The Ignatian Exercises

Here's something pretty cool.

The Jesuit community at Georgetown University has created a series of videos to explain and comment on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. These gentlemen, from all over the place, are some of the heavy hitters in Ignatian spirituality ~ they are the ones whom the rest of us read and listen to as we learn to do spiritual direction.

The first speaker is noted European historian John O'Malley, S.J. When he talks about Ignatius working on the Exercises in his early life, he reminds me of the constant interplay of traditions n my own life: Ignatius was studying and writing in Paris at the same time that John Calvin was. There's no evidence that they met, but a few summers ago I certainly enjoyed walking the streets in the neighborhood they had walked and contemplating my multi-dimensional heritage. At the time, I was finishing the Exercises (with one of the Jesuits who's apparently going to speak in this series) and starting to imagine myself in seminary and in ministry.

As I watch this first video as I write, I'm thinking that Joseph Tetlow, S.J. is a little intimidating! I wonder whether I would have fallen in love with the Exercises if he had been the one to introduce them to me. It's true that it's quite a challenge to learn articulate your prayer life as you make your way through them, but it's a loving and generous experience, not a scary, intellectual one.

These presentations take a bit of stamina, but are well worth your time if you have any interest in Ignatian spirituality or spiritual direction.

Gravity and Grace

I stole the title from Mompriest, who has offered a wonderful little reflection here. I guess she lifted the title from her yoga video.

I do yoga, in the most elementary, awkward, and almost immobilized kind of way. (I couldn't touch my toes when I was ten; let's not even go there now.) So the first challenge is to get back to that peaceful and yet demanding connection to my body.

But what I really like here is the multiplicity of meanings associated with these words. Off the top of my head:

Grace: a free gift of God.

Grace: God's loving forgiveness.

Gracefulness: the capacity to move with fluidity and elegance. (In my case: metaphorically speaking.)

Gracefulness: the capacity to absorb with generosity and graciousness whatever comes our way.

Gravity: the force which binds us to our earthly existence.

Gravity: the pull which orients our being.

Gravitas: the weight of wisdom which emerges from experience.

Gravitas: the wisdom to reflect with generosity and graciousness whatever comes our way.

Yes, I do see a connection (fourth definitions).

I'm making a little retreat in another month -- a few days away, with some guidance from my spiritual director. I need some time to make some space for the process of discernment ahead. And I need some silence so that I can handle eight days of it this coming summer with more equanimity than I did last year, when the cloud of grief hanging over my head almost consumed me.

I think I have a name for my retreat now. Gravity and Grace. I like that.

If nothing else, I can pretend that the photograph above is of me. I'm good with the body, the flexibility, or the hair.

(Guess I might need to work on that gravitas thing. But seriously ~ I've pretty much had it with experience.)

Happiness?

It seems that among the things to which those of us in some considerable pain must resign ourselves are the well-intentioned efforts of (our?)(Job's?) friends to urge us to reconsider our potential for happiness. Last fall, in the wake of one such conversation (full post here), I concluded that:

<<to say that the point of life is "to be happy" renders our existence virtually pointless, while the alternative, "to know God," offers us dignity and significance. If all that is available to me in the face of the death of my child is "to choose happiness" ~ well, that seems to me to represent the epitome of triviality. However, if knowledge of God ~ which would also mean knowledge of love, knowledge of ways to remain present to those I care for, knowledge of my life having some purpose ~ remains a possibility, then there is a point to life. >>

Today, Tim Muldoon, a writer over at Ignatian Spirituality, offers the following:

<Finding Happiness, which is perfect for those of a resolution frame of mind. Written by a Benedictine abbot (of Worth Abbey, in Sussex), the book looks at the development of the philosophy of happiness in the West, from the Greeks into the monastic period of the Church, focusing on the Eight Thoughts (acedia, gluttony, lust, greed, anger, sadness, vanity, and pride) which get in the way of happiness. Remove the eight thoughts, he suggested, following the 4th century monk John Cassian, and you remove what makes you unhappy.

