William Barry, SJ, in his book, A Friendship Like No Other, invites us to be aware of our “thin places,” those moments where we easily find God. Barry’s challenge to name for ourselves our “thin places” was a challenge I took to heart, and I have come to two conclusions.

First, there are “thin places” that occur in my life that are unique, special places that I do not get to visit very often, but when I do the felt presence of God is almost overwhelming. Many of mine are places in nature, such as the beach, my grandparents’ farm, and being in the North Georgia Mountains, and they invite me to understand the vastness and creative power of our creator. As I stand and soak in the beauty of nature these places offer, I also find that I understand that my mere presence in life is but one piece of God’s magnificent, ongoing creative work.

Second, as Barry’s question of “thin places” remained on my heart, I found myself pondering it often during my Examen. Over time, I began to realize that there are some very basic rhythms and routines of my life that allowed me to readily and easily find God: snuggling my daughter, Abby, while sipping my morning coffee; sitting down to lunch with my kids after preschool to hear about their day; reading to my kids and our night time ritual of prayer; and savoring the few quieter moments with my hubby after the last door of my kids’ room was closed. I was surprised to find that the rhythms of my life are spotted with moments that easily allow me to find God. Without realizing it, these moments are checkpoints to see how the ones I love are doing and even more importantly “still points” that allow me to savor the gifts in my life and to deepen my awareness of God in all things.

I am sure as I continue to ponder my “thin places,” I will be surprised, yet again, as to where God routinely pops up in my day.

Lisa Kelly looks at the transcendent moments of enlightenment experienced by Ignatius, Mother Teresa, Einstein, and a few others.  These visions can’t really be described, but these mystics speak of similar insights, which she calls “habits of the heart.”  Here’s one:

Get outside yourself—Stop judging and start observing, observing, observing. Be aware of what is going on inside. Ignatius taught his companion to just name what was going on inside and let it be what it is rather than trying to stomp it out or avoid it. He suggested seeing situations from multiple points of view—others in the scene, open to what insights may come from any vantage point, knowing God is in all of them. We are seeking what we don’t know or can’t see rather than reaffirming what we already think.

Many people want to know, and it’s not an easy question to answer.  Here are some things that help.  The late David Fleming, SJ, wrote an excellent small book by that title.  We have a whole section of this website devoted to it.  I like this “top ten” list by Paul Campbell, SJ. Jim Martin, SJ, recently published an essay about Ignatian spirituality in Catholic Digest magazine.

As I enter into an annual silent retreat with students, I am mindful of how great is the gift of silence.  We think too much; we speak too much.  We argue about concepts of God, we use limiting words for God.  To slightly modify a famous phrase from Meister Eckhart: I pray that God would rid us of all these words and thoughts about God!

Thinking is really a pretty terrible way of encountering God.  Words are even worse.  I come around again and again to a deep intuition of Ignatius: sensing, savoring God is what we’re after.  We must taste the bread of the Eucharist.  We must feel the scabbed hands of the leper, smell the deep fresh odor of the baby’s skin, listen to the wind through the trees, be awestruck by the sight of the kingfisher.

Words and thoughts are for helping others experience God, clearing away their obstacles to God.  Too often we pat ourselves on the back for our words and thoughts, though: we give grades, degrees, honors to those who use words well.  We get used to thinking of our intellects as hammers which make everything into a nail, including God.  (That is why atheism is a modern phenomenon, because only in modernity did people start conceiving of their intellects in such a disordered way.)

Words and thoughts are gifts, artful productions.  We must consider them more as something we do in love, rather than as objects we produce.  Today, we use words and thoughts to conquer the world.  We must rather use them to serve the world, to offer them to the world in love.  When I conceive of a thought, I rejoice that God has given me a mind.  When I speak a word, I rejoice that through speaking this word I might draw another to the truth.

