This Ignatian Life

My landlord invited my roommate and I to leave our apartment this month to do some renovations on the roof, bathroom and ceiling.  At the end of another dizzying school year this seemed like the perfect time for a vacation, yet the shoestring budget of a NYC Catholic school teacher wouldn’t allow much wiggle room for fleeing.  Needing the extra money that summertime tutoring brings and maybe a cake gig or two, I knew I wouldn’t really be able to go far.  Instead, I packed my bags, several books, and my computer and prepared to live a little bit here, a little bit there, visiting friends and doing a little bit of soul renovating along the way.

The first few days of renovation (a.k.a. my displacement) were spent finishing work from the school year–typing Word documents at the speed of light, updating curriculum, preparing reports on struggling students, etc.  I have to commend myself— I was pretty darn productive.  And then the work finished itself up and I was left staring into the tabula rasa that is summer ’10.  This is where the trouble began.  The lack of structure, certainty and purpose in my days was terrifying.  With the predictability and routine of my work environment and my home environment now gone…I too felt gone, lost and unsupported.  My confident, determined, and usually task-driven self all of a sudden felt without purpose.  Why so glum, I thought, when this is SUMMER and well-deserved relaxation should be a welcomed prospect?  The type-A in myself decided to sleep-it-off and wake up in the morning with a concrete list of tasks to put me back on track—go for a walk, do some laundry, call a friend in Omaha, read 2 chapters of a book, bake a pie.  Notice that nowhere along the way did I stop and turn to God…nope, I was the task master.

Go for a walk—check

Laundry—check

Phone call—check

Pie—check

Book— check, and…stop.

The book I picked up was Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet.  I have read through it several times—sometimes slowly mulling over Rilke’s advice and other times racing through the text on a face-paced commute simply to “kill time.”  No matter when read or in what style, Rilke’s message always feels fresh and new.  There’s always something different I am left with at the end of a simple leaf-through.  This time around, it was his advice on writing that stuck with me and his advice on avoiding look OUT to somehow prove one’s worth WITHIN:

“You are looking outside, and that is what you should most avoid right now.

No one can advise or help you – no one.  There is only one thing you should do.  Go into yourself.  Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.  This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write?  Dig into yourself for a deep answer.  And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple “I must,” then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your while life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse.”

Reading Rilke’s words struck an accord with my schedule-driven frenzy.  What if, just what if, the answer to rest, relaxation and a return to independence laid WITHIN?!  I could literally hear God whispering “duh” in my ear and repeating Rilke’s words as:

“… ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I PRAY?”

Looking within, slowing down, turning to prayer, turning to writing…the middle of my 10-day renovation vacation has led me to the beach.  No more lists for the time being—more Rilke, a little E.L. Doctorow, and embracing the WITHIN.

You can have hundreds of acquaintances, dozens of friends, one spouse or best friend, but, no matter how loving, no matter how close or supportive they all may be, while they may show you the love of God, and the Spirit of God lives within them, they are not God.

And I am left alone.  But somehow not lonely.

Ultimately, at some point, for all of us, it comes down to just being…

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alone….

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with God.

We may fill our days with many to-do’s, even to-do’s that refer to God, talking about God, reading about God, advancing the Kingdom of God.  But too often those take the place of what our souls truly seek:  to be One with God.  To be with God.  That’s where I am called to be right now.  Come with me?

Photo: “Solitude” by Dude Crush from Flickr (Used under Creative Commons license)

Watching the political race now under way, I see more and more propaganda filling the commercial spots on TV.  I often hear young people regurgitating the arguments of their heroic candidates, half-baked arguments that are nothing more than fear and vitriol wrapped in patriot’s flags.  How is it that people can get away with bending truths, twisting stories and outright lying on national television?  Too busy first with work and families, and then with other more frivolous obligations, we get distracted. We are barraged by images and sound-bytes, but nothing resembling a strong argument is provided.  Thus, rather than choosing carefully what we feed our minds, many of us pick over processed bits and pieces from the smorgasbord presented by various fast-news franchises.  Perhaps if we were to find a variety of places to get our substance from, we might assemble something like a balanced opinion, but many of us do not have either the time or the inclination for this type of piece-meal observation.  We simply allow ourselves to be told what to feel and try to avoid thinking about the situation altogether.

