Returning to God
March 19, 2011For those who are just coming to the blog, weekends are set aside for repetitions, a chance to go back to a prayer from the week and allow the graces of the prayer to deepen. This week, the focus has been on our sinfulness. As we continue to pray over our sins, it is helpful to remember why we do so. We do not pray over our sins just to wallow in self-pity and say “I am the worst sinner ever.” We also do not pray over our sins as though we were assessing ourselves at the beginning of a self-help program.
While there is nothing necessarily wrong with a self-help regimen, it is important to note that the point of calling to mind our sins in prayer is very different. The idea behind the reflections on sin in the Exercises is not “self-help,” where we recognize that we are not doing everything we should and say “I will try to be better.” In the Exercises, as with Lent, we pray over our sins in order to be closer to God in all that we do.
Posted by Mr. David Paternostro, S.J. in Weekend RepetitionDeath and Judgment in Light of Eternity
March 18, 2011 | IX.Grace: To understand that I will one day come before the Lord, and to realize how my relationship with Him is able to be strengthened and renewed at every moment of my life.
Text for Prayer: Ezekiel 37: 1-3
Reflection: It has been observed that ours is a culture that does not like to face the reality of death. From Botox to infomercials promising that we will live to be 100 to elaborate euphemisms to speak of death, we often try to deny the inevitability of death.
One reason, I think, for all this effort is the fear that thinking about death makes us feel like little kids again. Invariably, we start to think about things that maybe we thought we had outgrown: judgment, and heaven, and hell. Those are things we were told as children to make us behave, or to make us docile, or to make us nice. Or maybe it was something we were told when things were rough, that there was a better world right around the corner if we could just stay steadfast for a little longer. That’s what Marx was getting at when he declared:
Posted by Mr. Stephen Wolfe, S.J. in IX.“Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”
Our Own Sins
March 17, 2011 | VIII.Grace: To grow in sorrow for my sins, to be overcome with shame and confusion before God for my sinfulness.
Text for Prayer: Lk 5:1-8
Reflection: The graces that St. Ignatius suggests we ask for at this point in the Exercises are shame and confusion, and they can be especially difficult graces for us to ask to receive. However, as we grow in our awareness of our own sinfulness, it is important that we do not conceive of shame and confusion as a lack of clarity that leads us to despise ourselves. Instead, we should come to realize that shame is concerned with justice and that confusion is concerned with understanding. As always, we must begin with an awareness of God’s presence and of His love for us, of the fact that He has created each of us in His image and for His glory. The God whom we seek to know is a loving God, and it is only in the light of this Love and with the help of this God that we are able to consider our own sins for what they truly are: deliberate rejections of God’s love that we know are not for our own good (even as we commit them!). Thus the shame and confusion.
When we pray about our sin, Ignatius recommends that we consider particular periods in our lives: the places where we lived or travelled, our relationships, and what we did with our time. Ask the questions: What were my sins from that period? How do I see them now? Taking one period at a time, we then move through the various periods of our lives, taking account of the number and repetition of particular sins.
Posted by Mr. Michael Wegenka, S.J. in VIII.Tepidity: Habitual Deviation from the Road
March 16, 2011 | VII.Grace: For light to see the disorder of tepidity in my life and to be disgusted by it, to seek forgiveness for it, and the grace to amend it.
Text for Prayer: 1 John 2:1-11
Reflection: It is part of our human nature to get into habits. What exactly is a habit? A habit is an established disposition to act in a certain way by repeated choices of the will; it is a direction we freely choose by repetition. This makes habits both real work to establish and (the bad ones) difficult to break.
Our contemporary society has not lost touch with the idea of habit. Unfortunately, the negative habits we often hear about today do not touch on the most important realities. While not bad in themselves, these messages often focus on, for example, diet, exercise, or business success. True, it takes good habits to act well in these areas of life; but if it is true for them, how much more true it is for the spiritual life! I once heard someone comment, “I know people who will work harder to loose weight than to get out of their sins!” Even though this comment summarizes the culture by which we are surrounded and by which we are all affected, we can still choose to stir our generosity and reflect on habits in our spiritual life.
Posted by Mr. Andrij Hlabse, S.J. in VII.Venial Sin: Are You ‘Plumb Enough’?
March 15, 2011 | VI.Grace: a growing intense sorrow and, if God so wishes, even tears for my sins.
Reflection: I just finished reading a fictional novel that followed the life of a college professor whose life is a series of decisions that were petty and selfish as a young man, though he grew wiser and more generous as he aged. But even in his old age, he felt like something was always off. He finally came to understand his life as a construction project, where builders use levels and plumb bobs to insure the project is built right and true. In projects that are small and insignificant, carpenters can afford to be a little off with reading their level bubbles or their plumb lines — “not to worry, it’s plumb enough.” The story is different with bigger projects, like building a life of virtue over the years. When the small measurements at the base are off by a bit, the building rises at an angle that can be increasingly dangerous for the overall project. What was “plumb enough” suddenly threatens the success and security of the whole project.
We have the opportunity this Lent to be like the supervisor of the construction site of our spiritual life. Is it not salutary to stop periodically to assess how the project has been going? To see where our measurements are off by just a hair and need correcting? We’re not talking about major, obvious omissions, but the small day-to-day deviations that lead us away from God and set our life project off on the wrong foot. It can be hard to face these mistakes (do I really have to do this?). We understand these small deviations, where we are ‘plumb enough’, as venial sins. Venial sin damages our relationship with God without destroying it. If mortal sin is when a building collapses, destroying the whole construction project, venial sins are like when we cut corners and overlook things in our spiritual life. By themselves, they are not entirely destructive, but taken together through time and habit, they lead to bigger problems. Thus, they need God’s light to set them plumb and true.
