Train Like a Father, Fight Like an Apostle

PHASE 1: REBUILD

The house of God is one, and you’re its head. Die for it.

St. Cyprian did. He bled without flinching, so read this clearly: You’re not failing, but you’re under siege, and no one trained you for priesthood under fire. That ache you feel is real, but it’s not your defeat. It’s the bell of the desert, and it’s calling you to rise.

And man to man? You are falling short in places, but that doesn’t define you, nor do you need a guilt trip or reassurances. You need a reckoning.

How do you manage failure? How do you address your shortcomings? It’s hard to know when the majority of the advice isn’t specific to our vocation.

You’ve heard tons of good Catholic advice before, some even from me. Go to Mass more, pray the Rosary, fast, and make a good confession.

All of it is true. All of it is good. And all of it can, if misapplied, crush you because the rules change for a Catholic husband and father who really bleeds into his vocation. I want to be clear with you. Our roles don’t place us above the tenets of our faith. We don’t get a pass on required or even recommended spiritual practices because we’re “special.” Squatting is for everyone, right? It’s a matter of picking the right variation that suits your structure. The same is true for your spiritual practice.

Look at your life.

Carrying a newborn in your arms with exhaustion in your bones, tension in your marriage, and work that demands excellence from you. But none of this interrupts your spiritual life. This is your spiritual life.

You still need to train your body and soul. There’s no “sacramental glue” you can feel. It’s just survival. You long for the ascetic life, but you’re already in it. Twelve hours of service with no silence and no consolation. You’ve eaten nothing and prayed less. And then someone tells you to “add more devotions.”

That’s torment, not advice, and that’s how good faith spirals into quiet apostasy. You don’t feel any grace, just punishment, and it’s unsustainable.

The clergy aren’t feeding you, the laity barely notice fathers exist, and society despises you. You’re unformed because the Church stopped forming men. Bishops handed formation over to committees, priests gave homilies instead of orders, and fathers chose comfort over kingdom.

So what happens? You spiral.

You feel ashamed that we aren’t “doing more,” and the shame pushes you further from the very God who’s trying to meet you in that chaos.

I’m telling you this plainly: Your vocation is not an interruption to your spiritual life. Your vocation is your spiritual life. Fatherhood is not adjacent to sanctity. It is sanctity. Period. This is the greatest role you will ever play, and I’m tired of acting like it’s not. I know you are too.

You are a priest, not by sacramental ordination, but by domestic commission. You are the high priest of your home. Trying to comfort a screaming child and keep your wife level at the same time is Eucharistic. The exhaustion is sacrificial. When you get up off the floor and show up again, you’re offering yourself. You’re doing what every priest is called to do: lay down your life. And then? You have to do it again. You’re as good as your last offering, but you do it anyway, humbly, with a heavy but full heart.

Men never hear this. Instead, we get advice intended for men in actual monasteries or seminaries. It’s sound advice, but it’s dislocated. We need formation that speaks into the real, brutal economy of grace available to the man who is already pouring himself out daily in apostolic life of diapers and dishes, stress and silence, work and governance. A man deep in the desert getting burned left and right.

You don’t have permission to lower the bar.

Instead, locate it and then lift it in the only place it exists for you to glorify God. This is your training, and in it you will recognize that continuing to show up for your family is the core of your spiritual life—it’s your daily prayer and the very fire where your sanctification is forged.

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We Need to Clarify Your Fight

You are in the crucible of the domestic church. And your prayer won’t look like an hour of Lectio Divina. You don’t have that time, and you need to stop feeling bad about it. For clarity, your training has a place for these practices; however, I’m highlighting that you need to make sure you adhere to sustainable spiritual practices that build your spirit, not break it down with guilt and comparison.

There are fathers who do Divine Office, Lectio Divina, etc. Good. I don’t write for them. I write for fathers like you and me, fathers in the desert, who are constantly under fire and barely get a moment to think about God’s existence.

A lot of your prayer life does look like holding a crying child in the dark and whispering the name of Jesus over and over again until one of you falls asleep. Or holding your tongue and choosing to speak kindly instead of sarcastically to your wife because you’re exhausted and you think her question is silly. It’s rejecting a passing glance that locks eyes with another woman that you know is trouble. It’s denying the comfort of staying in bed for just 5 more minutes when you know you need to get up and set the tone.

You’re being formed. You’re not outright failing.

Understand that formation is the single most painful thing you will experience as a man with vocation. It is an all-encompassing physical and spiritual agony that can’t be described, only lived. But if you offer it up, embrace it, and ask God to make you into his weapon, he will.

