Prayer in Daily Life

There are two ways in which to make the full Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius.

 

You can go off for thirty days, usually to a retreat house, usually with a group of people doing the same thing, and spend your time in silence, meeting with a retreat director every day to discuss your prayer life as you make your way through the pattern of prayer "exercises" suggested by Ignatius and deeper into relationship with God.  The advantage?  Thirty days of concentrated time with God.  The disadvantages?  Time, money, those sorts of things . . .

 

Or you can do what's often referred to as a "retreat in daily life" or a "19th Annotation retreat" (so named for one of Ignatius' annotations in the book used by spiritual directors to companion others through the Exercises) ~ stretch the 30 days to 30 weeks (or more), spend an hour or so a day in prayer, rather than several hours, and meet with a director each week rather than each day.  (This is how I did it.) The advantage: Daily life experiences becoming a part of an intense prayer life.  The disadvantage: Daily life experiences getting in the way.

 

Some folks make 19th annotation retreats in concert with others; many retreat houses offer them during the academic year, with varying degrees of contact among group members.  The advantages: Structure, expense, perhaps community. The disadvantage? The loss of the individuality of timing and often, therefore, of the journey itself.

 

I'm accompanying someone through the 19th Annotation these days.  We've been at it for about four months now, and I am remembering something my own 19th Annotation director often says: When you see someone's entire life becoming wound up in the prayer, you know the retreat is starting to take hold.

 

It's really and incredibly wonderful, to listen in as someone makes connections between the stories of the gospel and the events and challenges of his or her own daily life. and begins to find in every ongoing thing ~  family life, work plans, relationships, memories, celebrations, crises ~ threads of God's love and activity previously unnoticed.

 

This is the best thing I get to do.

 

 

Father's Day Postscript ~ Spiritual Fatherhood

Not a term I was familiar with ~ spiritual fatherhood.  In fact, when it occurred to me, I thought I had made it up!  But it turns out to be a common appellation, especially in Catholic circles, in which priests are referred to as "Father" and heads of women's religious orders as "Mother," so that people are accustomed to thinking of their religious leaders as parental figures.

By the time it occurred to me that I had a spiritual father, the title had long since dropped away from our conversations.  But the idea of it, the hope and humor and warmth and challenge of a father, a spiritual father,  ~ indeed, that had come to fruition.

This priest ~ yes,  Catholic priest a Jesuit, a man my own father's age who had no reason to take any interest in my except as a graduate student in his classroom, at least not until I asked him if he would help me make the Spiritual Exercises ~ this man is the one I want to celebrate this Father's Day week.  Not only did he guide me through the Exercises; he remained a friend, advisor, and consoler through the darkest years of my life.  He responded to countless emails, listened to me for hours this past spring when  I made my more-or-less silent weeklong retreat, and continues to nudge me forward, despite knowing full well the depths of darkness to which my son's death has taken me.

I have found some other remarkable companions on the journey in the past few years.  But H. wins pride of place as spiritual father, and not merely because of his age. He was, I think I can safely say, the very first person to take my personal spiritual life seriously. I have known wonderful pastors and religious sisters, but H. was the first person willing to spend long hours listening and suggesting and questioning and pushing me as an individual.  I have heard hundreds of thoughtful and challenging sermons, but H. was the first person  to follow me down the rabbit hole discovered concealed under a single word or question and to point me toward the tunnel in which growth might be found.

Yesterday morning in church, I prayed for all sorts of fathers, good ones and bad ones, and their children, but I realize now that I did not pray for the most important ones of all, those who accept the call to tend and nurture our spiritual lives, to shelter us in life's spiritual tsunamis, and to push us back out into the sunlight.

I'm afraid that most of us don't have such fathers.  I'm so grateful that one night I said, "Hey, can I talk to you for a moment?" and found one.

Imagining in Prayer

Over at People for Others,  some of Vinita Hampton Wright's suggestions for making prayer imaginative are up today.  These would make wonderful foundations for many prayer encounters, including a brief one right now:

“If I could do anything I desire, it would be…”

Anything at all?  I would restore my son's life to him.

That obvious response aside, I realized this morning, in the context of helping a young woman explore questions about career and further education, that I am in fact doing exactly what I otherwise desire: pastoring a church, doing spiritual direction, giving the occasional retreat or presentation, teaching (usually), writing, and spending time with my family.

 “The most critical aspect of my life right now is…” 

My damned broken ankle!  This is one long recovery process.

“If God were a song, that song title would be. . .” 

"Blowin' in the Wind."

