Contemplation of Christ.

If we wish to take part in this Advent and Christmas event,
then we cannot simply be bystanders or onlookers,
as if we were at the theater,
enjoying all the cheerful images.
No, we ourselves are swept up into the action there,
into this conversion of all things.
We have to play our part too on this stage.
For the spectator
is already an actor.
He cannot withdraw.
…we cannot approach his manger
as if it were the cradle of any other child.
Those who wish to come to his manger
find that something is
happening within them.



- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, from The Mystery of Holy Night

An inspired work of art - a painting or a poem - reaches out to us and into us, to question, enlighten, and inspire. A great story draws us into itself and discloses the deeper drama of life. Stories shape us when we recognize part of our own story in them. (Brackley, p. 73)

In the next steps of our journey we turn to consider Jesus, the One who calls us.

But how can we know Jesus? He walked the earth two thousand years ago. Some in our contemporary culture speak of having a "personal relationship with Jesus," but this makes many of us uncomfortable. How do we even begin to have a relationship with this Jesus - let alone walk alongside him as a friend?

One way that Ignatius suggests we might do this is by taking one of the Gospel stories and imagining ourselves inside of it. Find a few quiet moments sometime in your day - like with the Examen from last week. Then, instead of sifting through your thoughts and feelings, enter into the Gospel story and see what you find there.

The Ignatian method suggests several steps to guide this exercise.

+++

Pause in silence before beginning the prayer. Remember that you are loved by God. Imagine this love as the warmth of the sun upon your back.

Ask that God would lead you in the way that God would have you go, that your whole prayer be directed toward the service of God's project.

Imagine the story slowly. Allow it to unfold in your imagination. What do you see? What do you hear? What do you smell? In your mind's eye, look around, and take it all in. As the events of the story unfold, pay special attention to the people. What are they saying? What are they doing? Pause wherever you need to.

Speak to Jesus about what's going on inside you as you watch this scene unfold. What are you doing in the scene? Are you a bystander? Do you relate especially to any of the people or any of the groups of people? Express this all to Jesus. Listen for his response.

Ask Jesus for what you want: to know him better. Remember that the goal of the exercise is not to obtain "answers," but to grow in relationship with Christ.

Close with a prayer of thanksgiving.

+++

There are other ways to think about this kind of prayer if you don't find this language helpful - other examples can be found here or on this site where someone has written out his prayers for you to see them.

Finally, must close by confessing that when I first tried this kind of prayer, it frankly didn't work. I felt nothing at all, and had real trouble entering fully into the story. Even today, I often find myself more confused by Jesus than anything else!

If you share some of these feelings, that's okay. Be honest with God and with yourself. Wait a day or two, and try it again. The important thing is not execute exercises perfectly. The important thing is not even to hear the Invitation perfectly clearly.

The important thing is simply to grow in relationship with Inviter. The important thing is to, like Bonhoeffer, approach the manger and see where it leads us.

And so we pray: Lead us on, Lord, lead us on.

The Reign of God.

In recent years, tens of thousands of people from all over the world have gathered at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and in Mumbai (Bombay), India, to celebrate their conviction that "another world is possible," a world free of mass poverty and environmental degradation, and to explore ways to bring it about. Are they deluded? Can we overcome poverty, violence, and environmental crisis before they overcome us? What do efforts like this have to do with the call and cause of Christ, and what does his message say about their values and prospects? (Brackley, 67)

The Reign of God is a banquet, a party, that all are invited join (Matt 8:11; 22:2; Luke 15:23). But since faith is lacking, God's revolution, which gathers us for that banquet, is slow, painful, under siege. Jesus said that God's Reign was underway in his ministry (see Matt 12:28; Luke 17:21). Already a present reality, it will fully triumph only in the future, even over the grave. "According to his promise we wait for a new sky and a new earth in which justice dwells" (2 Pet. 3:13). All creation longs to share in this liberation and communion (Rom. 8:19 - 21). The Reign of God means new human beings, new communities, a new, transfigured world (Rev. 21:5). That is the cause to which Jesus calls (Brackley, 70).

