Be Set Free

I'd like to begin our seventh session by focusing a final time on the transitional space of seeing the love in God's eyes as God looks upon us as we begin our prayer. The way Ignatius says that we've seen for the space of an Our Father, I will consider how God our Lord looks upon me. That is the love that is there.

Now we read in the Gospel of John in the Prologue that no one has ever seen God. Paul tells us that we walk by faith, not by sight. So how do we know what we see in the gaze of God upon us?

And this is a profound thing. If you think of any relationship, what you see in the eyes of the other person has a lot to say about what will happen in the relationship. If you see love and gladness to see you, and gratitude and desire to spend time with you, that's very different from a situation where these things are not there in the person's eyes.

So we can rephrase that question. What did people in the Gospel see in the eyes of Jesus? As we've said before, when their gaze met His—and you can go through the Gospels; it'd actually be a wonderful exercise sometimes.

So think, for example, of Nathaniel, whom Jesus meets, and He tells Nathaniel that "I saw you under the fig tree." Whatever these words mean to Nathaniel, Nathaniel realizes how deeply he is known, and all of his resistance melts, and he becomes the Lord's disciple. What did he see in those eyes that so drew him?

Think of Levi, or Matthew, at the tax collector's bench when Jesus simply passes by and says, "Follow me." And Matthew gets up and walks away from his whole life. Something that he sees in the eyes of Jesus—a love, an acceptance, an understanding, a welcome—motivates him to leave everything and simply to be with the Lord.

Now, what if we saw just even a bit of that for the space of an Our Father as we began our prayer? What would happen in our prayer?

The widow of Nain, Jesus sees her. She never says a word in the text, but her tears say everything. Her son is being taken out for burial. And Jesus enters into her life, gives life back to her son, and her tears are healed and joy returns to her heart. What does this woman see in the eyes of Jesus that shows her how His heart enters so deeply into her sorrow and resolves it?

Mark 10:21, this is a passage that I've used for many years in seeing this gaze of love. This is the—we call him the rich young man—who asked the question about eternal life, and Mark writes that, "Jesus, looking upon him, loved him. Jesus, looking upon him, loved him." And for many years, that's been my way of, for the space of an Our Father, entering into the prayer. Each of us will find his or her own way to do this.

Luke 13: the woman burdened for eighteen years with the illness is now in the synagogue, and Jesus sees her and sets her free. What does she see in His eyes? The Samaritan woman, whose life is so broken—what does she see in His eyes? And Peter, after his threefold denial and their gazes meet, and Peter's tears begin to fall, and this leads to that healing with the threefold question, "Do you love Me?"—and a relationship that will never again be shaken.

Saint John of the Cross writes this: The look of God is love and the pouring out of gifts. The look of God is love and the pouring out of gifts.

So that's Ignatius' invitation. Begin your prayer before you approach the scriptural passage with the space of half a minute or an Our Father, and just allow the Lord to look upon you with that love.

Now we move in this session into a new stage of the Exercises, having been grounded again in the foundational truths of God's love and praying for a heart that will respond completely in availability to that love. It becomes necessary to pray for liberation, healing, or freedom from the one obstacle to a complete yes to God, which is our own sinfulness, weakness, fragility, concupiscence—these various terms that we have for this—that describe this reality.

And so, Ignatius invites us now to bring our weakness, our fragility, the things that discourage us and hold us back and make us hope for less, to bring these to God in order to be healed, so that then our hearts can be increasingly set free to follow the Lord as the Exercises unfold.

The passage that I've chosen for this is Genesis 3:1–24. It's a long passage, an entire chapter. I'm not going to read all of it, just the first part, but we'll say something about it.

Because what Ignatius does is to help us get a real sense of what sin is as an encouragement to seek freedom from it, he invites us to see it in its truth and its reality. And this is eminently true of the first sin, the Original Sin, and its consequences and all that it brings into the world.

So as you pray, again, let your heart be at peace. Let it be quieted. Psalm 131: my heart is not raised too high. I have calmed and quieted my soul like a child that is quieted at its mother's breast.

And now, for a brief time, just become aware of the warm, personal, faithful love in the Lord's eyes as He gazes upon you.

And I'll begin the prayer. Now the snake was the most cunning of all the wild animals that the Lord God had made. He asked the woman, "Did God really say, 'You shall not eat from any of the trees in the garden?'"

The woman answered the snake, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden. It is only about the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden that God said, ‘You shall not eat it or even touch it, or else you will die.’”