As a historical note, when Ignatius wrote the Spiritual Exercises he was using a tradition that was already long established in monastic history, so what Jamison has to say about happiness is very much in the same vein as what Ignatius was aiming for. The idea is common in the Church Fathers and Mothers, Aquinas and the scholastics, and Ignatius: remove sin so that God’s grace may work in your life. That’s happiness. (Not necessarily pleasure–they all followed Aristotle on this point, that pleasure is passing but happiness is a way of being at work in the world. Pleasure is fine, but it comes and goes.)>>

Perhaps my own (and my friend's) confused thought was merging happiness with pleasure. I am willing to hazard a guess that in talking about "knowledge of God" I was in the vicinity of Jamison's discussion of happiness, and that what perturbed me so much about my friend's insistence on happiness was my perception that she wanted me to find a way to have some fun.

I believe that I can say with some authority that mothers who have lost children to suicide are not thinking much about fun ~ but we are focused intently on meaning of life questions. And on questions such as whether our own lives will ever again be about anything beyond endurance.

And so: I am thinking I'll take a look at this book.

AFTER ordination exams.

(And for all who have followed our miserable vacation saga: we are home and have learned that, indeed, middle-ear mess-ups can produce total life havoc. It will be awhile before The Quiet Husband can return to work, as he can't really walk or drive, but he should be fine eventually. Many thanks for all the prayers and support.)

Ignatian Accompaniment Through Grief

I've had a lot of time in the past fifteen months to reflect on what it means to accompany someone through terrible loss ~ what it means in general, what it means for me as a devastated mother, what it means for me as a spiritual director, as a would-be pastor or hospital or hospice chaplain. What is good and helpful and considerate? What is not?

This post, I do believe, is going to turn into a paean to Ignatian spirituality and to those whose lives it shapes, whether Jesuits or others who do spiritual direction in the Ignatian tradition. In my case, it means two Jesuits in particular: my former director, who had the temerity to move away after helping me for two years, but has remained one of my great supporters through seminary and has been a source of wisdom and challenge via email and occasional visits during this past awful year, and my current director, who thought two-and-one-half years ago that he was signing on for a monthly hour of support and guidance for a seminary student, and had to turn into a consistent and faithful source of compassion, prayer, presence ~ and, yes, wisdom and challenge, too ~ during a year of such harsh and time-consuming need that I cannot even begin to describe it.

(And that description doesn't even take into account the many others in my life who have brought their Ignatian experience to bear upon our conversations and friendships. Maybe some other posts someday.)

What is so distinctive about this spirituality that makes it so pertinent to accompanying someone through the journey of grief?

In the Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius suggests a wide variety of types and forms of prayer. Some lend themselves more to certain situations or meditations than others, but I've never had a director suggest that I should limit my prayer in one way or another. Flexibility ("accomodation" is Ignatius' term) is key, and I have been graced by finding directors who are fearless in their willingness to venture into unfamilar territory.

Given the range of prayer in the Exercises, it is nontheless the case that imagination is a significant hallmark of the Ignatian understanding of encounter with God. When a person makes the formal Exercises, there are many opportunites to pray, or meditate (Ignatius usually uses the term contemplation here ~ not to be confused with the emptying form of prayer so popular in contemplative prayer practice today) imaginatively throught the life of Jesus. Imagine the place, imagine the sights and sounds, imagine yourself as a person among his followers or family, on the edge or in the midst of his circle. Imagine yourself watching, listening, speaking, participating. Who are you? Who might you be called to be? Imagine Jesus into the circustances of your own life. What does he say; how do you respond?

