Pondering : A homily for Mary, Mother of God

This homily was written for one of the Homilists for the Homeless volumes. I have been rummaging around in my old writing as I prep for a couple of upcoming retreats. I am reminded of the need for prayerful reflection, not just at the New Year but every day. There are many frames for the daily Examen, but this list is a good starting point for me. What might you add?

• What astonished me? 
• What brought me to tears? 
• What made me howl with laughter? 
• What suffused me with joy? 
• What brought me closer to God?

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As for Mary, she treasured all these things and pondered them in her heart. — Luke 2:19

These days in particular —  poised between seasons, teetering on the edge of a new year — lend themselves to pondering, to treasuring the past year in our hearts.  What astonished us? What brought us to tears? What made us howl with laughter? What suffused us with joy? What brought us closer to God?

We contemplate, too, what the new year will bring. Will it astonish us? What new griefs will we have to bear? Where will we find God? When will we desperately need God?

Luke tells us that Mary pondered the all the events that surrounded Christ’s birth in her heart. I imagine her cradling a young Jesus in her arms, still astonished at her visit from Gabriel, still overwhelmed with joy, still worried what Simeon meant when he promised her heart would be pierced. What, I’m sure she wondered, would the next days and months bring? How would she cope?

How can we follow Mary’s example and prayerfully ponder our past, present and future with God? In his Spiritual Exercises, St. Ignatius of Loyola suggested a short daily practice called the Examen, a way to recognize God at work in every aspect of one’s life. Take ten minutes at the end of the day, advised Ignatius, and seek out God’s handiwork in your life.

Ignatius’ prayer begins by recognizing that we are always in the presence of God. Don’t be timid, ask God to help you pray, to bring his light to bear on your day. The line that opens today’s psalm well captures what Ignatius hopes for those praying the Examen: O God, be gracious and bless us and let your face shed its light upon us. [Ps 67:2]

Next, says Ignatius, tell God you are grateful. Ingratitude — not pride or greed — was the ultimate root of all sin, thought Ignatius. If we cannot see that all we have, our very lives and all that surrounds us, comes from God, then we are blind to God. God is our true treasure. Be specific, search your day for one or two luminous moments for which you are particularly grateful, and give God thanks for these gifts. 

The meat of the Examen is a review of the day. Take it hour by hour, noticing with God where you felt his presence, where you felt particularly beloved. Where did you love in return? The point is not to scour for sins, small or large, but to become more and familiar with how God is at work in your life. This is what God desires for us, as he asked Aaron to bless the Israelites, and by extension, us. May the Lord uncover his face to you reads the last line of Aaron’s blessing in one translation. May you see the Lord.

It is often the small things that turn out to be most important, the moment when someone unexpectedly waved you ahead in a long line at the grocery store, or the sense of awe you experienced walking out the door into a beautiful afternoon. As C. S. Lewis in noted in his Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, “We must not be too high-minded. I fancy we may be sometimes deterred from small prayers by a sense of our own dignity rather than of God's."  Don’t be too high-minded, share it all with God.

We are humans, and inevitably we fail in our love for each other and for God. So notice, too, the moments that make you wince as you review the day. Ask God to forgive you and prayerfully seek his advice on what remedy you might make. Who should you apologize to? Is it once again time to seek out the sacrament of reconciliation? What might you do differently next time? Ask God for the grace to walk anew in his pathways.

Pay attention to your feelings during the review of your day, what part of this prayer stirred your heart the most? Talk it over with God. Ignatius recommended doing this as one friend might speak with another, heart to heart. Finally, look to tomorrow. What are you worried about? What are you looking forward to? Close your prayer by asking for God’s grace and strength 0for what is to come.

As we begin this new year, resolve to take up the habit of sharing your day with God, treasuring its joys as Mary did, and pondering anew how you might in this moment grow closer to God. Like the shepherds and all who heard their stories, allow yourself to be astonished at what God has done for you, the small miracles as much as the large. 

May the Lord bless you and keep you, may his face shine upon you, and may you have peace, today and all the year to come.

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Image is Mary, Seat of Wisdom, at St. John's Abbey.

