When Did You First Encounter the Risen Christ?

 Posted by Beckey Eldredge – In Reflections  

 I took a long sip of my hot coffee to give me a minute to process his question. Sitting across from me was a man in his late twenties who had just asked me, “When did you first encounter the Risen Christ?”                                                      

His question made me pause. Not only was I thrown off by the depth of his question within minutes of meeting each other, but I was not prepared to be the one asked this type of question. When he asked to meet, I assumed I would be in the role of director offering questions to let him reflect on his own faith journey.                                            

It was a challenging question, not because I had not reflected on it before, but because of how badly I needed to be reminded of the beginning of my journey:  The moments when I was drawn inexplicably to God by a restlessness and desire to learn more. The moments when I was almost giddy with joy as I became aware of God’s presence in my life.    

As the coffee warmed my throat, I realized I saw in the young man the same inquisitive nature that I possess—the part of me that loves to hear people’s faith stories and the part of me that loves to hear when God got people’s attention. I could feel his question hitting me deep in my core, a nudge from God to remember where it all began.                           

I did my best to share my beginnings of encountering Christ, and then I eagerly listened to his story. It invigorated me tremendously both to share my own story and hear his.   As I got in my car, I continued to reflect. What I realized on the way home was how the majority of my ministry work the last three years was walking with those more often in a season of deepening than beginning. How quickly I had forgotten the joy of the first encounter with Christ!                                                                                                     

The joy of the first encounter with Christ is unforgettable. It is the same joy that propelled the disciples forward to spread the Good News with fervor and urgency. It is the joy that propels me along my own faith journey. It is the same joy that draws people into a relationship with God every day.                                                                                   

It was in remembering my first encounters with the Risen Christ and in hearing the young man’s story that both my faith and my ministry work were invigorated.                

Reflect on when you first encountered the Risen Christ. Then pose this question to people in your life and listen to their stories.                                                                                     

We Can Be More Fully Ourselves 

Posted by Andy Otto in Discernment

When I was a Jesuit, people often told me I had a higher calling. It seems common language for those who’ve felt called to priesthood or religious life, but I don’t believe anyone has a “higher” calling. We’re all simply called to be the people God made us. God calls us to all sorts of paths, choices, and careers, but none is higher than another. If we’ve truly discerned what we’re good at and confirm that God desires it too, then we’ve followed our calling.

Tim Reidy, in a recent America Magazine podcast, talked with James Martin, SJ, about the end of the series Mad Men. He noted that Don Draper, after finding some personal growth at a retreat, returns to his work in advertising. “This happens,” Reidy says. “People find themselves, but that doesn’t mean they have to abandon all they’ve done before.” Don is good at what he does, so he returns to it. Choosing to follow God more nearly doesn’t necessarily mean going in search of some other vocation. It means returning to our vocation as better, more whole people.
Some vocations may be more demanding than others, but no one is better than another. My wife’s job as a campus minister could be quite demanding, at times more so than my graduate classes. She would sometimes be envious of my chance to take theology classes, and I would find myself envious of her full-time ministry. We’d idealize the other’s calling. But what we needed to remind ourselves of was that God had called each of us to where we were at that moment. And I believe that God took delight in us using our gifts and talents in the best way we could.

God does not call each of us to some “higher” vocation on some metaphorical pedestal. God calls us instead to a deeper sense of self, to be someone who is fully human and can pay attention to his or her gifts and flourish. And if God ends up calling us to another vocation or state of life, it’s not to somewhere that’s higher, but to somewhere we can be more fully ourselves.

To Labor and Not to Seek Reward 

Posted by Marina McCoy in Reflections

The Prayer for Generosity gives us words that assist us on a lifelong path of becoming more fully surrendered to God.
St. Ignatius’s words “to labor and not to seek reward” can include larger vocational decisions to seek God’s call for its own sake, and not for external rewards such as wealth, honor, or security. Instances are choosing to be a social worker, or starting a small business that can benefit my community, or beginning a family. However, this kind of decision is only a first step. As we encounter various obstacles in life, the question of our own motivation is continually challenged; our love purified; and our surrender to God deepened.

