Why Complete Formation Matters for Every Christian

Jean Khoury

Summary: Jesus revealed to us the architecture of the spiritual life in all its dimensions, calling us to holiness, to full participation in His life. This revelation includes a complete spiritual doctrine, an integral body of teaching that belongs to the Church’s living apostolic tradition. Yet today, most lay Catholics experience only partial spiritual formation: a practice-based spirituality without doctrine, a single form of prayer, a general catechesis, or fragments drawn from religious communities but disconnected from the context in which they live. This article explores why a complete, non-partisan, non-partial body of doctrine—adapted specifically to the lay vocation without presupposing vows, a horarium, or a monastic form of life—is essential for the Church to fulfil her universal call to holiness. It examines six distinct forms of spiritual life and formation, argues for the necessity of integration over fragmentation, and presents the vision of what a truly complete spiritual formation looks like.

Introduction

When Jesus walked among us, one of His essential works was to teach, to reveal. He revealed God. He revealed the Trinity. He revealed the divine life itself and the salvation He was bringing us. And within this magnificent revelation lay something that we often fail to appreciate with sufficient clarity: a complete revelation of the spiritual life in all its dimensions, in all its architecture.

When Jesus called us to holiness, He was not calling us to a vague aspiration or a pious sentiment. He was calling us to something concrete and real: full participation in His own life. And here is what matters: such a call necessarily implies a journey, a learning process, and a specific revelation about how we are to travel that path. It means there exists a body of doctrine—not detached from life, but intrinsically ordered toward shaping how we live, pray, grow, and love—that teaches us what holiness is and how to attain it.

Yet today, we find ourselves in a curious situation. Most baptised Christians, and especially lay Catholics, have never encountered a complete spiritual doctrine. What they have instead is scattered fragments: a practice here, a prayer method there, a general explanation of something, borrowed ideas from a great saint or a religious movement. Like someone trying to build a house with materials gathered piecemeal from different construction sites, the result is unstable, incomplete, and far from what might have been.

This article invites you to consider a fundamental question: what does complete spiritual formation look like? And more urgently: why should the lay Christian, called equally with the monk and the priest to holiness, not have access to a doctrine as integral, as true, as life-giving as that which shaped the great saints and mystics?

Part One: Spiritual Doctrine and the Apostolic Tradition

Let us begin with something foundational. When we speak of spiritual doctrine, we are not speaking of opinions, preferences, or even pastoral suggestions. We are speaking of something that belongs entirely to the living apostolic tradition of the Church, that deposit of faith and practice that has been handed down from Christ through the apostles and carefully preserved and developed throughout two thousand years of the Church’s life.

This doctrine constitutes a true body, a coherent whole, not a collection of isolated teachings. What must be discovered and learned by every serious Christian is not something partial, not something partisan (favouring one tradition over another without justification), but rather the minimum necessary, sufficient, solid, and complete enough to ensure steady and optimal growth in the spiritual life.

What characterises such a doctrine? It must be simple enough to be understood by the ordinary person. It must be practical enough to be actually lived. And it must be clear enough to shed the necessary light so that each Christian can take full responsibility for the stewardship of their own spiritual life. This responsibility is not optional; it belongs to every Christian in his or her relationship with Jesus.

Why is this so important? Listen to the words of Jesus Himself, as recorded in the Gospel according to Saint John: “The Holy Spirit will lead you to the fullness of truth.”; And He says something more: ““”Having reached that fullness, you will have no more questions to ask.”; This is extraordinary. It tells us that the spiritual path is not an endless wandering, but a journey toward completion, toward fullness, toward a state of being in which we have encountered the truth so deeply that our questions dissolve not from confusion, but from satisfaction and understanding.

And who gives us this body of doctrine? Jesus tells us: it is the Holy Spirit. Throughout the two thousand years of the Church’s history, the Holy Spirit has provided all the elements of this doctrine. It is there, waiting to be discovered, learned, and lived. More than this: Jesus Himself is our bread, and this body of doctrine is Jesus Himself as bread. To grow in the spiritual life is, quite literally, to be fed by the whole of Jesus—to eat of Him completely, to assimilate Him into our very being. This is why we need the complete doctrine: because it enables us to encounter and receive the fullness of Christ.

Part Two: Six Forms of Spiritual Life

To understand why complete spiritual doctrine matters so much, it helps to distinguish between different forms of spiritual life that exist in the Church today. There are at least six such forms, and understanding the differences between them—and especially understanding what each lacks—will clarify why a complete, integrated approach is so necessary.