Fifth week epiphany

Sixteen years ago, as the feast of the Epiphany approached, I packed my bags and drove north to Gloucester, MA to make the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola  — the long retreat. You can do the Exercises in daily life, devoting time each day to the meditations over 30 or so weeks, as Ignatius suggests in the 19th annotation (he prefaced the Exercises with 20 notes). Learning to balance prayer and work in real time. Or you can spend 30 days sequestered in silence, moving through the four “weeks” or movements Ignatius proposed, then be pushed back out the door into the world — the fifth week. 

For a mother and wife and scientist, the second version was a luxury (ok, either version is a luxury TBH). It was the longest stretch I had ever spent away from home. I was a commuting student in college, so packing up for an extended stay away was a new-to-me experience.  Like the Magi, I would return home by a different route, or rather, routed in a different way. (Unlike the Magi, I didn't have to ride a camel into town to get what I might need. Post-it notes, as it turned it out).

I had a star to orient me. A gift of a lovely friend and talented artist. It now hangs in a west window at home, still bringing color to a winter landscape, still leading. 

I remarked to my spiritual director last week that the fifth week of the Exercises has a long tail. "Like the rest of your life?"  Yep. 

I left the Exercises with the Suscipe in my heart, "Receive, O Lord, all my liberty. Take my memory, my understanding, and my entire will. Whatsoever I have or hold, you have given me. I surrender it wholly to be governed by your will. Give me only your love and your grace and I am rich enough and ask for nothing more." 

These days, what surrendering my entire will looks like is not at all what I imagined at 50. And I still come to prayer with desires and entreaties, asking for much. But with enough grace I can occasionally recognize how richly beloved I am.

What does the fifth week look like? Like a carpenter smoothing a piece of wood by hand. The plane peeling a layer off here. Sanding down rough spots there.  Oil to keep the wood from drying and breaking, both a balm and a guard.

Inflammate omnia

Math Man is at a Zoom meeting tonight and I’m enjoying the post-kitchen-cleaning quiet in front of the fire with a sleeping cat nosing her way onto my keyboard. The cat is purring, the fire crackling and there is the faint hum of the dishwasher in the background, a testament to industriousness now rewarded. The tendrils of silence that are wrapping around me are bringing back memories of the 30 days I spent making St. Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises. Could it be thirteen years already?

I learned to make a fire on that long retreat, from an Irish priest. There was an enormous fireplace, but as it was bitterly cold in Gloucester that January, the cold air pouring down the chimney tended to extinguish fires before they got going. The trick was to set everything up so that with a single match it went up with a great “whooosh!” The rush of hot air reverses the flow in the chimney, the fire will now burn merrily along. 

This is also a metaphor for the Exercises. Ignatius sets everything up, with the hope that with the touch of the Holy Spirit, it — you— will all go up in flames come the fourth week. Ite, inflammate omnia, Ignatius often signed the letters missioning his Jesuit brothers. “Go and set it all aflame.” 

Giving up Lent

More than ever I find myself in the hands of God.
This is what I have wanted all my life from my youth.
But now there is a difference;
the initiative is entirely with God.
It is indeed a profound spiritual experience
to know and feel myself so totally in God’s hands.

— Pedro Arrupe, SJ

It's very nearly Holy Thursday, where Lent gives way to the Triduum and Lenten disciplines are put aside for another year. What did I give up this year? Not chocolate, not the internet.  I gave up oxygen, having come down with pneumonia at the end of March. I am still wheezy, still stripped of my singing voice — and to some extent my lecturing voice — still thinking more about breathing than I might otherwise. 

It wasn't my choice to surrender this. For the last couple of days I've been thinking about this prayer by Pedro Arrupe, SJ, written after his stroke in 1981, and the end of the Suscipe: "I give it all back to you, I surrender it wholly to be governed by Your will." There is a difference between choosing to give up a little luxury, and having something so essential stripped from me.  It pushes me into the depths, forces me to look at what it means to commend myself entirely into God's hands. This is what I profess to desire, to want God like air.  Theory is one thing, the practice, it turns out, is something else again.

Ten year challenge

Chair in the basement laundry room at Eastern 

Point, which was an apt place to work with the 

material of the First Week. Note the journal.

