Contemplation on God's Love

In this, our final session, we reach also the last of Ignatius' 14 rules, which is another that can really, really release a lot of hope in our lives. I've come to see it over the years as Ignatius saving the best for last, and that is, as we've gone through these rules, it may be that one or another of us has been saying to him or herself, "Well, Ignatius, these are very useful counsels, and I can see how they're going to help me in various ways. But there is this one area that I don't think really is ever going to change." And that's the area that Ignatius addresses in this final rule. There is no area where we cannot hope.

Hope where we feel least hopeful. That's the way I've summarized this rule at times in the past. So the rule says: identify that area of your life where you are most vulnerable to the enemy's temptations and discouraging lies, and strengthen it. So, with great reverence, because I know this can touch sensitive places in our hearts, is there that place somewhere within you that says, whenever this happens, everything gets undone in my spiritual life? And it just keeps happening.

It gets hard to hope. It's hard to continue with my prayer, hard to keep making the efforts. And it just seems to keep repeating. This is the most vulnerable place. So Ignatius' counsel is to identify that, know what that is, and then apply the spiritual tools to strengthen that place.

If you do that, wonderful things will happen. One of the most striking illustrations of this in our spiritual tradition is the example of Venerable Matt Talbot, this Irishman from Dublin who was so hopelessly alcoholic for fifteen years, and then had a moment of conversion and built the entirety of his spiritual life—his daily prayer, spiritual reading, and the penance that he undertook—on overcoming the vulnerability of alcohol. And from the day when he was 28 and had that conversion, he never touched another drop of alcohol and became the holy man of God whose cause of canonization is well advanced and who is such an inspiration for so many. He knew his most vulnerable point, and he built his spiritual life on strengthening it, and it made him a saint. Our own most vulnerable points are probably going to be less visible than that.

Places of fear or anxiety or burden, or where it's hard to hope, that we carry in our hearts—maybe even hidden from everyone—know what they are, apply the spiritual tools, and wonderful things can happen in the spiritual life. Before we finish, I'll mention some resources where you can pursue this and the other rules and learn more about them. In this, our final session, we'll focus on the final exercise of prayer in the Spiritual Exercises, which Ignatius calls the Contemplation to Attain the Love of God. And we'll at least see a little part of it, this beautiful exercise that is so much loved. Ignatius introduces this by calling attention to two points.

And the first one is, he says, that love ought to manifest itself in deeds more than in words. Love does need words, and spouses, for example, or close friends know how much those words mean. But it above all manifests itself in what one does—the lover for the beloved and the beloved for the lover. And the second point is that love consists in a mutual sharing of goods. You can almost hear Saint John Paul II's theology of the body here.

The lover gives and shares with the beloved what he possesses, something of what he has or is able to give, and vice versa. The beloved shares with the lover. So love is more a matter of deeds than of words, and love is a mutual sharing. Each of the two in love gives and shares with the other what he or she is and has. Ignatius invites us to see ourselves in this prayer as we stand before the Lord and all His angels and saints who are interceding on our behalf.

So the whole setting is suffused with love in the Communion of Saints. And this is the grace that we ask for. Here it will be to ask for an intimate knowledge of the many blessings received. So, a deep awareness of the endless ways that God has loved and blessed me, so that, filled with gratitude for all, I may in all things love and serve the Divine Majesty. From the knowledge of blessings arises gratitude, and that gratitude will help me to love and serve God in all things.

Now, what Ignatius invites us to do—and this is endless; you could spend days on this—is to consider the blessings of God under three different headings. Firstly, just to call to mind the blessings of creation. So here we'd stop: Where were we born and raised? Where have we lived?

And just think of the creation that God has given to us and blessed us to enjoy. Think of the heavens if we want, and the stars, the earth, the rivers, the fields, the mountains, the waters, the many gifts of creation that have sustained us and given us food and have supplied all that we need. And just let our gaze roam through the many ways that God's creation has blessed us, and we call to mind that love is more a matter of what one does than what one says, and that love is a mutual sharing. Then we would look at God's gifts in the order of redemption, of salvation. And here, this is as long as the entirety of Scripture and our own lives.