 “If my spiritual life were a movie, that movie title would be…”

My immediate answer was The Vikings (which is a History Channel series and not a movie), for reasons having to do with a sense of life as a series of challenges to overcome in a cold and barren land.  But maybe it would be Titanic.  The spiritual life as hope and memory in the face of doomed glamour and romance?   Or Ordinary People.  The most unexpected catastrophes ripple through the lives of the most ordinary people. 

“If I could write the perfect song about faith, it would sound a lot like the songs of [name a songwriter or recording artist]” 

Laura Nyro.

 “If I could go to the most prayer-friendly, spiritually inclined location on earth, I think that would be…”

Maybe Iona (where I've been) ?  But I'm guessing it might be the Ganges River (where I have not).

 

 

Moving Into Retreat Mode

"To go on retreat" can mean just about anything.

 

Corporate retreats, leadership retreats, new vision retreats, team-building retreats . . .

In much of my church life, it has meant to take a week-end's detour to a somewhat remote location for a couple of days of group worship, conversation, music, and dining, with occasional long walks tossed in.

A group from my home church made a fairly silent retreat years ago under the leadership of two women from Church of the Savior in D.C.   We did learn a lot about the inward/outward approach to the spiritual life, but my favorite parts were silently listing on the group white board the spring migrant birds I was watching, taking a solo canoe trip around and around a small pond, and walking the labyrinth under a full moon sometime past midnight.

 

Some years ago, making a retreat came to mean making the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, which I did in the daily life form over the course of a year.  As the year progressed, the silence became something I sought greedily more and more.  On week-ends that spring, I would disappear for hours, walking the cemetery and the Little Lakes, immersed in my newfound contemplative life. 

 

Since then, I've made several solitary silent retreats at various Jesuit centers, places where I could be assured of thoughtful daily spiritual direction and surrounded by people who "get" the need for pervasive silence.  Three of those retreats stand out.  The first, my very first silent retreat, at the Jesuit center in Guelph, Ontario. A bit of an incongruous week, as I was out in late summer nature all day, every day, soaked in Ignatian prayer and preparing for seminary to start week later, and yet engaged in a bit of a struggle with a spiritual director who could not get her mind around an Ignatian Presbyterian person.  I never did figure out what bothered her so much. 

 

The second, at Wernersville in eastern Pennsylvania, two-plus years after Josh died.  Again, a week almost entirely out-of-doors, that time as the leaves were changing, and a week of grappling with grief in ways that made it possible to inch forward over the next months.

 

And the third, in between: the retreat that wasn't. The retreat in Michigan at which I got the call that Josh had died.

 

This year, after three or four consecutive years at Wernersville, I decided to try something different.  Feeling so isolated out in Small Rural Church, I started to wonder who I knew, or knew of, who might direct me in a retreat in a city. I started thinking my way up and down both coasts ~ and then realized that Spiritual Director Emeritus, my guide through the Exercises, is at Georgetown.  We have continued to correspond, and he knows a lot about what you might call the spirituality of leadership, which is a huge issue for me these days.  And at Georgetown there will be lots of people! And so we worked out a retreat week for the beginning of February.  Which obviously did not happen, to my most miserable disappointment.

 

But five weeks from today, barring further disaster, it will.  The timing could not, actually, be better.  After the isolation of the last two months, I can hardly wait for the liveliness of a university community.  I plan on a lot of silence, but there will be concerts, I'm sure, and some lectures, and lots of people out and about.  I don't have to talk to anyone, but I will be surrounded by a microcosm of The World.  And given the struggles of my new small church,  everyone stands to benefit from a pastor's week of prayer and perhaps (who knows?) even direct attentiveness to leadership matters.

 

I have to laugh when I think of my Guelph director: How can you possibly combine Ignatian spirituality and Presbyterian theology?  I'm going to spend a week at the Jesuit residence at Georgetown on precisely that continuing adventure.  In April.  Here's hoping for a more-rather-than-less healed ankle and for the beginnings of Spring!

 

Turning Into a Spiritual Director ~ Part I

For the past several weeks, I've been a member of a committee working on a promotional video for the program in which I trained as a spiritual director.   Spearheaded by a young MBA/Marketing student who is also training to be a director, the video will explore the program via interviews with a group of graduates.  The committee has kindly held its meetings in my living room, since getting out is such an undertaking for me. 

 

My own interview for the video is next Friday, and I've had a lot of fun reflecting on the questions we've developed, starting with:

 

 

What drew you to the Ignatian Spirituality Institute?

 

The short answer is that my spiritual director suggested it.

