Introduction

So, welcome to these talks, times of prayer that we're going to share over the next four weeks. I'm really happy to be able to do this because the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius that we'll be sharing, breaking open, and above all, praying, have been such a richness in my own life that I'm just so happy to have a chance to share them with you. I would say it this way: twice in my spiritual life, spiritual realities have grabbed and absorbed my attention in a way that I knew was really something special and that I needed to attend to. And the two are related.

One was our founder, the founder of my religious community, the Oblates of the Virgin Mary, and that's the Venerable Bruno Lanteri. From the moment I encountered our community—this is eighteen, nineteen, twenty years old—he's fascinated me, and he has ever since. And the second thing was the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius. And I say the two things are related because Venerable Bruno had a deep love for the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises and gave them to our religious community as our primary apostolate. So that's how someone who is not a Jesuit happens to be so deeply involved in the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius.

My first experience of them was in my first year in the seminary when a Jesuit priest came. Over five days, he gave us a series of talks on the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises, essentially taking us through them. It just whetted my interest even more. But I'd say the key point came after my second year in theology—so two years away from priestly ordination—when one of my companions in the summer made the full thirty-day Ignatian Exercises. And something in me just wanted it in the worst way.

You know, I was drawn to that, just really desired and hoped for the grace of being able to do that. And through a series of circumstances, the following summer, I was able to do the thirty-day retreat with a really venerable and, I would say advisedly, holy—certainly knowledgeable—Jesuit. This Jesuit not only guided us through the thirty days of that retreat with expertise and with real spiritual unction and warmth, but he furthered in me a sense of the treasure that there is in this retreat in a way that has marked my life ever since. After that experience—and it's a little bit of that that I hope to share with you. Above all, I would say I hope that the Lord will share with you through what we'll be doing in these times of prayer over twenty-eight days.

That became a focal point for me. I studied the Exercises. I learned from men, Jesuits, who were real masters in them. And eventually, the time came when I began to give them myself. And much of the now forty-two years of my priesthood has been spent with the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises.

And I have experienced over and over and over again the power of these exercises to change lives. Now, there are endless accounts of this kind over the five-hundred-year history of the Spiritual Exercises, but I think the point is made. And better than my making the point, you will experience it as we go forward and you pray through the Exercises. Now, what we're going to do is, essentially with Ignatius as our guide, enter into prayer with the Scriptures, because that's the basic pillar of the Spiritual Exercises. There are other actions in the Spiritual Exercises, but the main one is to pray over and over again through the days with Scripture.

And Ignatius has a wonderful teaching, one of the most practical teachings in our spiritual tradition about how to do that. So we're going to look at those two things. We're actually going to be praying with Scripture, but we'll also break it open a bit at a time as we go through Ignatius' way of praying with the Bible. And I'll preface that by quoting just two sentences from the document of Vatican II on the Scriptures, the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation. And the Council says this: In the sacred books, the Father who is in Heaven comes lovingly to meet His children and talks with them.

Often we want to hear God's word. What's your answer? Well, here in the Sacred Scriptures, the Father comes lovingly to meet His children and talks with them. And such is the force and power of the Word of God that it can serve the Church as her support and vigor, which obviously the Church always needs, but how much more in these times? And then, turning specifically to us, it can serve the Church as her support and vigor and the children of the Church in three ways: as strength for their faith, food for the soul, and a pure and lasting fount of spiritual life.

As I've looked at that quote over the years, it just strikes me how much we need all three of those things. Think of your daily life in the work world, at home. You live your marriage, your role as a parent. You take part in the life of the Church and where the culture is. Three things that we so much need: strength for our faith. There is less support for our faith now around us in the culture, and it becomes more and more important that we find in our daily lives a way to grow stronger in our faith.

And here it is. Food for the soul. You know when you're thirsty and you feel your energy is diminishing, and then you have just the meal that you need and you're ready to go. That's what prayer with Scripture can become in our lives if we learn how to do it well and if we're faithful to it.

And I would say that the Spiritual Exercises are the best school of prayer that I know of. And then finally, a pure and lasting fountain of spiritual life, so that something pure, integral, unmixed with things that are not of God, grows stronger in our hearts as we live our daily spiritual lives. Now, who doesn't need these things? And here is the royal path to it. The Father comes lovingly to meet His children in the divine Scriptures and speaks with them.

I think many of us feel drawn to pray with Scripture, but I am quite confident that I speak for many of us when I say we may also have a sense that we're not quite sure that we really know how to do that well. Is there any help in this? You know, I went through years of preparation to become a priest. For example, we had our novitiate with a really fine, and I'd say holy, priest as our novice master. And we had many talks on prayer.

But one thing I will never forget: I remember that final day of my thirty-day Ignatian retreat with the Spiritual Exercises, and I said to myself, someone has finally taught me how to pray. Ignatius can do that for us. There is a spiritual journey in these Spiritual Exercises. Ignatius calls them weeks, and there are four of them. Call them stages if you want.

In the formal thirty-day retreat, there probably will be roughly five, six, seven, eight days—something like that. So Ignatius begins the journey of the Exercises with what he calls the Principle and Foundation. If you're going to build a building well, you need a solid foundation. And so Ignatius invites us to go back to the real roots of why we're here in this world: because God created us, because He loved us from eternity and placed us in this world to accomplish a task in our respective vocations toward the work of redemption in this life, and so enter into eternal life. Basically, the first and most foundational thing is just to know that we're loved, that God loves us.

