The Jesuit Guide To (Almost) Everything - James Martin [23]
That image was amplified when I read the conclusion of one of the great modern spiritual novels, Mariette in Ecstasy. Ron Hansen, an award-winning writer who is also an ordained Catholic deacon, penned the story of the religious experiences of a young nun in the early 1900s, loosely based on the life of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, the French Carmelite. At the end of the story, Mariette, who had left the monastery many years before, writes to her former novice director and assures her that God still communicates with her.
We try to be formed and held and kept by him, but instead he offers us freedom. And now when I try to know his will, his kindness floods me, his great love overwhelms me, and I hear him whisper, Surprise me.
The image of the God who surprises and the God who waits for surprises came to me from three Jesuit priests and the religious imagination of a Catholic writer.
In other words, that idea was given to me by religion.
Overall, being spiritual and being religious are both part of being in relationship with God. Neither can be fully realized without the other. Religion without spirituality can become a dry list of dogmatic statements divorced from the life of the spirit. This is what Jesus warned against. Spirituality without religion can become a self-centered complacency divorced from the wisdom of a community. That’s what I’m warning against.
For St. Ignatius Loyola the two went hand in hand. (If anything, Ignatius was criticized for being too spiritual, as his way struck some people as not centered enough on the church.) His way understands the importance of being both spiritual and religious.
FINDING GOD IN ALL THINGS
After Ignatius’s conversion, his life was focused on God. The introduction to the Spiritual Exercises reads, “Human beings are created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord, and by means of doing this to save their souls.” God, says Ignatius, is at the center of everything and provides meaning for our lives.
Another way of understanding that worldview is with a quotation from Pedro Arrupe, S.J. Father Arrupe was the head of the Jesuit Order from 1965 to 1981, a period of volcanic change in the Catholic Church. He is perhaps best known for reminding the Jesuits that part of their original work was with the poor and marginalized. In the 1970s a journalist asked Father Arrupe this question: who is Jesus Christ for you?
One can imagine the journalist anticipating a boilerplate answer like “Jesus Christ is my Savior” or “Jesus Christ is the Son of God.”
Instead, Arrupe said, “For me Jesus Christ is everything!” That is a good shorthand for how Ignatius looked at God.
But not everyone reading this book has that kind of relationship with God. Maybe few people do. For people on the path of independence, the path of disbelief, the path of exploration, or the path of confusion, the question is less about devoting oneself to God entirely and more about something else, the question that began our discussion: how do I find God?
Here is where we can turn to an important insight of Ignatius: God can speak directly with people in astonishingly personal ways. This can lead even the doubtful and confused and lost to God. The key, the leap of faith required, is believing that these intimate experiences are ways God communicates with you.
In his Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius wrote that the Creator deals “immediately with the creature and the creature with its Creator.” God communicates with us. Seekers, then, need to be aware of the variety of ways that God has of communicating with us, of making God’s presence known.
In other words, the beginning