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Authors: James Martin
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love overwhelms me, and I hear him whisper, Surprise me.
The image of the God who surprises and the God who waits for surprises came to me from three Jesuit priests and the religious imagination of a Catholic writer.
In other words, that idea was given to me by religion.
Overall, being spiritual and being religious are both part of being in relationship with God. Neither can be fully realized without the other. Religion without spirituality can become a dry list of dogmatic statements divorced from the life of the spirit. This is what Jesus warned against. Spirituality without religion can become a self-centered complacency divorced from the wisdom of a community. That’s what I’m warning against.
For St. Ignatius Loyola the two went hand in hand. (If anything, Ignatius was criticized for being too spiritual, as his way struck some people as not centered enough on the church.) His way understands the importance of being both spiritual and religious.
F INDING G OD IN A LL T HINGS
After Ignatius’s conversion, his life was focused on God. The introduction to the Spiritual Exercises reads, “Human beings are created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord, and by means of doing this to save their souls.” God, says Ignatius, is at the center of everything and provides meaning for our lives.
Another way of understanding that worldview is with a quotation from Pedro Arrupe, S.J. Father Arrupe was the head of the Jesuit Order from 1965 to 1981, a period of volcanic change in the Catholic Church. He is perhaps best known for reminding the Jesuits that part of their original work was with the poor and marginalized. In the 1970s a journalist asked Father Arrupe this question: who is Jesus Christ for you?
One can imagine the journalist anticipating a boilerplate answer like “Jesus Christ is my Savior” or “Jesus Christ is the Son of God.”
Instead, Arrupe said, “For me Jesus Christ is everything!” That is a good shorthand for how Ignatius looked at God.
But not everyone reading this book has that kind of relationship with God. Maybe few people do. For people on the path of independence, the path of disbelief, the path of exploration, or the path of confusion, the question is less about devoting oneself to God entirely and more about something else, the question that began our discussion: how do I find God?
Here is where we can turn to an important insight of Ignatius: God can speak directly with people in astonishingly personal ways. This can lead even the doubtful and confused and lost to God. The key, the leap of faith required, is believing that these intimate experiences are ways God communicates with you.
In his Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius wrote that the Creator deals “immediately with the creature and the creature with its Creator.” God communicates with us. Seekers, then, need to be aware of the variety of ways that God has of communicating with us, of making God’s presence known.
In other words, the beginning of the path to finding God is awareness. Not simply awareness of the ways that you can find God, but an awareness that God desires to find you.
That brings us to the first important moment in the life of Ignatius: his initial conversion. By focusing more carefully on this one particular incident, you can see how God can use everything to find you. So let’s return to that event and look at it in greater detail.
L ITTLE BY L ITTLE
Iñigo of Loyola, as I mentioned earlier, was thirty years old when his leg was shattered by a cannonball during the siege of a castle by the French military in Pamplona in 1521. This pivotal incident, which might have been merely a tragic setback to another person, marked the beginning of Ignatius’s new life.
After Ignatius stayed in Pamplona for several days, his French captors, who treated him “with courtesy and kindness,” brought him back to his family’s castle, where the doctors reset the bone. To do so, they had to break the leg. “This
The image of the God who surprises and the God who waits for surprises came to me from three Jesuit priests and the religious imagination of a Catholic writer.
In other words, that idea was given to me by religion.
Overall, being spiritual and being religious are both part of being in relationship with God. Neither can be fully realized without the other. Religion without spirituality can become a dry list of dogmatic statements divorced from the life of the spirit. This is what Jesus warned against. Spirituality without religion can become a self-centered complacency divorced from the wisdom of a community. That’s what I’m warning against.
For St. Ignatius Loyola the two went hand in hand. (If anything, Ignatius was criticized for being too spiritual, as his way struck some people as not centered enough on the church.) His way understands the importance of being both spiritual and religious.
F INDING G OD IN A LL T HINGS
After Ignatius’s conversion, his life was focused on God. The introduction to the Spiritual Exercises reads, “Human beings are created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord, and by means of doing this to save their souls.” God, says Ignatius, is at the center of everything and provides meaning for our lives.
Another way of understanding that worldview is with a quotation from Pedro Arrupe, S.J. Father Arrupe was the head of the Jesuit Order from 1965 to 1981, a period of volcanic change in the Catholic Church. He is perhaps best known for reminding the Jesuits that part of their original work was with the poor and marginalized. In the 1970s a journalist asked Father Arrupe this question: who is Jesus Christ for you?
One can imagine the journalist anticipating a boilerplate answer like “Jesus Christ is my Savior” or “Jesus Christ is the Son of God.”
Instead, Arrupe said, “For me Jesus Christ is everything!” That is a good shorthand for how Ignatius looked at God.
But not everyone reading this book has that kind of relationship with God. Maybe few people do. For people on the path of independence, the path of disbelief, the path of exploration, or the path of confusion, the question is less about devoting oneself to God entirely and more about something else, the question that began our discussion: how do I find God?
Here is where we can turn to an important insight of Ignatius: God can speak directly with people in astonishingly personal ways. This can lead even the doubtful and confused and lost to God. The key, the leap of faith required, is believing that these intimate experiences are ways God communicates with you.
In his Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius wrote that the Creator deals “immediately with the creature and the creature with its Creator.” God communicates with us. Seekers, then, need to be aware of the variety of ways that God has of communicating with us, of making God’s presence known.
In other words, the beginning of the path to finding God is awareness. Not simply awareness of the ways that you can find God, but an awareness that God desires to find you.
That brings us to the first important moment in the life of Ignatius: his initial conversion. By focusing more carefully on this one particular incident, you can see how God can use everything to find you. So let’s return to that event and look at it in greater detail.
L ITTLE BY L ITTLE
Iñigo of Loyola, as I mentioned earlier, was thirty years old when his leg was shattered by a cannonball during the siege of a castle by the French military in Pamplona in 1521. This pivotal incident, which might have been merely a tragic setback to another person, marked the beginning of Ignatius’s new life.
After Ignatius stayed in Pamplona for several days, his French captors, who treated him “with courtesy and kindness,” brought him back to his family’s castle, where the doctors reset the bone. To do so, they had to break the leg. “This
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