For some, this way of thinking about the Reign of God - or God's Project, depending on the language you prefer - may be new. It certainly was for me when I first encountered an inkling of it several years ago. Like a bolt of lightning, the idea that God's project was about more than getting us to heaven (and maybe getting us to be polite/pure along the way) opened my eyes and commanded my attention ever after. God's project is about justice? God's project is about making sure everyone has enough? In this world? Not only in some heaven, light years away?

It's a lot to take in - and can be hard to believe in a world trained on skepticism.

In the last few years, though, I've come to discover that there is a whole world of people who know this project of God's well - and they've been participating in it for a long time. From the south side neighborhoods of Chicago to the montañas sureste de México to a groundbreaking Sunday School program put into wonderfully creative practice in the Seattle Lutheran church I'm blessed to serve this year, I've encountered community after community that is living into God's project today.

Even when you catch a glimpse of this project, however, living it isn't always smooth sailing. It's so easy to become discouraged at the temples of injustice still to be torn down, at the banquet tables still to be built, at the slow, slow progress of change. How to we keep going when these start to weigh us down?

Maybe it's by remembering the promise of God's project in all its fullness. In our OT reading this week, God is speaking to Abram in a vision. Implicitly we understand that they are inside - maybe it is a darkened room, and maybe Abram is discouraged. So,

The Lord brought him outside, and said,
"Look toward heaven and count the stars,
if you are able to count them."
Then he said to him,
"So shall your descendants be."
And he believed the Lord;
and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.

May it be so for us, too.

The Call.

In the First Week we reflected on "Getting Free." We now turn to consider what are freed for in "Something Worth Living For."

Between the First and Second Weeks of the Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius inserts the exercise traditionally called the Kingdom Meditation. In this exercise, retreatants consider the call Christ makes to everyone to collaborate with God's work in the world. This exercise prepares them to hear that call in the future and to consider now, beforehand, what a fitting response might be. (Brackley, p. 60)

A few Sundays ago we heard several readings about Calls: the call of Isaiah in a terrifying throne room, the call of Paul the persecutor, the call from Jesus to Peter and the first disciples. Today's chapter from Brackley invites us flesh out our idea of the Call. (In place of "Call," we might also use the word "Invitation," a sense suggested by the Greek word used in the New Testament.)

The aim of the exercise is not to experience the invitation during the exercise itself but to prepare for it (61).

The first thing Ignatius surprises us with is that before we hear a Call or Invitation we prepare. We are not necessarily expecting to hear a divine Call/Invitation this week - or this season of Lent - for we cannot control when such things happen, after all. Rather, we want to put ourselves in such a state of mind that when the Call/Invitation does come we will respond in the best possible way.

How do we do this? Personal spiritual exercises like our Examen from last week are part of the story, to be sure, but there is more to it than that. Our journey, after all, is not simply an intellectual exercise that we can pursue on our own, by ourselves, in a little room somewhere. Brackley suggests that we must be with people among whom such a call can emerge.

We discover our callings in response to the world. Mothers and fathers discover theirs in response to their children. Couples call forth from each other their vocation of spouse and lover. Martin Luther King discovered his prophetic calling during the Montgomery bus boycott. Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Nazi Germany and Dorothy Day in Depression-era New York grew into their vocations in response to their turbulent surroundings. Our surroundings shake us, sift us, and draw our vocation from us.

A lot depends on where we place ourselves. If King had spent his youth hanging out by the pool, would we remember him today? The crucified people are a privileged place for hearing the call to service. They provoke the crucial question: What will we do to take them down from their crosses?

Faith recognizes the call to love and serve as the voice of Christ. Christ invites people of every time and place to participate in the Reign of God (59).

I find this idea particularly striking as we are preparing to hear a Gospel story on Sunday about Jesus' desire to gather us together as a hen gathers her chicks. (And, I should mention, as we prepare to study the Gathering part of our worship during Adult Forum this Sunday.) Must we be gathered together by God in order to hear our calling in the world? Must we be gathered together in the way God gathers - without regard for class or race or even personal creed? Is this a crucial part of the way toward the life God intends for us?

And if so, it presents us with all sorts of other counter-cultural implications. Becoming part of a community is not something that happens overnight. It happens over time. And if becoming part of a community happens over time, maybe hearing our Call, our Invitation from God doesn't happen in one "a-ha!" moment, but maybe it happens over time, too.