 

The longer version:  I had made the Spiritual Exercises two years earlier.  At the time, I was doing graduate work in the Humanities at John Carroll University, and I had taken two courses in literature and spirituality as a way of meeting my professional requirements for literature courses (I was teaching high school at the time) and my personal desire to further my religious education.  The courses did not cover Ignatian spirituality per se, but my professor was a Jesuit priest, a brilliant man and a gifted educator, and it was clear to me that there was something about Ignatian spirituality that I wanted to pursue.  My professor radiated a joy in his life with God that I had seldom witnessed in anyone else, and whatever that was about ~ I wanted it.

 

The same professor offered a course on Ignatian spirituality during that time period, but I couldn't fit it into my schedule.  One night, my own class on Islam ended early, and I wandered down the hall and sat in on the second half of his class.  I don't remember the topic under discussion, but I do recall sinking into my seat ~ as much as one can sink into a molded plastic classroom chair ~ with a grateful sense that I had found my home. 

 

When the course rolled around again a couple of years later, I signed up for it, and about three weeks later asked my professor if he would help me make the Exercises.  I remember the conversation very clearly; it took place in his office late at night, after class, and I was sure that he would refuse and pass me on to someone else.  I didn't know him well at all, but I was aware that he was often away traveling, and doubted that he had the time to give me the Exercises.  Imagine my surprise when he said "Sure" and pulled out his calendar so that we could set a time!  Suddenly I was launched into . . . I had no idea what.

 

As that incredible year rolled to an end, my director asked whether I had considered the ISI.  I had, in a vague sort of way, because I had fallen in love with Ignatian spirituality, and credited it with changing my entire life orientation.  But the Exercises, even accommodated to my Protestant sensibilities, seemed distinctly Catholic to me, and I doubted that they would be something I could put to use in any way.  Besides, I had already made the decision, part and parcel of my experience of the Exercises, to go to seminary.  How much could a person manage?  (Much more, as things were to turn out.)

 

Next thing I knew, I was applying to the ISI.  Once again, prior commitments got in the way, and I had to wait until the next year to enroll, the year in which I started seminary in Pittsburgh. 

 

A little preposterous, to be sure. 

 

Thank God for Holy Spirit impracticality.

 

 

 

 

Margaret Blackie's Rooted in Love ~ Blogging Book Tour

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to meet with a spiritual director?  What sorts of thoughts and ideas might you share?  What might you expect in the form of guidance about your life of prayer?

Have you ever wondered what people are talking about when they enthusiastically mention the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius?  Those folks who tell you that "the Exercises changed my life" ~ we can be somewhat tedious, can't we? What's the big draw?

Or have you, perhaps, longed to have a conversation about your spiritual life with a friend or companion, but had no idea where to start?  What counts as "spiritual?"  Will your friend laugh at you?  You know that you would fumble for the words with which to describe your experience of God, or prayer ~ or your lack of experience.  How does one begin?

Margaret Blackie's book, Rooted in Love, answers these questions in a relaxed, friendly manner.  To read her book is to settle into a deep and wide-ranging spiritual conversation with a companion who is simultaneously a "friend from down the block" and an experienced spiritual guide.

Mags is a long-time spiritual director in the tradition of St. Ignatius of Loyola, so her book is peppered with Ignatian concepts of prayer, presented in a down-to-earth way.  And she concludes each chapter with a short set of exercises so that her readers might experiment with the concepts, language, and practices she introduces.  Much as she might if she were your "real life" director, Mags sends you off at the end of each reading with questions and ideas to ponder and review in your own periods of silence with God.

Mags is also a woman who has engaged many of life's puzzles with a discerning mind and heart: questions of career and call, issues of relationship, and challenges of the inner life.  She is not afraid to describe her own dilemmas, just as she might to a friend or spiritual director, and thus she models the kind of conversation many spiritual seekers long for. 

When Mags, who blogs here, invited me to review her book, she also offered to answer a few questions.  I immediately asked for her views on the following:

One of the first questions often asked by people seeking spiritual direction is "How can I establish some sort of rhythm or consistency in my prayer life?  I mean well, but I constantly procrastinate and delay."  How do you help people who hope to embark upon a deeper life of prayer get started?

 

I have three comments. I think most people procrastinate in prayer either because they are afraid of something or they are avoiding something. The first addresses the fear or avoidance - don't try and be anything other than you are; honesty in prayer is the most important thing. If you are afraid of something in particular bring it to God; likewise, if you are avoiding something, ask for the desire to deal with it.

 

The second piece of advice is more practical. If you have decided you want to pray for twenty minutes at a day, and you don't have twenty minutes - then do what you can. Praying for 5 or 10 minutes is better than not praying just because you can't spend the time you ideally wanted to.