“O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth shall proclaim your praise.” (Ps 51:15)

Michael Leach, author of Why Stay Catholic, offers five ways to remember the truth “that we all wear the face of Christ in a unique way and that what we do unto anyone else we literally do unto ourselves.”  Here’s the first one:

When standing in line at the checkout I remind myself that the individual in front of me is the Christ and that the injunction to love her as I love myself is literally true. A little miracle happens: I not only love her but like her, and if her credit card is no good or her kohlrabi doesn’t register, I don’t get mad. By the time it is my turn to chat with the dark-eyed checkout girl from Nicaragua I am madly in love.

Read the whole thing.

“What makes us human is precisely our experience of the infinite, the fact that we are never satisfied. We are the subjects of unlimited longing, finding infinity not outside ourselves but within. We ask questions about totality and ultimate meaning, and by so doing find that we are asking the question about God. God and humanity are not rivals. One does not love God less by loving someone more; in reaching out to love another person, we are reaching out for God. To speak about love for God and love for human beings is to speak of the same reality. And in the experience of ourselves as mystery, we experience the absolute mystery that is God.”

Ron Modras
Ignatian Humanism

Lisa Kelly has an idea for the ultimate Ignatian gift.  Actually it’s two gifts.  Read about them here.

Dean Brackley, the late Jesuit educator who spent many years teaching in El Salvador, wrote a beautiful meditation on what it feels like to fall in love because of the ministry of the poor. The text comes from a piece he wrote in 2000 for Salvanet, “A Publication of Christians for Peace in El Salvador,” published as a PDF file here.

Writing of those who visit El Salvador for the first time, he says:

The visitors feel themselves losing their grip; or better, they feel the world losing its grip on them. What world? The world made up of important people like them and unimportant poor people like their hosts. As the poet Yeats says, “things fall apart;” the visitors’ world is coming unhinged. They feel resistance, naturally, to a current that threatens to sweep them out of control.

They feel a little confused–again–like the disorientation of falling in love. In fact, that is what is happening, a kind of falling in love. The earth trembles. My horizon is opening up. I’m on unfamiliar ground, entering a richer, more real world. We all live a bit on the periphery of the deep drama of life, more so, on average, in affluent societies. The reality of the periphery is thin, one-dimensional, “lite,” compared to the multilayered richness of this new world the visitors are entering. In this interchange with a few of their representatives, the anonymous masses of the world’s poor emerge from their cardboard-cutout reality and take on the three-dimensional status of full-fledged human beings.

That is what love is like: “entering a richer, more real world.” Of course many are like those in Plato’s cave, content with the small pleasures, unwilling to take the risk of love. For love is demanding. It changes your whole world. It is always holy ground, the place where we experience the terror of not being in control. That is why love is the least inadequate way of conceiving of God.

Image by logostoni under Creative Commons license.

Dorothy Day’s 1934 Letter to an Agnostic is republished in this week’s America Magazine.  In it, she writes about her own struggles with belief and unbelief, sounding this very Ignatian note:

We are taught that our souls never exercise just as our body does, otherwise it will never be healthy and well, and if it is not in a healthy state, of course we feel morbid. And prayer is that exercise for the soul, just as bending and stretching is the exercise of the body. It is intellectual pride, the arrogance of youth which makes the physical act of prayer difficult.

Read the whole thing here.

The great theologian Karl Rahner, SJ, addressed these words to Jesuits, but they apply to all persons of faith:

“It is by entering into the world of today, and being with men in their difficulties, their anxieties and doubts, that we can bring this world to faith, and not by posing as somehow different. . . . Our faith must be such that even the unbeliever cannot deny that here a man believes who is like himself, a man of today, on whose lips the word God does not come easily and cheaply, who doesn’t think he has mastered everything, and in spite of all this, rather because of all this, he believes.

“For Christianity is not a formula which makes everything clear, but the radical submission of myself to an incomprehensible Mystery Who has revealed Himself as ineffable love.”