Gather us together, Lord, and prepare us to hear your Invitations in the ever-changing contours of our lives. Amen.

Rules for Discernment.

Yesterday we began thinking of ourselves as being on the road, but unsure of how to proceed on our journey. We are freed, yes, but... now what?

We began with one tool, the Ignatian Examen, a way of thinking through - on a daily or regular basis - where we have been and where we are. Today we add a second tool: the categories of consolation and desolation. We'll add both tools to our packs as part of a kind of Ten Essentials for the journey ahead.

In The Call to Discernment, our journeying companion Dean Brackley describes a variety of feelings we experience, some of them on a daily basis, some of them at various high or low points in our lives (44-45).

Everyday challenges can trigger the fear and discouragement that derail wise choices. Having to confront a difficult person can leave us dispirited. Gross evil - violence, greed, mendacity, intractable injustice - can make us feel overwhelmed. Failure can make us want to throw in the towel. Six months into married life a spouse can get a sinking feeling and start to wonder, What did I get myself into?

In cases like these, how much do our feelings accurately reflect our situation? Can we trust them as a reliable guide for making decisions, especially since ideas-for-action frequently arise from such emotional states?

On the other hand, life-reform also awakens joy, excitement, and a sense of freedom. A film like Gandhi or a religious service can stir up a deep desire to spend our lives in service. A conversation with a prayerful person can stimulate enthusiasm about learning to pray, or to pray better. If I've been down on myself, feeling guilty for some past action, somebody might affirm me and remind of God's forgiveness, leaving me feeling like I've just awakened from a bad dream.

[Ignatius encourages us to begin] understanding and responding to emotional states like those just described, which he calls "consolation" and "desolation." These are not just any emotions on the periphery of experience, such as pain from an illness or pleasure from a great piece of music. They are stirrings and moods, states and affective currents which affect us globally and endow ordinary emotions with a distinctive tone. That is because they have come from so deep within us that they seem, paradoxically, to have their origin beyond us.

There are other terms we might use for "consolation" and "desolation." We might think of "consolation" as including feelings like hope, faith, and love and desolation as including despair. In other language, we might think of consolation as feeling full of gratitude for and enthusiasm about our assets, while desolation is feeling full of discouragement about our needs and shortcomings.

To identify experiences of consolation, we might ask ourselves questions like the following:

When did I feel most alive today?

When today did I give and receive the most love?

When today did I have the greatest sense of belonging to myself, others, God, and the universe?

What was today's high point?

For what am I most grateful today?

To identify experiences of desolation, we might ask ourselves questions like

When today did I most feel life draining out of me?

When today did I give and receive the least love?

When today did I have the least sense of belonging?

What was today's low point?

For what am I least grateful today?

It is especially important to recognize that consolation is not simply about feeling "happy" or "optimistic." You might well feel, for example, a sense of belonging in the midst of personal loss or grief at the injustice of the world. In the same way, desolation is not simply about feeling "sad" or "pessimistic." You might well feel a momentary pleasure or a cheap thrill as you seek to patch over a deeper emptiness you might be feeling (read again the words of Barbara Brown Taylor that open our post from last Friday).

It also important to recognize that consolation and desolation are not simply individualistic feelings. Communities, neighborhoods, congregations, families, couples - any group of people in some form of common life together can go through times overflowing with joyful consolation or dominated by life-sapping desolation.

And, as Brackley is quick to point out, consolation is most commonly accompanied by an urge to serve others, to be facing outside of ourselves rather than turned in on ourselves - incurvatus in se, as Martin Luther put it. We also, he writes, feel consolation when we grieve for the sufferings of Christ, or for the crucified of today(49). While we may not feel "happy" about injustice, we may find ourselves drawing near toward others, and toward community with our brothers and sisters in Christ - especially toward our brothers and sisters who are suffering as Christ did - and this movement toward others is, after all, moving us toward the life God intends for us.

There are other descriptions of consolation and desolation that you can seek out if you would like to explore this tool for navigation further. And with that, we place our tools in our pack and turn to face the next stage in our journey, which we will begin on Friday.

Reform of Life.

Well, we've confessed and we've been forgiven. We've been baptized into the wet waters of new life! Nothing but roses from here on out, right?