You might be able to guess where I am going here. If you're a regular reader, you know that I have often bemoaned the statement so frequently made to me after our son died: that "I can't imagine" sentence. In fact, its repetition by a few individuals has resulted in my consistent avoidance of them. (The Lovely Daughter tells me that people are trying, and that I could be more generous, but I have my own problems with imagination ~ I find it difficult to imagine either that they are or that I could.) As a statement of intended solace, "I can't imagine" is not as bad as "I know just how you feel" ~ but it's close.

This past week it suddenly dawned on me why my Jesuit and other Ignatian friends have been such a source of help to me. Steeped in the practice of imaginative prayer, it never occurs to them to say, "I can't imagine." They seem to slide into imaginative accompaniment effortlessly. They don't have to be parents or to have suffered this degree of loss or faced this kind of horror; they can imagine it, at least well enough.

It's not effortless, of course; even as a neophyte director, I know that it takes considerable intentionality and attentiveness to imagine yourself into someone else's life and concerns. It also takes great generosity of spirit: as you share the Scriptural and prayer lives of others, you begin to understand how differently we all respond to, understand, and encounter God. You seek, always, to reverence both the other person's experience and your own; to absorb the similarities and the differences, to recognize that God is reaching out to each of you, and and to know that you can listen contemplatively and imaginatively even if what you are hearing is nothing at all like what you yourself would have come up with. It's not effortless at all.

But there it is. Just as even I, with some considerable practice, can access the notes to a simple Bach composition on the piano and with them, an entire tradition of music, so someone practiced in imaginative interaction with Scripture can access a tradition of prayer that makes it possible to walk with someone through the universal and yet endlessly unique pathway through grief.
I don't think I've ever heard someone well versed in Ignatian practice say, "I can't imagine." I know that these are people whose imaginations are at work all day, who are accustomed to drawing on their interior resources in all circumstances, and to allowing them to expand whenever they seem inadequate to a particular situation. God's gift of imagination is how we find God in all things, even ~ somewhere, someday ~ in this wilderness of sorrow.

(Cross-posted from Desert Year.)

Little Retreat - 12: Hannah (Sermon on 1 Samuel 1:4-20)

What do you want so much that you think about it all the time? If you’re younger, maybe it’s a video game, or a particular soccer ball, or some new music for your ipod. Those of us who are a bit older have different material desires – a certain piece of jewelry, perhaps, or maybe something for the house. Perhaps it’s the intangibles that stir up our longings -- a new job? The resolution of a medical problem? A chance to travel to see our families again?

What Hannah wanted more than anything else was a child -- a male child, to be specific. At least the story seems to tell us that that’s what she wanted. She was one of two of Elkhanah’s wives, and his other wife had children and Hannah didn’t. Elkhanah loved her more than he did his other wife, and did more for her, and told her how much he loved her, but the other wife taunted her and gave her a hard time and generally made her life miserable, and besides – in her culture, the production of children was what made a woman’s life meaningful.

Hmmmmm….did Hannah really just want a child, or want a child for the usual reasons we think of for having a child? Maybe not. When Hannah went to God with her longing for a child, she promised that she would consecrate his life to God; she promised that she would turn him over to God. She wasn’t looking to complete a family in the usual way – she wasn’t planning to keep her family together. She wasn’t anticipating the enjoyment of raising a son and watching him grow into adulthood – she was planning to give him away to God.

The evidence, it seems to me, is that what Hannah wanted was purpose and meaning in her life. And in her time and place, purpose and meaning for a woman was all tied up in bearing male children. No wonder Elkanhah’s other wife lorded it over her – the other wife was the successful one, the one whom in the eyes of the community had it made. Hannah had the love of her husband, but without a child she was unable to fulfill her role as an adult marred woman; her life seemed to have little point.

It’s hard for us to understand today, in a world in which women, and men, have many different choices about ways in which to live out meaningful lives. I don’t need to detail them – we all know that we have a multitude of options and choices. But in Hannah’s time things were very different. Her husband, Elkhanah, was actually something of a radical– he thought that she should be satisfied with his love, should see her life as valuable because he loved her. But Hannah didn’t see it that way. She thought that meaning and purpose could be found only in bearing a child.

