I’ve been a practicing Ignatian Christian for several years now—I practice it, but I am not there yet, so I keep practicing.  My practice arena of choice these days seems to be right here in my own home.  It is the place I do my Examen. It is the source of many of the tensions I have been instructed by my spiritual director to “sit with” rather than constantly try to fight to go away. It is where I most frequently experience God in the form of love from another (my children and my husband) and where I most frequently have the opportunity to respond to God’s love for me with my own love for another. But that experience and responding thing doesn’t always come so easily.  I must admit there have been more than a few times in which I have recited the Suscipe (“Take lord, receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, all I have and possess”) not out of gratitude or submission, but out of desperation to be freed from the challenges of my little calling here. So I keep practicing.

Obviously, the practice helps me personally by centering, reflecting, and maintaining that greater perspective of what I am called to do and to see this role of parenthood as truly a calling. For this time and place, first and foremost, I have these three incredible human beings that I need to nurture into faith-filled adults. That was my discernment after doing the 19^th annotation.  After over a year of going through the weeks, I had not discerned a new job or direction for my life. I was still just a wife and mother. But, thanks to Ignatius’ pathwork, I could see those very same tasks involved in that role in a very different way, a way that was freeing rather than draining. 

And at the same time, I have also found a few ways to actually pass on the practice to my kids. While Ignatius lays out a formal Examen to reflect upon one’s day, I tuck my six year-old daughter in at night with a few simple questions sometimes phrased a bit differently:  What was the best part of your day?  What was the hardest?  Where were you most happy? Where were you most sad?  Where did God use you to do something for someone else? Where was it too tough to do the right thing?  These questions have led to some amazing conversations and made me realize my six year-old is far more aware of the presence of God than most adults.  She can easily cite her greatest joy in family time, being all together and her greatest sadness in being alone or not included.  She can grasp “being used by God” even if it was only to include another classmate in a jump rope game.  And in the trust of those cozy moments snuggling in bed at night, she can, with a lump in her throat, admit when it was too hard to do the right thing.  And in that, I understand all the better how God can love me, even more somehow, when I myself am so weak.

And, I can see every once in a while, how our modeling of compassion and the faith that does justice, has somehow rubbed off on our pre-teenage sons.  At first, it felt like we were dragging them along with us as we tried to do service for others.  But over time, after hearing the lectures again and again and being exposed in multiple ways to the injustices around us as well as other Ignatian Associates who have dedicated their lives to service of the poor, being ‘aware of those most in need’ became a fabric of their lives as well.  They now have dear friends among the poor in the slums of foreign countries.  They write school papers on being inspired by Romero.  They naturally include those on the margins in their class.  I know my sons are still challenged by the tensions of wanting to fit in with their friends verses doing the right thing for others like all kids are.  And I have no illusions that my kids are not more than two steps from serious trouble at any time.  They roll their eyes.  Sometimes they ask to stay home. They talk back and have plenty of attitude.  And then again, I realize that for all my Ignatian practicing, I do that too sometimes when I’m just not feeling ready to go where God is calling me.

As I continue to practice this Ignatian parenting, I yearn to find more ways to make the connection.  I would love to hear from others who view their parenthood through this lens.  I know Ignatius wrote his Exercises mostly for single male novices within the Society of Jesus, but given what I’ve been able to apply so far, I’m thinking he would have made a pretty good dad.

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