This Ignatian Life

Part 1

13 March 2007 – a post I wrote two years ago for another blog:

“Every morning when we wake up, we look for God’s face” is how someone once started a reflection. It had made a lot of sense to me at the time, a clear image of God our mother, whose face we seek first thing when we wake up, as any trusting three year old would do.

For some time, I tried to imagine God’s face in the morning, looking at me, but it was more up to my imagination if I’d find God there or not. Then I realised what I needed to do: not forcing God to show her face by the sheer power of my (failing) imagination, but asking politely for it.

So today I woke up and said: please show me your face.

Breakfast, nothing. Leaving the apartment, nothing. Walking up to the traffic light – there! The woman who is begging at the car’s windows waves at me and comes over! Huge smile on her face, half of her teeth are gold, beautiful, she starts talking to me in Romanian. When I tell her that I can’t give her money, but that I can go to the supermarket for her, her smile grows even wider. I ask her what she needs, she mentions chicken, bread, potatoes, sugar. So I go up to the supermarket and for the first time ever, I thoroughly enjoy grocery shopping. I get the things that I’d never get for myself, sweets, Italian bread at the counter (so far, I have been too shy to ever go there), fruit juice, yoghurt in many colours… And other useful stuff – two big shopping bags full. When I come back to the traffic lights, she moves towards me in between the cars with her huge smile. In the middle of the road, I hand over my shopping bags. I can see that God is pleased.

Show me your face again, I can’t get enough of the beauty of it!

Part 2

13 March 2009 – two years later and she still smiles at me every morning:

Maria has become my friend in the two years that I have done her grocery shopping. On Monday, she asked me to get something for her from the pharmacy, for her stomach. She handed me a piece of paper with the name on it. The medicine is called Cytotec and when I got to the office, I googled it. Wow. It comes with a big warning sign because apart from doing something good to the stomach, it also does something bad to the uterus and is known to lead to abortion. I read some more, and it turns out that it is used particularly among undocumented migrants. The data comes from the United States, but my guess is that it’s probably as common in Europe.

I knew I wasn’t going to buy this for Maria, but what would she do with the child? I saw a saviour scheme coming my way: I was going to take her to the appropriate services, they would provide her with accommodation, she could finally leave her husband (sometimes husbands force their wives to beg, but I have no proof that anything of the like is happening here), she could stay at my place while her new life was being sorted out. This would be her fourth child and she begs in order to feed the other three in Romania, so maybe she wouldn’t be want to keep it? Could I raise the child for her? In my head, I went through a whole story of giving meaning to a piece of paper and figuring out someone else’s life…

The next morning, I asked her if she was indeed pregnant and in a longish conversation (she is very eloquent with the few words of Italian that she speaks), she made it clear to me – to the point when I finally believed her – that she wasn’t pregant and that her doctor in Romania had prescribed exactly this drug and that she had been taking it for a long time, including while pregnant with her last two children. We went to the pharmacy together and although they would have given me Cytotec for her without questions, I did end up buying something that ‘lines the stomach’ instead.

But what about all the others? Who will help them find solutions that don’t involve going to the pharmacy? Who will think through all the options with them and not let them down at the end, whatever they decide?

Kyrie eleison.

These days, it feels if a big hand is moving me along in life, gently but a little too fast for my tastes. The coincidences that happen to me in great number are all blessings, and the nature of the graces that I receive shows me that somewhere, somehow, someone must love me tenderly.

Not that I can make any sense of it at the moment (that’s why I call them “coincidences”) but I’m sure it will all come together eventually. There is the grace of having two wonderful friends from England visiting me for most of this week, with their sprituality that is very different from my own now but that I found nourishing and inspiring. Then there is the grace of having a sudden and unexpected crush, with the warm and silly feelings that that involves. And the grace of a great job in a great place, and the challenge of not letting it completely take over my life and emotions.

I am grateful that all of the above are taking place in the real world. Most of my life seems to have happened on Facebook over the last month (or the last year?), and although I really like the fact that I am in touch with 400+ people through their status updates, it is also a little draining. Especially since it involves one of the five senses only.

Now that I am a little more rooted in the real world again, I am starting to realise how my other senses were craving attention. When had I last listened to real loud music? When had I touched someone not just by accident? When had I last been prayed over? When had I been blown away by someone’s anger and then again when they asked forgiveness? When has my heart last beat so loudly? It’s all happened in the course of just one week. And I feel so much more alive for it.

Thank you, God.

Photo: “come back to the real world” by Scarlet Rose from Flickr (Used under Creative Commons license)

I tried not to look because mass was in full course. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him only when people started to stare and shuffle: probably a foreigner, as they call them here in Italy, of unidentifyable southern European complexion. A beggar. A nuisance on a Sunday morning – we are here to pray after all! He started walking around. Wrinkled face but not a streak of gray in the brown hair under his hat. A heavy bag over his shoulder.