Or……….. did she? Maybe Hannah wanted something more. Most of us, if we want something deeply, whether it’s a video game or a new job, so deeply that we pray for it -- our idea is that God will fulfill our dreams and we will be grateful and then we will go on about our lives, living them pretty much as we always have. We may find more meaning and satisfaction in a life with some new music to listen to, or we may find new purpose in a more challenging job, or a job with a better future – but we tend to stop there.

Hannah didn’t. Hannah didn’t stop there. She could have prayed for a son and promised to be grateful for his arrival and to care for him and raise him well, living out her life as a respected member of her community. She could have – but she didn’t. Hannah wasn’t just hoping for a child, and she wasn’t just seeking a meaningful life. She was looking to align herself completely with God’s purposes – to fulfill God’s desires. That would mean a big sacrifice for her – she would give her lovely child back to God when he was three or so years old -- but that’s what she wanted. And so she promised God that if God would give her a male child, she would consecrate that child to God as a Nazorite. He would be prohibited from certain ordinarry bodily practices, like shaving his head. He would be precluded from indulging incertain delights – like drinking wine. He would be set aside as someone who would become wholly God’s servant as a priest and prophet.

Maybe we should re-think those things we want so much. Maybe we should re-think what and how we want. Maybe Hannah sets the standard. A new item for the house, a new job Something that will give more meaning and purpose to our lives -- maybe that much desired college admission letter? Not enough on its own. Hannah shows us that we might want to think in terms of aligning ourselves with God’s purposes, that our desires are found within God’s desire for us. And those desires – when they are part of God’s purposes for our lives – they always turn out to be about service.

You already know this, of course. I’m just reminding you. Those of us who are teachers, those of us who are running a store or working in a business or government office, those of us who are in school or raising a family – we know, intuitively, that in our service to others we are living out God’s purposes. But might we think about it a bit more? – might we be a bit more intentional about what we are doing? – how might we, quietly, in our prayers, make a consecration , a donation, of what we do to God? How might we consecrate our students, our customers, our co-workers, our teachers and professors, our own children, to God?

Especially, we might ask – especially when we don’t know the end result! So often we have no idea – will that student perhaps grow up to be an astronaut? Will that customer go home, grateful for a kind encounter in our store? Will our children live good lives, helpful to others?

We don’t know, and again we look to Hannah. Hannah had no way of knowing that the baby she cried out for, the child she consecrated to the Lord, would become the prophet and priest who interfaced between the people of Israel and God over the issue of a king for Israel. All Hannah knew was that she longed for a child, longed for a life of purpose and meaning, longed to align herself with the desires of God. Many years after Samuel’s birth, Israel would still be governed by judges, whose main task was to resolve disputes. Samuel would become the prophet who represented the people to God and God to the people in the decision to select Saul as the first King of Israel. Samuel would become the priest who subsequently anointed David as King. Hannah’s willingness to turn her life, her greatest desires, over to God, made her deeply vulnerable to all possibility, but it also and gave her life its ultimate purpose.

If we are able to absorb Hannah’s story into our own, we may find that we live a similar narrative. Our own versions, of course – we face different cultural expectations and limitations in terms of what constitutes a meaningful life in its specifics. But when we seek purpose in our lives by offering God’s greatest gifts back to God in service to others, we not only follow Hannah’s example – we follow someone else who would have known her story. Jesus, in aligning himself entirely with his Father’s purposes, lived his earthly life and then lost it in willing donation on our behalf. In seeking to place our deepest desires within the desires of our God, we imitate Hannah in her quest for a child and her gift of that child to God, and we imitate Jesus in his eternal quest to embody God’s longings by giving of himself to us. Purposeful lives, it turns out, do not come from receiving what we want, but in giving what we receive. Thanks be to God.