The First Form: Spiritual Life Without Formation

The first form may be described as a spiritual life without formal formation. It lacks structure and precision, yet it often includes serious practices: attending Mass, praying the Rosary, engaging in adoration, and similar devotions. These are real, valuable practices, and they should not be dismissed. But they remain largely disconnected from a coherent understanding of what the spiritual life is, where it is leading, or how all these practices fit into an architecture of growth. It is spirituality by habit and sentiment rather than by understanding and intentional development.

The Second Form: Learning a Single Form of Prayer

The second form consists in learning to pray, but only in one particular manner. A person might discover the Rosary, or Contemplative Prayer, or Lectio Divina, or Meditation on specific themes, and take this as their entire spiritual path. These are genuine forms of prayer, each beautiful and fruitful, but each also limited. The person who knows only one form of prayer is like someone who visits a great library but reads only one book. They may find deep nourishment in that single work, but they miss the vastness of the wisdom available to them.

The Third Form: General Catechesis

The third form is the study of the fourth part of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which treats prayer and the spiritual life. This offers a genuine service: it provides a general, accessible understanding of prayer. But it has inherent limitations. It necessarily treats questions in a general manner, and it cannot reach the depth of understanding that one finds in the teachings of the great masters of spiritual life: the mystics and doctors of the Church such as Saint John of the Cross and Saint Teresa of Ávila. The Catechism is admirably clear and authoritative, but it is not designed to do what a complete spiritual doctrine does: to accompany a person through the entire journey of transformation in Christ.

The Fourth Form: Spiritual Life in Third Orders and Ecclesial Movements

The fourth form is found in third orders or secular orders—such as the Carmelite Secular Order, the Dominican Secular Order, the Franciscan Secular Order, and the Benedictine Secular Order, as well as in various ecclesial movements. These communities often draw their spiritual inspiration from the great religious traditions and from the founders of religious orders. This is noble and can be genuinely fruitful.

However, there is an important limitation here, and it requires us to be honest about it. An ecclesial movement is not a religious order. A secular order comprises lay members who do not live a religious life in the strict sense. They do not have vows in the same manner; they do not share a common horarium (daily schedule); they do not live according to a fully defined form of life as a community. What this means is that when the spiritual life of a religious order—which was developed within and depends upon that specific form of life—is extracted from its original context and adapted for lay members without that form of life, something is inevitably diluted or lost. The spiritual doctrine, which was always meant to animate and express a particular way of living together, becomes partial when lived in isolation or in a merely associational setting.

This is not a criticism of these orders and movements, they serve a real purpose and help many people. But we must be clear-eyed about what they are and are not. They provide something essential but not the whole.

The Fifth Form: Religious Life Proper

The fifth form of spiritual life is that of religious life itself: monks, nuns, and all consecrated persons. Here something remarkable happens. Two aspects are inseparably united in a way that is unique.

The first aspect is the form of life itself: a structured way of living received through a rule, constitutions, customs, and habits. This includes the vows (poverty, chastity, obedience), the practice of obedience within community, a defined horarium, and a specific charism, a particular spiritual gift and mission, within the Church, both spiritual and ministerial.

The second aspect is the spiritual life itself—the doctrine, the prayer, the growth, the transformation. But crucially, this spiritual life does not exist in isolation. It exists in relation to, and depends upon, that form of life. The rule shapes the spirituality. The communal living shapes the prayer. The obedience shapes the abandonment to God. The horarium provides the rhythm that makes the spiritual practice possible. To imagine that one could extract the spiritual life of a religious order and live it fully outside that form of life is a kind of theological confusion. It is like trying to understand a flower by removing all its roots and soil and expecting it to flourish on a table.

This has happened for many centuries, though we do not always pay attention to it. Well-meaning lay people, inspired by the spiritual beauty of religious life, have sought to live that spirituality outside its native context. The result is inevitable: what emerges is often a diluted form of both the rule and the spirituality. The lay person cannot follow the rule as intended (they have a job, a family, unavoidable secular responsibilities), so the horarium becomes different if not vague, the structure becomes fragile, and the spiritual practice, which depends on that structure, becomes weakened as well. This is not because lay people are less holy or less committed, far from it. It is because the spiritual life of a religious order is inextricably tied to a form of life that lay people, by definition, do not live.

Therefore, we must be very careful not to dilute, extend, or naively transplant the spiritual life proper to religious orders into the secular context without recognizing that something essential is missing: the form of life in which that spirituality grew and which it naturally expresses.

The Sixth Form: Complete Spiritual Formation Adapted to Lay Life

And here we arrive at the sixth form, which corresponds to complete spiritual formation. This form possesses what we might call the full architecture of a spiritual doctrine. It enables a person to assume full responsibility for his or her own spiritual life. It is the kind of body of doctrine we have been describing: one that covers all the essential stages of the spiritual journey, all the means of growth, all the helps and forms of prayer needed, presented in a way that is minimal yet complete, non-partial and non-partisan, and valid for all people.