There's a meme going around on social media recently, often tagged "How hard did aging hit you?" with the invitation to post current photos next to photos from ten years ago.  Ten years ago today I was at Eastern Point, on the coast of Massachusetts, deep into the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola as laid out in the 20th annotation. Thirty days of silence, away from home and family, free to pray.

In the fall, I wondered how I might revisit the Exercises this winter. And then my father died and I tossed my winter break plans out the window. Now I wonder if I shouldn't reframe that 10-year challenge question: how hard did the Long Retreat hit me?

I pulled the black Moleskine journal I kept out to browse, flicking through the pages, stopping to look the photos that I added when I came home, wondering at the neatly printed notes I made each day on post-it notes about my prayer to prepare for my meetings with my director.  I would stick them to the front of my journal and then generally never once refer to them.  Much of what was written there went unsaid, as is true of so much of the Exercises. But I'm grateful for those notes that I carefully taped into the journal now, because they are about the only thing I can read. The Exercises might change lives, but they did nothing to improve my handwriting. I'm equally grateful for the letter my director suggested I write to future me, noting what I might want to re-visit later.

How hard did that Long Retreat hit me? Hard enough that a decade later it is still unfolding. #fifthWeek

Dot Magis: Sacred cacophony

St. Benedict Fra Angelico via Wikimedia Commons

“From holy Easter until Pentecost without interruption let ‘Alleluia’ be said both in the Psalms and in the responsories.” —from The Rule of St. Benedict, Chapter 15.

"...my breath caught in my mouth. Alleluia? I had barely thought the word in weeks, and now we were singing it in four parts, in Lent. St. Benedict’s Rule flashed through my mind. Wait, I wanted to say, until 'holy Easter'! 

Holy Easter duly arrived, and with it, a delightful explosion of Alleluias. But I still wondered at my discomfort with those out-of-season Alleluias. I was reminded of St. Ignatius’s caution to retreatants in the Spiritual Exercises (#127) to 'not read any mystery that is not to be used on that day or at that hour, lest the consideration of one mystery interfere with the contemplation of the other.' It can be hard to hear God’s voice in a cacophony, even a cacophony of sacred mysteries." — read the rest at DotMagis

I have a short piece up at DotMagis reflecting on how the out-of-season singing of alleluia made me more aware of the need to be present to each of the tasks and people that appear in my inbox and at my door even in this particularly chaotic time of year.  Just as with the sacred mysteries of the Exercises, I mused, take things one a a time.  What I hadn't quite realized when I wrote it is that these swirling demands are not like sacred mysteries, they are sacred mysteries.  Enveloped as they may be in difficult personalities, or troubles that I can't unravel in a few lines, even popping into my inbox, these are collisions with the sacred.  And surely a mystery.

DotMagis: Praying one word at a time

Last May I went to hear The Egg sing at the magnificent Fish Church in Stamford, Connecticut.  On the way, I spent an incredible afternoon walking New York City with my friend Cindy.  We met through blogging, and the timing of her trip and this concert let us meet in person.  I enjoyed getting a chance to be a choral roadie mom, riding the bus with the group and handing our programs and information at the church.  It was a flying trip, I left Philly around 8 am and returned 16 hours later.

The space and the concert were both incredible.  In order to catch the last train back home, I had to dash the second the concert ended, blowing a kiss to The Egg as I went.  The church's organist and music director dropped me at the station, and I sank into the quiet car on Amtrak to process the day.  As I did, the music kept playing in my head, Robert Parson's Ave Maria (which you can hear at 2:06), along with the realization that my prayer life swims in a similar sea, from which words and notes arise with incredible clarity, only to be caught up again into the wider service of the piece.

From those reflections came this reflection, posted yesterday at Ignatian Spirituality's DotMagis.

This morning, listening again to Robert Parson’s Ave Maria, I realized that this is the rhythm not only of my prayer, but of my life. There are moments when I am blessed with an utter certainty of God’s presence, followed by moments when I am so distracted by the complex cacophony that pervades my daily life I lose track of the underlying melody entirely. I can be befuddled by, entranced with, or simply carried away by the complexity of the sacred tune swirling through the universe. And there are so many times when I strain to hang onto the barest whisper of God’s voice, unsure if it is still there. - Read the rest at DotMagis.