(Image: Admont Giant Bible, Salzburg; c. 1150 ~ Here)

Little Retreat - 11: Cemetery

The fall color is almost gone, of course, and these images are several years old. But some exact same things happen year after year, and the yellow around this particular monument happens for about a week three-quarters of the way through October.

Some things change. Soon there will be a new memorial bench in the cemetery. I stopped by on the way home from church today and concrete has been poured. Maybe the bench next week?

Today I assisted at my first baptism, and remembered the baptisms of my children, and then I went and stared at the concrete among the faded leaves on the cemetery ground.

Little Retreat -10: Mary Oliver

Song for Autumn

In the deep fall
don't you imagine the leaves think how
comfortable it will be to touch
the earth instead of the
nothingness of air and the endless
freshets of wind? And don't you think
the trees themselves, especially those with mossy,
warm caves, begin to think

of the birds that will come — six, a dozen — to sleep
inside their bodies? And don't you hear
the goldenrod whispering goodbye,
the everlasting being crowned with the first
tuffets of snow? The pond
vanishes, and the white field over which
the fox runs so quickly brings out
its blue shadows. And the wind pumps its
bellows. And at evening especially,
the piled firewood shifts a little,
longing to be on its way.

Little Retreat - 9: Mary Oliver

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Little Retreat - 8: Fall Color

Neighborhood Walk, October 2004

Little Retreat - 7: Oregon

Amazing photography here.

Little Retreat - 6: Short Story

One of the columnists in the local paper is doing one of those "write your life story in six words" things.

Mother brother son dead hope fragile.

Little Retreat - 5: Thinking About a Longer One

I just found this article, which might be of interest to anyone wondering about silent retreats.

For the next couple of hours, I am contemplating Mad Men.

But in the background: hopefulness for next summer.

As I used to tell my students: everything is connected.

(I have no idea what the connection between Mad Men and a silent prayer retreat might be, other than that those are the two things on my mind at the moment.)

Little Retreat - 4: Identity

This morning, as I was shaking hands outside the sanctuary, someone addressed me as "Reverend" for the first time.

As in, "Good morning, Reverend."

Something to think about.




(Image: Iona Abbey, 2006)

Little Retreat - 3: Prayer

"Ironically, one may have great trouble praying after going through an especially beautiful, consoling experience. Such experiences often imply considerable unconscious threat to self-importance in spite of their overt beauty. One's reaction to this may sometimes be to turn away from prayer for a while, and one may be mystified as to the reason."

~ Gerald May, Care of Mind, Care of Spirit (1982)

(Cemetery Image, 2004)

Liitle Retreat - 2: Listening

If God has made all things by the Word, then each person and thing exists because God is speaking to it and in it. If we are to respond adequately, truthfully, we must listen for the word God speaks to and through each element of creation ~ hence the importance of listening in expectant silence.

~ Rowan Williams
Where God Happens (2005)


(Image: St. Augustine, 2004)

Little Retreat - 1

The next two weeks are full, and that's assuming that no one around here gets the flu:

Two papers to finish and a mammoth final exam to prepare for ~

Some unbloggable medical challenges ~

A dear friend's wedding ~

Trying to figure out what to do about the holidays this year, holidays which it would be my preference to ignore (and the first one is only a couple of weeks away!) ~

Yeah, that's enough for a couple of weeks.

One of the little things I have to do is send in my deposit for an 8-day summer retreat here. After last year's debacle, I am equal parts anticipation and apprehension. I'm going to start small by taking a couple of days of silence for myself at the local retreat house when we have spring break in March to see how I manage.

Anyway, I am thinking about retreats and silence and attentiveness and mindfulness and all those good things, all in the context of the weeks ahead. So I think for the next while I'll try to find something on which to focus each day and post it here. And by then . . . it'll be time to move over to the Advent blog.