That's where it starts. And then, in what he calls the first week—call it the first major step—Ignatius invites us to pray for freedom from anything that would hold us back from God: weaknesses, fragilities, sinfulness, failings, and so forth, and to bring these to the loving mercy of our God for healing. And then, in what is the real heart of the retreat—the center, most developed part of the retreat—Ignatius invites us to pray through the life of Jesus together with Jesus, and just drink in Jesus, learning more about Him, growing in love of Him so that our lives will be more centered on the Lord Jesus. And then, in the third stage or the third week, we walk with Christ through His Passion, seeking the strength that we will need to live this new, rich, growing spiritual life. And in the fourth and final stage, we pray with the Resurrection of Christ, where we see the victory over all His sufferings, which engenders hope and energy and courage for us as the retreat concludes and we resume a more normal way of living our lives.

Along the way, as we'll see, Ignatius will give very valuable instruction about prayer, about many aspects of the spiritual life, and about understanding discernment, attractions, thoughts—what's of God, what is not of God. He has some marvelous teaching on that. So I'm going to conclude now with a lovely text that we read in the Liturgy of the Hours every year in Advent. And it's the very first lines of this written work by Saint Anselm, the Proslogion, which is a beautiful meditation on God as Creator. And as I read these first—oh, it should be about four sentences.

You'll see why I read them as an invitation to the whole process that lies ahead. I generally read these to retreatants the first night when we gather to begin any retreat that I give. Oh, little soul, he says, escape from your everyday business for a short while. Hide for a moment from your restless thoughts. Break off from your cares and troubles and be less concerned about your tasks and labors.

Make a little time for God. That's what these sessions are. Make a little time for God and rest a while in Him. Enter into your mind's inner chamber. Shut out everything but God and whatever helps you to seek Him.

And when you have shut the door, look for Him. Speak now to God and say with your whole heart—and here he quotes Psalm 27—"I seek Your face; Your face, Lord, I desire." Make a little time for God—ten minutes, fifteen minutes, a half hour, whatever you can comfortably do—and rest a while in Him. And with Ignatius as our guide, in so doing, we will experience the refreshment and growth and renewed energy that the Spiritual Exercises so blessedly offer us. Amen.

Jesus' Invitation

So, welcome to our first session of prayer as we begin the Spiritual Exercises. And we'll begin with a passage of Scripture, which is Jesus' invitation into prayer, into sharing with the Lord what we really, really desire and need. Now, before we start the biblical passage, just very rapidly, I want to make one point about the two basic methods of prayer with Scripture that Ignatius teaches. One we call meditation, the other we call contemplation.

Both are rich. Both are wonderful ways to pray with Scripture. We can feel free to use either one of them, or a mixture of them, as our hearts desire.

Meditation, in the sense in which Saint Ignatius uses it, is the application of the reasoning faculty that God has given us as a way of entering into the richness of God's Word and allowing it to touch our hearts and transform us.

So, for example, if I were praying with, let's say, the first of the Beatitudes: "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven." If I meditate on this text, I might do something like this. Now I'm just going to create something to make the point.

Blessed are the poor in spirit. Why is this the first Beatitude? The first of, actually, the beginning of the whole Sermon on the Mount. Obviously, Jesus sees something important in this first Beatitude.

And He doesn't simply speak of poverty, but You speak, Lord, of "Blessed are the poor in spirit." And so I can recognize that You're not speaking simply of material poverty, but of a space of the heart, an attitude of the heart, a disposition through which we face life. Blessed are the poor in spirit. There's something there about not being self-sufficient and knowing that I'm not self-sufficient and being willing to depend on God. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven. Jesus, why is it that this attitude of heart is the attitude of heart, or the space of heart, that even gives entrance into Your Kingdom?

Now I'll stop there, but I think we can see what we mean by meditation. That is the application of this wonderful thinking, pondering, considering, reasoning mind that God has given us to the Word of God. And as we do it, it breaks open. God's grace mingles with our human reasoning, and the Word touches our hearts. I may find myself saying as I meditate with the first Beatitude, “Jesus, help me to live more that way in my life.” Something about this is beautiful. I think of Mary. I think of Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus—“Help me to live more like that in my own life.”

The second way of praying with Scripture employs the imaginative power that God has given us, this marvelous faculty of the imagination, which allows us to be present to things that are not physically before us.

If I say, for example, just mention your mother or your father, whether they're living or with the Lord, and invite you just to see them, you can see the face, you can see the person, even if they're not physically present. And this is a wonderful power that God has given us, through which we can pray with the Scriptures as well. We'll say more about this in future sessions, but I simply want to introduce that because we are going to contemplate, in Ignatius' sense, the first of these passages. So let's turn to that now. And this is the encounter of Bartimaeus with Jesus in Mark 10:46–52.

So I invite you now to let your heart slow. Let the preoccupations and the anxieties, let them subside a bit in your heart, and just let your heart be aware of the Lord.

This is how we begin all prayer for Ignatius: just aware of the presence and the gaze of love of God upon us. Prayer is always a relationship, two persons. So just let your heart see the love in Jesus’ eyes for you that, let’s say, people in the Gospel saw—the people that He healed or instructed, the people who were so fascinated that they left everything and went three days out in the desert just to be with Him. And become aware of the love in His heart that desires to speak with you, to be with you.

