The Jesuit Guide To (Almost) Everything - James Martin [39]
When I climbed the opposite side of the hill, I turned to look back. Though it was around five in the afternoon, the equatorial sun blazed down on the green valley, illuminating the long brown path, the tiny river, the people, the banana trees, the flowers, the grass.
Quite suddenly I was overwhelmed with happiness. I’m happy to be here, I thought. After the loneliness, the sickness, and the struggles, I felt that I was exactly where I was supposed to be.
It was a surprising experience. Here was God speaking to me where I was—physically, emotionally, and intellectually—and offering what I needed on that day.
Was it clarity? Uncommon longing? Common longing? Exaltation? Hard to say. Maybe all of those things. But it was especially meaningful to where I was at the time.
God speaks to us in ways we can understand. God began to communicate with Ignatius during his recuperation, when he was vulnerable and more open to listening. With me, on that day in Nairobi, God spoke to me through the view of that little valley.
God can also meet you at any time, no matter how crazy things may seem. You don’t have to have a perfectly organized daily life to experience God. Your spiritual house does not need to be tidy for God to enter.
In the Gospels, Jesus often meets people in the midst of their busy lives: Peter mending his nets by the seashore, Matthew sitting at his tax collector’s booth. Just as often he encounters people when they’re at their absolute worst: an adulterous woman about to be stoned, a woman who has been sick for many years, a possessed man not even in his right mind. In each of these situations God said to these people, busy, stressed out, worried, frightened, “I’m ready to meet you, if you’re ready to meet me.”
If God meets you where you are, then where you are is a place to meet God. You don’t have to wait until your life settles down, or the kids move out of the house, or you’ve found that perfect apartment, or you recover from that long illness. You don’t have to wait until you’ve overcome your sinful patterns, or you’re more “religious” or you can pray “better.”
You don’t have to wait for any of that.
Because God is ready now.
Chapter Four
Beautiful Yesterdays
Finding God and Letting God Find You
FOR IGNATIUS AND HIS friends, finding God often meant noticing where God was already active in their lives. And we can notice God not only in peak moments, like the ones we just discussed, but also in daily events where God’s presence is often overlooked. God is always inviting us to encounter the transcendent in the everyday. The key is noticing.
This insight—that finding God is about noticing—helps the seeker in two ways. First, it makes the quest straightforward. As I mentioned, Walter Burghardt, S.J., defined prayer as “a long, loving look at the real.” Contemplating the real, rather than trying to grasp an abstract concept like the transcendence of God, or trying to puzzle out a complicated philosophical proof, is an easier place for most people to start.
This is not to deny the appeal of the intellectual path. In his book A Testimonial to Grace, first published in 1946, Avery Cardinal Dulles, a distinguished theologian and the first American Jesuit named a cardinal, wrote that his own religious awakening was encouraged by Greek philosophy, which helped him to see the world as an ordered whole. “The Platonic ideal of virtue,” he wrote, “had enormous consequences in my personal philosophy.”
Still, this most rational of men was finally moved to recognize God when he linked the philosophical idea of God with the natural world. His epiphany came as an undergraduate at Harvard, while he was walking along the Charles River in Cambridge and spied something more commonplace than a philosophical