At our parish on Mother’s Day, we have a tradition of honoring all women, whether they biologically have children or not. I am always deeply moved by this tradition, because it allows us to honor women who “mother” even if they do not have children of their own.

As all women stand in our parish, I can barely hold back the tears as I survey the room and the beautiful array of women who stand with pride. This tradition allows us to honor the religious sisters of our parish, who nurture people by tending to their needs and faith lives. It allows us to honor the women who were never able to have children or who chose not to have children, yet still have profound impacts on the lives of others. They, too, are mothers in my eyes!

When I stand up, I most certainly stand with a full heart of love for having the opportunity to love my two children. As I stand, though, I cannot help but think of all the other women in my life that make me the woman I am today: my own mom, my grandmothers, my sisters-in-law, my aunts, my cousins, my friends, colleagues, my mom’s friends who are like second moms, women at our parish, some very dear religious sisters, and on and on. These women create a circle of support that provides strength and courage in my own mothering.

St. Ignatius says, “Love ought to show itself in deeds more than in words, and love consists in sharing what one has and who one is with those one loves.” The act of mothering allows us to do this every day. This Mother’s Day, I invite us to be thankful for all the women in our lives who have shown us the meaning of St. Ignatius’s words.

Thane Kreiner of Santa Clara University makes connections between Ignatian traditions and the work he does to train social entrepreneurs to build businesses that serve the poor.

So we are left with love. “Love ought to manifest itself more by deeds than by words,” said St. Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus, in 1540. In the Spring, 2007 Stanford Social Innovation Review Roger Martin and Sally Osberg define entrepreneurs by their direct action, in addition to attributes such as courage, fortitude, and creativity. Social entrepreneurs are distinguished by the “primacy of social benefit,” or the value proposition: large-scale, transformational change. The social entrepreneur “releases trapped potential or alleviates the suffering” of fellow humans.

The world needs more social entrepreneurs, Kreiner says, quoting Ignatius’s close friend Juan Polanco: “quamplurimi et quam aptissimi (as many as possible of the very best).

During Holy Week I’ve encountered two very different and yet equally profound meanings in the act of a kiss.  The first, of course, is the act by which Judas symbolized his betrayal of Christ: a tender, intimate act which was a lie and a travesty.  The other was the act by which we show reverence for the cross of Christ in the liturgy of Good Friday.

I celebrated Good Friday liturgy with my family at Campion Center in Weston, Massachusetts, home to a community of retired Jesuits.  There is a beautiful chapel there somewhat reminiscent of the baroque style of the Jesuit church in Rome, the Gesù, and being there calls to mind the grand sweep of Jesuit history symbolized by that church.  As I looked around the congregation, I saw men who have spent decades in service to Christ.  They have been professors, pastors, presidents.  They have served in Beirut, Beijing, Boston, and Botswana.  They have baptized, taught, built, preached, and given spiritual direction to thousands.  Now, here they live out what is likely their final assignment: they move slowly with walkers, or are pushed about in wheelchairs, and spend much time in silence.

The celebrant raised the cross as he and two other priests approached the altar: “behold the cross of Christ, on which was hung the salvation of the world.”  The three of them processed around the large chapel, pausing for those who were non-ambulatory, so that they might kiss the cross.  The rest of us later processed up the center aisle in order to similarly revere the cross.

It was the faces of those old Jesuits who inspired me.  For a moment, I saw not an old man in a wheelchair, but a missionary still responding to the Call of Christ the King.  They would raise their arms and lovingly bring the wood of the cross to their lips and kiss the feet of the One for whom they had toiled their whole lives.  There was something in their eyes. I could see it.  They are still in love.

Ignatius writes in the Spiritual Exercises, “love shows itself more in deeds than in words.”  A kiss is a small gesture, but it is a symbol, a manifestation of something deeper that stretches across years, lifetimes, and generations.  It is a deed by which a person can render back to God the love that God has given.  Once again the Jesuits have taught me something: the meaning of a kiss.

The final contemplation of the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius is the Contemplation on Divine Love, or the Contemplation on the Love of God. It captures all of the movements we’ve been praying through during our retreat in daily life.

In the video below, Kevin O’Brien, SJ, explains the exercise as contemplating God’s love, which is given to us so freely and generously. We are first asked to contemplate how God creates out of love, creates everything in this world and our very lives, and sustains everything by God’s labor and God’s love. We are called to see all things as a reflection of God’s love and give gratitude. And that gratitude should inspire in us a natural response to give back.

