More than a thousand people representing the Ignatian “family” will gather in Washington November 12-14 for learning, prayer, and networking.  The theme of  the Ignatian Family Teach-In for Justice is “The Gritty Reality.”  Most of the those attending come from Jesuit colleges and universities, high schools, and Jesuit parishes.

The weekend includes dozens of breakout sessions. Monday, November 14, is an advocacy day on Capitol Hill.

Dean Brackley, SJ, died recently.  He was an American Jesuit who moved to the University of Central America in 1989 shortly after the murders of Jesuits there.  Jim Martin, SJ,  reprints a powerful article he wrote about what the poor can teach us.

The middle-class cultures of the North are newcomers to world history and have only existed for about 200 years. We’re not all bad people, we’re just a tiny minority under the common illusion that we are the center of gravity of the universe. The poor can free us from this strange idea. . . .

The problem for us is that the new freedoms and economic security have distanced the non-poor from the kind of daily life-and-death struggle that has been the daily fare of the poor of all times right up to today. Maybe 90 percent of all the people who ever lived have struggled every day to keep the household alive against the threat of death through hunger, disease, accidents and violence. By distancing the non-poor from the daily threat of death, the benefits of modernity have induced in us a kind of chronic lowgrade confusion about what is really important in life, namely life itself and love.

Read the whole thing.

Something to think about | I hold that every poor man, every vagrant, every beggar is Christ carrying his cross. And as Christ, we must love and help him. We must treat him as a brother, a human being like ourselves. If we were to start a campaign of love for the poor and homeless, we would, in a short time, do away with depressing scenes of begging, children sleeping in doorways and women with babies in their arms fainting in our streets.

There are many sufferings to heal. Christ stumbles through our streets in the person of so many poor who are hungry, thrown out of their miserable lodgings because of sickness and destitution. Christ has no home!  And we who have the good fortune to have one and have food to satisfy our hunger, what are we doing about it?

St. Alberto Hurtado, SJ

A couple of updates on Jesuits in Washington DC.

The Ignatian Pro-Life Network is calling for participation in the annual Mass for Life & Rally on January 24 in Washington. Details on the Network’s Facebook page. The Network is a union of pro-life groups from Jesuit high schools, colleges, universities, and parishes across the U.S.

And take a look at this impressive video about the Jesuits at Georgetown University. (Click here if you can’t see the video.)

Something to think about | Much of the reflection in the Exercises is geared to an effort to share the vision of Jesus and understand what he was and is trying to do in the world and its history.

The meditations are very clear in their implication that the task that Jesus received from God is not to save souls out of the world, but to save the world, to refocus and reintegrate all creation by drawing the human race back into its proper relationship with God—and therefore proper relationships within the human race and all the created universe.

Such a perspective judges everything in terms of what we can know of the divinely intended outcomes. Such a vision leads to radical judgments about the way we are conducting the affairs of human society now. Such a vision certainly does not allow one to take for granted wars; poverty; famines; injustices; marginalization of ethnic, racial, linguistic, or economic groups; or other unnecessary sufferings or deprivations.

One cannot simply say that this is how it is and how it will always be because the world is like that—in the context of the Exercises, that is plainly untrue. It is untrue because God does not intend that kind of arrangement of human society in which so many are excluded. These sufferings are not divinely made but humanly made. God has not abandoned creation but reaches out at all times and to all peoples with possibilities and grace for redemption—not, according to the gospels, a redemption confined to life beyond death, but redemption of all aspects of human life in this world which we help to shape for good or for ill.

Monika Hellwig
An Ignatian Spirituality Reader

A story from Tattoos on the Heart, by Greg Boyle, SJ:

At three o’clock in the morning, the phone rings. It’s Cesar. He says what every homie says when they call in the middle of the night, “Did I wake you?”

I always think Why no, I was just waiting and hoping that you’d call.

Cesar is sober and it’s urgent that he talk to me.

“I gotta ask you a question. You know how I’ve always seen you as my father–ever since I was a little kid?  Well, I hafta to ask you a question.”

Now Cesar pauses, and the gravity of it all makes his voice waver and crumble, “Have I . . . been . . . you son.  And you . . . will be my father.  And nothing will separate us, right?

