This Ignatian Life

For the next four months our family is living in San Salvador while my husband is on sabbatical and writing a book on Rutilio Grande, the first Jesuit killed here during the civil war of the 70’s and 80’s. We were eager to expose our kids to not only another culture, but also the realities of the developing world. We are inspired to work and pray on the same hallowed ground as the Jesuit and Church women martyrs. And we are so blessed to have the time as a family away from the busyness of life in the States, to reflect upon how we live this Ignatian life.I was asked yesterday what I missed the most? What’s the hardest part of trying to live and raise a family in a way that doesn’t exactly fit the American norm? My mind shot to the laundry list of items we had sent down from US grocery stores—chocolate chips, candy corns, books in English just to name a few. But living without the comforts of home really isn’t that challenging to the soul. How about facing daily the dangers of life in the developing world like blatantly unsafe conditions, vicious crime, or the constant threat of disease? In all honesty, those really don’t affect me that much. I have the ability with my credit card to be freed of many of the hazards of life that so many around me suffer daily. In truth, living abroad, even in a developing country, is very do-able these days. But in reflecting upon the question, I realized the most difficult part of living this Ignatian Life, of being as they say “ruined” by God, was the same here as in the States, as in Africa, as it would be anywhere on Earth; The hardest part is trying to find or build the community of others who ‘get it.’

Being “ruined” tends to mean we no longer fit in fully anywhere. We don’t fit in with the elite of the country with whom our children attend school, some of whom have an open disdain for the poor. We don’t fully fit in with the campesinos who show us so much hospitality even though we in no way share the daily grind of their lives on dirt floors under tin roofs working for $6 a day. So we long for a community of our own which shares our spirituality, helps us to find the face of God in the suffering, and inspires us to live the faith that does justice. Trying to do that on your own is like constantly swimming upstream against the current of materialism, fear, and self-interest.

While I know Ignatian spirituality is designed to discern individual calling, I also know that Ignatius and his companions relied on each other for the strength to live that unique calling. By far, the greatest gift of our experience in El Salvador has been the open companionship of the Jesuits and others from the Jesuit world with whom we find ourselves traveling this road. To be so far from home and yet instantly have a bond with another person you have never met before, not because they speak your verbal language but your spiritual language, to meet that person is to come home to a place you’ve never been before. Our Jesuit companions both at home and here have welcomed and supported us with open arms. As a lay woman I have such consolation to feel so “included” in this network that spans the Earth. But, at the same time, we are not fully a part of the Jesuit community either. They have their own residences and support systems and do not face the same struggles in raising children or sustaining marriage that we do.

And so what I came to realize in discerning what is the hardest part of living this faith as a lay family here (or anywhere) is ….finding you. You reading this blog. You who seeks with me to understand and live this Ignatian life. You, whom I’ve most likely never met, but know we together are called to live differently in this world. Finding you, knowing you are out there, being connected to and sustained by your faith and acts of justice, that is the greatest challenge of this Ignatian life for me.

So to whomever you are reading this blog, taking the time to once in a while reflect and discern what it means to know Jesus in this way, know this: I need you. I miss you! Life without you on this Earth would be pure desolation. But just knowing you are out there walking the walk too, empowers me to walk it as well. I just need to know there are others who live in this tension with me and that there is “somewhere” that I truly fit in. I know it is not a physical place we share, but in knowing itself.

Photo: “Group Hug” by snarlenarle from Flickr (Used under Creative Commons license)

The darkened room is lit only by the blue hue from the computer screenof my lap top. Three feet away from me lies my 80 year-old father in his hospital bed, wheezing for breath, reaching for hallucinated objects, babbling incomprehensibly. And I try to make sense of this beginning of the end for my dad.

I struggle to understand what could be the purpose in such an ending to this life, to spend weeks if not months or years in deluded or vegetative states. As I watch my father change from being a jovial retired fighter pilot to an atrophying nursing home resident, I can only make sense of it all through the lens of my faith in something greater than us and the experience of Love.

A friend asked me tonight, “If we all believe so strongly in an afterlife of pain free and joyful salvation, why do we do everything we possibly can to avoid it?! Good question. Could it be we fear more than we believe?

Ignatius offers me another way to look at this moment. “Above all, we seek to place ourselves with God’s Son so that in all ways we seek to respond to that Love that first created us.” To place ourselves with God’s Son. That more than anything is where I want my dad right now. I desire neither his death nor his recuperation (neither sickness nor health) for I honestly don’t know what would be ‘better” for him at this point. But I do have a certainty that above all at this middle of the night moment what my dad needs more than anything is the calming grace of being in the presence of the Son of the One, one who knows exactly how it feels to be human and facing death and one who will walk that journey with him.

Even more appropriately at this time, I try to discern the implications of this moment for me. To place myself with God’s Son so in all ways I seek to respond to that Love that created me. God gave life to me, gave an essence to me, through this man gasping at my side. My connection to him is overwhelming. If his essence is no longer to be present in my life, if I will no longer hear his great stories of flying adventures or hear that knowing phone ring during half-time of the Notre Dame football games, I will still know Love because of him. I look at this moment while being in the presence of Christ and respond in love, confidently, by letting him go if need be, by comforting him for the time he remains, by not angsting or prolonging or regretting, by breathing deep and being fully present to this moment, by fluffing the pillows one more time, and calming the jittery hands with a gentle touch and raising the paper cup of water to his parched lips yet again. Mine is not a cup of sorrow to be begrudgingly swallowed that I must endure this, but a chalice of life that gives me the patience and energy to choose to sit at his side for yet another night, knowing we are both at this moment sitting with God’s Son.

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.