This post is based on Week Four of An Ignatian Prayer Adventure.
Parenthood: there is no greater joy or desperation. A parent is fully responsible, yet fully out of control. All of us know how easily a toddler can bring the most eloquent and intelligent to their knees. As a vocation, a calling from God, parenthood requires a sacrifice of self and a lifetime of love. Like any vocation, sometimes we seek it, and sometimes it is thrust upon us.
Mary and Joseph were among those who had parenthood thrust upon them. What desperation that must have sparked! This week in our Ignatian Prayer Adventure, we have been with Mary and Joseph on their desperate journey to Egypt to escape Herod’s slaughter of the innocents. Years later, returning home after the feast of Passover, even with the support of an entire caravan of family, Mary and Joseph could not ensure the security of their child. (Luke 2:41–52)
In Ignatian prayer, I sit in the desperation of Mary and Joseph as they search three days for Jesus. Three days. This is not just a foretelling of the wait after the Crucifixion. It is the reality of a lifelong Holy Saturday of emptiness and desperation that many of us experience. Some repress these feelings or numb them with substances. Some close their hearts, not wanting to touch the desperation, let alone wallow in it. But some never stop searching. In that search we recognize the surest sign of vocation: what we must do because God, our ultimate peace, is on the other end.
The profound implications of Jesus’ statement overwhelm me. “Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” (Luke 2:49) Our desperate journeys—for ourselves, our children, our parents, our spouses, or for those we don’t even know on the other side of the world—are so real and clearly human. And yet all of them, if they are our callings, end where they began, in the house of God—not the church or temple per se, but in the dwelling space within each of us, where we trust that God’s security and love for us and our children and all others abide.
What am I desperately searching for now? How does my search end in God?
Image: “The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple” by William Holman Hunt, public domain via Wikipedia.
