It’s Monday. Most of us have meetings to go to today or later this week. Here is a prayer before a meeting. It’s published on the St. Louis University Prayerbook, a site where members of the SLU community share prayers.
Heavenly Father, we come to you today asking for your guidance, wisdom, and support as we begin this meeting. Help us to engage in meaningful discussion; allow us to grow closer as a group and nurture the bonds of community. Fill us with your grace, Lord God, as we make decisions that might affect the students, staff, faculty, alumni and friends of Saint Louis University. And continue to remind us that all that we do here today, all that we accomplish, is for the pursuit of truth for the greater glory of You, and for the service of humanity. We ask these things in your name, Amen.
Consider this my “overthinking the Super Bowl” post. (Wait till I get to the Olympics!)
First things first: I’ve always loved sports, and I’ve always enjoyed the Super Bowl. I just love the pure fun of competition, and at least during my adult life I’ve thought that sport reveals something about the human condition and the human psyche. (Especially the male psyche; I say this having coached rowing for a number of years, both men and women of all ages.)
As I get older, though, I’m more fascinated by the expression of desire in sport. Why do we want to win? Why will the Dwight Freeneys of the world submit themselves to pain just for the chance to play and win? Why do athletes embrace ascetic practices (askesis comes from the Greek, meaning to exercise) for the sake of glory?
The answer is in Homer’s Iliad. Describing the soldiers’ anticipation of the war, he describes them “rejoicing,” as if to suggest that the war itself is the place where they will fulfill what their lives are for. Later, after the death of a key figure, Patroclus, the Greeks pause in the midst of war and celebrate the fallen warrior’s life with Olympic-style games. War and games are the proving grounds, the arenas within which each man proves his mettle, shows his excellence. War and games are the place where a man shows his deepest desire: to be worthy of life.
Ignatius knew this. He was a soldier, and his conversion to a life following Christ was hard precisely because over time he came to understand that he had to re-train his desire. His early post-conversion life was still rooted in seeking excellence; in his autobiography, for example, he describes the awkward scene when he was ready to kill a man who had disparaged the Blessed Virgin. The will to win was still embedded in his psyche, and if it were not for the fact that he let the donkey he was riding on decide which way to go at a fork in the road, he would have committed murder.
Ignatius learned to let go of the desire to win by embracing more and more Christ’s invitation to serve him. A new form of askesis emerged, a form rooted in Saint Paul’s model of straining for the high calling in Christ Jesus (see Philippians 3:14)–a calling that paradoxically involved letting go of competition.
There is something deeply rooted in the psyche of males, young and old. Boys wrestle and fight and compete; men want to one-up each other. War and games are two sides of the same coin of competition for the sake of glory. What Paul and Ignatius teach us is that the desire to compete is rooted in an even deeper desire. Underneath the desire to be worthy of life is a desire to know and be known by the author of life, to find radical freedom in the radical obedience to the author of my life. And that deeper desire cannot be satisfied with competition. (Achilles, the unsurpassed hero of the Greeks, was miserable.) It can be satisfied, Ignatius realized, only in a life founded upon the praise, reverence, and service of God, so radically that everything else in life serves that single end. It culminates not in competition, but in love–not in the attitude of overcoming one’s enemies, but in the sacrifice of self that enables enemies to become friends. In short, in the imitation of Christ.
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.
I’m three weeks into a new semester of teaching a course on Ignatian Spirituality at Boston College. It’s an absolute delight, both for the subject matter and the smart students with whom I share it. I’ll be posting some reflections on our conversations as time goes on.
This week, what sticks with me from last evening’s class is Ignatius’ absolute confidence that God is acting at all times, in so many ways, to get our attention and to move us, through grace, to remove the barriers which keep us from truly knowing God. We were reading one of Ignatius’ letters (of which there are over six thousand extant; and no, we are not reading them all) in which he was reassuring a woman named Inés Pascual who had lost a friend. His manner was direct, saying in essence that she had a tough road ahead and that in her sorrow she was vulnerable to losing focus on the end to which God was still calling her.
Ignatius’ tone in the letter suggested a need to keep moving; I suggested an image from his own days as a soldier, in which the experience of a comrade’s death on the battlefield cannot be an excuse for losing sight of the mission. It’s a somewhat arresting tone to modern ears, accustomed to the well intentioned but often vacuous pieties like “so sorry… God’s taking care of her…know that I’m praying for you….” Ignatius reminds her that the work of the spiritual life does not stop because we are sad; in fact, it become harder, precisely because sadness may distract us from recognizing the always-present action of God’s grace.