“That’s right.”

In this early morning call Cesar did not discover that he has a father.  He discovered that was a son worth having.  The voice broke through the clouds of his terror and the crippling mess of his own history, and he felt himself beloved.  God, wonderfully pleased in him, is where God wanted Cesar to reside.

Jesus in Matthew’s gospel says, “How narrow is the gate that leads to life.”  Mistakenly, I think, we’ve come to believe that this is about restriction.  The way is narrow.  But it really wants us to see that narrowness is the way. . . . Our choice is not to focus on the narrow, but to narrow our focus.  The gate that leads to life is not about restriction at all.  It is about an entry into the expansive.

Photo from Flickr Commons by M.V. Jantzen

A 30-day online retreat focused on social justice begins today. You can find reflections for Day 1 here on the Jesuit Refugee Service website.

What for years seemed like extreme cruelty, now impresses me as heroic parenting.

The parent in this case was my mother who, back in the 1950s, thought the Three Stooges were too violent, carrot and celery sticks were excellent snacks, and putting a piano in my childhood bedroom would inspire me to practice in between lessons.*

Shouldn’t be too difficult to guess what Halloween was like during my formative years – I collected pennies for UNICEF (United Nations Children’s Fund) instead of candy. And so what if I haven’t needed a dental cavity filled since the early 1960s, pennies instead of candy? Pennies? Really? Really.

For decades, the annual pennies-for-UNICEF-on-Halloween drill was on the  list of childhood grievances I’d recite in psychotherapy. No, it wasn’t at the top – I’ve never been quite that nuts. Still, it was on the list of childhood never-quite-experienced.

Now that I’m older, not only do I appreciate my mother’s passion for social justice, but I love her for hard wiring it into me.  I don’t wait for Halloween to make charitable contributions. I also buy “fun size” candy bars all year long. Thanks be to God.

*FYI: they were, they weren’t, it didn’t.

On Monday, November 1, the Jesuit Refugee Service/USA will begin an online retreat that links the Spiritual Exercises to the plight of refugees and vulnerable migrants.  The retreat marks the 30th anniversary of the founding of the Jesuit Refugee Service.  Go to the JRS/USA home page on Monday to begin the retreat.

The Jesuit Refugee Service  assists refugees and other displaced persons in 57 countries.

Fifteen years ago, Jane Knuth wandered into the St. Vincent de Paul thrift store in Kalamazoo, Michigan, looking to buy a rosary for her daughter’s First Communion.  She became a volunteer.  She liked the people who worked there.  Even more, she grew to know and love the poor people who came to the store for clothing and other necessities.

Knuth has written an extraordinary book about her experiences called Thrift Store Saints: Meeting Jesus 25¢ at a Time.  She tells stories about the people of St. Vincent de Paul, volunteers and customers, writing with an elegant simplicity and a generosity of spirit that delighted me.  Few books have touched me more deeply.

You can sample the book online here.

Here’s a story from the book about how Knuth learned about the dignity of the poor.  A man comes in asking for some clothes for his cousin, who has just been released from prison.  He’s nervous, obviously unused to asking for help:

On the clothes racks we find sweatpants, shirts, socks, and a winter coat. As I bag the clothes, he asks, “Can I rake your leaves? I’d like to do something to help you folks out. I’ll make sure my cousin comes in to thank you when he gets a day off, but let me do something today.”

I tell him it isn’t necessary, but he asks again, and then another time after I hand him the bag. I refuse again just as my coworker Jim walks by us.

Jim, overhearing the offer, is more perceptive than I. “I’ll get you a rake,” he tells him. “Thanks very much, it would be a great help.”

The man rakes every leaf into a tidy pile. When he comes back inside, he is no longer anxious or uneasy. He shakes our hands, gathers up his small bag of clothing and walks out.

This man raking the leaves at the St. Vinnie’s thrift shop is confirmation of a niggling suspicion I have about the place. Gradually, over the first few months that I work there, it starts to become uneasily clear to me that we are not trying to change the world. We aren’t trying to change poor people either.

The only thing it seems we are trying to change is ourselves.