Serendipity Kinds of Things (The Spiritual Exercises)

Yesterday a friend wrote about something unexpectedly wonderful.

And on the Ignatian Spirituality blog, someone posted about how there's always something good.

Well, no.  There isn't.  Sometimes things are unremittingly bad.

But unexpectedly wonderful things do happen.

There were three kinds of responses to my email hacking problem (plus the helpful ones about what to do), which sent evil links to everyone on my contact list.  A lot of the emails bounced back, thanks to spam and virus programs.  Most people figured out what was going on and deleted without comment.  And some people emailed to me ask me whether I'd been hacked.

One in the latter group was my very first Jesuit Jesuit spiritual director.  I sent back an explanation and then, realizing that we hadn't communicated in a couple of months, sent a short email filling him in on my life and asking about his.  He responded with a draft of an article on which he's working in which he talks, among other things, about the revitalization of the Spiritual Exercises in the 1950s and 1960s. In the 1960s he was a young Jesuit gaining much from that rethinking of the Exercises; forty-five years later he was passing the renewed tradition on to me.

(And in a humorous aside, one of my own directees commented, after finishing the Exercises, that she had told her friends that she had been sort of surprised by my approach and wondered how it could be called spiritual direction, although at the end she could see that it was effective.  "Oh, that's because I first learned how to do this from H!" I laughed.)

At any rate, I wrote back with a response to the article and how what he writes about has affected me, and he responded with a comment not-for-blogging, about how profoundly God has been active in my life, especially though these past few years. 

And I thought, Now that was a gift of my email having been hacked.

So yes, wonderful things do happen, even in the context of internet chaos and frustration.