My students raised poignant questions. What did he mean about grief? About suffering? Was he denying the reality of suffering? (Thoughts of Haiti were lurking in the background there.) Answers, in short: grief is real, but God’s grace is greater. Suffering is real, but God burrows through to our hearts in the midst of it. God is always acting. We may be saddened; grieved; broken; but God seeks to offer comfort, shelter, hope. Of this Ignatius is absolutely certain. He wanted Inés to share that confidence and maintain her commitment to God in her time of difficulty.
I find that attitude compelling. Grief can slide into a kind of selfishness; one uses the experience of pain to draw attention to oneself and elicit from others shows of sympathy. Ignatius’ counsel is to maintain a focus on God, a focus rooted in the First Principle and Foundation– that God has created us for a purpose, and that grief must not get in the way of our seeking it if we are to find freedom and joy.
Great example: Dan Jansen. You’ve probably seen the Visa commercial recalling his awesome story: favored to win gold at the Olympics; sister’s death just hours before the race; a tragic fall in the race; trying again in the next games, falling again; trying a third time and winning gold with a world record. I nearly cry every time I hear his name. But what an example of keeping focus in spite of grief. What a compelling analogy for considering the contours of the spiritual life. God is acting; we must let nothing get in the way of our responding; that is our joy.
I’m a big fan of the writing of William Barry, SJ, especially what he has to say about friendship with God. Now he’s taken his message to YouTube. This video gives the gist of the idea. For more read this article and then read his book A Friendship Like No Other.
It has arisen in large part from my work trying to understand and speak to students about the prevailing hookup culture, inviting them to listen to their deeper desires for friendship, for relationship, for intimacy. It invites people to a way of imagining the possibility of love, an way of imagining that is different from many cultural messages that in the end do not satisfy our desires.
Sometime over the weekend, the Ignatian Spirituality page at Facebook signed up its 5000th fan. The Ignatian community on Facebook is large and lively. Many of the dotMagis blog posts appear there too, and they often spark lively comments. Consider becoming a fan if you’re not one already.
“Look, listen, and feel.” These are the basic instructions of any CPR course. Why? Because we know from experience that in order to help a person who appears to be in physical distress, it is important first to see what is really going on before intervening, lest one do more harm than good. Let’s look more closely at the caring act of providing CPR to see what spiritual lessons we might find.
After shaking a person in need and asking: “Annie, Annie, are you all right?”—to make sure she is not just napping—the helper feels carefully for a pulse. She then lowers an ear to the person’s mouth with a cocked head in order to look, listen, and feel for signs of breathing. Can she see the chest rise and fall? Does she feel the victim’s breath on her cheek? Can she hear the sounds of breathing? Only once these questions are answered can the helper decide which course of action is best.
Paying attention to what is really going and checking things out with all the tools at our disposal are important lessons for all of life, but particularly for the spiritual life. It has been my experience as a spiritual companion and as one who has been well-companioned myself, that particularly because things are not always as they seem, it is important to check things out before trying to fix, change, or “improve” something in our lives.
Given the hustle and bustle and demands of everyday life, I wonder if I am attentive enough to what is really going on in my spiritual life? I wonder, too, if I might need to be shaken up a bit to find out if I am merely sleeping or if I am really out of it. “Eddie, Eddie, are you all right?” I wonder further: What about my spiritual pulse? How would I check it? Am I “breathing?” Does the Spirit’s breath cause my chest to rise from within?
As Catholics near the season of Lent and as all people of good will think about our spiritual growth, we might do well first to exercise a spirituality of CPR before we attempt a remedy for the season, such as giving up chocolate. If we find out what is truly going on inside us, perhaps we might decide to spend more quiet time alone or more time with our families or to forgive someone or ourselves….
A closing thought: Since it is often difficult to shake ourselves or check our own “pulse” or even to see if we are “breathing” adequately, we might do well to seek out a spiritual companion or friend who knows how to “look, listen, and feel.”
Jesuits come from many walks of life. Brother Pat Douglas, SJ was trained as a clinical social worker before he entered the Society. In this video he talks about his vocation and his work among at-risk Lakota youth on the Pine Ridge and Rosebud Indian reservations in South Dakota.
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:
dotMagis blogger Tim Muldoon has just published a new book, a memoir titled 
“Look, listen, and feel.” These are the basic instructions of any CPR course. Why? Because we know from experience that in order to help a person who appears to be in physical distress, it is important first to see what is really going on before intervening, lest one do more harm than good. Let’s look more closely at the caring act of providing CPR to see what spiritual lessons we might find.
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