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Doing advocacy in the spirit of St Ignatius

November 19, 2008 By: usievers Category: Uta's Posts Comments Off

For the last week (10-16 November), I have been with a group of almost 50 people from all over the world in El Escorial, outside Madrid, in Spain. What we attempted to do has never been done before: to define the nature of advocacy, specifically Ignatian advocacy, using a process that included elements of common apostolic discernment (i.e. discernment as a group) as well as a “normal” methodology for group decision processes. The group was composed of (a majority of) Jesuits, lay women and men working in Jesuit institutions and NGOs, and a representative from Christian Life Communities.

As I am not an expert in advocacy, I had asked to be in charge of the liturgies: morning prayers and evening eucharists. It was only the second time that I was preparing 15-minute prayer sessions for a group and the challenge to find meaningful material seemed a little overwhelming at first. In fact, it took me entire days but every minute of it was fun and worth it. I will never know if people actually noticed that I was leading them along the four weeks of the Spiritual Exercises (the first four days) plus one day where we reflected on the Holy Spirit as ‘Advocate’. Neither did it matter that much – people will always find surprising insights where you don’t expect it at all.

The most surprising insight for me was what I got from it myself. I had prepared the prayers, I had read them before, watched all the videos, listened to the music, so there was nothing unexpected for me in there. However, every morning, the prayers touched me anew, gave me a new insight, moved me in some way.

One of the videos I showed had been produced for the General Congregation at the beginning of this year. Did you see the ultrasound picture of a fetus? Have you ever thought of the Incarnation in this way?

Or this text that took on a very concrete meaning when we read it on the morning of the fourth day, the “crunch” day where we had most difficulties in moving on as a group:

Above all, trust in the slow work of God. We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay. We would like to skip the intermediate stages. We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new. And yet, it is the law of all progress that it is made by passing through some stages of instability – and that it may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you; your ideas mature gradually – let them grow, let them shape themselves, without undue haste. Don’t try to force them on, as though you could be today what time, (that is to say, grace and circumstances acting on your own good will) will make of you tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new spirit gradually forming in you will be. Give our Lord the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you, and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.

(Pierre Teilhard de Chardin SJ)

I came away from this one-week Workshop physically exhausted but spiritually challenged and refreshed. How did that happen? I was on the organising team and we never planned for spirituality to take a big role in the workshop, apart from the morning and evening “input”. And yet, as people kept referring to the Kingdom of God as our vision in advocacy and eventually, on the last day, among all the other actions planned, the group decided to start a network on Ignatian Spirituality and Advocacy, I felt that we were being moved by something bigger than “group dynamics”. I pray that the movement of the Spirit will be as perceivable in implementing Ignatian advocacy on the ground and through our new networks as it has been during the week in Spain.

Click here to read the full blog of what happened during the Ignatian Advocacy Workshop.

Don’t just forgive!

September 17, 2008 By: usievers Category: Uta's Posts Comments Off


Matthew 18 two Sundays ago has made me think what reconciliation might mean – in practical terms:

“If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. If the member listens to you, you have regained that one. But if you are not listened to, take one or two others along with you, so that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If the member refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.” (New Revised Standard Version)

Jesus seems to recommend a pretty straightforward ‘routine’ to go through when things go wrong between two people: “If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone.”

For me, the call in this verse is to first of all recognise that someone has wronged me (or ‘sinned against me’, but I like ‘wronged’ better since it has a stronger implication of injustice). I am easy at ‘forgiving’ or explaining away how other people treat me. The way forward that I have found in this verse is that it is not good for them to wrong me, it is not something that should be be forgiven without saying a word, in the supposedly ‘good Christian way’. No, they need to know that they have crossed the line with me, my very subjective line, and they need to know in person and from me, one on one. It’s good for them and it’s good for me. (The other option, that I find myself using much more often, is becoming upset and taking it out on them behind their back.)

And when that fails, then I can turn to the community for mediation (the questions here are: which community?), and failing that, finally acknowledge that there are irreconcilable differences and just treat them with compassion and understanding for their problem with me (“Let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.” – and we all know how Jesus treated those).

After taking these steps, and especially the very first one, forgiving can then take place on the deeper level, that of a personal honesty about what has happened to me, personally, in relation to you, personally. I don’t have to pretend that ‘all’s well’, that there are no problems and that I am this nice, forgiving person. Either things are well, or they are not, but I will have contributed my best, my own, to the emering reconciled relationship between two people with a problem.

On a larger scale, I find it much easier to do that: confronting injustice, speaking out for other people, comes more naturally to me than doing the same for myself. It is there that I feel I can be ‘prophetic’ and I am annoyed that we as a Church are not more prophetic in addressing injustices. But I also know that being prophetic, confronting injustices in my own environment is a first step and the one that lays a foundation of basic integrity that I need to ‘fight the good fight’ for other people, those who maybe cannot or dare not speak for themselves.

Photo: “Reconciliation Room” by Edith OSB from Flickr (Used under Creative Commons license)

This Postmodern Life

August 21, 2008 By: jjok Category: Uta's Posts Comments Off

Like most Romans, I escaped the city for the long weekend of Ferragosto, the feast of the Assumption, which is a public holiday in Italy. I went to a mountain resort with five other people, some of whom I knew well, others less. On Saturday morning, we decided to visit a nearby sanctuary of the Madonna of Macereto, renowned for its architectural value. None of us had any ‘religious’ intentions for the visit, and I would guess the relationships with the official Church of the rest of the group were indifferent at best, given some of their comments.