This form is particularly suited to those who do not have a defined form of life—who are not consecrated, who do not live under vows, obedience, or a fixed horarium—yet who are called, equally with the monk and the nun, to fulfil the universal call to holiness. It provides what religious life provides (a complete path to union with Christ and participation in His redemptive mission), but it does so in a way that is adapted to and does not presuppose the monastic infrastructure. It stands on its own; it does not depend on being borrowed, diluted, or transplanted from somewhere else.

This is what is missing in the spiritual life of the contemporary Church. This is what is needed.

Part Three: Why Completeness Matters

At this point, someone may ask: is this not a matter of schools of spirituality? Has not the Church always had multiple schools—Carmelite, Benedictine, Ignatian, Dominican, the Desert Fathers, the Fathers of the Church? Does each not grasp something essential, even if none grasps the whole?

The answer is yes and no. Yes, the Church has been blessed with many schools of spirituality, each bringing forward something vital and true. But this is precisely the point: they address something essential but not the whole. They are not inadequate as schools within religious contexts—the Carmelite contemplative tradition, the Benedictine balance, the Ignatian discernment—each of these animates and expresses a particular form of spiritual life. But they were never designed to stand alone as complete doctrines for lay people. They presuppose the form of life in which they grew.

What is needed is not another school competing with these traditions, but rather something different: a synthetic approach. A doctrine that draws on what is essential and true from all the great traditions, that honours them and does not replace them, but that weaves them together into a coherent whole that is self-standing and complete. Such a doctrine can then serve as a principle of integration, not contradicting the schools, but showing how they fit together, how contemplation and action relate, how the act of hope and the act of love inform each other, how Mary and the Eucharist are the twin fountains of spiritual life.

This is what the Church approves when she approves a form of life: not merely a lifestyle or a set of practices, but a doctrine, a secure, sound doctrine that can lead to holiness but within a specific style of life. When the Church recognises an order or a movement, she is in effect saying: this order, with both its form of life and its spiritual doctrine, is sufficient to lead a person to sanctity. The fullness in question is not the fullness of all revelation (that belongs to the deposit of faith as a whole), but the fullness of means necessary to reach holiness. It is the fullness of practical doctrine aimed at transformation in Christ.

Part Four: The Foundation in the Paschal Mystery

What should such a complete spiritual doctrine look like? How should it be organised to be both accessible and profound?

The foundation must be the liturgy and, within the liturgy, the paschal mystery of Christ’s death and resurrection. From this centre, everything else flows naturally. The liturgy of the Word offers to us Lectio Divina—the sacred reading and meditation on Scripture that nourishes the conscious, intellectual, moral part of our being (what the Christian tradition calls the soul or spirit as the seat of understanding). The Eucharist itself, the Communion with the body and blood of Christ, offers us Contemplative Prayer and Adoration, the deep, wordless communion with Christ that nourishes the roots of our being (what the tradition calls the spirit in its deepest dimension, the place of direct encounter with God).

In this way, all our being is fed. Anthropologically, our soul (our conscious, reflective part) is nourished by the Word of God. Our spirit (our deepest centre, where we are most ourselves before God) is fed by immersion in Contemplative Prayer, in adoration, in that direct touch of grace that comes after communion or in connection with it. These are not two separate spiritualities but rather two dimensions of a single, complete encounter with the living Christ.

Such a doctrine would address all the dimensions of Christian life: the life of prayer (in all its forms), the life of the virtues and the growth of the theological virtues, the understanding of the spiritual journey itself (its stages, its characteristics, its dangers), the role of the sacraments, the centrality of Mary to have the fullness of Jesus, the work of the Holy Spirit, the integration of suffering and the cross into our union with Christ, the call to holiness in the midst of ordinary life.

All of this forms one coherent, integrated whole, not a patchwork of borrowed ideas, not fragments of monastic spirituality awkwardly adapted, but a doctrine that stands on its own and speaks directly to the lay person seeking to love God with their whole heart and to participate in the redemptive mission of Christ in the midst of their ordinary duties and relationships.

Part Five: Meeting the Church’s Need

Why does the Church need such a doctrine now?

Consider the reality. The Church teaches that there is a universal call to holiness. Every baptised Christian is called to sanctity, not as an exception but as a rule. We are all called to full participation in the life of Christ. But how many Catholics today have access to a coherent, complete doctrine that teaches them what holiness is, how to grow in it, what the spiritual journey looks like, and how to navigate it intentionally?