 

Finally, if neither of the first two issues is a problem, it may be that the way that you are trying to pray isn't working for you. Try something else.

 

As you point out in your book, you encountered Ignatian spirituality at a young age.  In the spiritual direction program in which I trained, there is an increasing number of young students -- men and women in their twenties and thirties.  How do you think Ignatian spirituality speaks to young people in particular?

 

The Spiritual Exercises were designed for a person making a significant life choice (considering joining the Ignatius and his companions). The material on discernment and making decisions is so incredibly helpful to younger people. In your twenties and thirties you are in the midst of choosing career, life companion and what kind of life you are to lead. You also tend to be slightly less encumbered with responsibilities and obligations and therefore you have greater freedom. To have such tools when you are in the midst of making these choices is invaluable. Learning how to be discerning early sets you up better for whatever will come your way in life.  

 

And finally, Mags, who is both a chemist and a spiritual director, gave an unexpected answer to my third question ~ but one which may encourage all who struggle with more than one vocation or call in life.  My question was: In Ignatian spirituality, we often speak of "finding God in all things."  In what "thing" have you found it most difficult to locate God, and how was that challenge resolved (if it was)?

 

Probably in chemistry! I wish I had a different answer to that! I can intellectually see God in chemistry, but there are times when I find it hard to encounter God through the daily minutiae of building an academic career. There is a lot of evidence which supports the choice I have made to balance chemistry and spirituality. Nonetheless, I think I continue to walk the path I do out of an act of faith, rather than felt confirmation. I guess when I stop and pay attention I recognise that I do feel called to this life, but at the same time it can sometimes feel like an awkward fit.

 

Enjoy the book and the blog tour!

(Margaret Blackie asked me to review her book, which I had already purchased.  I have received no compensation for this post.  If you'd like to read another review, take a look at Fran Szpylczyn's at There Will Be Bread.)

(And . . .  I've started a new blog!  So you'll also find this piece cross-posted there! Eventually.)

 

 

Reverence: Healing

The cat squirms in my lap for a few moments and then leaps, an elegant arc of orange and white fluff, four feet into the air and through the doorway into the next room.

 

The vet had told us that she would lie quietly, recovering for a couple of days, and not to permit her to run around.  Ah, but the cat is six months old, and I am sixty years.  There are some differences.

 

Yesterday, utterly discouraged, I huddled under my blanket in my space, the corner of our living room where my recliner and table scattered with meds and electronics are located.  I laughed briefly when I read another woman's account of her recovery from ankle surgery; she describes an identical geography.  But I wanted  to cry when I looked at the dates on her descriptions and realize how long a recovery this will be. 

 

Each trip to the bathroom, eighteen steps  through the same sunroom into which the cat flew with such ease, and eighteen steps back, hopping with my entire weight borne by my walker, hands aching, is an undertaking akin to hiking the Great Wall.   I have had to relinquish my teaching job, and to give up my long-anticipated retreat time.  Will my pastorate go as well?    There's so much to worry about, work-wise and money-wise.   

 

And yet, healing is taking place.  In some mysterious and miraculous way, the severed edges of bone are binding themselves back together, recreating blood flow and rebuilding marrow and spongy and hard bone.  Just as astonishingly, my body is accepting the presence of metal parts as the new normal. 

If all goes well, the result will be an ankle that will support walks on the beach some months from now.

 

Miscellaneous movements ripple through even this disrupted and limited life.  I hear from a lady twenty years my senior, a new widow, and I am able to write to her with the authority of experience about her days of freshly felt grief, the exhaustion and the disorientation.  I don't mention that the spirit often takes considerably longer to heal than the body. 

 

I ponder Ignatius, he of the 1521 cannonball injury, which resulted in months of bed-ridden recovery and the understanding of religious psychology that led to the Spiritual Exercises.   What would he think, I wonder, of my binge-watching of The Sopranos, which I have not seen before?  An extended meditation on spiritual desolation if ever there were one. 

 

And last night, or this morning, around 3:00 a.m., I turned to read a piece written by the Australian Jesuit poet Peter Steele S.J, to which my friend Michelle has linked.  When I first saw her post, I had saved it for later, thinking to pray with the poem as a form of lectio divina, but when I went to the link at 3:00 a.m.,  I discovered that, unbeknownst to me, Peter Steele died of cancer in the summer of 2012.

 

I am devastated. It was a stack of Peter Steele's poems that spiritual director emeritus had emailed to me in the first months after Josh died; the two men had developed a friendship while both were at Georgetown that year.  It was Peter Steele's poems that I sat reading, tears in my eyes, late one night in the computer lab at seminary, surrounded by other students pursuing their Greek or Hebrew, oblivious to anything beyond the linguistic challenges staring back at them from their screens. 