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The Egg is standing in the back row, in front of the tabernacle.  Sometimes you see him, sometimes you don't!

Choose. A homily for the 21st Sunday in Ordinary Time.

"Sugus" by aTarom

I wrote this homily for the collection Sick, and You Cared For Me (part of the Homilists for the Homeless series - all the profits go to aid the poor), which was published last fall.  We called the candies, "eggman candy" because we called the farmer who brought the egg the eggman.  He always kept a few of these Swiss sweets tucked into his basket.

It's not the big choices that confound me, but the little ones.  The choices I sometimes don't even realize are choices until I reach the examen at the end of the day.

This is a homily I wish I could preach aloud.

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“Choose,” urges my mother, as I peer into the basket the farmer set down in our dim front hallway. The pale grey cartons of eggs are stacked on one side, a sharp contrast to the brightly colored candy on the other. I clutch a nickel in my small hand; do I want purple or red? Is there no green apple? Candy was an infrequent treat in my rural childhood, making it so hard for me to choose.

Forty-some years later I’m sitting in a sun-drenched office overlooking the Atlantic, clutching a cup of tea, listening to my director explain the next step in the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, the Meditation on Two Standards. “It will be here to see a great plain, comprising the whole region about Jerusalem, where the sovereign Commander-in-Chief of all the good is Christ our Lord,” says Ignatius, “and another plain about the region of Babylon, where the chief of the enemy is Lucifer.” Lucifer sits on a thrown of fire and smoke; Jesus stands in a lowly place. Their standards are flying; the battle lines are drawn. Choose.

For anyone drawn to spend four weeks walking with Christ through the Spiritual Exercises, the bare choice itself isn’t hard. It’s already been made. As Joshua proclaims in the first reading, “As for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.”

Or is it? Many of the disciples walking with Jesus in John’s Gospel complained that the choice was tough, sklērós it says in the Greek, as something dried up and hard to chew on. “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you,” Jesus has said to them just before this Gospel opens. Words that scandalized them, words that shook their faith, words that were hard to swallow.

To choose to stand with Christ is a choice that leads to things we are not sure we want to eat, cups we are not sure we can drink. “If you want to get warm you must stand near the fire: if you want to be wet you must get into the water. If you want joy, power, peace, eternal life, you must get close to, or even into, the thing that has them,” says C.S. Lewis. “Eat my flesh,” says Jesus, “that I might abide in you, and you in me.” Choose.

Ignatius invites us to look closely at the camps, to see what we are getting into when we eat of the flesh and drink of the blood of God’s Holy One. To choose to carry Christ’s standard, says Ignatius, is to welcome poverty — spiritual poverty and perhaps even material poverty. To choose Christ is to prefer rejection over worldly honors. To choose Christ is to elect to stand with the foolish and the useless, to joyfully embrace humility for the sake of the Gospel. Choose. It could be tough.

The difficulty in choosing, for me, lies not in my intention, but in noticing the choices before me in the midst of my daily life. Choices rarely present themselves cleanly, with bright flags flying to identify the camps, and the lines of battle so clearly drawn. Instead it is a man facing me on the sidewalk, asking for something to eat. Choose. It is the mentally ill woman who wants a ride home from church. Choose.

Ignatius hoped this meditation would give those who made it a concrete understanding of what is fundamentally driving their choices, in our hearts as well as our heads. Can I recognize what is stirring me up in each situation? Is it greed? Is it fear? Or is it Love?

Pedro Arrupe, S.J., the former Superior General of the Society of Jesus said, “Nothing is more practical than finding God, than falling in Love in a quite absolute, final way. What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will affect everything. It will decide what will get you out of bed in the morning…what you read…whom you know…Fall in Love, stay in love, and it will decide everything.” Where else would we go, Lord?

The Twelve remained with Jesus, not for power, nor out of fear, not because it was a rational decision, but because Who they fell in with was Love. And what we love, decides everything.

DotMagis: Wild Joy

Alan Holdren/CNA

"There are very few people who realize what God would make of them if they abandoned themselves into his hands, and let themselves be formed by his grace."