And now, in that setting, let's read through the text. They came to Jericho. And as He was leaving Jericho with His disciples and a sizable crowd, Bartimaeus, a blind man, the son of Timaeus, sat by the roadside begging. On hearing that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to cry out and say, "Jesus, Son of David, have pity on me," just over and over again.

And many rebuked him, telling him to be silent. He kept calling all the more, "Son of David, have pity on me." Jesus stopped and said, "Call him." So they called the blind man, saying to him, "Take courage. Get up. He is calling you."

He threw aside his cloak, sprang up, and came to Jesus. Jesus said to him in reply, "What do you want Me to do for you?" The blind man replied to Him, "Master, I want to see." Jesus told him, "Go your way. Your faith has saved you." Immediately, he received his sight and followed Him on the way.

Now I'll invite you to be there, as it were. Just imagine that the movie of the Gospel, of the life of Jesus, was showing on the wall in front of you or in the room where you are. And you could walk right into it, and you're there, and you take part in it. That's what Ignatius means by contemplation.

So I see the crowds. I see this road now as it leaves the city, and I see the blind beggar seated by the road. How is he dressed? What posture does he have?

And maybe I find myself there by His side with Him. If you feel so moved, take His place and become Bartimaeus. You and I know how much we need the Lord to see, to find our way. And so there I am now, seated like Bartimaeus or even in his place, waiting. And I hear that Jesus of Nazareth is coming close.

And this man, out of his great need, and each of us, out of his or her need and our hope that in Jesus we will find healing, we begin to approach the Lord. But he's helpless. He's blind. He can't approach the Lord the way the others in the crowd can. And you and I, at times when we feel our own even desperate need for the Lord as we face family situations, struggles in our own hearts, discouragement, financial troubles, struggle with the culture that surrounds us, and the sufferings of our Church.

Sometimes we too feel our own need and our own helplessness. And maybe as we pray, by God's grace, a spark of hope grows within us that in Jesus, there will be an answer. And now I watch as this blind Bartimaeus pours out the need of his heart and his hope in Jesus in this repeated cry. And maybe I make this repeatedly to the Lord myself now in my prayer: Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me. Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me, over and over and over.

And as I pray, his cry becomes my cry. And I find myself saying to Jesus, Jesus, Son of David, you who love me, my Savior, you to whom all things are possible, have mercy on me. Come close. Help me in my helplessness. Help me to change. Help me to grow. Help me find my way through this difficult situation. And I don't stop. I make this prayer over and over to the Lord.

And I see that Jesus hears this cry of the blind Bartimaeus and that of my own heart. And I see Jesus stop, set aside the crowd, set aside His journey. The only thing that matters to Him now is the response to that cry of the heart.

And I hear Jesus say to those around Him, "Call him." And I hear them say to Bartimaeus, and today to me, "Take heart. Rise. He is calling you." He doesn't want you to remain locked in your discouragement. He's calling you out of that.

And I feel my heart begin to lift with a new hope. And now, like Bartimaeus, I stand before Jesus, and our eyes meet. I see His face. What do I see in His eyes? What does Bartimaeus see in his eyes that gives him such courage and such hope?

And now I hear his question to me, his question to the deep place in my heart that is afraid or discouraged or in need. What do you want me to do for you? What do I want You to do for me, Jesus? What is the need? The real need, the deep need, the many needs? What do you want me to do for you?

Take time in your prayer now. Pause, maybe, if you feel so moved, and answer that question. One of the most blessed things you can do in prayer is to answer that question which Jesus asks.

And now as I pray, the crowd, the surroundings recede in some way. And there I am, Jesus and I alone in the midst of the crowd. And now I speak to Him from my heart without hurry, and I answer His question. And I dare to tell Him all that I hope He will do for me, all the hope, all that I hope for from this time of prayer. And I say to Him in my own life, Master, let me receive my sight.

Help me to see where I am confused and discouraged and depressed and struggle and don't know the way forward. Don't see where You are leading clearly, and I am confused. Master, let me receive my sight. Help me to see. Help me to see my way clearly through the doubts and fears that so often press on my heart.

Help me to overcome. Show me the way to overcome that obstacle that keeps me from the closeness I long for with You. And now, with Bartimaeus, I experience Jesus' word of healing: Go your way. Your faith has saved you.

Something has changed. Something has been healed. I sense the love that pours out from Him and brings healing and new hope to my life. And now, like Bartimaeus, I follow Jesus along the way.

Take a moment, again following Ignatius, as your prayer concludes, just to look back over the time of prayer and ask: What word or words in the Scripture most spoke to my heart? And what were You, Lord, saying to me through those words?

What touched my heart in this time of prayer? What was my heart feeling as I prayed? Hope, struggle, and what did I sense the Lord saying to me?

Sometimes, I'll just conclude on a personal note: it seems to me that that prayer of Bartimaeus, "Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me," summarizes all of our prayer.

That's the deep prayer. We come with so many needs and such helplessness to the One who is infinitely loving, warmly loving, personal, close, the Savior, and infinitely powerful. And we simply say, Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me. You know what I need. Heal me in the way that I need.