 

I never even met the man, and I'm sure he never knew of my existence, but I sat here, and sit here still, grieving the loss of someone who gave life to words in a way that touched me when it seemed that nothing could.

 

This poem to which Michelle linked, is an elegy of sorts, a litany of good-byes to places and sights the dying poet knows will not be his again.  And yet it is also a celebration, of the beauty of this life as recorded in one man's recollections.

 

It would seem that in his case, as in that of Ignatius, the body finally gave out, but the healed spirit continues to soar, with the lithe elegance of a small cat.

 

My Word: Reverence

New Year's words are proliferating across the internet.  Various bloggers suggest that one choose a word, or offer to do the choosing - a word to serve as a guide, a focus, a call back to priorities, for the year ahead. 

I'm joining the swell of movement and offering my congregation "star words"  (thanks to Marci Glass) on Sunday ~ I think. The stars were cut out and the "Star Gazing" (think: magi) sermon planned when I tumbled down the steps last week.  The new sermon, "Stars in the Desert" (think: magi, John the Baptist, Jesus' baptism, and the desert fathers and mothers, so often asked for "a word" by those who sought their wisdom), is well under way. I guess if I am delayed another week (which tonight seems highly likely) I can work stars into "Come and See."

Last year my word, chosen by me, was Serenity.  I ended up with a stained glass window hanging of my word, and a relatively calm couple of months of discernment as I switched churches and walked through a doorway into a new realm of unexpected challenges.

This year, I sought a word that would help me to look outward, to listen, observe and respond more gently ~ albeit also more firmly.  The word I chose was Reverence.   An Ignatian word.

Spiritual Director Emeritus frequently speaks about "attention,  reverence, and devotion" as hallmarks of Ignatian spirituality. I've blogged about them at least once.  I discarded the first and last fairly easily as I considered words for this particular year.  I'm a short ways down the road on attention, and I did not want a word that I might interpret to demand more in the way of work, effort, discipline, intervention.  I'm kind of ok there as well.

But reverence?  An attitude, an approach, a willingness to calmly honor who or what presents itself to you. 

That could use some work, and might enrich my movement through this world as well.  A year of this, as the spiritual director who first did it for me describes it:

"Reverence is giving acceptance to, cherishing the differences of, holding in awe the uniqueness of another reality. So, before you judge or assess or respond, give yourself time to esteem and to accept what is there in the other."

My word: Reverence.  First object of reverence: a body and life considerably slowed due to a broken ankle.

Lifetime Books

There's been a question making the FB rounds ~ something about books that have had an impact in your life, books you can't forget.  Here's my list, with a few annotations

 

1. To Kill a Mockingbird: My first adult book, in fifth grade.  I'm sure I've read it at least 50 times. 

2. Night: I don't know when I first read this, but I've taught it a few times.

 
3. Hamlet: I think I saw my first Hamlet production, believe it or not, in a Royal Shakespeare Company performance at Stratford-upon-Avon when I was in junior high. 

 4. Macbeth: Junior year high school English ~ big paper on Lady M.

 5. Poems of Emily Dickinson:  When I was a senior in high school, I did an independent study one quarter on mysticism in the poetry of ED.  I didn't think there was much chance of there being a God, but I guess that's never stopped me from pursuing the possibility. 

 6. Poems of T.S. Eliot: Another major feature of my junior year of high school.

 7. Dante's Inferno: I took a college course on Dante, in English in the Italian Department.  I don't think we ever got out of the Inferno.  I'd been waiting for that one since being introduced to it via Eliot (see above).

 8. By the Shores of Silver Lake: I inhaled the Little House books as a child.  I think the later ones made the biggest impression on me.  When we were high school seniors, a friend and I re-read them all, and we would pretend to be  Laura and Mary out there on the Dakota prairie during our nighttime winter walks between our dorm and the library, when the air was frigid and the snow high in the Connecticut Valley of western Massachusetts.

 9. The Secret Garden: I've written about this one before, along with Heidi: Those wonderful childhood books in which motherless heroines prevail and, in the case of Mary Lennox, create something beautiful.  My kind of girls.

 10. The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius:  Ten years since I first caught a whiff of these.  How I learned to pray.

 11. The Little Prince:   A children's book for adult readers.  The fox and the sunsets. 

 

Now that I think of it, I believe that all of this writing is connected. 

 

Despite my best efforts to the contrary, there are hundreds and hundreds of books in this house, and Kindle is not helping.  But I suppose that I could make do with the above plus a Bible on my proverbial desert island.

