Spiritual Paths

One of my readers brought up a good point about yesterday's blog, so I need to be more clear.  If a path is spiritual, it changes a person who is on it.  The work is hard but if the path is a good fit you are inspired to do the work and change for the better in the virtuous life.  I know this from my own experience.  I was on a dogmatic path as a Catholic Christian.  I believed in the divinity of Jesus much as some people believe in the Dharma, Four Noble Truths, Vedanta, Upanishads, and Tao Te Ching, or The Twelve Steps.  This is a dogmatic path, not a spiritual one.  I was not appreciably changed by my belief.  I did not or could not do the work of the spiritual path.  Each day I would take up my cross, not Jesus's cross, and I would try and be happy, which is to get my way and avoid misery.  Neither happened because I had a lot of active character defects.  I wanted everything and everybody to change, but me.  I looked at other paths but they were not a good fit for me in however I tried them.  Defeated by my own personal path, I came back to Christianity and a sober Catholic version and began to do the work.  It is not easy. The path did not change but little by little, I did.  This is how the Jesus path became a good fit of me.  Many people will go to mass on Christmas, but that will be it for mass that year.  How many of them are on the dogma path and not the spiritual path is something I cannot answer.  I used to teach and focus on Catechism, but I now leave that to others.  I now focus on teaching surrender, detachment and the contemplative way.  I have a small following, as you might expect.