We want to find a reason to explain the situation we find ourselves in.  We begin with goodwill, as we reminisce about the good times and explain how we lost everything because of politician X.  We look to our leaders to return us to the way things were, when there was prosperity along with values and morals!  What we really mean is that, when the economy was good, we lived in a world where we could ignore scandal, but now that things are more difficult we find more reason to get outraged.  The thing is, evil did not just arrive.  We find fault in others because we can no longer ignore the consequences of our actions and cannot bear to accept the blame ourselves.

I once had an exchange with a good friend that nearly ended our relationship.  I am sure my friend would give another story and, in truth, I am not naïve enough to believe that either of us was wholly innocent.  What gets me, though, is that, through it all, the presence of darkness was so near.  I loved this person and wanted the good.  Still, after a number of interactions, I felt betrayed.  When witnessing the failure of my hopes I began to question my motives, emotions, needs, and everything else that it was possible to scrutinize.  Even after self-searching and “owning my part,” I felt pain.  I wanted someone or something to blame and I sought out the fault in the other.  As I found my friend’s true sin, I began waiting for an apology.  With this waiting my own heart began to darken, throwing the truth into shadow.  Before long I went from seeing the goodness present in all things to focusing on the evils present in the shadows and hidden folds.  In my search to find the reasons to blame, I became unable to forgive the wrongs that I perceived.  The more I saw, the more anger I felt, and the more I found myself confused by whether or not the goodness of God was truly part of the picture.

Who is your enemy?  Conservative Oilmen?  Liberal Media Moguls?  Whoever it is, the baseline is the same: we are all afraid of getting attacked and losing what we have.  We want to believe that we are doing the right thing, but we also want comfort.  When we look to the world, we realize that at this point in history, it might be difficult to get both.  So, we blame the administration and we vilify the media.  We blame politicians and find fault with corporations.  While all of these groups bear a significant amount of blame for the deterioration of our infrastructure and the erosion of basic trust that has occurred in the last couple of decades, we cannot overlook the simple fact that we, my fellow Americans, are equally to blame.  By prolonging this war, we have agreed to the murder of thirty times the number of civilians in Iraq as died in the twin towers.  We say we “support our troops” even when we have lost the same amount of American soldiers as died in the Trade Centers (and seen 10 times that number wounded), and done nothing to provide for the psychological well-being of these men and women when they return.  We promote environmental practices that cause irreparable damage to our country’s natural resources in hopes of finding a small amount of oil.  We kill our unborn, and then we ignore cuts in health-care and education, the very things that are intended to create physical and intellectual growth in those kids who live.  I find it difficult to imagine that anyone who supports a culture of life, when he or she stops to think, is really in support of any of this.  Yet it is our country that supports these things.  We make this OK.

Where are the small still voices that ground us?  Have we been warped by our own desire to point out the sin in others?  In the process of rooting out evil so that we have someone to blame, are we becoming the very thing that we profess to despise?  I sometimes think that, before long, we might realize we have become the enemy that we profess some other parts of the world to be.  Have we lost the capacity to believe in the goodness of others?  Where is our willingness to actively, and also gently, pursue positive ends rather than filling the sky with hot air or simply sitting by as we watch the world slip violently toward some scorched-sky future that we believe is inevitable?  What happened to our willingness to pursue change and fight for something we believed to be good?  Is there a solution that makes sense, or have sound bites impeded our capacity to devise a reasonable solution?  Are we able to navigate our personal emotions and still find the good, or has our emotional, white noise drowned out the voice of God?

Photo: “Quiet Exclamation” by thorinside from Flickr (Used under Creative Commons license)