 

 

 

Walk in a Relaxed Manner

I am in the midst of reading Joyce Rupp's book by the same title as that of this post for a book group. I am a big fan of Joyce Rupp's prayer and retreat writings and have used them in several contexts.  I can't honestly claim the same enthusiasm for her narrative approach to her Camino de Santiago pilgrimage, the subject of this book.  But I love the title - words of advice offered her by a fellow pilgrim; I am often drawn into pilgrimage language by Ignatius of Loyola, who often described himself as a pilgrim; and I am in need of a metaphor for my next venture: new (to me) Small City Church, newly re-unified life in all dimensions, new long-term commitment. I think that "walk in a relaxed manner" will do well.

I Love Teaching Intro to Religion!

I am procrastinating grading so . . .

 

From some college student reflections:

 

"At first I was not happy about the requirement to go to outside events, but now that I have been to a lecture and a mass, I feel that I have gone outside my little bubble and witnessed others' beliefs and thoughts."

 

"Learning about the history of the Bible is surprisingly interesting."

 

"Religion has not been a huge factor in my life in the past several years, but now I think I might go back to temple."

 

"I had never really thought about the possibility of multiple interpretations of a Biblical text."

 

"To be honest, I was not looking forward to this course at all . . . but now I am excited to take my next course next semester."

 

 

Yes . . . there was at least one very unhappy student ~ I'm afraid I was a bit sarcastic one day and my meaning got lost, but I was very glad that she raised her concerns so that I could address them.  (At least I hope I did.)

 

I have been a bit preoccupied with my old church-new church stuff this term, and sometimes I feel more behind and confused than my students do.  We cover way too much in this survey course -- from Ignatian spirituality to Tillich to Freud to Frankl to Biblical criticism and exegesis to interfaith dialogue to Islam to justice.    The instructors have a lot of leeway, as long as we cover some basic ideas foundational to discussing religion, address the Bible and interfaith dialogue, and deal with a religion assigned by the department -- that's where Islam came in this semester. 

 

I started with Ignatian spirituality -- something almost no other instructors do, but hey: we're in a Jesuit university and I think it's always a good idea to understand your heritage.  Whether they are Jewish or Christian (no Muslim students this term), Ignatius has become a part of their heritage by virtue of their presence at the school.  And I'm ending with a discussion of justice across traditions because soon it will be cold and dark and stressful all the time, and I think that's something they can sink their teeth into even when they've about reached the end of the semester.

 

The most fun?  Reading their reflections on their "outside experiences" ~ a Catholic-atheist debate, an apparently dynamite lecture on the theology of sports (I have a number of athletes in class), Jewish and Methodist students at mass, a Catholic student at my home Presby church, a martial arts class, an Otis Moss, Jr. sermon ~ I think they're having a good semester.

 

Two Years Ordained Today!

Fall 2005 - Opening conversation at the beginning of the Spiritual Exercises, taking place in a small office at John Carroll University, where I am taking a course on Ignatian spirituality and have decided to dive in and make the Exercises with my professor.  We barely know one another.



Me, former lawyer, teacher in Orthodox Jewish school, Presby elder: 

I'm thinking that I might be, you know, called to ordained ministry in my own denomination, but obviously that would be ridiculous, so there's no need for us to discuss it.


Spiritual director, 75-year-old Jesuit: 

Umm hmm.

Not a Silent Retreat!

 

 

We met six years ago as would-be spiritual directors on the first night of our training program, which began with a week-end retreat.  We finished up two years later at another retreat, and with four other members of our class formed a peer supervision group ~ which means that we meet every month or so for conversation around our experiences as spiritual directors.  Some time ago, three of us realized that we would all be turning sixty this year, and this week-end we managed to pull off a mini-retreat as a way of being intentional about the "final third" of our lives.

The three of us: Two Catholics and one Protestant, two employed in church positions and one doing major volunteer work related to spiritual direction, two married and one single, six children, work experience including missionary in El Salvador, teacher, lawyer, pastor, psychiatric nurse, and diocesan staff for pastoral ministry ~ and spiritual direction, of course.

We spent a very small amount of time each of us on her own; mostly we talked.  And talked and talked and talked.  A few hours Friday night and nonstop from breakfast through lunch today.  (We never left the dining room ~ midmorning, one of the staff members at the retreat house stopped in to ask if we knew that lunch wouldn't be served until 12:15!) 

We used Paula Huston's book A Season of Mystery: Twelve Spiritual Practices for Embracing a Happier Second Half of Life, which provided a great springboard for conversation.  I think we all agreed that it was particularly relevant to the third third of life; we found the topics pertinent and helpful and challenging.  I would highly recommend the book to any group of people seeking to look reflectively and unflinchingly at these final decades and to approach them as a time in which to live prayerfully and authentically.

