The Call of the King is a meditation in the Spiritual Exercises that invites us to join Christ in his work of healing the world.  Christ is a king leading an army, but he’s a leader who works alongside his troops.  He says, “I want to overcome all diseases, all poverty, all ignorance, all oppression and slavery–in short, all the evils that beset humankind.  Whoever wishes to join me in this undertaking must be content with the same food, drink, clothing, and so on, that comes with following me” (SpEx 93).  (This quote is from the modern paraphrase by David Fleming, SJ.)  You’ll find the whole meditation here.

What’s your part in the work of Christ? You might take some time this weekend to think about the king’s call to you personally.  This fine guided meditation about the Call of the King by Mark Link, SJ, may help you in your prayer.

Something to think about | Often we tell ourselves, or we are told, in an effort to quell our desires, to look at all the good we already have.  We can be made to feel guilty and ungrateful for desiring what we want.  But if we do suppress our desires without being satisfied that God has heard us, then, in effect, we pull back from honesty with God.  Often, the result for our relationship with God is polite distance or cool civility.  Perhaps God cannot or will not grant what we want, but for the sake of the continued development of the relationship we need to keep letting God know our real desires until we are satisfied or have heard or felt some response. . . .

A woman may, for example, be experiencing a “dark night of the soul” and not like it at all.  Her desire may be for it to be removed.  She may be helped by the knowledge  that others before her have experienced the same thing and have been the better for it, but such knowledge does not  have to satisfy her desire to be rid of the dark night.  A short circuit in the relationship might occur if she tells herself or is told by her spiritual director to squelch her desire “because the experience is good for you.”  What she needs to experience is God’s response, not a theorem of spiritual theology.

William Barry, SJ

One of my favorite characters in fiction is Konstantin Dmitrich Levin in Leo Tolstoy’s great novel Anna Karenina.  Levin is an intelligent young aristocrat with a powerful conscience and a strong thirst for truth.  He abandons the Orthodox Christianity of his childhood and seeks an answer to the meaning of life.  He finds none.  For himself (and everyone else) he foresees only “suffering, death, and eternal oblivion.”  His intellectual despair deepens so badly that he hides ropes and guns, fearing that he will take his own life.

One day a peasant tells him about a friend, “He’s an upright old man.  He lives for the soul.  He remembers God.”  The words strike Levin powerfully and cause a rethinking.  He perceives a vast difference between his thinking and his life.  His thinking was a tormented search for ideas that might give meaning to his existence.  Meanwhile he has fallen in love and married a woman who loves him very much.   He actively manages a large estate. He’s responsible for the well-being of his brother, sister, and an extended family.   His son is born.  He is busy with a wide circle of friends.  He takes on civic responsibilities.

How ironic, Levin says.  He thinks that life is meaningless, but the life that he actually lives is busy, productive, and satisfying.  What did this mean? he asks.  “It meant that his life was good, but his thinking was bad.”  His reasoning tells him that life is a pitiless struggle for survival that rewards selfishness and power.  But he doesn’t really believe that, and he certainly doesn’t live that way.  In his everyday life he lives for an ideal of the good. Like the peasant’s friend, “he lives for the soul.  He remembers God.”

Levin may be just a character in a novel (though I’m told that he’s a lot like Tolstoy), but I love him because his story shows how God can be found when we look at life as we actually live it.  This is something Ignatius taught us how to do in the Daily Examen.  I rely on it.  It’s hard for me to think my way to God.  It’s much better to pay attention to how I really live.

Could you live your everyday life in just six pieces of clothing?  It is the question behind a website called “Six Items or Less.”

In the trans-Atlantic experiment, people around the world volunteered to choose six items of clothing and wear only those six things for a month, at work and at home.  That’s it.  People wrote about their six choices, how they used them and how other people reacted to them wearing the same clothes all month.

The astonishing part of this experiment:  Virtually no one noticed.  People from around the world who participated in the experiment in June, wrote blog updates during the month, reflecting on their experiences.  They wrote that no one realized they were wearing only six items of clothing over and over again. Wives and husbands both wrote that they didn’t mention the experiment to spouses and that not even the spouses noticed it.  One woman said her mother, who sees her daily, didn’t notice.  Her mother shrugged and said she wouldn’t know what any of her children wore yesterday.

It makes me wonder about the image we try to project to the world at large and those around us and how little it really means.  And it makes me consider my own life before God.  Do I spend a lot of time putting on a costume before I come to God?  Do I want to impress God somehow?

Do I even put off coming before God until I can fix myself up?  I’ll really get into my relationship with God when work isn’t so busy.  When my life is less hectic or when my kids are more settled in their lives.  When I am holier.  As soon as I stop being so impatient with other people.  When I can be perfect. . .

It’s a lesson I have to learn over and over again–God is just waiting for and loving me, and incredibly joyful when I finally put aside the six things I think I need to do or be and just open my heart to him.

Since I no longer believe in coincidence, I’m wondering what God is inviting me to see, not only in the sudden spate of movies glorifying food, but because this morning’s kitchen adventure soon became an especially contemplative exercise.