Students who undertake service projects at my university often constructively question their own motives: do they take up a service project for the sake of the others whom they serve? to increase their own learning? as a good resumé builder? to feel pleasure in helping another? Often our own motives are not clear even to ourselves until problems arise. For example, a person at a homeless shelter is angry because no more beds are available, and though this is not the student’s fault, she feels badly about the lack of gratitude and asks why she is there.
At such times, we confront not only a lack of “reward” but also a certain impurity in our own motives. Acknowledging that our own actions are not as other-centered as we thought can be humbling. Then we often have to choose how and why to continue. Ignatius’s words encourage us to take up these challenges as an opportunity for the purification of love.

We can also labor without seeking reward by letting go of the fruits of our own labors. Often, we do not know our actions’ effects. A small act of kindness to a stranger on the morning commute may encourage another to act more gently in the next part of her day at work. A student who sits in the back of a class with cap pulled down low may later tell his teacher that the class was transformative.
St. Thérèse of Lisieux wrote of her desire to come to God at the end of her life with “empty hands,” so that God would take her not for her works, but only for herself. Like Ignatius she recognized that we are loved unconditionally. When we know of that love, then our gifts to God and others can then also be freer of self-concern. We can surrender ourselves into God’s hands in all our labors, trusting that God will use whatever we offer to bear fruit.

Purpose in this Moment 

Posted by Lisa Kelly in Reflections

So often in our lives we want that big picture, the clear road map, the understanding of the infinite, whether it is to know what the future will bring, what life’s purpose is, or even where this Ignatian Adventure might lead. But skipping to the end of the book would miss the point. Being human means we can’t know the whole picture. No human in history has clearly seen his or her complete road map, so it isn’t going to start with me.
Faith means taking the journey even though we don’t know how it will end. All I truly have is the present moment, and each and every moment holds a purpose. In each moment I get to make a choice to keep my feet firmly planted in the enormous love of God for me or to let my disordered attachments pull me into actions and worldviews that take me away from reflecting that love.
St. Ignatius recognized in his Principle and Foundation that we can easily be preoccupied with what our lives will be down the road—will I be rich or poor? Will I be sick or healthy? Will I live a long life or a short one? And in that preoccupation we miss the presence of the Spirit in the current moment. 

How can I “praise, reverence, and serve God” right now? In this moment? In this one little action or gesture? The choices we make within each moment will bring us one step closer or farther from our heart’s desire. Our purpose in life need be no bigger than our purpose in this very moment. What’s yours?

One Word at a Time 

Posted by Michelle Francl-Donnay in Ignatian Prayer

To listen to Andrea Bocelli singing Ave Maria, click on this Link

The interior of the church looked like it had been torn from the pages of Isaiah, “I lay your pavements in carnelians, your foundations in sapphires; I will make your battlements of rubies, your gates of jewels, and all your walls of precious stones.” The air was still, heavy with the heat of early summer and anticipation. I settled into my pew, tore my eyes from the distracting beauty that surrounded me to focus on the choral ensemble arrayed across the chancel.

Suddenly the tenors plunged as one voice into the soaring space, “Ave Maria…,” a line echoed by the baritones, then caught up into a complex harmony of overlapping phrases by the sopranos and altos. The music swirled above us and poured down the walls. Eddies of sound spun down the main aisle.
A word or phrase would surface in perfect clarity, then become submerged into the polyphony, only to re-emerge again on the next word. Gratia, grace. Benedicta, blessed. The depths of each phrase of the Hail Mary were sounded by threads of intricate harmony. My ear strained to follow the final note of the final Amen, until it too, was caught into the silence.