I remember a wonderful Jesuit priest commenting on this passage and about Bartimaeus' answer to Jesus' question, "What do you want me to do for you?" And the priest commented that if Bartimaeus, instead of answering and expressing what his heart really deeply did desire, were to have mentioned something different— you know, there's a family member or there's this situation— but he answers the question deeply, authentically from his heart. If he had not done that, would the miracle have taken place as it did?

This is a beautiful thing to do in prayer. Tell the Lord what's really there. Don't hesitate. That's what He really wants to know. And that's where His healing will come.

So blessings as we—well, I was about to say conclude our prayer on this first day, but it's really just a beginning for the day. God's blessings.

Deeper Communion

So welcome to our second session, and I want to pick up now on this distinction between meditation and contemplation. So meditation, as we said, is the application of this wonderful reasoning power that God has given us as a port of entry into the richness of the Scripture. And then the second method that I had just briefly introduced is what Ignatius means by contemplation. To be more specific, we can speak of it as imaginative contemplation. And what Ignatius means by this, again, solidly rooted in the Church's age-old tradition of prayer, is a second port of entry into the Scripture, which is the use of this wonderful imaginative gift that God has given us.

Essentially, the power of imagination allows us to be present to things, people, and places that are not physically there before us. So again, as we introduced this last time, let's say, for example, think of a good friend or a loved one. Just see that person. If it helps, shut your eyes as you do this. Maybe it's your mother, your father, brother, son, or grandchild.

Choose a song that you love and just hear it. Maybe it's the national anthem, a hymn that you love, or just a popular song. And you can hear it playing in your imagination. Or maybe the sound of waves washing up on the shore, and you can hear that. Just smell the smell of freshly brewed coffee or maybe freshly baked bread just out of the oven, and just smell that, or if a flower—a rose, for example.

Feel the beating of the sun down upon you on a hot day. This is the heat that surrounds you, or maybe the opposite—the cold of a winter day, with snow or wind in your face, or the water that surrounds you as you swim.

We have this wonderful ability to be present to things that are not physically before us, and this is another rich portal of entry into the Scripture.

So, for example, if we were praying with the calming of the storm at sea and we prayed it with this imaginative, contemplative method, what we would do is be there with the disciples, maybe in the boat as they're putting off from the shore in the evening after a long day of healings and teachings. And we see Jesus in the boat with us, quickly fall asleep. And at first, everything is peaceful as we row out from the shore, and then we watch the fishermen put up the sail and the boat heads out across the lake.

And then, as we're there in the boat, we feel the wind rising. We feel the waves begin to form, the boat being rocked. We experience the water beginning to pour in. We see the terror—fear of the disciples. Maybe we feel some of that ourselves as we've gone through different circumstances in life. And then that cry from the heart to Jesus: Save us, Lord. We're perishing.

So that would be the imaginative, contemplative way of praying with the Scripture—just to simply be there and live it, as it were, from within. As I said last time, it's like walking into the movie, and you're there and you live it from within.

Okay. So that is what we mean by meditation and contemplation.

Now, this passage that we're going to choose for today, you can pray it either through the reflective, meditative approach or the imaginative, contemplative approach, or you can mix the methods. There's a lot of freedom, and one is no better than the other. It's like here is a house with a friend inside, and there are two doors into the house. Whether you go through one door or the other, the endpoint is the same, and that's communion with the Friend. And these are just two different ways of entering into the Scripture.

So our Scripture for today is Matthew 11:25–30. And again, this is a loving invitation of the Lord into the process of prayer, into a deeper communion with Him, and that's why we choose it at the beginning of these spiritual exercises. So let me just read that passage.

But as we do that again, take a moment and just become aware of the gaze of the Lord, the Lord's love upon you, eager to be with you, eager to say this word to your heart, open to your response.

Prayer is, again, a relationship. It is two persons. It is not a human person and a written page, but it is the human person and the Divine Person who speaks through the written page. That's the mediation of His word to our hearts.

At that time, Jesus said in reply, I give praise to You, Father, Lord of heaven and earth. For although You have hidden these things from the wise and the learned, You have revealed them to the childlike. Yes, Father, such has been Your gracious will. All things have been handed over to Me by My Father.

No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son wishes to reveal Him. Come to Me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am meek and humble of heart, and you will find rest for yourselves. For My yoke is easy and My burden light.

So now I am there with the Lord. Maybe I see myself seated at His feet together with Him in the house. Maybe I just want to focus on the words and reflect on them and hear them.

And I sense the thrill of gratitude in the heart of Jesus as He lifts up His heart to the Father whom He so loves and by whom He knows Himself so deeply loved. This is the deepest truth of our lives, that we are loved by that Father and that Son. We are brought into that infinite Love, which is the Holy Spirit.

What if we understood our lives this way? And I sense the thrill of joy and gratitude in the heart of Jesus as He lifts His heart to the heart of the Father whom He so loves and by whom He knows Himself so deeply loved. And that same Father who says to you through your baptism, as to Jesus in His, you are My beloved son. You are My beloved daughter. Maybe pause here and just hear those words.

This is the deepest truth of your life, that you are beloved, infinitely beloved in the heart of His Father and His Son, in the heart of the Trinity.

And now Jesus thanks His Father that He has revealed the mysteries of the Kingdom, not to the self-sufficient, not, Jesus says, to the wise and the learned, those who feel that they don't need to be taught, that they're enough unto themselves. But He has revealed the deep truths of the Kingdom to those who feel themselves helpless, who know that they depend on God for everything, like a small infant. Think of Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus. This is the deepest truth of that joyful spiritual life that she lived.