Posted by Mr. Joseph Simmons, S.J. in VI.The Evil of Sin: Rejection of God’s Love
March 14, 2011 | V.Grace: Shame and confusion about myself, when I see how many people have been banished from heaven for committing a single mortal sin, and how many times I have deserved eternal banishment for my sins.
Text for Prayer: Romans 1:18-25
Reflection: We have pondered and prayed about God’s immense plan for creation: to exist in him and be glorified. God’s very act of creating, his calling things into existence (“Let there be light!”), is at the same time a call to return to Him, their ultimate destination. We have also seen our place within this plan. That is, human beings are created to praise, reverence, and serve God. By accomplishing this we are saved, we are brought into the glory of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. But as we all know, this is much harder than it looks.
There are many seemingly insurmountable obstacles to praising, reverencing, and serving God in our world today. Each day all sorts of distractions bombard us. And those are just the ones that are external to us! There are just as many distractions that come from within us—daydreams, worries, and temptations. These obstacles complicate the task of being a human being created by God for his greater praise, reverence, and service.
Posted by Mr. Mikey Wood, S.J. in V.Weekend Repetitions
March 12, 2011The weekends will be dedicated to repetitions– going back to your prayers in order to allow a particular grace from that prayer to deepen. The purpose of repetitions can be made clear with two examples: one from the life of St. Ignatius, one from contemporary life.
In his Autobiography, St. Ignatius recalled how when he was having his experiences in the caves of Manresa that would later become the Exercises, God treated him “just as a schoolmaster treats a child whom he is teaching.” By his own admission, in those days Ignatius was not always the quickest learner when it came to the spiritual life. Ignatius had his own ideas of how to follow God’s will, and the Lord patiently instructed him otherwise. Eventually, Ignatius recognized the truth of that old adage repetitio mater studiorum (“repetition is the mother of studies”), and saw how it applied equally to the classroom and the chapel. In the classroom, we rarely ever understand a lesson by giving the textbook just one look. Often, we’ll need to go back a few times to see what is being said, and a few more times to see how it fits in with everything else that we’ve learned. So too in prayer: often, we’ll need to go back a few times to understand what is going on in a prayer period, and a few more times to see how the grace of the prayer fits in to our own lives.
Posted by Mr. David Paternostro, S.J. in Weekend RepetitionThe Examination of Conscience – Daily Tool for the King’s Service
March 11, 2011 | IV.“There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’”
So C.S. Lewis quips in The Great Divorce, neatly summarizing the determinative power of our human free will. Yet, such a choice is not one that is sorted out in just one decisive moment – at the end of time or before – but rather each at each moment of our lives. It is to an examination of the way we use our wills that we now turn.
Immediately after offering the Principle and Foundation at the opening of the Spiritual Exercises, St. Ignatius lists the examination of conscience. Upon consideration this makes plenty of sense; only once we know the proper destination of our course of life on earth can we have a clearer understanding of what deviates us from this path. Better understanding that we are made for God calls for a response on our part! The course of life offers us choices – some of which promote our end, some of which slow us down in pursuing it, and some of which outright oppose our end. Most simply put, sin and the praise, reverence, and service of God do not coincide.
Posted by Mr. Andrij Hlabse, S.J. in IV.Ordering All Created Things to God
March 10, 2011 | III.Grace: That I might see God as the beginning and end of all created things and that I might use and love all things in the Lord.
Text for Prayer: Psalm 19: 1-6
Reflection: A great art critic can look at a painting or sculpture, or hear a musical composition, and tell you that it’s Van Gogh, or Michelangelo, or Mozart. He can do this only because he has learned, over time, to notice the distinctive marks, the telltale traces of the creator that permeate the work.
Creation works the same way. From the earliest days, Christianity has maintained that we can know God through His creation. Paul proclaimed to the Romans, “Ever since the creation of the world, God’s eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things He has made.” Creation then is a powerful revelation, disclosing to us, in partial form, the mind of the maker.
Posted by Mr. Stephen Wolfe, S.J. in III.Godwards: The End of Man
March 9, 2011 | II.Grace: To have a deep appreciation, realization, feeling, and taste for what it means to be a creature, to have God’s love create me and keep creating me each day, to be totally possessed by the creator.
Text for Prayer: Ps. 104
“Man is created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord, and by this means to save his soul.”
-St. Ignatius Loyola, Spiritual Exercises, n. 23
Reflection: As we begin the holy, penitential season of Lent today, let us also consider the way in which St. Ignatius begins the Spiritual Exercises that will guide us as we approach Easter. Ignatius speaks both of the moment of creation—of the moment when God loves the first man into being—and of the end of man—of the reason for man’s existence and the ultimate goal of his life. In this way, we start the retreat with a consideration of both the beginning and the end of man. However, Ignatius is not speaking about only the first man, Adam, who fell. Instead, he is speaking of every single human person; he is saying that we all have the same origin and the same goal. We are all from God and are all meant for God, and that is what he wants us to know—and to know deeply—as we begin these Lenten Exercises.
It might be helpful to consider first how God creates. God creates man out of nothing and continues to create him every day, his whole life long. This is not merely a moment of invention, when a switch is flipped on man’s back before he is left to run his course. Instead, God’s hand is always at work in His creation, forming and guiding it, even when He does this through His creature’s freedom. This is a rather spectacular fact, if for no other reason than that man cannot create a single speck. The whole of the universe—from the greatest galaxy to the most evasive sub-atomic particle—is not created by anyone but God. Human beings might change some part of that universe, might subdue the earth in order to make it more livable, for instance; but these changes always depend utterly upon all that God continues to do for us in continuously creating the world.
Posted by Mr. Michael Wegenka, S.J. in II.