Of course we know better. Life is messy - and sometimes it can feel like we are beset on all sides by its messiness. As Pastor Carol put it in her sermon on Sunday, we are baptized, yes, but before our wet heads have dried we are beset with questions, choices, a million little forks in the road, each of which has the potential to pull us down paths we should not go, away from the full and vibrant life God intends for us.

Jesus knew this problem well. Luke tells us in our Gospel reading from Sunday that Jesus was full of the Holy Spirit when he was led by the Holy Spirit away from the baptismal waters of the Jordan River to go hungry and be tempted again and again.

Jesus knew that navigating the waters of the baptismal life is not always easy. As Dean Brackley puts it (44),

[The baptismal life] involves struggle. It stirs deep sentiments in us. As we commit to change [or to living out our baptismal covenant], we experience two kinds of feelings at a deep level: on the one hand, discouragement and strong desires to backtrack; on the other, enthusiasm, hope, and joy at the prospect of a new way of life.

How are we to navigate these currents, moving as they are in different directions?

Sometimes we use tools to navigate our way. Sometimes these tools don't tell us so much exactly where to go so much as they tell us where we have been and where we are - and sometimes knowing that much helps a great deal in figuring out where to go next.

One tool that Ignatius used and handed down to his followers was called the Examen. In the Examen, as Brackley puts it,

Ignatius... invites us to recall how God and many creatures gave us life and sustenance, as we were acting selfishly. This exercise produces gratitude and enthusiasm for the future. It also gives us a more mature appreciation of sin as ingratitude and betrayal. (40)

In that way, the experience reshapes our likes and dislikes, our will and our thoughts. Engaging that reality draws us out of ourselves and even moves our hands and feet to act. Sitting with reality, allowing it to work on us, working through the feelings and the thoughts it stirs is what we mean by contemplation. Contemplation arises naturally out of our need to be in touch with reality in its rich complexity. Contemplation in this sense is the opposite of flight from reality. Rightly understood, spirituality is the opposite of escaping from reality. We encounter Ultimate Reality not by leaving the world, but by plunging into it, as Jesus did. (22)

I invite you to take a few moments today to try this exercise. You can find a step-by-step guide to the Ignatian Examen here. You might consider printing out, if looking at a computer screen makes it difficult to focus.

Then, look back over a day - or a week, or a month, or a year, or even (as Ignatius suggested) an hour - and examine it in the way Ignatius suggests. This could take as little as 20 minutes.

I pray God's presence be with you in your prayers and examinations.

Forgiveness.

(image © daniel w. erlander www.danielerlander.com)

On Saturday I read the chapter on The Reality of Evil, and reflected on the first half of our rite of Confession and Forgiveness - the first half being the part where we confess. Sometimes this is the only part we remember - as if we begin our worship services simply with "Confession" and then continue with the service feeling vaguely bad about ourselves. But the rite in our cranberry hymnal is called Confession and Forgiveness for a reason.

And the Forgiveness part is truly shocking. Take the Reality of Evil, in its personal and global/systemic forms. Realize how overwhelming it is - take a moment to let it sink in.

Then realize that God's love is BIGGER than all the evil in the world, than all the evil we could have possibly done. This is hard to believe, but it is the amazing truth we proclaim in the second half of Confession and Forgiveness! And it is an amazing truth, truly. With a Love like that washing over us - over the whole world - we shall indeed overcome.

(Side note for Lutherans: This may be why Martin Luther almost considered Confession and Forgiveness the third sacrament - a means of grace on par with Baptism and Eucharist! He ultimately decided that Confession and Forgiveness was really the really the rite of Baptism without the water - and the water, for Luther, was important. This is why we alternate at the beginning of our Sunday liturgy, depending on the season, "Confession and Forgiveness" with "Affirmation of Baptism.")

In his chapter on Forgiveness, Brackley suggests something about Confession and Forgiveness that continues to stick with me.

First he suggests that it comes not just through churchly rites but through other people. God's forgiveness is "channeled by people who accept and forgive us in their own human way" (34). We might know this from personal experiences in our lives where a relationship has been restored after forgiveness took place.

