Home  Inspiration Lent Lent: Week Eight
Context for Prayer: Week 8
Taste and See the Goodness of the Lord
The spiritual tradition that began with St. Ignatius in the 1600s has remained vital down the centuries precisely because it helps ground us in our immediate experience. Ignatius’ respect for the unique way in which God deals with each person, his valuing of the totality of human experience, and the stress he placed on careful attention to our inner world, have allowed generations of Christians to penetrate the personal and cultural overlays that keep us from a felt sense of the sacredness of all reality. His aim was to foster a faith stance that found God “in all things” and elicited a willingness to join in God’s creative work in human history.
Such a vital sense of God’s presence and action in the world has become increasingly rare. The awareness of a universe illumined by transcendent mystery that former generations took for granted is often muddied in our culture of self-preoccupation, excessive pragmatism, and endless distraction. Even within our churches there is widespread unbelief among believers. God is identified with religion and its institutions, a way of life that involves church going, guidance from the Bible, and being nice to each other. Our commitment to this god of religion can run the gamut from fiery passion to a vague nostalgia, but it has little real connection to the God of Jesus Christ. Such a god is more of a moral and intellectual principle than a living person to whom we can relate as friend to friend, lover to lover, child to parent, and from whom we seek final consolation and comfort. Only rarely is God a living, informing, comforting, and challenging God whose reality dwarfs that of our everyday world.
This retreat has tried to present a view of faith rooted in mysticism, i.e. the experience of being
touched by God, however difficult that experience may be to express or image. Rather than being the province of some spiritual elite or confined to the realm of the esoteric and miraculous, the mystical is open to all and found in the ordinary moments of our lives. When we begin to meet reality in an admiring, non-possessive, non-manipulating way, the transcendent mystery of God begins to show through in all things. The beauty of the natural world captivates us and the religious, poetic, romantic, ironic, and humorous dimensions of life come to the fore. We move from wondering how and whether, legitimate as these questions are in themselves, to the wonder of simply being. From that point forward, nothing is ordinary and everything is charged with mystery.
The God Who Labors for Me:
With this shift in awareness comes a deep appreciation for the gift of our lives. Every breath, in fact, is gift. We become conscious of being created, sustained, challenged, and redeemed in each moment by a God who loves us just as we are. Moral demands arise, not from fear driven exterior injunctions, but from the desire for an intimacy that requires an enjoyment of beauty without the urge to possess, manipulate, or assimilate to oneself. We have restored to us that childlike instinct for astonishment and wonder, a deep sense of the sacredness of all things and a new realization of how inextricably bound we are to our world and to one another. With this sense of wonder and gratitude, we are invited to labor with this God who labors for us. Teilhard de Chardin, SJ once remarked that just as Jesus gestated for nine months in his mother’s womb, he now gestates in the womb of the world until all of created reality is presented in Christ to the Father. Our task as disciples is to give ourselves to this process of gestation, open and responsive to the promptings of the Spirit of the Risen Jesus and the invitation to take our part in the divinization of all creation.
Take Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and all my will – all that I have and possess.
You, Lord, have given all that to me.
I now give it back to you, O Lord.
All of it is yours. Dispose of it according to your will.
Give me love of yourself along with your grace.
For that is enough for me.
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Inspiration
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As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same;
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells;
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.
I say more: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—
Christ—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.
—Gerard Manley Hopkins SJ
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