This Ignatian Life

I’ve been quite impatient lately. Well, let me restate that: I’m a perpetually impatient person who has been feeling a particularly severe pull towards impatience lately.  These last few weeks I’ve been impatient for spring break to arrive, and then Easter, and then the summer, and then another year.  Another year when I will be stronger, more disciplined, more diligent, more prepared, more focused.  Impatient for settledness. Impatient for meaning. Impatient for healing. I’m always waiting for that time to arrive…But someone in my life recently reminded me that we can only live in the moment.  Trite and cliche, I know.  Something I’ve heard countless times.  But the way she said it to me struck me profoundly, because she reminded me that each moment I spend “living” in the future is a moment I’ve failed to experience the now.  I cannot live in some imagined time when things will be better. I think in the fatigue and anxiety that seems to be plaguing me lately, I particularly need to be reminded to be in the present.  In that spirit, I will share a prayer that I recently rediscovered that I think is apt as I commit myself to living in the present, particularly during this Lenten season, when it is so very easy to grow tired of the waiting.Above all, trust in the slow work of GodWe are quite naturally impatient in everythingto reach the end without delay.We should like to skip the intermediate stages.We are impatient of being on the way to somethingunknown, something new.And yet it is the law of all progressthat it is made by passing throughsome 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 circumstancesacting on your own good will)will make of you tomorrow.Only God could say what this new spiritgradually forming you will be.Give Our Lord the benefit of believingthat his hand is leading you,and accept the anxiety of feeling yourselfin suspense and incomplete.Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ(printed in Hearts on Fire: Praying with Jesuits, Ed. Michael Harter, SJ, The Institute of Jesuit Sources, St. Louis, 1993)
Photo: “Impatience“by mdezemery from Flickr (Used under Creative Commons license)

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