But then he suggests that the same thing could be true on a global scale! What I mean here - and what I think Brackley means here - is not a matter of governments making carefully-worded public apologies for past misdeeds. Rather, what I think he is getting at is this (35):

Plenty of people suffer terrible injustice closer to home, in all our countries: abused women and children, oppressed minorities, homeless people, immigrants. Engaging them puts us in touch with the world, with ourselves, and with divine mercy.

Brackley goes so far as to suggest that this engagement, this restoration of relationship with the poor and the marginalized is the very "sacrament" of Confession and Forgiveness happening not in the church but out in the world. He writes (34):

It seems that God has chosen people like them as ambassadors of grace for people like me.

Then he lists others who have come to know this truth: Dorothy Day, Mohandas Gandhi, Che Guevara, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, Simone Veil, Oscar Romero... perhaps you know of others. Perhaps you have come to know this truth yourself.

It is the truth that makes the words from Sunday real.

God, who is rich in mercy, loved us
even when we were dead in sin,
and made us alive
together with Christ.
By grace you have been saved.
In the name of Jesus Christ,
your sins are forgiven.
Almighty God
strengthen you with power
through the Holy Spirit,
that Christ may live in your hearts
through faith.

Amen.

The Reality of Evil.

Ignatius stresses coming to terms with evil, including our own, in view of God's healing and liberating forgiveness (Brackley, p. 21).

On Ash Wednesday, between the sermon and the marking of ashes on foreheads, we confess our sin with a lengthy litany - much longer than the confessions with which we sometimes open our Sunday worship. This extensive confession suggests that Ash Wednesday is not only about coming to terms with our own mortality - "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return" - but that it is also about coming to terms with our sin, our participation in the evil of the world. It is as if we begin Lent by facing up to the reality of evil.

I have sometimes heard churchgoers wonder, with good reason, about the worship-opening Confession and Forgiveness. Why, after all, should we confess to deeds we have not personally done?

And I imagine this is especially true on Ash Wednesday. In our confessional litany, we declared "Our neglect of human need and suffering, and our indifference to injustice and cruelty, we confess to you." I must confess that I felt especially weird saying this one in our congregation. After all, with our soup kitchen and nightly SHARE shelter, with our support of various social ministries in and outside of the church, we do attend to human need and suffering, and we are not indifferent to injustice and cruelty! Why should we confess to such a thing?

The reason, I think, is that we are confessing not only as individuals but as a people. We confess as the specific group of people gathered in the pews that day, we confess as the whole church gathered across space and time, and we confess on behalf of the entire human race to our shared creator. We have sinned as a people, and we confess as a people.

It is when we step back and take this wide-angle view that we begin to see the true reality of evil. It is a reality that is illustrated well, I think, by the Dan Erlander image at the top of today's post (scroll up to see it again), and by the words our companion Brackley writes on page 26:

We have organized a world that that excludes billions from the banquet table and the decision table.

It is a moral problem, the great sin of our time. We rarely think of sin in these terms. We usually apply that label first to personal actions - theft, adultery, lying, homicide - and then, analogously, to original sin, habitual sin (vice), and, perhaps, structural sin...

[But] the New Testament locates them in a wider context, as part of the "sin of the world" (John 1:29). Sin is a large-scale enterprise, a kind of "anti-reign" opposed to the Reign (or Kingdom) of God (see 1 John 5:19; Luke 4:5-6). Sin "reigns" (see Rom. 5-7) in individuals and also in relationships and institutions. Personal sin is a participation in the anti-reign.

And we participate in this anti-reign every day. Even we, who have made impressive changes in our lives, even we, who are a part of a community that has its sights set on a more just and sustainable society, even we participate in this anti-reign, for we are inextricably wrapped up in a structure of society that is horrifyingly death-dealing. It is nothing short of evil.

And so we say:

Let us confess our sin in the presence of God and of one another.

Loving God, show us our sin. Give us knowledge of the part we play in the systems of injustice. Do not let us brush it aside or pretend it is less than it is, lest we live into a lie and not into the truth which you intend for us. Be our way, our truth, our life, and set us free. Amen.

Free to Love.

That hollowness we sometimes feel
is not a sign of something gone wrong.
It is the holy of holies inside of us,
the uncluttered throne room of the Lord our God.
Nothing on earth can fill it,
but that does not stop us from trying.
Whenever we start feeling too empty inside,
we stick our pacifiers into our mouths
and suck for all we are worth.
They do not nourish us, but at least they plug the hole.