I think I'll go ahead and start right now by posting a St. Augustine (the place, not the man) reminder that there are worlds and creatures beyond the ones which consume our ordinary and frenzied lives:

Down Where?

As you know if you've been reading this, I'm doing my "field ed" (internship) in a downtown church this year. Every day, whether I am there or at seminary or at home, I wonder what I am doing and what God is inviting me into. Every day, I think: a year from now I will most likely be doing something in ministry, and my vision of what that might be probably could serve as a definition for the word "murky."

This morning I am doing the readings in the main service, and tonight I am preaching in a smaller service. My sermon is sort of on the topic of gratitude, which you can imagine is a difficult one for me. I try to remember the words of one of my seminary friends, now out in the world and looking for her first call, when I questioned my capacity for taking Homiletics last spring. "You will be studying and proclaiming the Word; what could be more healing?"

I have this to say: Healing comes in odd forms.

As I am getting ready this morning, I've read two things that apply. The first, a wonderful and brilliant sermon from Songbird, which I suggest you read in its entirety, closes with the following:

" . . . Jesus is turning the whole idea [of greatness] upside down for us, reminding us how far we have to go to go with him. He made it plain how far you have to go: all the way to the bottom, out of love for all. . . . "

The second, quoted on The Website of Unknowing, is from Parker Palmer's The Promise of Paradox.

"The way of the cross is often misunderstood as masochistic, especially in an age so desperately in search of pleasure. But the suffering of which Jesus spoke is not the suffering that unwell people create for themselves. Instead, it is the suffering already present in the world, which we can either identify with or ignore. If pain were not real, if it were not the lot of so many, the way of the cross would be pathological. But in our world — with its millions of hungry, homeless, and hopeless people — it pathological to live as if pain did not exist. The way of the cross means allowing that pain to carve one’s life into a channel through which the healing stream of the spirit can flow to a world in need."

Spiritual Direction 101

Nice video on spiritual direction here ~ about eight minutes.

As a spiritual director, I use some of Joseph Tetlow's materials. He's a contemporary of my first Jesuit director, and the interview gives a little sense of the gentleness, intellect, and insight behind the generation that re-thought Ignatius' work and made it accessible to those of us who would never have encountered it without their efforts.

Breakfast Conversation (II)

I've been mulling over another part of the breakfast conversation.

My friend said, more than once, "All you can really do in this life is choose whether to be happy." Or something to that effect.

I don't believe that the purpose of life is to be happy. Happiness is a nice side effect, and one that probably a majority of Americans experience much of the time.

Of course, a lot depends upon how you define happiness. But I think it's safe to say that in a world filled with wars, violence, starvation, deprivation, and disease, an awful lot of people do not find happiness in any conventional sense of the word.

The Presbyterian Church teaches that our chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy God forever. The Catholic Church, that it is to know and love God. My friend St. Ignatius, that it is to praise, reverence, and serve God, or (in more contemporary language), to live with God forever.

Thus those of you who are not religious and from time to time dismiss faith as a crutch or a false source of comfort might see that the purpose of our lives, as stated in major Christian creeds and confessions, is often at odds with comfort.

I can assure you that is not much of an opiate to be told, in the face of the loss of a child, that glorifying God is the chief end of your life.

But as I see it, to say that the point of life is "to be happy" renders our existence virtually pointless, while the alternative, "to know God," offers us dignity and significance. If all that is available to me in the face of the death of my child is "to choose happiness" ~ well, that seems to me to represent the epitome of triviality. However, if knowledge of God ~ which would also mean knowledge of love, knowledge of ways to remain present to those I care for, knowledge of my life having some purpose ~ remains a possibility, then there is a point to life.

I'm not saying it's easy. And I'm not saying we should seek out misery for ourselves, or view life as a grim narrative of pointless toil or senseless suffering.

But the hard reality is that to know God in the context of Christianity is to know sorrow.