And I ask to be, in this spiritual sense, childlike. O Lord, my heart is not raised too high. My heart is not lifted up. I do not go in search of things too great for me. Psalm 131.

It's that kind of spirit where Mary, who says, "He has looked upon the low estate of His handmaid," and her heart thrills with joy at what God has done in her.

And I ask Jesus, the Son who knows the Father, to reveal Himself, to reveal the Father to me in this time of prayer, that He choose to do this in my heart.

And now I sense Jesus close to me, speaking to my heart. Maybe here again, I pause just to hear—more than hear, receive, accept, drink in, respond to His invitation: "Come to Me." When you feel alone, when you're discouraged, when you feel that no one understands, that you are alone on the journey, even if you're surrounded by people, hear this invitation.

Come to me. I understand. I know.

And I share with the Lord now as I pray my own desire here in this time of prayer. Even as I sense the deep longing in my heart to come to Him, to know that my heart is close to Him.

And now I hear Him say to me with infinite love, I want you to come close. Don't hesitate. Don't stay at a distance. Don't let your fragilities hold you back. Come to Me. I invite you. I call you. I want you. I love you. And it’s in coming to Me that you’ll find healing.

Come to me, you who labor and are heavily burdened. Do you feel that? I do. You do, often in our lives. Heavily burdened, you rise in the morning with your heart heavy, struggling to face the day, or that phone call from your college-age son or daughter that leaves you worried or anxious, or the report from the doctor, or the job situation.

Come to me, you who labor and are heavily burdened, and I will give you rest. That rest that Ignatius and Augustine spoke of so famously, that only in God we can find.

Lord, I pray now: grant me the rest that my restless heart so seeks and desires. I say yes to Your invitation. I bring to You my burdens, my labors, my weariness, and I hear You promise me rest of heart. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and lowly of heart. Both words are blessed: gentle, lowly of heart. How can we be afraid of this God?

Learn from me, Jesus says, and I ask the Lord for this kind of learning as I go through these times of prayer. It's the learning that my heart most desires—relational learning, person-to-person learning, learning about Jesus.

And we have a promise: You will find rest for your souls, for my yoke is easy and my burden light. In my own prayer, I come back to this text over and over and over again, and I never tire of it because I can feel burdened or discouraged or weighed down or anxious about the future, like you do at times, like all of us do, and maybe more often in these days than perhaps in the past.

And then here's this invitation: Just don't be alone with it. Come to Me. I understand. I'll give you the rest that your heart needs and the strength to go forward.

As you conclude this prayer, ask again these questions: What word in this Scripture most spoke to my heart, and what was the Lord saying to me through it? What do I take to the day from this time at prayer?

And what stirred in my heart as I prayed? What was my heart feeling?

What is Your message to me, Lord, as I rise from prayer to begin this day?

And may that message and that encouragement bless all the hours of this day. Amen.

Fear Not

So, welcome to our third session as we move into the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius. And I want to look briefly at an experience of meditation, that is the reflective approach to praying with Scripture. Now, I'm aware as we do this that, whether we've used this word "meditation" or not, we've been doing this all our lives whenever we've been just thinking about the meaning of Scripture. That's really been meditation. And what Ignatius will do is just show us how to do that more richly.

So this is a man whom I'm calling Mark, and an interview with him, which he gave me permission to share. He has entered the Church a year earlier, and he is praying daily with Scripture at this point. Today, he's praying with the parable of the Good Shepherd in John 10, and he writes about what happens as he prays.

"It was a beautiful time of prayer, an intimate time. There was so much in the words." Now you can already hear meditation there. "There was so much in the words. It's so beautifully written. I wasn't reading words. It was alive, almost directly touching my heart." And whether it's meditation or contemplation, as I say, this is where prayer leads. With Saint John Henry Newman's lovely description of prayer, you have it there: heart speaks to heart. The Divine Heart, through the Scripture, speaks to the human heart.

And that's what Mark is experiencing here. "It wasn't just words. It was alive, almost directly touching my heart. I had read this text many times, but it hadn't really spoken to me. The words had just lain there on the page."

"For some reason," let's just note that, "for some reason, this time, I had a deep sense of Christ, of awe, of the Good Shepherd easing my fears and leading me." "For some reason," this is really a very nice way to describe what, in theological terms, we would speak of as grace. So God's grace touches his heart. He opens himself. He's done it other times with this passage. Faithfully, day after day, he's praying. And today, in God's loving providence, God's grace touches his heart as he reads these words about the Good Shepherd, and they come alive for him. They speak to him in a rich way, and you'll experience this from time to time in your daily life of prayer.

"This time of prayer was more meditative and not so much in the imagination." So whether Mark knows it or not, he's using Ignatian terminology here. He's aware that this is more reflective than imaginative.

And this next line is a beautiful description of what meditation is. "I let those beautiful words sort of swim in my heart back and forth. I let those beautiful words sort of swim in my heart back and forth. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven. Come to me, all you who labor and are heavily burdened, and I will give you rest. I am the Good Shepherd. I know my own, and my own know me. I let those beautiful words sort of swim in my heart, back and forth."