- Barbara Brown Taylor, from "Settling for Less"

These words from Barbara Brown Taylor remind me of Pastor Carol's sermon for Ash Wednesday, in which she invited us to a little "spring cleaning" of our souls.

In our spring cleaning, we might pull everything out into the open, so that we can see what we're dealing with. Then we might sort through all of the things that we have collected. Are there things - fears, desires, habits, ideas - we are carrying around in ourselves that have outlived their usefulness, and that we no longer need? Have some of these things now even come to be a burden on us, weighing us down or blocking our path? Are there things that are just, in Barbara Brown Taylor's words, just "pacifiers" serving to "plug the hole" rather than nourish us for the fullest life God intends for us? What shall we get rid of this year? What shall we leave behind?

At the beginning of Ignatius' Spiritual Exercises stands an introduction he calls "The Foundation." Like a guide preparing us for the adventure we are about to undertake, the Foundation encourages us to shake ourselves free of attachments to things that might hinder us, that might trip us up, that might block our path on our journey with Jesus.

The Foundation, writes Brackley (p. 10), speaks to the heart of life's drama. It is about getting free to love.

This Sunday we will hear the story of Jesus' temptation. We will hear the story of Jesus preparing for his own journey - yes, Jesus, too, had to prepare! Different pacifiers are laid at his feet; each one he leaves behind. We are not told whether this was easy or hard for him. We are only told that we was human, and that like us, Jesus, too, had to get free in order to love.

Spirituality for Solidarity.

If you have a high-speed internet connection, I invite you to watch at least the first minute of this video. In it, a British TV host puzzles over the mysterious black smudge on VP Joe Biden's forehead - a smudge people around the world received yesterday for Ash Wednesday.

The TV host is now receiving a royal ribbing in the British press, but we shouldn't be too hard on her. The black smudge is strange, after all.

I was reminded of this myself yesterday when we had several visitors from the neighborhood join us at St John United for our Ash Wednesday services. These visitors don't normally attend our Sunday services - though a few have visited on occasion. But for some reason, Ash Wednesday drew them in.

As I left worship that evening, I puzzled over this. Who knows what stories led them here? Maybe they grew up in a Christian faith, and remembered Ash Wednesday from their youth. Maybe they still found certain Christian rituals powerful, even if they'd left other rituals behind. Maybe they just work on Sundays, and were happy for a weeknight service to join our community at worship. Or maybe their stories are complicated and complex, multi-facted and mysterious: hard to pin down. Maybe they are just like us.

What is it that draws us - all of us - into these strange rituals?

Dean Brackley writes that (p.8)

...our lives are too rich for... ordinary common-sense discourse to encompass. If the holy Mystery called God pervades our lives, as I believe it does, then we need religious symbols to point to reality as it actually is. Without that language, we sell our experience short.

I imagine that, since you have found this blog, you probably agree, to some degree, at least.

And yet you likely also know that stepping into those symbols, approaching the holy Mystery called God through ancient rituals, annual or weekly, can be a dangerous thing. You never know where it will lead you. It might even lead you back out into the world.

Brackley writes:

We are more aware today of the social and institutional dimensions of our lives. Christians are more aware of the social implications of their vocation and the mission of the church. We are all more conscious of the scope of misery in the world, of the institutional mechanisms of injustice, and of the global dimension of our moral drama. Responding to massive injustice according to each one's calling is the price of being human, and Christian, today. Those looking for a privatized spirituality to shelter them from a violent world have come to the wrong place.

Can these rituals do this, too? Can they lead us ever deeper, not only into ourselves but into the world, into a relationship of serious solidarity with our suffering sisters and brothers, in our neighborhood and in the farthest reaches of the globe? Can a smudge of ashes on a forehead be a part of this?

We can only hope.

For a variety of reasons we come, looking for a variety of things. May God gather us up - our questions, our fears, our dreams, our hopes - and guide us out again. Amen.

Meet Ignatius.

In 1517, a young German professor nailed 95 theses to the door of his neighborhood church. He was beginning to rethink his relationship with Jesus Christ, and he was eager to share his findings with others.

He wasn't the only one.

