When my son, Brady, was eight weeks old, I led my first Charis retreat in the Diocese of Baton Rouge. I remember kneeling at the closing Mass, both exhausted and energized from juggling being both mom and minister, and begging God, “If you want me to continue this ministry, show me how. Is this a both/and call or an either/or call for me, God?”

The words, gentle as always, rose up within me, “both/and.”

As discernment so often goes, I re-discern this call to be both mom and minister frequently. When I review my experience of the Second Week of the Spiritual Exercises, two themes of my call emerge: my call to being a mom, and my call to ministry within the Church. My call to motherhood resonated strongly with Mary mothering Jesus. My call to ministry resonated strongly with the invitation to “enact my decision to say yes to following Christ.”

The Second Week of the Exercises invites us to follow Jesus by living out our unique call to be Christ’s disciples. We are invited to follow Christ and let Christ show us how he wants us to live out our discipleship.

Just two weeks ago, I found myself at the end of my 12th Charis retreat with those familiar feelings that an authentic calling brings: exhaustion and energy. As I sat at our closing prayer service, savoring the graces of the retreat, I found myself overwhelmed at what God had done in my life since kneeling at the close of that first retreat: God gifted us with another child, Abby. God not only saw me through two more retreats in the Diocese of Baton Rouge, but God saw me through nine more retreats in Athens, GA. God showed me how to live my both/and call.

This is what the Call of the King is about: living our lives in a way that we are uniquely invited to follow Christ, and trusting that God will show us the way. I hope to remember this as life brings change in our lives and I fret over whether or not I will know how to continue to live my both/and calling.

It’s a problem we’ve all experienced: we deeply desire something; we think God has put the desire in our hearts; but it seems impossible that we’ll ever have it.  Ignatius had a suggestion, Lisa Kelly says:

Ignatius told his companions that the solution to dealing with this tension . . .  is to step back in prayer and recognize and name both poles, the current reality and the future desire of our heart. As a detached observer, to walk around them in our minds and see them from all angles—looking for God’s invitation within them as well as our own over-attachment.

Sometimes the current reality will be really hard to admit because it hints at our failures. Sometimes we are too focused on the future to see the goodness we have right here and now. Sometimes the now is so good we fear a different future and act out, trying to keep anything from changing. Christ sits next to us in all of these, trying desperately to get us to see He is right here and will be no matter what the future holds.

Read the whole thing.

Image by CmdrFire under Creative Commons license.

I recently followed a link on this site to a 2003 article in America that expanded my understanding of Ignatian discernment.  I knew about discernment of the inner movements of the heart.  But William Spohn, SJ, points out how important it is to discern the what is happening outside ourselves.

How does God call us to the right path? Usually this awareness comes through a process of discerning both the interior and the worldly poles of vocation. God’s Spirit works in the depths of our humanity to help us become aware of our gifts and aspirations, and the same Spirit works through our experience to point out what the world needs from us. Often the Spirit helps us notice those problems that our talents are uniquely suited to address. Grace connects these two poles like a spark that arcs between them. Reflecting with others on the experience of invitation helps to ground that call and “keep it real.”

For other good material on discernment, look at the IgnatianSpirituality.com page on vocations.

My new favorite description of love is the willingness to enter a mess. It’s a pretty decent description of the Incarnation (or kenosis for you theologians out there); it captures the spirit of that oft-quoted passage from Matthew 25 about feeding Jesus when you feed the hungry. It’s pretty close to the sentiment that Ignatius counsels in the Contemplation to Attain Love in the fourth week of the Spiritual Exercises. It’s certainly what was on Ignatius’s mind when he penned the beautiful Suscipe prayer: “take, Lord, receive all my liberty….” For if the spiritual life is coming to inhabit the place where God stands, and seeing the world as God sees it, and being willing to act upon what one sees from that place, well, that’s being willing to enter a mess.

Sue and I are sprinting toward a lovely mess. The amazing thing is that it wasn’t one we’d planned. It was one that God told us to enter last month when He e-mailed Sue the photo of a 7 year-old boy in China, Fu Yuan, who has a heart defect. God said, “yes, he’ll fit into your family nicely. You can get him some good medical care, you can give him older sisters who also started their lives in China, and you can help him make the transition because you, Dad, speak Chinese like a 7 year-old.” We protested that we couldn’t afford the fees; we’re taking care of Sue’s mom; we’ve had to deal with various work and school difficulties; yada yada yada. I went into a conversation with Sue thinking we’d have to say no, and came out of it convinced I’d be with my son by the end of the year. Thanks be to God!

In recent weeks, Vinita Wright has been posting some terrific material about Ignatian discernment on her blog Days of Deepening Friendship.  For starters, take a look at “Four Strategies for Discernment,” “The Grace We Need,” and “Consolation and Desolation.” To keep track of Vinita’s posts, sign up for her blog.

Vinita is a spiritual director, author, editor, and novelist.  Along with Paul Campbell and me, she’ll be doing regular reflections during the eight-week Ignatian Prayer Adventure online Lenten retreat, which starts next Sunday.