And as he does this, you can see their meaning and their power entering into the deep places within him and touching his heart. "That prayer left me spiritually happy, kind of in consolation for a day and a half. I couldn't stop thinking about those words. I used them in some teaching that I was doing." This may have been catechetical teaching in the parish. "I used them in some teaching I was doing, and I knew that it wasn't just teaching. I was teaching from the heart, from experience."

And this is what can happen in our daily lives if we are open to praying daily with God's Word. If you have ten minutes, that's fine. Fifteen, twenty, thirty, whatever is right.

But this is what God's Word can do in our lives.

So our text for our third session of prayer is Isaiah 43:1–7, which I've summarized as the invitation to fear not, to not be afraid.

So we are moving now into what Ignatius calls the Principle and Foundation. Before we go any further in this journey of prayer, the first central foundational need, the principle from which everything else flows as a consequence, is simply this—simply, it's everything—to know how deeply we are loved in God's heart. For Ignatius, we never look at our own response, our own failures, sinfulness, until first we have let our hearts be warmed by this deep truth of God's love for us.

So I'll read the passage now. And this is in the second part of the Book of Isaiah, and God, through the prophet, is speaking to His discouraged people. They've lost everything. They're exiled. They're humiliated. The future is dark. It can feel like that in our lives at times. And to this discouraged people, God says these words:

But now thus says the Lord, who created you, O Jacob, and formed you, Israel: Do not fear, for I have redeemed you. I have called you by name. You are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you. Through rivers, you shall not be swept away. When you walk through fire, you shall not be burned, nor will flames consume you.

For I, the Lord, am your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior. I give Egypt as ransom for you, Ethiopia and Seba in exchange for you, because you are precious in my eyes and honored, and I love you. I give people in return for you and nations in exchange for your life. Fear not, for I am with you. From the East, I will bring back your offspring.

From the West, I will gather you. I will say to the North, give them up. And to the South, do not hold them. Bring back my sons from afar and my daughters from the ends of the earth. All who are called by My name, I created for My glory. I formed them. I made them.

So, again, as we pray, let your heart be quieted. Maybe just a little less troubled by the anxieties and burdens that weigh, and just be aware now of the gaze of love of the Lord upon us.

Ignatius says, do this for about the length of time that it takes to say an Our Father. How long does it take to say an Our Father? I wouldn't know for sure. Thirty seconds, something like that. So this is brief, but this really is blessed in prayer. Lift up your gaze to the gaze of Jesus and see the love that is there.

And now hear His words to you. God speaking to the heart of His exiled people here in Isaiah 43, and not only to them, but to me as I pray this day. I, who am so often discouraged and disheartened. And I sense now the Lord with me. I sense Him speaking these same words to my heart.

I read them slowly. I taste them, as it were. I allow their meaning to enter into my soul. If it feels right, pause the recording, take up the Bible, and let your heart stay with whatever verse or verses in Isaiah 43 that speak to you. It's very important in this kind of prayer that there is no hurry, no agenda, no need to finish the entire passage—let your heart rest wherever you feel the Lord speaking.

Thus says the Lord, He who created you, He who formed you. And like the people of Israel, as I read these words, I again become aware of God at the origin of my being, of my belonging to His people. And I glimpse, I sense the mystery of an eternal love that surrounds my whole being from my beginning, every moment of my life.

And I hear the Lord say to me these words: Fear not. These words, so often repeated by Jesus—do not be afraid—because we are so often afraid.

And now in my prayer, perhaps I speak to the Lord of my own fears and my own fears with regard to myself, my sense of inadequacy, the way I just keep failing. I'm so slow to respond to You, Lord. And over and over, I hear Him say to me, "Fear not, for I have redeemed you." That is, I am your protector. I am at your side. I'm with you. You're not alone. My power and my love accompany you.

I hear the Lord say these words to me, and then these beautiful words: I have called you by name, which is to say I know you deeply, individually. I have called you by name. You are mine.

And I think now, perhaps, of my own name. And as I pray, I hear the Lord pronounce my name. Hear Him say your name.

And as He does so, He gives you your identity. He gives you life. He makes you His own. He tells you that you are not alone. In the silent depth of my heart, I hear the Lord pronounce my name again and again and again, and my heart responds.

When you pass through the waters, I will be with you. When you walk through the fire, you shall not be burned. These are the symbols of the most dangerous situations in nature, situations which threaten even life itself. And these and all they represent will be powerless to harm you because I will be with you. Whatever difficulties I call you to pass through, you are not alone, and I will sustain you.

And a new sense of trust begins to dawn in my heart. And finally, these lovely words: because you are precious in my eyes and honored, and I love you.

Three phrases: you are precious in my eyes and honored, and I love you. With deep attention, ponder each of these three—precious, honored, loved. And if I may say this reverently, dare to hear the Lord say these words not only to His people Israel, but to you today, always. And let your heart respond to the Lord who speaks His love to you.

And with Ignatius now, as your prayer concludes, let your heart ponder these questions: What word in the Scripture most spoke to me? And what touched my heart in this time of prayer? What did my heart feel as I prayed? What did I sense the Lord saying to me as I prayed this day with this passage?

This is another Scripture that I choose because, like so many others, I love it deeply. It is simply—and this is said to a people deeply discouraged and so conscious of their limitations and failures—it is simply God saying to His people, "Don't be afraid because I love you. You are precious in My sight. You're honored. I love you, and I will see you safely through the struggles."

May that sense of hope, of being loved, bless this day. Amen.