To our surprise, the sanctuary was celebrating its annual pilgrimage that day, and we found ourselves in the middle of marching bands that were gathering in the big courtyard. The sanctuary was packed with pilgrims but we had a look inside anyway. Nobody minded our tourism in the midst of prayerful adoration. Outside, the bands were ready to get going and out of a side-door appeared a gentleman with a mitre and staff, the local bishop maybe or his auxiliary.

We followed the procession at a small distance, being aware I guess of our intentions as bystanders and observers of religious customs of another era. I would have loved to hear the thoughts of the others, most of them Italians. They must have been quite different from my own, which went something like this:

“Interesting mix, these pilgrims – lots of old people, but also families with children, young women supporting their grandmothers, middle-aged men, young volunteers of the local fire brigade. Here comes the bishop. He is blessing the people further ahead, oh dear, I hope he is not going to bless us! What am I going to do if he does? Make the sign of the cross and embarrass myself in front of my friends? Good, he passes without a blessing–must have recognized us as tourists.

“There are maximum three priests in the whole procession, all at the front of course. That would have been quite different a century ago. Like the rest of the procession – it would have included everybody from the surrounding towns, and there wouldn’t have been any bystanders, everybody would have been part of it. They wouldn’t have walked to the parking lot and back but instead all the way down to the next town, about two and a half hours downhill (that’s what the sign said) but surely more like five hours with a heavy wooden Madonna and Child carried by six men.

I felt caught in a postmodern paradox. All these people in the procession so fervently singing and praying the rosary and believing that the wooden Madonna had miraculous capacities. And our little group with cameras and critical minds and disaffected hearts, not seeing what the pilgrims were seeing, not being able to sing along.

How can we find our own way of being pilgrims? Which part of the Church is there to call us, to make our hearts sing?

Photo: “Macereto” by fabiofotografie from Flickr (Used under Creative Commons license)

Wooden thoughts

July 20, 2008 By: usievers Category: Uta's Posts Comments Off

This Woodsculpture course was something I had wanted to do for some time. Actually, I hadn’t thought about wood in particular until I came across the course brochure, but I’d been in love with Michelangelo’s craft for years. Wood, it turned out, can’t be “just” sculpted or carved, like stone. You need to go with the “grain”, and even if you treat it as it wants to be treated (and not as you initially planned), it might still split later, or take on a different colour, and other things that stone doesn’t do. That’s of course what living things are all about, the unpredictibility of life – and often the will of one being against the other. I chipped away happily for the first session of the course, about two hours, and was so exhausted after that that I came home and went straight to bed!

At the second session, I realised that I had chosen a piece of wood with a really good “resistance factor” to my efforts: mahogany. I tried all kinds of different tools that the tutor hadn’t really introduced us to but that were lying around, and while the other students where happy with just their chisels, I filed and I sandpapered, I scratched and I sawed. And the piece looked more and more unsightly. I ended up taking it home to see what if anything could still be done with it, and secretly decided to skip the third and last session of this “Summer School”.

This morning, I had another look at my sorry piece of resistance wood, and started taking it in my hands, trying to think how to mold it to make it “better”. First, I decided that it needed to be cut in two and maybe something could then be done with the separate pieces. I’d have to do lots more work, but it would eventually become the piece I originally envisioned: perfectly round and smooth.

And then something happened: the mahogany chunk suddenly felt complete. It was totally and utterly “good” as it was, at least that’s what my hands told me. While I was stroking its irregularities, the chips and “wounds” of my perfecting it, I realised that what I had in my hands was me. Not perfect, not even remotely beautiful, but with an unchangeable (or at least not within the time of a three-week course) shape that still resembled pretty much the original piece as I had found it in the workshop.

But I had done something to it, and it showed: there were smooth parts on the sides, patches of rough wood where I had used a file that was too coarse, the corners that I had hewn round with a chisel but that needed smoothing with sandpaper. Where I had thought to cut it in half, it turned out that this was the perfect size of wood to hold in two hands at the same time (and hit someone over the head with, if need be!). If you weren’t careful, you could still draw a splinter from it – this piece would never be as smooth and perfect as I had originally thought.

Also, the final touch would be to oil it and make it shiny, but as my tutor had told me, you don’t do that unless you are perfectly happy with the shape of the wood, since the oiling brings out each and every single imperfection of the carving process. Of couse, the oiling would also bring out the fine lines in the wood that the rough piece was still hiding within itself. So there is something to look forward to – if and when I’ll have done some more smoothing around the edges, maybe I’ll take the step and oil it. Or maybe not. Because as it is now, it is a perfect reminder of where I am in my life: not done yet, no finishing touches to be applied yet, I’m still right in the middle of it, with more chiselling and filing to be done. And even if in the process, the piece gets more damaged than can be made good with sandpaper, it will still be me, the (almost) unchangeable shape, the way God has created me.

Photo: “Wood of the Cross“by John O’Keefe from Flickr (Used under Creative Commons license)

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