Something to think about | Discernment presupposes an ability to reflect on the ordinary events of one’s life, a habit of personal prayer, self-knowledge, knowledge of one’s deepest desires and openness to God’s direction and guidance. Discernment is a prayerful “pondering” or “mulling over” the choices a person wishes to consider. In his discernment, the person’s focus should be on a quiet attentiveness to God and sensing rather than thinking. His goal is to understand the choices in his heart: to see them, as it were, as God might see them. In one sense, there is no limit to how long he might wish to continue in this. Discernment is a repetitive process, yet as the person continues, some choices should of their own accord fall by the wayside while others should gain clarity and focus. It is a process that should move inexorably toward a decision.

Charles Jackson, SJ

Leonardo da Vinci, St. John the Baptist, 1513-16, Louvre

This week we are republishing some of the most popular posts from dotMagis.

The word “God” is a pronoun whose antecedent we do not know.

When we are struck by beauty, when it lays claim to our attention and nearly takes our breath away, or when beholding the beautiful makes us for a moment deeply aware that there is much more in the world than we can possibly understand, even if we should read all the books and gather all the data–then we are beholding God.

When we allow ourselves to fall in love–to release ourselves to love, to be overpowered by love such that we cannot control the cascading of emotions (heartsickness, profound desire, anguish, overwhelming joy), we are allowing ourselves an experience of God.

When we act in faith–that is, orient our lives toward something we can only partially understand right now, like who we’ll be when we grow up, or how we’ll make our way in the world, or how our talents might unfold in the future–we are breathing the breath (Lat. spiritus, Heb. ruah, Gk. pneuma) of God.

These and other experiences remain only experiences until the point at which we begin to reflect on who God is.

God is, as Augustine says, “more intimate to me than I am to myself.” But just as I may be unaware of the most interior parts of myself, I may be unaware of God. If I am of a discerning mind and heart, I will come to acknowledge God, but I will never come to know him. Only God can reveal himself to me.

We cannot name the experience of God, lest we limit it and thereby lose its full meaning. We cannot explain it to another, even with the cleverest of parables or allegories. The best we can do is point others to how they too might name their experiences of God. In the ancient days, the prophets reminded Israel that God was at the heart of who they were as a people. God revealed himself as the giver of the law, the principle of right action for the individual and the community.

John the Baptist, another prophet, said that the one who is to come will show us God. He reminded us that sin gets in the way, and that repentance is a clearing of obstacles to knowing God.

Jesus taught in parables in order that we might turn from sin toward God. Jesus showed us the way to the Father. He is the supreme parable, icon, sacrament of God.

Following him, what remains is the life of deepening friendship with God, whereby we gain our freedom. We deepen the life of God in us and move ever closer to God.

Saint Augustine Portrait by Botticelli

The last straw which led to Saint Augustine’s conversion to Christianity was the voice of a child, playing a game in which he chanted “take and read, take and read.” The voice led Augustine to pick up the Bible and read a passage from Romans which made him look upon himself and the world in a new way.  And he was set free.

How many are the moments in which we can be Christ for others! Now is the moment: do not delay. The bridegroom is coming. Trim the wicks of your lamps. Perhaps next to you, perhaps now reading your e-mail, perhaps sleeping next to you, perhaps in the cubicle next to yours, perhaps on the other end of the classroom, perhaps on the playing field, is someone whom Christ must touch right now. And perhaps yours are the only hands, the only voice, the only smile, the only embrace, the only look that he can use to touch his beloved. Be alert! The moment will never come again. Trust yourself to God, and he will act.

No kid stuff to plaster all over my refrigerator with fruit magnets, just stuff that has captured my attention. Mostly images, snippets of scripture, prayers.

Some stuff, like the laminated Sacred Heart of Jesus card from a funeral back in 1996 has been posted on at least three different refrigerators since then.  The chart with Shabbat candle lighting times for Baltimore, Maryland is about to be replaced when 5772 blows in on September 29.

One recent addition is a Heloise Hint about using isopropyl rubbing alcohol to clean laminate flooring. Even if I stop seeing what I’m looking at every time I’m in front of the cold food box, I’m comforted by knowing a St. Jude medal and prayer is there.

Actually, I’ve pretty much stopped looking and seeing. Everything on my refrigerator has pretty much faded into wallpaper — except during those times when everything springs back into more-than-full-focus. Veni Sancte Spiritus!

This morning was one of those times.

The much-loved prayer attributed to Fr. Arrupe, SJ has been on my refrigerator for ages upon ages. But this morning I suddenly noticed how the well-known first line, “Nothing is more practical than finding God” is wonderfully framed by a magnet declaring, “Her whole life is simcha.”

Simcha (Hebrew: gladness or joy or celebration)

Lisa Kelly says that consolation is sometimes painful:

On the surface, we fun-seeking humans will do lots of things that are not of God to avoid feeling bad, to avoid the aches of the heart. We shop. We eat. We yell. We procrastinate. We deny the reality before us. But while each of those may provide temporary satisfaction, are they really leading us closer to God? Closer to where and who we are called to be? Ignatius calls us to constantly go deeper, to be reflective and aware of the emptiness of those surface solutions. Where is it you don’t want to go? That’s likely exactly where Ignatius would take you.

Read the whole thing.