A little over a thousand miles away, in a northeastern corner of Spain, Ignacio Lopez was hit by a cannonball. It broke one of his legs and badly injured the other, and we was sent home to Loyola to recover.

For the next several months, Ignacio found himself with little to do but read. And so he did. He worked his way through a commentary on the life of Christ that encouraged the reader to imagine herself inside the Biblical stories. Ignacio tried it. He was never the same.

Ignacio spent the rest of his life developing and promoting a series of "spiritual exercises" based on the ones he had read about. He found companions along the way, and eventually formed the Society of Jesus, more commonly known as the Jesuits, who at the very least provide us with some pretty fantastic universities today.

Of course, we are Lutherans. In addition to knowing more about that German fellow than about Ignatius, we also carry around some hard-won principles about magical recipes for getting right with God.

God comes to us! we say. Not the other way around. We don't need to do some spiritual Stairmaster to find our way to some mountaintop Jesus.

Indeed. God loved us first, and washed us in a holy bath to a new life in Christ. God has freed us, freed us to: Live among God's faithful people! Hear the word of God and share in the Lord's supper! Proclaim the good news of God in Christ through word and deed! Serve all people, following the example of Jesus! Strive for justice and peace in all the earth! New life! Amen!

And yet, and yet. As each of us knows all too well, life is complicated. It is full of ups and downs, rainy seasons and dry seasons. We get distracted and discouraged. Our energies run low, and we find ourselves a little less able and a little less willing to follow Jesus out of the gracious waters and into the new life, the new season, the new day to which he is calling us.

I think Ignacio's spiritual exercises can help us with this. They can help us deepen our inner wells, filled by God's stream as they are, and stoke our inner flames, lit by the Holy Spirit as they are.

Of course, if we are to deepen our "inner" lives, we must be careful not to let our "outer" lives dry up. We must not become navel-gazers. We must be sure we our spiritual exercises are part and parcel of the new life are living day by day, a life for the life of the world. To this end I have found it useful to adopt a particular angle on the spiritual exercises best articulated by Ignatian scholar Dean Brackley in his book The Call to Discernment in Troubled Times: New Perspectives on the Transformative Wisdom of Ignatius of Loyola.

Brackley is a Jesuit priest and professor who served in Manhattan and the Bronx before volunteering to take the place of one of six assassinated Jesuits in El Salvador in 1989. He had a middle-class upbringing in upstate New York, had a spiritual crisis that fractured the faith he was raised on, and finally found renewed hope by deepening his relationship with Jesus Christ through the exercises of Ignatius. But he did not do his exercises while hidden away from the world.

He writes (2-3):

[The Exercises] helped me notice that when I drew near to suffering I experienced a sense of solidity and some relief. Letting the drama of life and death break through my defenses - the drama of down-and-out adults and youth at risk in Lower Manhattan where I lived and worked - helped me gather together my scattered self. It did me good to get close to these people. Since then, that kind of experience has continued to nourish me. The crucified people of today lead us to the center of things. Eventually they helped me rediscover Christianity. Through those difficult years and ever since, the Ignatian path, Ignatian spirituality, has been crucial for finding my way.

Like Luther and like Ignacio, Brackley is unable to keep these experiences to himself. He hopes to share what he has found with us, that in Christ we might find new life for the life of the world.

He writes (p. 8-9):

With major institutions in crisis, we find it hard to say where the world is headed. Some believe this affords groups of deeply committed people a better chance to shape the future than they would have under more stable, less fluid conditions: an encouraging way to think about this state of uncertainty. In any event, we urgently need a critical mass of such people to make this century the century of solidarity and turn the swelling tide of misery, violence, and environmental crisis.

The good news (gospel) assures us that it makes sense to struggle against the odds and to celebrate along the way. I do believe, as the song says, that we shall overcome some day. I hope these reflections will stoke the inner flame of generous readers and provide them with resources to help bring that day closer.

It is my hope that our shared reflections on the themes of this book might deepen the wells of grace that sustain us - over a season, over a year, over a lifetime - for our daily work in God's world. It is my hope that they might challenge us to go deeper into the world that surrounds us, with all of its pain and all of its beauty. And it is my hope that they might deepen our understanding of the mystery of Christ, and of his journey to the cross and beyond.

May God bless and keep us on our journey throughout these forty days.