I’ve been cooking — and eating  — for many years. I was raised by foodies who entered cooking competitions on weekends. My mother (The Gourmand) vs. my father (The Short Order Cook) — grab your ingredients and claim your burners…on the same stove. In our suburban kitchen. Perhaps, I’m being called to remember that in a marriage broken enough to eventually collapse, there was still joy to be found in cooking for a family with many hungers.

Another memory:  walking into divorce court nearly a decade ago,  my soon-to-be-ex husband looked me in the eyes and said quite wistfully, “I miss the meals.” Perhaps, I’m being called to remember that great cooking could not sustain a marriage that was spiritually depleted.

With time, cooking for friends would heal and reveal more about the meaning of nourishment; that time is now. Thanks be to God.

Photo: What was cooking while I wrote this post!

Here is a deeply moving poem of gratitude by Franz Wright, a poet who draws on his work with addicts and the mentally ill.

One Heart

It is late afternoon and I have just returned from
the longer version of my walk nobody knows
about. For the first time in nearly a month, and
everything changed. It is the end of March, once
more I have lived. This morning a young woman
described what it’s like shooting coke with a baby
in your arms. The astonishing windy and altering light
and clouds and water were, at certain moment,
You.

There is only one heart in my body, have mercy
on me.

The brown leaves buried all winter creatureless feet
running over dead grass beginning to green, the first scent-
less violet here and there, returned, the first star noticed all
at once as one stands staring into the black water.

Thank You for letting me live for a little as one of the
sane; thank You for letting me know what this is
like. Thank You for letting me look at your frightening
blue sky without fear, and your terrible world without
terror, and your loveless psychotic and hopelessly
lost
with this love

Fellow blogger Tim Muldoon (see his post on desire below) has written an excellent article about what’s needed to help young people form the intimate bond that sustains marriage.  Dating is passe.  The hookup culture is the norm.  Young people “stumble from one defective friendship to another without a strong sense of how to deepen and expand them in ways that are, over the long haul, life giving.”

The remedy, he says, is friendship–specifically, the understanding that “God is friendship.”  This “de-centers” the individual.

Individual feelings at a given moment in the relationship are not as important as the larger story in which each partner plays a part. The story is not about me: what I’m feeling, how I’m being fulfilled, what I’m getting out of the relationship. Instead, the story is about the friendship itself, how I participate with the other in an unfolding drama where God is the key actor. The questions are different: what is God doing? How is God challenging me to grow? What is God revealing to me about myself, about the other? Such a de-centering can be liberating, in the sense that it allows me freedom to grow, instead of being limited by my own self-interest and especially my own often unruly emotions.

With the feast day of Saint Augustine coming up later this week (August 28) I have been thinking about his (likely) influence on Saint Ignatius–specifically, Augustine’s writing about desire in his autobiographical Confessions.  One of his most insightful comments comes upon reflecting on his first experience of heading off as a student to the big city–Carthage, in north Africa–and falling into a “swirling cauldron of lust.” (I love this language in translation by RS Pine-Coffin.)

I read this text with my first-year students and ask them to consider whether the description is apt.  Augustine describes his young self as not yet being in love, but rather desiring to be in love–wanting, in other words, to feel that rush, that high that comes from first love.  We now know that the rush is from chemicals like dopamine, “feel good” drugs that our brains generate in response to various stimuli.  And we can trick our brains into generating these drugs by looking at pictures or reading romances.

Augustine digs deep in his account of desire, asking in essence where it came from and how for so long it steered him toward misery (including a long-time concubine and a child out of wedlock.)  At one point he offers the weak prayer, “Lord, make me chaste!  (But not yet!)”  I am reminded of one of the desert mothers who similarly struggled with chastity all her life–Christopher Jamison writes of her in his book Finding Happiness–who prayed not that the desire would be taken away, but rather that she would be granted strength to master it.  The desire was energizing as long as it did not master her.

For Augustine, sin was not in desire itself; it was disorder in one’s experience of desire.  When desire masters us rather than our mastering desire, we fall into sin.  We make life choices that do not lead us in the direction for which God has made us.  We desire not what God creates us to desire, but rather the feeling of false or temporary desire–the chemical rush of feel-good drugs which, over time, wears off, only to be replaced by the next rush.

Ignatius understood that desire could lead us to life or into sin and death.  That is why at the beginning of his Spiritual Exercises he indicated that the exercises were designed to “overcome oneself, and to order one’s life, without reaching a decision through some disordered affection.”  The experience of desire is part of every person’s life; the ordering of desire is the invitation to holiness.

George Anderson, SJ, often prays this lovely prayer by St. Theresa of Avila on his morning subway ride:

“Let nothing disturb you, let nothing frighten you. All things are passing. God never changes. Patience obtains all things. Nothing is wanting to the one who possesses God. God alone suffices.”

Read his reflection on praying on the go.

Mirada Global is a multilingual Web site that compiles articles from Jesuit publications in North and South America. It covers a variety of subjects, from religion and politics to culture and ecology. The magazines that contribute content include America, Criterio (Argentina), Mensaje (Chile) and Accion (Paraguay).  Mirada Global is edited by Antonio Delfau, S.J., and features content in English, Spanish and Portugese.