Forget living like monks. The monastic framework is valuable; we honor them and their example. But you need to start training like an apostle and a father on fire.

Enough briefing, let’s go.

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Fatherhood as Formation in the Furnace

1. Establish the Operating Reality

Principle: Your domestic life is the training and battleground of your life and not a barrier to holiness.

Fatherhood is prayer, not an interruption to prayer. Go to the Lord like Abba Pambo, as a man who has not yet begun to serve.

Mindset Shift: “I’m being cruciformed in real-time, not falling behind in holiness.”

2. Reject the False Binary

Problem: Ascetic practice vs. family life is not either/or. It’s transfigured in your station.

• Common advice: “Wake up at 5 AM to pray.”

• Reality: You’ve already been up since 3:17 with a teething child.

• Training Protocol: Replace spiritual heroics with embedded faithfulness.

  • “Pray without ceasing” becomes “Pray within parenting.”

  • E.g., Whisper the Jesus Prayer while rocking the baby and offer up each act of service.

Forget balance; it’s a lie. The cross you bear isn’t ergonomic, and neither was His. You will sweat, you will struggle, and you will bleed. Embrace your struggle and offer it up.

3. Develop Your Field Manual

Rule: Anchor your spiritual formation to your actual schedule—not your ideal one. It works like this with any form of fitness.

Build a micro-rule of life in these categories:

• Prayer: 60-second Angelus when you wake. 1 brief examen at bedtime. Bless us, O Lord, at meals.

• Silence: 1 deliberate act of withheld reaction per day = interior mortification.

• Fasting: Skip the luxury, not the meal. E.g., “No scrolling while holding the baby.”

• Scripture: One Psalm during the day.

If your house is spiritually silent, don’t be shocked when your son starts listening to strangers.

4. Introduce a Training Model: Tension as Resistance

Concept: The chaos and exhaustion you’re experiencing is your gymnasium of virtue.

Like resistance training, tension is the mechanism for strength, not the obstacle to it.

• Frame spiritual warfare in terms of:

  • Endurance → Patience with children

  • Humility → Admitting error to your wife

  • Detachment → Choosing the slow, hidden good over quick, visible gratification

5. Reintegrate the Sacramental Vision

Truth: You are already participating in the liturgy of Christ by living your vocation fully.

You don’t have to “escape to God.” He exists in your daily life in the desert through your vocation.

• Relearn to see your home as a monastery:

  • Kitchen = refectory

  • Floor = place of prostration

  • Crying child = bell calling you to intense prayer

6. Be Fraternal, Not a Lone Wolf

Instruction: Don’t train alone.

Your family is your first fraternity. Build with them. Then, find one other father, either digital or local, and hold each other accountable to this rule. Don’t fall for the trap of “brotherhoods.” Many of them create dependency and become echo chambers of bad catechesis. Christ and your fraternity at home first.

Ask yourself:

• “Where did I engage faithfully this week?”

• “Where did I face a spiritual ambush?”

• “What was my prayer in the furnace?”

7. Sanctity Over Stats

Shift: Stop measuring success by hours prayed and scripture read. Measure by presence given and action taken.

• Did you return gentleness when you felt fury?

• Did you keep the faith in silence when you could have self-pitied aloud?

These are priestly acts, not small ones, and while the fruit may be invisible now, your son will inherit it.

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Rebuke the Enemies of the Domestic Church

• Comfort Theology: The lie that God will not demand everything from you.

• Digital Monasticism: The fantasy that watching trad content equals transformation.

• Clerical Passivity: When your pastor won’t lead, your children still need a priest. That’s you.

• Effeminized Devotion: Rosary-only men with no rule, no household order, and no spine. These are boys with beads. You’re a father with a blade. Pray and govern.

Abba Moses the Black bled in the sands for holiness and warned young brothers not to take up spiritual struggle if they weren’t ready to die. It’s monastic advice in nature and sound fatherhood advice. You’re already dying every day. The only question is whether it’s sanctified or squandered.

Don’t wait for permission; you already have it. The fire is here. It’s in your house. Welcome to the desert.

You’re in a lifelong apostolic quest to crush sin, to sanctify your bloodline, and to outlast Satan in your house. Don’t approach this like a 30-day challenge.

Train like a father and fight an apostle; you’re already in formation. Pick up your cross and fight. Don’t give Hell a chance.

⸻

Built in the Desert. Covered by Mary. Forged in Fire.

☩ Sans Peur

– Emmanuel