— Ignatius of Loyola

I'm still fruitfully pondering Pope Francis'  Christmas message to the Curia, with its helpful list of spiritual maladies and cures. (Though I wonder if there is a spiritual equivalent of hypochondria or medical students' disease?)

The pope prescribed prayerful humor and joy for the malady of the funeral face. Which prompted me to wonder in reflection posted at DotMagis last week, can we abandon ourselves to joy in prayer?  What might happen to us — to others — if we did?

"...I love the impish way Thomas More’s prayer begins, with a request to the Lord for good digestion, and, oh, by the way, some food to digest would not go amiss. It reminds me of the way my college-aged sons banter with me in the kitchen, certain enough of my love for them, and theirs for me, to playfully tease me. In his Exercises, St. Ignatius encourages us to speak to Jesus as one friend to another. Do I love God enough to banter with him, as my sons do with me? Or perhaps I should ask if I’m certain enough of God’s love for me that I would risk bantering with God in my prayer?"

...read the rest at DotMagis

Luminesce: For the feast of Ignatius of Loyola

Ite, omnia incendite, et inflammate! 

Go, and set the world on fire!  

— St. Ignatius of Loyola to St. Francis Xavier, upon missioning him to India

A few weeks ago, at the end of an evening gathering of writers I was at, a priest/writer closed the night with a poetic blessing.  One word in particular wove its way through her benediction, "luminous..." which my brain insisted on rewriting as the imperative "luminesce!"

Luminescence is light that comes from within a material, photons shed as atoms and molecules change state.  It's not reflected, it does not consume like a flame. It's kenotic, releasing what has been hidden within.  

The usual translation of Ignatius' words to Francis Xavier is, "Go, set the world on fire!" (Or the looser translation I found here:  "Go kick some butt!") But like the archetype eats/shoots/leaves meme - without certain knowledge of the punctuation, it's ambiguous. Does inflammate go with omnia or with ite?

I might be willing to translate it as "Go, set everything alight, and be aflame!" Pour forth the light that has been poured forth into you.  Luminesce.

Happy feast of St. Ignatius of Loyola!

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Warning on the video. I found the music to be grating, mute it and play something lilting and classical.

Ignatian Spirituality: Give whirled peas a chance

Mateusz Tokaski Still Life with Pea

It's July, which means that Ignatian Spirituality is celebrating St. Ignatius' upcoming feast with 31 days of posts old and new.  The theme this year is finding God in unexpected places, and my reflection on encountering God's gentle sense of humor appeared last week.   I loved the layers of puns in the title the editor gave it:  God surprises in peas and teas

“You know I don’t eat anything green,” insisted my youngest son, pushing his plate of mashed potatoes, meat loaf, and green peas away from him with a single finger. Arms crossed, six-year-old Chris glared at me across the dining room table. His older brother stuck a fork in the meat loaf, and startled, peered more closely at his plate and grinned. He, at least, was on to me."

You can read the rest at DotMagis.

On the verge of summer

My friend Fran at There Will Be Bread had a lot (or should that be a Lot?) on her mind after a whirlwind week; Crash (now in the midst of a summer that will take him from intensive Latin, to work with a church historian, to the Naval History and Heritage Command) is writing about writing again after a whirlwind of a sophomore year.  Do you just show up again without explanation?

I turned my grades in yesterday, and while there are still some loose ends to tie up as department chair, I suspect it might be summer on my calendar.

Ignatius talks about stopping a few paces before your prayer space to pray for the grace you desire in that time of prayer, and to once again commend yourself into God's hands.  In that vein I headed off Tuesday night through the rush hour traffic to spend the night at the old Jesuit Novitiate in Wernersville, and to see my spiritual director — to stop for this moment before my summer begins and ask for the graces I might need and to remind myself just how I live and move and have my being.

And like Fran, here are my scattered thoughts, more than a bit windblown...

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The weather was, as the local news station kept repeating on the drive up, "unsettled," but I threw my umbrella in the back and walked twice in gentle rains. After dinner, I walked through the hedgerows and back up toward the cemetery.  The newly cleaned gravestones glowed blue-white in the dusk, bright ovals hovering over the high grass.  I walked through, stopping to pray for a couple of men I knew, and for Joseph Grady, SJ, a scholastic, because my late neighbor Marie Malloy prayed for him. Then I leaned against the wall down by the oldest grave in the cemetery, which belongs to Anthony Ryan, nSJ a novice who died 10 weeks after he entered in 1931, and prayed.  Despite the unsettled weather, it was a very settling spot to pray.