We didn't think to take a picture!  But here's where we went.


 

News! Article Published!

I'm so excited to be able to announce that my article has been published in the September 2013 of Presence, the journal published by Spiritual Directors International!

 

It's called "Ignatian Spirituality: Companionship in Loss" and it's a blend of personal story and practical reflection for spiritual directors.

 

(As far as I know, it's not available online.)


 

48-54/60

2004 Thanksgiving in Chicago

Phew!  All three kids made it to college and stayed there until diplomas were in hand.  Those years meant trips to Chicago and New Orleans and Oregon for us, studies and travel in Europe for the boys, camp counseling in North Carolina for two of our three, and a trip to Iona and France for us.  Two days in Chartres a block from the Cathedral!

A major life transition for me, as I switched from law to teaching history and literature in a Modern Orthodox Jewish day school.  Immersion into an entirely new-to-me culture. There are several Orthodox neighborhoods in the Cleveland area, including some close to ours, but I knew nothing of life there ~ the religious observances, the focus on Torah, the food and celebrations, the academic expectations, the family lives.  Six years in and out of a different world on a daily basis.

Several worlds, in fact.  This was also the period in which I made the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. I've written about that year so often here that I won't elaborate further today, except to say this:

I was 52 that year.  I can't put my finger on any explanation for my being so open to new experience and deep prayer in that particular year, but in retrospect the whole experience was a powerful confirmation of how profoundly one's approach to life can change, or be changed, at any time.  As I sit here writing on my laptop in my comfortable living room in Ohio in 2013, I think of Ignatius in Spain in the early 1520s, beginning to formulate what would become his little guide to prayer for those who would accompany others as he was beginning to do.  Had he not been slammed by that cannonball and had I not bumped into a wise elder of his Jesuit order nearly 500 years later, would I have become a spiritual director?  become a pastor?  survived Josh's death? 

 

Probably not.

 

Here's what I think about life from the vantage point of sixty:

 

Very strange.

Noticing

Nearly everything I've read so far this morning has been about Noticing.  I'm going to take that as a hint.

 

From 31 Days of St. Ignatius

 

From A Church for Starving Artists

 

From the Pope

 

From Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge (NM)

 

All of which reminded me of Mary Oliver's poem, "I happened to be standing."

Things the Spiritual Exercises Taught Me About Jesus

 

 

This month's 31 Days with Saint Ignatius festival at Loyola Press (see the sidebar and click on the badge) highlights a wonderful post by Becky Eldridge, a spiritual director and retreat leader, on "Five Things the Exercises Taught Me About Jesus."

 

It took me the course of about a year to make the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises, in the company of a wise and experienced older Jesuit - a year of daily prayer and weekly discussion through the pattern of prayer devised by Ignatius 500 years ago.  It's hard to remember now, without going back to that year's worth of journals, what I learned from the Exercises themselves and what came later, as the Exercises have shaped my life of prayer ever since, but I think I could trace some of it back to the following:

 

Jesus is extremely persistent.  I was not a particularly devout and certainly not any holy kind of person when I embarked upon the Exercises.  I had the sense almost immediately that I had dived into waters way, way over my head.  But Jesus kept after me.  You can say all you want about God being a God of invitation rather than a God of imposition, but I can tell you that Jesus is a tenacious pursuer.  Which reminds me . . .

 

Jesus is also extremely creative.  An elder in the Presbyterian Church and a teacher in a Jewish school gets the idea to hang out with a Jesuit and pray through Scripture for a year.  Really?  How weird is that?

 

Jesus is interested in each of us as an individual.  Try settling in with some of those narratives of individual encounter for awhile.  Do it the way Ignatius would: sights, sounds, odors (well, okay, not having a sense of smell meant that I could never do that one). Touch, taste.   Zacchaeus, Nicodemus, the Woman at the Well, Bartimaeus,  Mary Magdalene, Thomas. Was that well water icy cold or was it sort of lukewarm?  Was the sky clear that day, or was it overcast?  Pay attention to the details as you experience them.  Sooner or later it occurs to you that Jesus is paying attention to the details in your own life, and you should, too, because he can make something of them.  In fact . . .

