother of our life of union with Jesus. She is the mother of our interior life.

One of the most practical and underestimated ways of keeping in tune with Our Lord and his Mother is through the habit of frequent spiritual reading. This is one of the key practices in the spirituality of the Legion. It is built into every meeting of the Legion at all levels. In the early years of a praesidium it is recommended that the spiritual reading be taken from the Handbook until we are steeped in the spiritual treasures of the Legion but of course we can choose readings from other sources too. But we can spend a lifetime reading, studying and praying the Handbook and continue to gain fresh insights and apostolic motivation from it. Cardinal Suenens in his life of Edel Quinn stresses that the Handbook was her bedside book and it is my observation that legionaries who truly love and study and know the Handbook are invariably really dedicated legionaries with an authentic apostolic and contemplative spirit.

But the legionary should not confine his or herself to listening to the spiritual reading at a Legion meeting. The Handbook encourages us as follows: ‘Private spiritual reading, as well as developing Christian convictions, greatly helps prayer life. Preference is to be given to the reading of the New Testament, with a suitable Catholic commentary (cf DV 12) and spiritual classics, chosen according to one’s needs and abilities. It is here that the “wise” guide is especially important. Well-written lives of saints provide a good introduction to the spiritual life. They provide a headline, which would draw us on to goodness and heroism. Saints are the doctrines and practices of holiness made visible. If we frequent their company, we will soon imitate their qualities. This is a quotation from ‘Can We Be Saints’ even though the Handbook does not say so. Frank Duff obviously felt he could not express it in any better way and it was a recommendation close to his heart and an intimate part of his own spiritual life.

I think the Legion emphasis on spiritual reading for a healthy interior life is especially important in an age of mass media and limitless information. Our minds are often pulverised by the sheer volume of noise of the mass media. We have the television, radios and walkmans and DVD’s, the newspapers, the internet, the mobile phones and their text messages and the uninvited literature that is pushed through our letter boxes. And of course, gossip and other forms of communication can dominate our lives. I think it is possible that the interior life of even good legionaries can be blunted by over exposure to the noise of our information culture. Television can sap our apostolic zeal and slowly but surely diminish the liveliness of our faith and banalise our ways of thinking and behaving. The media in its many forms seldom focuses our attention on God and the things of God.

Of course, this explosion of information technology can be a great blessing in many ways and an instrument of evangelisation that could enable us to evangelise the whole world. We all know the tremendous benefit of the mobile phone or the e-mail facility when an emergency arises and we need to contact someone urgently. Lives have been saved through the use of the new world of information technology. Nor must we underestimate the potential for good in our own interior life of this exciting new world of information technology. There is a religious media and we can benefit from the tapes, CDs, videos, movies and the digitalised world that can bring us in such accessible and attractive form much of the very best spiritual writing to read or listen to or even watch. But here too we need a rigorous discernment because what claims to be Catholic or even Christian is neither in reality and may be just as unhealthy for the spiritual life as no spiritual reading at all. Pére Lacodaire puts it well when he says: ’ Life is too short for anything but the best when it comes to books’. To sum up the Legion spirit in this matter I think you could say: In the midst of all this deluge of information we need to feed our minds and hearts with the Word of God and care for our spiritual health by the habit of good spiritual reading. As G.K. Chesterton once said: ‘we should do with an open mind what we do with an open mouth: let us close it on something really good’.