As the years pass, I have come to believe even more something I heard from older brothers who were more advanced than me on the road of spirituality. I recall them saying:
“Your life is nourished by an intimate and personal experience with God; in our case, with Jesus, an incarnated and historical presence among us, and with the Spirit of Life he left us.”
From that experience, faith, hope and love are born, cultivated and sustained. What is not connected to that deep well ends up weakened.
I have experienced this in my own life. I lived it during the years I shared the Jesuit mission.
Action — as urgent, just and necessary as it was — ended up wearing me down when it did not spring from within. Then came long periods of emptiness. The more I neglected silent spaces to listen, in the intimacy of my conscience, to the voice of eternal Wisdom that lives in the soul, the darker and colder life turned.
With time, I learned that those moments are, in reality, a call from the soul: an invitation to turn our gaze inward, to awaken, to pay attention to that which we have neglected, to return to the house of the Father, where grace and love are always available.
Today, I recall the numerous Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola to open myself up to accepting this concept. St. Ignatius invites us to commence with “The Principle and Foundation”: to experience from within a Creator God, a Trinity of Love, that loved us from the origin of creation itself and continues to love us with a tenderness that surpasses all comprehension.
It is not a matter of reaching a logical conclusion, but of receiving a gift. That is why St. Ignatius insists on “feeling it and enjoying it in our interior.”
St. Ignatius recommends that we don’t rush to advance before we have profoundly experienced this fundamental truth. He himself said that this grace led him to cry abundant tears because, once he allowed himself to be seen by this Love, he discovered the pain of not having amply returned it.
Those tears can include feelings of shame and guilt, but when they are embraced by mercy, they can bring healing.
From that experience, St. Ignatius invites us to review our life, the decisions we have made, and the mistaken paths we have taken. “Sin” is no longer seen as a moral stain and recovers its original meaning: hamartía, a word related to the art of the archer that means “miss the bullseye,” “fail the direction” and “not reach the goal.”
To look back on one’s life without having experienced first God’s unconditional love can lead to desperation; to do it from the certainty of being loved leads to a conversion.
The next step of the Exercises is an invitation to find in Jesus the way, truth and life.That is why, during this time of prayer, Ignatius proposes a simple and profound petition: “to know Jesus intimately, to love him and follow him more.” To know him in his joys and sufferings, in his compassion for the poor, in his closeness to the excluded, in his self-giving until the cross and in the joy of his resurrection.
All our senses are invited to participate: to see, listen, touch, smell and contemplate with our imagination the events of the Gospel, allowing them to pass through our minds to our heart and, from our hearts, to our lives. This process culminates in “Contemplation to reach love,” which flows into authentic contemplation in action.
After experiencing this grace, our gaze changes. We receive the gift of discovering the presence of God in all things.
Then we begin to recognize his touch in those who smile at us, in the hand that consoles the sick, in the mother who breastfeeds her baby, in the forgotten prisoner, in the cook who prepares food with love, in the dawn, in the hummingbird and the bees … All becomes a song to the Creator, as perceived by St. Ignatius, St. Francis of Assisi and so many saints.
And then come tears, but different ones: tears of gratitude, of amazement, of joy in discovering the presence of Love in everything.
This road was not only for them. It’s also an invitation for you and me.