 

Jesus wants us to do stuff.  Mostly he wants us to tell other people how much he loves them, in whatever way we are called to do that.  It turns out, and this has been a startling discovery for me in ministry, although I should have known it from my own family and friends, but people in church have surprised me ~ anyway, it turns out to be harder than you might think, because a lot of people don't believe you.  They think there are all kinds of rules. So Jesus wants us to do stuff  ~ doctoring and nursing and parenting and teaching and grocery bagging and typing and lawyering and farming and building and even ministering ~ to share his love in ways that might help people get it.  It would be nice to sit around all day and talk about prayer, but he wants us to do other stuff, too.  He really does want us to be contemplatives in action.

 

Jesus will sit around with you when life becomes almost completely unbearable and when all you want to do is die.  That one I didn't learn until later.  My year of the Exercises was one of the most optimistic and open-hearted years of my life.  I can't say that I experienced the portion of the Exercises (it's called Week Three, but it isn't really a week, which  doesn't matter for our purposes here) in which you pray through Jesus's passion and death ~ I can't say that I experienced it with much depth or fervor ~ but a lot of people don't.  Not then, anyway.  I was a pretty average Week 3 person.  I was a lot more interested in Mary Magdalene at that point  than I was in Jesus.  But later I got dealt a Week 3 life, and when I came up gasping for air eighteen months later, I found that the Jesus I had gotten to know a little during the Exercises was someone willing to sit around with me for a long, long time.  Despite my own utter lack of hospitality.  (An understatement.)

 

There's more, but I think that Becky's limit of five is a good one.  And we have most of the month of July left.  So I'll leave it at this:  Getting to know Jesus is an excellent way in which to spend a year.


 

God In All Things - Part II

 

 

Like my friend Rosa, I am revisiting the question of God in all things, that Ignatian principle some of us were writing about yesterday.  For Rosa, a homeless woman.  For me, three men.  Five men.  Mothers.  A father.  Caregivers.

 

Three of the men are connected to my church and have been in the hospital this past week; one of them has escaped to a rehab facility.  The primary caregivers for all of these men, in their forties, fifties, and sixties, are parents ~ not spouses or partners or children ~ which tells you some things about the curve balls life has tossed their way.  One of the men is massively disabled as the result of a car accident thirty years ago when he was sixteen and was, I learned yesterday, in possession of a Congressional nomination to Annapolis.

 

Thirty years his parents have cared for his every need.  Thirty eff-ing years.

 

He is seriously ill, in intensive care, and today his two housemates from his group home, along with a caregiver for each, came to visit him.  It was decided that his condition was such that they should await another day, but when I left they were still there.  I know nothing about the story of either of them, but they are not permitted to be without one of their caregivers, even in a hospital waiting room, as I learned when I offered to stay with them awhile.

 

Sometimes I will come across a blog post, or an essay, in which the writer confidently and carelessly remarks upon the rewards in store for those who parent young adults, the pleasures of daughters and sons-in-law, of grandchildren, of presiding over an extended family of multiple generations.

 

Me? I am working on that concept of God in all things.

 

 

31 Days with Ignatius: Finding God in All Things

 

 

I'm not necessarily going to write something in response to each of the 31 Days hosted this month by Loyola Press (see the sidebar for a link to the site), or even to most of them ~ but I will to some of them.

 

This first day's theme happened to be the subject of some of my conversation with my spiritual director this past week.

 

Do you know how hard it is to find God in all things?  God creating and giving, God dwelling, God laboring, God loving ~ in all things? 

 

It sounds easy, I know.  "How I have loved this life," says the narrator pastor in Gilead, in one of my all-time favorite lines in literature.  But then I spend a lot of time with people whose loved ones lost sight of their love for this life long enough to end theirs, and I know how treacherous and tiring is the road back for their survivors.

 

Look at the beauty of nature ~  look at my birds, the five little house finches who hatched and grew up in my geranium basket.  But the sixth didn't make it, and today I ran over a chipmunk who darted into the street too fast for me to respond.

 

Look at Nelson Mandela, to whose triumphs we are so attentive at the moment.  But there were those 27 years in prison.  Most of us would say that those years honed a leader and a nation and a world.  But they are still years lost to the family of a husband and a father, not to mention to the man himself.

 

It is not easy, not if you are paying attention at all, to find God in all things.  But if you avoid paying attention, because it's too difficult to do so, then you will miss the key to the conundrum.

 

My first spiritual director says that, "First you have to find God in some things."  For most of us, baby steps.

 

Andy Otto's post is an excellent guide for those of us who are always beginning.


 

31 Days with Ignatius

 

It's another Iggy month!

 

 

Loyola Press is once again hosting 31 Days with St. Ignatius, a month-long celebration of Ignatian spirituality. The online feature includes a calendar of great Ignatian articles, videos, and prayers for you to be inspired by throughout the month of July. It all leads up to the feast day of St. Ignatius Loyola on July 31.