As I took the train home late that night, I was struck by how much like my prayer this setting of the Ave Maria had been. I gather myself in stillness to listen, plunge in with a word or two. Adsum. Here I am, Lord. God willing, I hear the music that ever surrounds us, but even with long practice the individual notes elude me.
Words tumble about, caught in the currents of my thoughts. Sometimes, there are flashes of heart-rending clarity. And in the end, the transcendent Trinitarian chorus carries me into silence again, my heart straining to follow their lead.
Perhaps because this particular piece had been composed by a contemporary of St. Ignatius, I thought, too, of his Second Method of Prayer. (SE 252) Gather yourself comfortably before God, he advises, still your gaze, and don’t let it roam about. Take a familiar prayer, like the Our Father, or perhaps the Ave Maria—the Hail Mary. Say the first word, hold onto it, explore it, relish it, turn it about. When you’ve exhausted that word or phrase, go on to the next. Let each word pull you more deeply into the Divine mystery.

This morning, listening again to Robert Parson’s Ave Maria, I realized that this is the rhythm not only of my prayer, but of my life. There are moments when I am blessed with an utter certainty of God’s presence, followed by moments when I am so distracted by the complex cacophony that pervades my daily life I lose track of the underlying melody entirely. I can be befuddled by, entranced with, or simply carried away by the complexity of the sacred tune swirling through the universe. And there are so many times when I strain to hang onto the barest whisper of God’s voice, unsure if it is still there.
Gratia plena, indeed. I pray to be filled with the grace to hear God resounding through time and space, and the courage to follow him into the depths. One word at a time.

Purpose in this Moment

by Lisa Kelly, as she begins An Ignatian Prayer Adventure.

So often in our lives we want that big picture, the clear road map, the understanding of the infinite, whether it is to know what the future will bring, what life’s purpose is, or even where this Ignatian Adventure might lead. But skipping to the end of the book would miss the point. Being human means we can’t know the whole picture. No human in history has clearly seen his or her complete road map, so it isn’t going to start with me.
Faith means taking the journey even though we don’t know how it will end. All I truly have is the present moment, and each and every moment holds a purpose. In each moment I get to make a choice to keep my feet firmly planted in the enormous love of God for me or to let my disordered attachments pull me into actions and worldviews that take me away from reflecting that love.

St. Ignatius recognized in his Principle and Foundation that we can easily be preoccupied with what our lives will be down the road—will I be rich or poor? Will I be sick or healthy? Will I live a long life or a short one? And in that preoccupation we miss the presence of the Spirit in the current moment. How can I “praise, reverence, and serve God” right now? In this moment? In this one little action or gesture? The choices we make within each moment will bring us one step closer or farther from our heart’s desire. Our purpose in life need be no bigger than our purpose in this very moment. 

What’s yours?

Care of the Person, Care of the Self

By Tim Muldoon in Spirituality

Care of the person (cura personalis) is one of the common principles of Ignatian spirituality and pedagogy. It is rooted in the faith that God has created me to do some good in the world, and that through discernment I can come to an understanding of how to love the people in my life as Jesus might, awakening in them the same desire to give their lives in loving service to others.
Cura personalis has an eschatological dimension—a fancy theological way of expressing that all the ways we love others are oriented toward building the kingdom of God little by little, allowing God to use us in the workings of a divine symphony.
One implication of this faith that is appropriate during the summer months is that our care for other persons must not neglect the care of that one person whom we will know our entire lives: ourselves. For those who practice care for others, it can be easy to neglect the self. Parenting, I find, can elicit from me patterns of self-giving which are not really sustainable. Losing sleep, always seeking the good of the other, spending time on what the other needs instead of what I need—all these I tend to write off as so many types of sacrificial love that I can offer up to God.

Yet the legal maxim nemo dat quod non habet (no one gives what he does not have) applies to the spiritual life as well. Care of the self is integral to the desire to practice cura personalis. This summer, perhaps it is time to return to the springs of living water that are the Scriptures and the Church’s liturgy.
To use a different approach, consider how care of the self can include such disparate activities as taking long naps, reading a challenging essay, physical exercise, foreign travel, walks in nature, conversation with friends, a glass of wine on a beautiful lanai, or climbing a mountain. Care of the self will include building up my capacities to undertake the mission God has entrusted to me; but it will also mean sometimes simply enjoying the gifts of leisure. In both cases, care of the self is a work of cooperating with God in the eschatological work of building the kingdom.