This video is part of An Ignatian Prayer Adventure, Week 8. If you’re receiving this via e-mail, click through to watch the video The Contemplation on Divine Love.

It is with the somber feel of Holy Week that I write that our old friend, Fr. Dennis, has died.  Last April I wrote about visiting him with my husband as he said Mass in his apartment.  His tears as he tried to get through the Mass with his increasingly debilitating disease was so sad.

Fr. Dennis moved to assisted living shortly after we were there.  By Easter Week he was cruising around his new place on a scooter, happily giving us a tour of the chapel where he could offer Mass for the residents.  He introduced us to the resident Protestant chaplain and the easy affection and respect between them was apparent.  Clearly, they were brothers in ministry.

He still ministered to us on that visit, laughing out loud as I complained about something at church.  Then, with another laugh, he recounted for my son how I had come to him at other times with my “injustices.”  He made it all better with his laugh.  None of it really mattered.

We kept up on him, but heard he had to stop presiding at Mass at his rehabilitation center and that talking had become quite difficult for him.  Then about a week ago, we were told that he had been moved to hospice.  We knew many people who had stopped in to see him.  He was exhausted, they said.  There was a 5 minute limit.  Wait a day or two before you go.  And then he died.

We miss him very much.  He has been with us in some close family tragedies and served as a sounding board for other things.  We were on committees with him and could watch the great administrator at work.  He was smart and funny and his laugh filled a room.

This week, as we attended the services for this wonderful priest and minister, I realized that a priest is not just “my” priest.  We were there grieving.  But so were dozens – hundreds? – of other families where he has been with them in their own losses. He has listened to many others besides us and let others share their difficulties.  He has shared his with them.

Our family is one small family in his lifelong ministry, in one of many parishes and other places he has served.  He knew we loved him, but I wish I had said Thank You more loudly and clearly.

My new favorite description of love is the willingness to enter a mess. It’s a pretty decent description of the Incarnation (or kenosis for you theologians out there); it captures the spirit of that oft-quoted passage from Matthew 25 about feeding Jesus when you feed the hungry. It’s pretty close to the sentiment that Ignatius counsels in the Contemplation to Attain Love in the fourth week of the Spiritual Exercises. It’s certainly what was on Ignatius’s mind when he penned the beautiful Suscipe prayer: “take, Lord, receive all my liberty….” For if the spiritual life is coming to inhabit the place where God stands, and seeing the world as God sees it, and being willing to act upon what one sees from that place, well, that’s being willing to enter a mess.

Sue and I are sprinting toward a lovely mess. The amazing thing is that it wasn’t one we’d planned. It was one that God told us to enter last month when He e-mailed Sue the photo of a 7 year-old boy in China, Fu Yuan, who has a heart defect. God said, “yes, he’ll fit into your family nicely. You can get him some good medical care, you can give him older sisters who also started their lives in China, and you can help him make the transition because you, Dad, speak Chinese like a 7 year-old.” We protested that we couldn’t afford the fees; we’re taking care of Sue’s mom; we’ve had to deal with various work and school difficulties; yada yada yada. I went into a conversation with Sue thinking we’d have to say no, and came out of it convinced I’d be with my son by the end of the year. Thanks be to God!

“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

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.

My daughter Laura turned me on to the British band Mumford and Sons. They’re something special. “After the Storm” speaks of longing for God, and the hope that love will triumph:

And there will come a time, you’ll see, with no more tears.
And love will not break your heart, but dismiss your fears.
Get over your hill and see what you find there,
With grace in your heart and flowers in your hair.

The lyrics (most of them, anyway) are part of the video, but you can read them all here.  If you like this song, listen to “Roll Away Your Stone.”

(Click here to watch the video on YouTube.)

The devotion to the Heart of Christ, so vigorous some years ago, so much on the decline today, would flourish once again if people would understand that it consists essentially in accepting Jesus Christ as love incarnate, as the manifestation of the unconditional love of God for us. Anyone who accepts this is bound to experience fruits beyond all his expectations in his own prayer life and in his apostolate. The great turning point in your life comes not when you realize that you love God but when you realize and fully accept the fact that God loves you unconditionally.

Anthony de Mello, SJ