Now, in the language that's being used here to reveal truths of faith, obviously, the snake is the one Ignatius calls the enemy, the Evil One. And notice the dynamic here: the tempter raises a question that invites Eve to answer, and she does, and the dialogue begins and it grows heavier and heavier. We'll see that Ignatius, in his Spiritual Exercises, will counsel us: don't even begin. Don't even begin with the first dialogue with temptation. End it immediately and you never have to deal with the snowball effect that we see so vividly here.

But the snake said to the woman, "You shall not die. God knows well that when you eat of it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like gods who know good and evil." The woman saw that the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eyes, and the tree was desirable for gaining wisdom. So she took some of its fruit and ate it, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked, so they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves.

And then the rest all follows: when God comes walking in the garden, that's the way of describing the closeness between God and the man and the woman—the harmony and the closeness. But instead of responding lovingly to His love as they have until now, they become afraid, they hide, and then all the rest happens: the pains of childbirth, bringing food from the ground through the sweat of your brow, the expulsion from the Garden of Paradise, the consequences of sin with which we live still in our world today. And liberation from it, which is a beautiful thing.

One of the most beautiful things a priest sees in his life is the ministry of the Sacrament of Confession. When you see hearts set free, burdens lifted, peace and joy—sometimes even to tears—returning to people, that's the prayer here: for that kind of freedom or liberation.

So the Lord has told me of His love for me, and everything in me wants to be available to that, like the potter and the clay or like Mary. You know, let it be done to me according to your word—above all, like Jesus: To do Your will is my delight.

And there's really only one obstacle to that, and that is this reality of sinfulness and sin.

So we pray as we go through this passage for a deep, new, fresh understanding of this reality so that we can turn to the Lord as Redeemer and find freedom from it. In fact, as you read the passage, you'll see that already toward the end of the passage, you'll see there the promise is already made of the Redeemer who will come.

Maybe we could just read this text slowly, allow it to speak to us, allow it to teach us of the reality of sin, and then, having done that, turn to the Lord and ask a grace that He delights to give, and that is growing and increasing freedom from it so that we may be increasingly available to Him.

I want to read some words from Venerable Bruno Lanteri, whom I've quoted earlier in this series, and these were spiritual notes that he wrote for himself and passed on in his spiritual direction to many people. We have a document where he traces out a spiritual program for a married woman and gives to her almost exactly the same, these words that I'll read here now from his own spiritual writings. And let them speak to your heart. They've blessed so many people.

"If I should fall a thousand times a day"—so I was impatient with the children and I wanted to overcome that and I did it again, or I got angry, or I wasted time, or I was self-indulgent, or I missed an opportunity to help a person, or my prayer wasn't what I would have wanted it to be, whatever it might be. "If I should fall a thousand times a day," I just keep doing this and I get discouraged. How do we respond?

"A thousand times a day, I will begin again. That's the power of that beginning again, so that we're never defeated. With new awareness of my weakness, certainly, promising God—and this is important—with a peaceful heart, not with anxiety or stress or self-recriminations in an anguished way. Promising God with a peaceful heart to amend my life. I will never think of God as if He were of our condition and grows weary of our wavering weakness and negligence."

And we often do this, if I may say this reverently. You know, here's a person who is never on time, and we get tired of it pretty quickly. Here's a person who says that she'll have her part of the project done, and we know it's not going to be done when we need it. Here is a person who always misses the meaning of a relational situation and can hurt people because the person just misses it, and we grow tired of that, and so forth. And what Venerable Bruno is saying is we tend to think God is like that with us—when I just keep falling over and over again, that He grows tired of this.

"No. I will never think of God as if He were of our condition and grows weary of our wavering weakness and negligence. Rather, I will think of what is truly characteristic of Him and what He prizes most highly—that is, His goodness and mercy—knowing that He is a loving Father who understands our weakness, is patient with us, and forgives us." Venerable Bruno's mother died when he was four. He was basically raised by his father, who was a doctor and really a wonderful father. There was a deep love.

And later, when he had spiritual direction for twenty years under a truly saintly Jesuit, the word "Father" for Venerable Bruno is suffused with love, warmth, closeness, and support, and that's the way we'll think of God. So that when we bring, at this stage of the Exercises, our failures—repeated failures a thousand times a day—our sinfulness, the burdens of our fragility, we bring them to the Lord. We bring them to the Lord knowing that we are received in this way by a loving Father who prizes most highly goodness and mercy. And that sets our hearts free for the liberation from these burdens that allow us to follow the Lord each day. Amen.