St. Francis de Sales recommends any person seeking to grow in the love of God receive Communion frequently. By "frequently," he means at least every second week, preferably every Sunday.

Frequent Communion, he says, will benefit you spiritually. "By adoring and eating beauty, purity and goodness itself in this divine sacrament, you will become wholly beautiful, wholly good and wholly pure."

If something is worth doing, it's worth doing well. If it's going to be done well then it must be done often.

Take physical fitness, for example. To keep healthy and spry, it just won't suffice to go for a weekly one-hour walk. Strenuous activity needs to happen frequently, daily if possible, to maintain even a modicum of heart-lung fitness.

Even in the time of St. Francis de Sales, 400 years ago, people felt they didn't know how to pray. Today, we live in the most secularized of all ages. It is easy to turn to things, not so easy to turn towards God. A million distractions beset us. Indeed, more than a secular age, ours might be characterized as a distracted age.

Still the human heart, yearning as it does for infinity, is tied to the earth. That is true in all epochs. So in his Introduction to the Devout Life, Francis not only wanted to encourage people to pray, he felt he must give them a method.

In his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey asks his readers to meditate on their own funeral. Think about what you would like people to say at your funeral — a family member, a friend, a co-worker and a member of your church.