I tend to get angry when I encounter acrimony and incivility in discourse among Catholics.  Fr. Jim Martin, who has seen more of it than I have, has a healthier response.  He laughs at it.

No matter what you write, there are Catholics ready to take immediate offense, to explode in righteous anger, to threaten to report you to the proper authorities or, most of all, to correct.  The most common responses are these five: 1.) Your soul is in mortal danger.  2.) You’re uneducated and need to be schooled. 3.) I hate the church and so I hate you.  4.) You’re an unthinking tool of the Vatican.  5.) You’re disobedient and must be reported.

The rest of it is hilarious.

A bunch of young Jesuits launched a new website yesterday called The Jesuit Post.  Content will range very widely indeed.  The first batch of articles  include pieces on David Foster Wallace, parish masses, Tim Tebow, yoga, Paula Deen, the folk-rock band Hem, and health care reform.  Editor Paddy Gilger, SJ says “this site is about Jesus, politics, and pop-culture, it’s about the Catholic Church, sports, and Socrates.  It’s about making the case for God (better: letting God make the case for Himself) in our secular age.”

Go take a look.

Fr. Adolfo Nicolás, Superior General of the Society of Jesus, spoke to Belgian Jesuits in September 2010 about a “globalization of superficiality,” a result of a surfeit of information (Click here if you can’t see the video.)

I am mindful of Eliot’s lines from “Choruses from the rock”:

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

Nicholas Carr suggests in a provocative book that the internet is rewiring our brains and that we are losing the ability to think deeply.

The Examen is a meditative practice of not only reviewing one’s day, but also reviewing one’s knowledge: what one chooses to give over one’s attention to. It may be seen as the practice of avoiding superficiality by bringing before God that which merits our attention, our knowledge, our love. We are not human search engines churning mindless information: we are human beings capable of loving the way Christ loved, of giving our attentiveness and our intellectual powers to those places in the Kingdom where Christ calls us to work.

Stop surfing for two minutes: sit in silence and pray.

It’s time for what I’m calling IgnatiusFest—the month-long celebration of all things Ignatian that’s becoming an annual tradition here on IgnatianSpirituality.com.  Festivities begin tomorrow, July 1, and continue until St. Ignatius’s feast day on July 31.

We have a calendar called 31 Days with St. Ignatius which offers something deliciously Ignatian for each day of the month.  Just click on the link and you’ll be taken to that day’s video, blog post, prayer, or article.

We’re inviting you to join in.  Please add your own reflections about the way you’ve been touched by St. Ignatius and the spiritual outlook that bears his name.  Put them in the comments, and I’ll highlight them throughout the month.

Anthony de Mello, SJ, on finding God in all things:

There is a key word: solely, only or entirely. That is the key word—doing it only for God. This is the nishkam karma. On the day we are given the grace of doing action for the sake of action and nothing else, then our hearts will be aglow. The idea is doing action without desire for any fruit, and without any selfish intention at all. The action is done only for God’s glory. . . .

Finding God in all things presupposes a total death to the self. The death of the empirical self is the crowning glory of the Spiritual Exercises: that a person’s self-love, self-will, and self-interest have merged into the will and the interest and the love of Christ. As long as we can live this for a few moments, for a few hours, for a few days, we have become contemplatives in action. So it is really a mystical grace. We cannot produce it, but we can dispose ourselves for it by loving God.

Seek God Everywhere

“Suppose there were a reality faster than light, so superenergized that it would be at rest, everywhere at once. Every object we see—though it appears rock-hard—is actually just another form of energy: e = mc2. Couple that with all we know from religion; encounters with God are so often described as burning bushes and fiery pillars and tongues of flame. I Am is the pool of energizing existence out of which everything draws its ‘is,’ ‘the dearest freshness deep down things.’ It may not help everyone, but when I pray, I pray to a Person made of light.”

William O’Malley, SJ
God–The Oldest Question

Gary Smith, SJ, on Sudanese refugee mothers:

“I have known and wept with and consoled the Sudanese refugee woman, particularly as she is a mother. When you know her as a mother, you understand how she can age so quickly. The Sudanese refugee mother is poor and frequently has a baby strapped to her back or nursing at her breast. She is always working—sweeping, cooking, cleaning, carrying huge loads on her head—and is often pregnant; most likely, she has had children who have died of malaria. She is friendly and long-suffering, loves to talk and joke with her sisters, is close to her tribe and clan, most often cannot read or write, and is born into and suffers from a rigid male-dominated culture. She dies young. Often she is old before her time, but she possesses an interior beauty that endures until she dies. She would die in an eye blink for her family.

“I have buried her after childbirth. I have anointed her as she was dying of some tropical disease. I have given her alms when she has extended her hand, fingers lost to leprosy. I have raced my car over impossible roads to get her to a clinic where she can deliver her baby. I have been with her when she is dying of the shock of a breech birth, a little foot sticking out of her body. I have helped her younger daughters continue with their studies in the face of a cultural attitude that educating a girl child is not necessary—an attitude she has faced firsthand. I have fallen in love with the African mother, whose goodness and beauty have left me shaking.

“One day, such a mother, Mary Kenyi, came to me. Her old body was covered in a threadbare dress. She often came by, asking for a few beans or some grain and sometimes for a blanket. She has nothing, not even a son or daughter to care for her in her old age. All of her children were killed in the Sudan civil war, along with her husband. I saw her, a long walking stick in hand, coming toward me as I was conversing with a staff member outside our compound. I thought to myself, perhaps with an edge of irritation, I wonder what she will be asking for today?  She carried a small plastic bag and handed it to me, giving me a smile that would capture the heart of the most heartless.

“In the bag was a gift for me.

Three eggs.”

From They Come Back Singing: Finding God with the Refugees

Jesuits educated me (St. Peter’s College), they employ me (Loyola Press), and they pastor me (St. Mary Student Parish, Ann Arbor).  So I’m very interested in how the Jesuits see themselves these days.   Here are a couple of items that reveal a lot about them.

One, an article by Ryan Maher, SJ,  is an appreciation of what he calls the “passion that manifests itself in a bred-in-the-bone love of teaching.”

The other is a video that simply shows five newly ordained Jesuits talking about their passions and hopes as they begin their priestly ministry.  One says that his passion is “let other people know about this God who loves us so much and so much wants us to be part of our lives.”  It’s inspiring.  (Click here if you can’t see the video.)

Go Forth and Set the World on Fire from Chicago and Detroit Jesuits on Vimeo.

It’s July, the month of high summer (in the Northern Hemisphere) and the month of St. Ignatius Loyola, whose spiritual ideas we celebrate here at IgnatianSpirituality.com.  Ignatius’s feast day is July 31.  Loyola Press has assembled a collection of reflections, insights, prayers, blog posts, and article excerpts for every day of the month.

Here is the list. Today’s good idea is an invitation to browse the “What Is Ignatian Spirituality?” section of this website.

Fr. Adolfo Nicolas, SJ, Superior General of the Jesuits, reflects on Jesuit institutions and lay people. This is from a summary of a talk he gave recently to Jesuits working in the social apostolate:

Mobility is essential to our charism; thus we need to learn a new way of discernment, to let go and move on. For example, when starting a school, we should immediately prepare our lay successors so that we can hand the work over to them after no more than 15 to 30 years. He also stressed the fact that the shrinking number of Jesuits is being compensated for by the growing number of competent lay people who wish to work in our institutions. This gives us the freedom to dream again, to be creative, flexible and mobile. He encouraged us to see our institutions as our children: let them go off, get married and go their own ways.

Read the whole summary.