Wonderfully Made

So, welcome to our fourth session as we move into the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius. And this time, we'll take another step deeper into the foundation. But before we do that, I want to take just a couple of minutes to share an example of imaginative contemplation.

So let's keep in mind that two different saints in our tradition, Saint John of the Cross and Saint Ignatius, both use the word "contemplation," but they use it in very different senses. So, I'll put an adjective in front of the way one saint uses it and the other to see the distinction.

Ignatius speaks of, as I've said, what we can call imaginative contemplation. So that is the application of this rich faculty of being present to things that are not physically there—the imagination as a way of entering into the richness of God's Word.

When John of the Cross speaks of contemplation, he means infused contemplation, which is a different kind of prayer that generally comes later along the path in the spiritual life, in which a person is more receptive. That's what the word "infused" means: that God simply pours love, fruitfulness, and communion into the person's heart, and the person's call in that case is simply to receive it.

But we are speaking here of imaginative contemplation, and this is Catherine. Catherine was, as a young woman, alive, intelligent, bright, full of life, and then suffered a minor illness when she was 21, went into the hospital for it, and underwent a rather severe stroke as a result of the procedure. And she lost a good part of her memory, she became subject to huge mood swings, and it was this long seventeen-year process of gradually recovering her emotional stability and peace.

And this day, she is praying with the Passion of Jesus, and it's in the Gospel of John. And it's the moment when Jesus is standing before Pontius Pilate, and the people are calling for His death, His crucifixion. So she describes this: immediately upon beginning, I found myself desiring to pray with the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus in the Gospel.

I saw Jesus standing before Pontius Pilate and His accuser. So this is pure imaginative contemplation. She’s there. She’s walked into the movie. She’s taking part, and she sees Jesus standing there before Pontius Pilate and the crowd of people around Pontius Pilate who are shouting accusations, calling for His death.

And she finds herself wondering, how could Jesus stand there while everyone called for His death, I wondered? How could He be so calm? This woman who underwent, as it were, out of nowhere or in a totally unexpected way, a trial that shaped her life for those seventeen years. And here is Jesus on the verge of His own death, and there He stands so calm.

You can just see grace working, beginning to touch as she prays with Jesus. She’s there contemplating, watching Jesus go through His own Passion that will lead to His death. Grace is already speaking to her own passion, if I may use that word, in her own heart, her own life.

"As I placed myself completely into that scene," which is a beautiful description of contemplation, "feeling Jesus’ calmness, I began to hear Jesus saying quietly to the crowd, "Yes. Take Me. Do what you want with Me, for My death will be your salvation."

“Give yourself over to them,” God told His Son. “I can never let you go. No matter what happens, I am with you. You are safe in My arms.” Now, if I may approach this with reverence, obviously those words are not there in the Gospel literally in that way, but this is how Catherine, as she prays, touches the deep love and bond between the Father and the Son that will keep Jesus safe through this.

The experience continues and leads to a deep healing in her own heart. But that's just a little taste or touch of the richness and the fruitfulness of how God's grace can work in imaginative contemplation.

Our text this time will be more along the meditative lines. So our text is Psalm 139:1-18. And here, in keeping with Ignatius' foundation, we explore how God is at the origin of our being.

So again, as you begin to pray, let your heart be settled. Let some of the worry go for a moment. Just be present to the Lord. Open your heart like a sponge that's relaxed and ready to receive the water as it gently enters. Let your heart be open to receive God's Word and see the love in the Lord's eyes for you, as when you open yourself to His Word, you allow Him to speak His Word to you.

Lord, you have probed me and you know me. You know when I sit and when I stand. You understand my thoughts from afar. You sift through my travels and my rest. With all my ways, You are familiar. Even before a word is on my tongue, Lord, You know it all.

Behind and before, You encircle me and rest Your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to reach. Where can I go from Your Spirit? From Your presence, where can I flee? If I ascend to the heavens, You are there.

If I lie down in Sheol, You are there. If I take the wings of the dawn and dwell beyond the sea, even there Your hand guides me. Your right hand holds me fast. If I say, surely darkness shall hide me and night shall be my light. Darkness is not dark for You, and night shines as the day.

Darkness and light are but one. You formed my inmost being. You knit me in my mother's womb. I praise You because I am wonderfully made. Wonderful are Your works.

My very self, you know; my bones are not hidden from you. When I was being made in secret, fashioned in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw me unformed. In your book, all are written down. My days were shaped before one came to be. How precious to me are your designs, O God. How vast the sum of them. Were I to count them, they would outnumber the sands. When I complete them, still You are with me.

If you feel so moved, you might just pick up that text, either listen to it again, take up the Bible when you have a chance now or later, and just reread those words.

If we let the Lord speak those words to our hearts, the truth of our life and this deep truth of how infinitely, personally, closely, warmly we are loved will come alive in our consciousness.

So we're praying with a psalm here. Psalms are prayers, and they are words spoken from the human heart to God. As you pray, make these words your own.

Lord, You have probed me and You know me. Let this be your own heart that speaks to the Lord.

And this is a psalm of wonder, a psalm of marveling at the closeness of God, as we've said, to each of us. You have searched me and you know me. And my heart now, as I pray, ponders this marvel: that the infinite and eternal God knows me and that I am important to Him. One of the greatest sufferings in life is to feel that no one knows me, and it's not true. There is One who knows me, who knows you infinitely, deeply, daily.