It might seem, then, that it would only make sense to choose the pursuit of happiness over the pursuit of knowledge of God.

But really ~ if the choice were placed in the stark relief drawn by the worst kind of scenario, would you choose trivia over dignity and value? And perhaps it is in choosing the latter that genuine happiness lies.

Someday.




(Cross-posted at Desert Year.)

God as Irony

As most of you know, through a series of those ironical twists of life which I am coming to see as the places in which God dwells most deeply, a couple of Jesuits have played huge roles in my landing where I am now.

I did the graduate work necessary to retain my teaching license at the local Jesuit university. At first, my reasons had to do with convenience of location and ease of registration; later, they had to do with my pursuit of what I called my "stealth religious studies degree." Needing work in literature and history which I could justify to my licensing board, I took courses that met my real interests in the other arena of my life. Since I taught world history, it was easy to get approval for graduate work in Islamic history and philosophy, in Renaissance art, in medieval church history. Since I taught English, I managed the same for the courses I took in spirituality and autobiography and spirituality and literature.

And when the "official" requirements were behind me, I got started on a course in Ignatian spirituality, asked the professor to guide me through the Spiritual Exercises, and found myself applying to seminaries.

Two interesting pieces of writing have popped up on my computer in the past few days. One was a comment on an old post from someone who sees the Exercises as a one-way street toward a specific destination and urged me to avail myself of resources which, had he skimmed this blog, he would know that I have been immersed in for years. The other led me to a reflection on Father Tom King, a Georgetown Jesuit who died a few months ago, written by another Jesuit who had first encountered him as a student. Here's the part that caught my attention:

*********

"I asked him why he had focused so much of his career on the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin - a Jesuit paleontologist, philosopher and theologian whose work had for a long time been considered suspect by the Vatican. I asked Father King if it made him nervous to be associated with someone who had for a while been silenced by the Church because of his work.

First, he gave me a long discourse on the nature of time. ...

Then he said something that was for a me a moment of grace, a signal moment in the gradual emergence of my own vocation. He laid out for me his understanding that in the Church, as in any organization, someone has to be willing to be ahead of the curve, even though that can be an uncomfortable and even treacherous place to be. If no one is willing to do that, he said, then progress will stall, growth will be stunted. That would be bad for the Church. Someone has to be willing to lean into the future, to take the risks associated with asking "What if?" That's why the Church has Jesuits, he said. "

**********

I've had two Jesuit spiritual directors over the past now-going-on-five years. One of them helped me through the long process of discernment that led me to seminary and, although he himself is now elsewhere, has remained as an eloquently supportive presence in my life during this past horrific year since the death of our son. The other has seen me through the questioning and anguish that, while it changes, doesn't end, and has been a consistent presence, guide, companion, and friend through a time of relentless turmoil.

Neither of them has ever indicated any kind of idea that the Exercises or the prayer life that emerges out of them is limited to a particular kind of person or a rigid focus. The process is always one of growth in relationship with God through Jesus in their Spirit, but how that works itself out remains to be seen and lived, not controlled.

When I read the reflection about Tom King, and his insistence that someone has to be willing to ask, "What if?" I thought ~ that's it. That's what lies at the foundation of spiritual direction, at least as I have experienced it and now try to make it available to others: that willingness to ask, "What if?"

What if I help this woman who has wandered into my class make the Exercises ~ to what might that lead?

What if I accompany this woman through overwhelming and immobilizing grief ~ how might that reality be transformed into another?

I have thought for a long time now that the foundational attitude of an effective spiritual director is one of hope, and I am sure that I have challenged the hopes of both of these men. But "What if?" is a question of hope.

It remains a baffling irony to me that my journey has taken me from a teaching experience in an Orthodox Jewish school along the path of Ignatian spirituality and into a Presbyterian seminary education. (And that's only the last ten years!)

I am extremely grateful to have run into Jesuits who are willing to ask "What if?" and to lean into an indecipherable future.