I am not Catholic, however I have found several resources the past couple years that have helped me continue daily devotions and prayer, which are through a Catholic lens. It started as I randomly began the listening and reading along with Fr. Mike Schmitz as he went through The Bible in a Year podcast. That lead me to the Hallow app at the start of Lent in 2025.
Additionally, I have been reading Thomas Merton again lately, who was a Trappist monk. While he also has the Catholic lens, I was introduced to his writing when I moved to Kentucky in 2002, when I read The Seven Storey Mountain and visited the Abbey of Gethsemani in Bardstown.
I share all this background, only to acknowledge that I'm often reading and praying along with traditions I know little about, but only in a desire to deepen my personal relationship with Christ.
Today is the first day of Lent and in this mornings prayer, we prayed the Litany of Humility.
I have prayed many times for help to grow in humility, selflessness and in ways that allow me to think of others, as much as I consider myself.
The Litany of Humility took it a step beyond:
Deliver me, Jesus. From the desire of being loved... From the fear of being humiliated... From the fear of being wronged... That others may be praised and I unnoticed...
That is not the whole prayer, but they are requests that I am not sure I have ever prayed.
I want to be loved. I do not want to be humiliated. I do not want to be wronged. I do not want to go unnoticed.
The prayer is to have no fear of those things and to not let those desires overcome my ability to be holy and seeking Jesus. It is just a shock to the system to begin meditating on these desires. In a world that promotes attention, that values likes, where everyone is living within their own constructed real and virtual identities, it raises the question on how can we live in that world, yet still fulfill many of the requests being prayed within this prayer.
If understanding how your identity is meant to be constructed, if not via reflections of others or social media, I encourage you to read chapter five, "Things in Their Identity," by Merton in his book New Seeds of Contemplation.