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One retreat was wrapping up, another just beginning, so everyone was having a talking dinner.  Arriving near the end, I found an empty table, filled my plate and sat down with a book and crept into the silence held between its covers.  At the end of the meal, a Jesuit friend (and my long-time confessor) came over, offering tea and gentle conversation, both of which I gladly accepted. It was a grace-filled entry into the celebration of the sacrament of reconciliation, a celebration that was warm, joyful, grounded in my current challenges, bracing and above all, a deep experience of mercy.  Easter all over again.

Ignatius of Loyola 24: Where's Iggy?

Last year, Ignatian Spirituality had a delightful app for mashing up your own image of St. Ignatius (I've been sporting mine on my tea mug).  Find Your Inner Iggy is back again this year. Check out Ignatian Spirituality’s Facebook page to read contributions from Fr. James Martin, SJ, Margaret Silf, and Fr. Greg Boyle, SJ, on how they’ve found God: in an unlikely place, in decision making, in prayer, in imagination, in service to others, and in all things.

Share how you’ve found God in these places by posting on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and Vine with the hashtag #FindIggy.  Loyola Press is giving away cool prizes for the best images.  Iggy tattoos?  Who knows!   Join in here:  Find Your Inner Iggy

Ignatius of Loyola 4: Hearing voices

On the 4th of July some years ago I was on retreat at Eastern Point, which is near Gloucester's harbor.  Sitting out on the rocks to pray, I kept hearing voices, names and tantalizing bits of sentences floating on the breeze.  To say I was distracted was an understatement.

The silence at Eastern Point is pretty profound and the waves pounding against the rocks tended to muffle any noise from the surrounding neighborhood, so voices caught my attention.  But I couldn't figure out where they were coming from, though they sounded nearby and vaguely mechanical.

I shared the mystery with my director, she hadn't heard them, but she hadn't been out of the house yet that day.  (To be clear, I was never in doubt that there was a ordinary explanation for the voices!) Out for my walk, the voices were louder, but not quite clear enough to catch more than a word or two.  As my walk took me across the small land bridge toward the harbor, I finally achieved clarity.  There was a Navy ship in the harbor, as part of the celebration of the 4th...and what I was hearing was its PA system.

At La Storta, as he headed to Rome with his companions in 1537, Ignatius heard voices, but unlike me, he heard God sending him to Rome, to be part of Jesus' company. I would guess that mystic is not the first association many people have with St. Ignatius, but Ignatius' early mystical experiences (and experiences that posed as such) are part of the ground from which Ignatius' rules for discernment of spirits grew.  (Read about the rules here and a longer but fascinating piece about Ignatius the mystic here.)

Ignatius of Loyola 3: Letters

I associate Ignatius with letters, not so much because of his prodigious output of letters, more than 7000, but because while I was away making his Spiritual Exercises, handwritten letters were how I stayed in touch with my kids.  The Boy was a wondrously faithful correspondent, writing me every third day; near the end, counting the breaths until I came home.

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Read Ignatius' letter of advice on writing letters here, a small selection of other letters from Ignatius here.

Ignatius of Loyola 2: In 1493

In 1493, Christopher Columbus left Spain with 17 ships, bound again for the Caribbean to establish settlements there.  Ignatius of Loyola was not quite two years old, but one of his older brothers was on the voyage.

When I was in college I read some of the contemporary accounts of the colonization attempts.  It was not gentle reading.

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"Inspiration of Christopher Columbus" by Jose Maria Obregon, 1856. From Wikimedia Commons.

Ignatius of Loyola 1: Looking up to Ignatius

The image of St. Ignatius to the left hung in the stairwell at Eastern Point retreat house when I made the Spiritual Exercises there.  If you look closely, you can see my reflection at the lower right (the sleeve of my grey sweatshirt and the camera in front of my face).  Through his Exercises, Ignatius has had a substantial influence on my life, though our lives are separated by centuries, and an ocean.

