The Jesuit Guide To (Almost) Everything - James Martin [35]
In the First Week of the Spiritual Exercises, spiritual directors often invite you to meditate on the gifts that God has given you, and then, as Ignatius suggests, on your own sinfulness. This is not as formulaic as it sounds. After spending time thinking about blessings in their lives, people often feel, in a sense, unworthy of what they have received. Not that they’re bad people. Rather, they ask, What have I done to deserve all this?
At this point in the Exercises your faults may come to the fore. As Bill Creed, a Jesuit spiritual director, once told me, “In the bright sunshine of God’s love, your shadows begin to emerge.”
This can lead to the realization that you are, as Jesuits say, a “loved sinner,” imperfect but loved by God. Typically this prompts gratitude, which leads to a desire to respond. You may feel so overwhelmed by God’s love for you, even in your “imperfect” state, that you want to say “Thank you! What can I do in return?”
For Christians this often takes the form of a desire to follow Christ. The response to the urge comes in the Second Week in the Exercises: a series of meditations on the life of Christ. In the Second Week, the desire is more explicit than one for “I know not what.” It is for a particular way of life, that is, following Christ.
You don’t have to be in the middle of the Spiritual Exercises for this kind of desire to manifest itself. You may be reading something about religion or spirituality and think, This is what I’ve always wanted, to follow this path. You may be sitting in a church service, hear about Jesus, and think, Why don’t I follow him? You may remember the way you felt about God as a child and think, What would happen if I returned to that path? Your desires are more formed in this case. You are able to identify clearly your desire to follow a specific path, or to follow God. This is another way that God calls us.
Desires for Holiness
An attraction to examples of holiness is another sign of the desire for God. This can be triggered in at least two ways: first, learning about holy people in the past; and second, meeting holy people today.
In the first case, one famous example of this experience is that of Ignatius. There he was lying on his sick bed, reading about the lives of the saints, when he started to think, in essence, Hey, I could do something like that. His vanity was attracted to their great deeds, but a more authentic part of himself was attracted to their holiness.
This is one way that God can call you to holiness—through a heartfelt attraction to holy men and women and a real desire to emulate their lives.
But holiness resides not only in canonized saints like Ignatius but also in the holy ones who walk among us—that includes the holy father who takes care of his young children, the holy daughter who attends to her aging parents, and the holy mother who works hard for her family. Nor does holiness mean perfection: the saints were always flawed, limited, human. Holiness always makes its home in humanity.
So we can be attracted to models of holiness both past and present. Learning about past examples of holiness and meeting holy people today often makes us want to be like them. Holiness in other people is naturally attractive, since it is one way that God attracts us to himself. Experiencing the attractiveness of sanctity today also enables us to understand why Jesus of Nazareth attracted great crowds of people everywhere he went. Holiness in others calls out to the holy parts of ourselves. “Deep calls to deep,” as Psalm 42:7 says.
This is something of what Marilynne Robinson, author of the novel Gilead, had in mind when she wrote in an article, “What I might call personal holiness is in fact openness to the perception of the holy, in existence itself and above all in one another.”
Vulnerability
Here’s an often misunderstood and misinterpreted statement: many people feel drawn to God in times of suffering.
During a serious