Think of the creation of the world. And then, when the Fall takes place, the promise of the Redeemer and the gradual working out of that promise through the patriarchs—Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph—and the years in Egypt, the Exodus, the return to the Promised Land, the prophets, the kings, down through the centuries to the Incarnation of Jesus, God shaping and directing everything in the world so that Jesus would be born. Every moment of the life of Jesus, which is part of the work of redemption—His years of hidden life, His travels, His miracles, His teachings, the culminating moment of His Passion, Death, Resurrection, and Ascension, the birth of the Church, the sending of the Holy Spirit—and in our own lives, the many ways in which God has mediated to us the grace of the Redemption: the faith that was given to us, perhaps through our parents; the Baptism that we received, perhaps early in life; the prayer in our family growing up; the Sacraments, the Eucharist, Confession; the instruction in the faith that we've received; the people that we've met who have encouraged us; the experiences in life through which God's grace has come to us and we have been inspired to grow in prayer and in the life of faith with the Lord.

And this is endless. We can spend as much time as we want on this. And we call to mind that love is more a matter of deeds than words, and that love is a mutual exchange. And then thirdly, Ignatius says, we call to mind special favors that we have received. Think, for example, of how Saint Thérèse tells God the story of her soul, and it's infused with this marvelous awareness of God's faithful love directing the many twists and turns of her at times painful life, but she sees God's love at work through all of it.

Well, the invitation here would be maybe to tell God the story of your soul—how He brought it about so that your parents should come together and you should have life, how He saw to it that you would receive the gift of faith, and how through the many different places where you've lived, the stages of life, the people you've known, the events of your life, God's grace has always been present there, guiding it. This is something I've done often at the end of Ignatian retreats. Sometimes I'll be just sitting in a garden doing this, just reviewing with the Lord the story of how His love has guided my life and seen me safely through so many things. And you find that your heart begins to fill with gratitude, and you remember that love is more a matter of deeds than of words, and that love is a mutual sharing. And it's at this point Ignatius says, I will reflect on myself and consider, according to all reason and justice, what I ought to offer the Divine Majesty.

That is all I possess, and myself with it. Thus, as one would do who is moved by great feeling, I will make this offering of myself. And this is Ignatius’ famous Suscipe prayer, “Take, Lord, and receive.” And I'm just going to read it very slowly, just to give us time to maybe allow these words to enter our hearts and to offer them to the Lord. Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and my entire will.

All that I have and possess, take, Lord, and receive it. You've given me so much. You've given me everything. And since love is a mutual exchange, I want to give it back to You. You have given all to me.

To you, O Lord, I return it. All is Yours. Dispose of it wholly according to Your will. Give me just the two things that I need. Give me Your love and Your grace, for this is sufficient for me.

So I'll read that again. Maybe pray this with me. Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and my entire will. All that I have and possess, You have given all to me. To You, O Lord, I return it.

All is Yours. Dispose of it wholly according to Your will. Give me Your love and Your grace, for this is sufficient for me. And this is the final point of prayer in the Spiritual Exercises, through which the person loved by God and desirous of returning that love is now prepared to return to daily life and to bring this into the everydayness of our lives. I'll conclude simply by mentioning the resources to which I alluded earlier.

If you'd like to pursue further what we've done through these sessions, as we've gone through some of the richness of the Spiritual Exercises, the prayers with Scripture that I've shared are, in general, taken from the book that I wrote entitled An Ignatian Introduction to Prayer: Scriptural Reflections According to the Spiritual Exercises. Some of what I've said about the methods of prayer—meditation and contemplation—is taken from another of these books I've done, entitled Meditation and Contemplation: An Ignatian Guide to Praying with Scripture. For the 14 rules for discernment, the fundamental book would be The Discernment of Spirits: An Ignatian Guide for Everyday Living. I've also done podcasts on all of these themes, and you can find these on discerninghearts.com or the Discerning Hearts app.

And for these and for any materials I've done, you can simply go on my website, which is frforfather, frtimothygallagher.org, and everything can be found there. It has been a wonderful privilege to share this journey through the Spiritual Exercises with you. And I pray that what we've done together over these days and through this prayer be a blessing now and going forward. I'm reminded as we're concluding of the words that I shared in our first session, that as I finished the Exercises, I said to myself, somebody has finally taught me how to pray. Well, I hope that something of that grace has been given as we've done this and that what we have done is opening a pathway so that as we conclude—more than conclude—this is a commencement, you know, the way we speak of the end of a college session or something like that.

This is really a beginning more than an ending. And may God grant that it be fruitful and blessed in a special way through the wisdom of Saint Ignatius. Amen.