The Catechism is invaluable, but it is not designed to serve this purpose. (see: Catechesis vs. Spiritual Formation) The various schools of spirituality speak wisdom, but they were developed within religious contexts. The parish provides the sacraments and community, but typically not ongoing spiritual formation (while it should). The result is that millions of lay Catholics are left to piece together their spiritual life from fragments, with little understanding of where they are going or why, with no clear map of the spiritual journey, with limited knowledge of the prayer forms available to them, with confusion about the relationship between their daily work and their call to sanctity.

This is a tragedy, not because it is anyone’s fault, but because it is unnecessary. The wisdom is there. The tradition is there. The masters are there. What is needed is someone to gather all of this, organise it coherently, present it in a way that is both true to the tradition and utterly accessible to the ordinary Christian seeking to grow in holiness. (See: Three+ Years Formation Plan of Formation in Spiritual Life) (See also: Spiritual Formation as a Journey)

When the Church approves a spiritual movement or the formation offered by a community, she is in effect saying: this spiritual doctrine, as practiced in this context, is a valid and sufficient path to holiness. Such approval is not a claim to absolute superiority, but rather an assurance of theological soundness and spiritual fruitfulness. It is possible for multiple doctrines to lead to holiness, yet the Church recognises those that are truly complete, truly coherent, and truly adequate to the task.

What the Church also needs is this: a complete spiritual doctrine presented as a catechism: a teaching that is systematic, accessible, sure, and specifically designed for those without a religious vocation, yet equally called to sanctity. Not a book of pious sentiments. Not a borrowed spirituality watered down. But a true, integral, ecclesial project that serves the universal call to holiness.

Conclusion

Jesus revealed the architecture of spiritual life. He promised that the Holy Spirit would lead us to the fullness of truth. He declared that He Himself is our bread. He called every single one of us to holiness, not as an ideal for the few, but as the ordinary destiny of the baptised.

For lay Catholics to live this call fully, they need what every serious Christian needs: a complete spiritual doctrine. Not partial teachings borrowed piecemeal from different sources. Not practices without understanding. Not doctrine without lived integration. But a whole—a coherent, profound, practical body of wisdom that covers all the dimensions of the spiritual journey and speaks directly to their situation, their vocation, their daily life.

Such a doctrine does not replace the schools of spirituality or the richness of the different traditions. Rather, it gathers what is true and essential from all of them, weaves it together in a unified vision, and makes it available and alive for everyone. It becomes a principle of integration, showing how contemplation and action, Lectio Divina and Eucharistic adoration, the virtues and the gifts of the Holy Spirit, suffering and joy, Mary and Christ, all belong to a single, beautiful, coherent vision of how a human being grows into the fullness of Christ.

This is the promise of a complete spiritual formation: that you need not wander in fragments. You need not settle for partial knowledge. You can encounter a doctrine that is entire, that is true, that has been tested in the tradition and is alive in the present moment. You can receive, as Scripture says, the “bread” of Christ in its wholeness. And in doing so, you can respond fully to the universal call to holiness—not as a distant ideal, but as a lived reality, woven into the very fabric of how you pray, how you love, how you live, and how you grow in union with the one who loved you first and calls you still.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Holy Bible, English Standard Version (ESV). Bible Gateway, http://www.biblegateway.com

Catechism of the Catholic Church. Vatican Press, 1992.

Saint John of the Cross. The Ascent of Mount Carmel. Translated by E. Allison Peers, Dover Publications, 1989.

Saint John of the Cross. The Dark Night of the Soul. Translated by E. Allison Peers, Dover Publications, 2003.

Saint Teresa of Ávila. The Interior Castle. Translated by E. Allison Peers, Dover Publications, 2007.

Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. The Story of a Soul. Translated by John Beevers, Image Books, 1989.

Blessed Marie-Eugène of the Child Jesus. I Want to See God. Translated by Barbara Baily & Muriel Saint-Michel, Institute of Carmelite Studies, 2009.

Scholastic and Contemporary Works

Garrigou-Lagrange, Reginald. The Three Ages of the Interior Life: Prelude of Eternal Life. Translated by Sister M. Timothea Doyle, TAN Books, 2003.

Benedict XVI, Pope. Deus Caritas Est (God Is Love). Vatican Press, 2005.

Khoury, Jean. “The School of Mary and Religious Life”; School of Mary.

Khoury, Jean. “Is the School of Mary a Charism?”; School of Mary.

Various Articles on Spiritual Formation, School of Mary.

Author’s Note: This article represents the synthesis of theological reflection on spiritual formation and the universal call to holiness. It is presented as a contribution to the ecclesial conversation on how the Church might better serve the spiritual development of lay Catholics. The author acknowledges the assistance of artificial intelligence in the composition and refinement of this work.