It seems really hard to have spiritual goals.

A lot of how I think about the spiritual life is in terms of moral and personal development. Am I more patient? Am I more present, accepting, loving, intentional, etc. than I was a year ago?

Those are really hard questions to answer. They don’t seem to be truly measurable except for a hunch or a feeling that I might be moving in the right direction. How do you measure how present you were in the last week?

Add to this the fact that my spiritual practice – Centering Prayer – is, at its core, a passive practice. I conceive of it as an opening of the self to God – to a transformation that can only happen by grace.

So the only real tangible spiritual goal I can think of is “time on the mat.” How much time do I actually spend in meditation, opening myself to the possibility of transformation, each day?

That’s pretty much all I can come up with for a true spiritual goal. Time on the mat.