In the Exercises, there is a contemplation which asks you to imagine standing before God and the communion of saints.  My image of Ignatius in that gathering was of a tall, thin man standing off to the side smiling — perhaps drawing on this image I looked up at each day on my way to meet with my director.  I was shocked to discover that Ignatius was only 4'11" tall.  I am a solid two inches taller than the good saint!

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Andy Otto's wonderful post about five ways to find God in all things is reprised on Loyola Press' 31-days of St. Ignatius calendar.  I love his suggestion to do something by hand that you might not have to.  Yesterday my kids and I baked bread, kneading and shaping the loaves.  This morning I was reminded of the sacredness of the everyday when I sliced a piece for toast and noticed that my oldest had slashed the sign of the cross in the top of the loaves, as his Irish great-great-great grandmother did.

31 Days of St. Ignatius

July 31st is the feast of St. Ignatius of Loyola, and Loyola Press is hosting a month long fest for the saint!  There is a calendar with interesting Ignatian links for each day (full disclosure, one of my reflections is featured on  July 9), watch their Facebook stream for other features during the month.

Who is St. Ignatius of Loyola?  Project Gutenberg has his autobiography in a number of electronic formats, there is a short biography here and here, or you can read Margaret Silf's imaginative conversations with Ignatius, Call Me Lopez. Or watch for a daily interesting (to me at least) Ignatian fact posted here...

Postcards from the Exercises: Reconciliation Redux

I'm retracing the Spiritual Exercises in an adapted form (though I think you could argue that the Exercises are always adapted) using the materials posted at The Ignatian Prayer Adventure and writing weekly reflections on my experience for IgnatianSpirituality.com's DotMagis blog. I joked with the editor of that series that I felt like I was sending her weekly postcards from my trip with Ignatius. Since I have more to say than fit on those virtual postcards.... 

As the First Week of the Exercises draws to a close, Ignatius suggests you might feel moved to make a general confession, to take even those sins already confessed and absolved to the sacrament of reconciliation.  Last weekend, when I pulled the copy of the Exercises I'd taken along on the 30-day retreat, I found the slip of paper on which I written a note to one of the Jesuits in residence at Eastern Point, asking if he would hear my general confession (and his response, written frugally on the same sheet), repurposed as a book mark.

As the third week of my Ignatian Adventure wound down, with its contemplations of brokeness — the world's and my own — I recognized a desire to sacramentally deepen the graces of this time.  General confessions, though, are not to be undertaken lightly, or frequently (and as practical matter, never without an appointment!)  In the spirit of this 8-week adaptation and Ignatius' notion of repetition as a tool to sharpen our focus, I decided to use an evening walk as a time to prepare, and take one single thread of brokenness to confession.

The experience knitted some of the "crushed bones," leaving me ready to welcome a steadfast spirit and walk on the journey of the Second Week.

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Make me hear rejoicing and gladness, that the bones you have crushed may revive. From my sins turn away your face and blot out all my guilt. A pure heart create for me, O God, put a steadfast spirit within me. — Psalm 51:10-12

I return it all....

Crash went back to Wonderful Jesuit University this week.  Math Man was at the national math meeting (which to balance out the MLA on the East Coast was held on the West Coast).  Driving distances for me is tough as I'm still booted (my foot, not the car), so I sent him back by train and UPS.  (To be clear, Crash went by train, a large box of his stuff, including the two pillows he grabbed to prop up my foot on the way home, went via UPS.)

As I put him on the train, a line from Ignatius' Suscipe ran through my head, id tibi totum restituo — to You I return it all.  I stood there watching him go up the steps of the train, the conductor looked at me and said, "He'll be fine."  True, but I pray these words somewhat differently these days.  It's one thing to offer to return my (intangible) gifts, I don't have to watch them vanish down the tracks.  It's quite another to offer to return what I nourished inside of me and kept safe under my pinions.

I miss his company in the kitchen, he's a companionable and serious cook, but he's still finding time to bake.  Read his tale of baking Jesuit bread (Wernersville's Brother's bread from the Secrets of Jesuit Bread Baking) at his Jesuit school....