Two people blocked his entry (gently) to the altar room, so he walked around the back, holding out his little plastic cup, asking (gently) for some coins. People gently talked to him, smiled at him. He didn’t seem to understand Italian.

Still trying not to stare, I assumed he was gone when I didn’t see him at the sign of peace, but probably he was busy shaking hands somewhere. We are a welcoming community, after all. During communion, he walked aimlessly up and around the altar, then around the back of the pews. As far as I could see, a total of four people tried to talk him out of the church during the 20 minutes he was with us. One of them eventually convinced him, walked him to the door and off he went.

After mass, it turned out that a number of people I talked to were convinced that no action would have been necessary. I would guess there were probably about thirty people (we are a small congregation) who were too shy to ask him to take a seat, warm his hands, invite him to take part in the mass. The four sensible ones did what seemed best for the community, on our behalf.

Here is how I want to look at it: Jesus came to visit us in church yesterday to check in on us. Some of us mistook him for a beggar and he ended up being gently ushered out. I assume he got nailed to some cross around the corner from the church, or, given the raising xenophobia in Italy, in any case will be eventually. Some cross or other.

“All it takes for evil to flourish is for good men (and women) to do nothing.”

Will I stand up next time? Will I stand by the beggar and turn my back to my sensible friends? All I can do is hope that the Gospel message will eventually sink in, that I will eventually act on it. It’s a long process.

Photo: “Begger Outside a Church in Rome” by christopher.woo from Flickr (Used under Creative Commons license)

This past weekend topped anything I have experienced so far in my two years in Rome. Being better networked now means that I get invited to more things around town, and almost all of this weekend’s events in some way involved religious and priests.

There was an Ordination in the Romanian Greek-Catholic (Byzantine) rite, and I was able to glimpse some of the beauty of long masses in a different language and what that does to unveil a mystery rather than veiling it. You would think two hours forty minutes in Romanian would be boring, but far from it. The weaving back and fourth between the sacred and profane, the altar ‘room’ with the doors opening and closing – it somehow spoke to me, that’s all I can say.

There was a talk by Cherie Blair, the wife of the former British prime minister, which was moving and inspiring and challenging (you will see why from this article about it).

I also helped bless the changeover of one General Council (the leadership body of a religious order) to another by gate-crashing their mass. I knew so many people there that it felt appropriate to go, and besides, the Superior General of the Jesuits, Adolfo Nicolás, was giving the homily and I try to hear him speak whenever I get a chance – he is just naturally inspiring, that’s his job and he does it very well.

There were about fifty religious sisters at the ceremony, from all kinds of different congregations, and no more than ten men, most of them priests, most around the altar. This was such a sharp contrast to the ordination, where it had been the opposite ratio, with an even bigger crowd.

I also visited two friends of mine, women religious as well, and spent a wonderful morning and lunch with them and their community, singing Christmas carols and being taken around the beautiful villa of their Generalate (headoffice).

Sunday ended at the English College, where the seminarians from the UK who are studying in Rome stay. It was their annual carol singing and theatre performance night, and both were great fun. Here, the audience was younger (mostly seminarians from other colleges) but the atmosphere was one of tradition and venerability – it’s the “Venerable English College” in its full title, after all.

Going back and forth between male-dominated and female-dominated events, one cannot help but compare. What I saw over the course of this weekend were many more similarities than differences. First of all, it seems that we are all trying to give life to something called “church” which is ultimately us, each one of us, ordained, professed or “normal”. And we are all struggling to do that, even though we are sure of God’s presence in the process.

What touched me, every time, was when that search was done honestly, without hiding difficulties or pretending that it would all be “okay”. At the English College, it was the sharp satire of the “theatre” part that seemed to bring relief (one might even say liberation) to the student-actors who could step out of their usual roles and say something honest about the ups and downs of their lives as seminarians.

At the changeover ceremony of the sisters, it was the physical expression of handing over the tools of their work to the next General Council, and the stretching out of hands to bless them that spoke most honestly, almost without words, of the hard work, the joy and pain that come with leading the order.

Fr Nicolás’ homily on that occasion was as honest as always, and there is no desperation when he acknowledges that we “have lost it” – the attraction that religious orders and their founders once radiated. His is a hopeful realism coming from a trust in God that’s far beyond any worries about shrinking numbers.

At the ordination, the moment of truth was maybe in the person of the ordinand himself. A Jesuit who is ordained a priest in the Byzantine rite will inevitably bring together people and mentalities from far and wide. And so this ordination was not only a completely “strange” but fully Catholic rite in a city where minor changes to the Roman rite are always hotly debated, but a sign of a Kingdom where there are no more divisions between Christians. It was a concrete reason to keep the dream alive, with concrete people acting out the huge diversity of the Catholic church.