You know when I sit and when I stand; you understand my thoughts. Even before a word is on my tongue, Lord, you know it all. And there it is again, the sense of marvel that God is so infinitely close, always faithful, sharing, knowing, loving me in the depths of my heart, where my hopes and struggles and thoughts and joys stir within me. Maybe as you pray, invite the Lord into those deep places of your heart. Behind and before, You encircle me and rest Your hand upon me. The Lord's loving and protecting hand is always with me, no matter where I am, in all the times and places of my life.

And finally, this is a psalm of wonder, of marveling at God's eternal love that calls me into being. What a blessed thing to reflect on: that from all eternity, God knew me and arranged providentially, down through the centuries, all that would bring my parents together so that I would have life in this place and this time with these people. You knit me in my mother's womb. Maybe pause here and just sense the love that lies at the origin of your being, my being.

And my heart now responds together with this psalmist at prayer. I praise You. Wonderful are Your works. Gratitude stirs in my heart, and my heart responds in praise to God.

So I read, maybe I reread the words of the psalm just slowly, unhurriedly, letting the Lord speak to me and reveal their meaning to me.

And, again, Ignatius invites us as our prayer concludes to ask what word in the Scripture most spoke to me. Maybe take that word with you for the day. Saint Francis de Sales calls this a spiritual bouquet that he invites us to take from the prayer to the day, like a person who walks through a field and maybe gathers some flowers that the person takes home. And do this at the end of the prayer, something that your heart can return to and rest in throughout the rest of the day.

I'll conclude with this sentence. Well, I'll-just about two sentences from Saint Ambrose because we've prayed with the Psalm, and Ambrose speaks beautifully of the place the Psalms can have in our life of prayer. I remember my mom kept the Bible by her bed, and every night before retiring at the end of long and tiring days, she would read one of the Psalms. It's a beautiful thing. Saint Ambrose says, a Psalm is a cry of happiness. It soothes the temper, distracts from care, lightens the burden of sorrow. It is a source of security at night, a lesson of wisdom by day. It is a shield when we are afraid, a celebration of holiness, a vision of serenity, a promise of peace and harmony.

Perhaps today's prayer can also invite us to consider the place the Psalms can have as we pray daily. May God fill the hours of this day with His grace. Amen.

Dedicated to God

Welcome now to session five, and we'll dedicate this session. It will be our final session on the foundational reality on which this whole process of the Exercises is built, and that is God's love for us.

But first, I just want to mention something that is fundamental to prayer as a relationship, and that is something we've seen already in some of the passages. And that is certainly the freedom, but I'd say even more the invitation—the warm invitation when you pray to tell God what is really in your heart. I've always loved this passage in Mark, Chapter 5, of the woman with the hemorrhage.

She does want a healing. It's been many years she's been afflicted, but she hopes to do this anonymously, as a brush of a finger in a crowd. And she's able to do it. She approaches the Lord. She does brush her finger against His garments, and she immediately feels that she's healed.

And Jesus is obviously also well aware of this, and He stops and says, "Who touched Me?" The disciples make the obvious response: "The crowd is hemming You in on every side. How can You even ask, 'Who has touched You?'" But Jesus knows, and the woman knows.

And this wonderful woman—all the details are given. This is not easy for her. With fear and trembling, she takes courage. She falls on her knees at the feet of Jesus and tells Him everything, which is a beautiful thing to do in prayer.

And then she has this response from Jesus: “Daughter, your faith has made you well. Go in peace. Be healed.” Daughter—which is to say, you’re more than an anonymous brush of a finger in a crowd, even a healing brush of a finger—but one of the lasting and deep and beautiful relationships holds between us, and I want you to know that.

This happens often when I meet with my own spiritual director. I'll raise whatever burden or anxiety or problem that I'm raising, and I've gotten so I know how the director is going to respond, and the director will say, "Well, have you spoken about that with the Lord?" And I get a little bit of a smile and say, "Well, no, I haven't. I kinda knew you were gonna say that." And I'm really grateful to my director because slowly, gradually, over the years, I'm learning to do that—what this woman does at the feet of Jesus—and that is really to tell Jesus, not just to make the human efforts to deal with, you know, to make wise decisions in dealing with whatever the issue may be, which of course we have to do. But above all, to tell the Lord everything, to share with the Lord what's really in my heart.

I've quoted before John Henry Newman's classic description of prayer as "heart speaks to heart." When that's happening, then our prayer is really at the deep point. The image that I sometimes have of this is a husband and wife across from each other at the breakfast table. And let's say she has a burden in her heart about which she has not spoken with her husband, and he knows something is weighing upon her, but she hasn't been able or felt able or just hasn't spoken about it. The two of them will speak, but the conversation will probably remain fairly superficial. You know, these are my plans for today. Did you get that message and so on?

When the moment comes that she feels free to tell him what's really in her heart, then the communication will change completely. And then the communication will draw them into deeper communion. So that's the invitation as we pray: as different things are touched in our heart, to bring them to the love of the Lord, who always invites us to do as this woman does—to tell Him, as we say, everything.

So our passage this time is Jeremiah 1:4–19, which is this rich biblical passage in which God reveals to the prophet and to all of us that we are known from eternity, loved from eternity, given a mission in this life from eternity. And that's why we're in the world, in this place, in this time, in these circumstances, in this vocation.

So again, just let your heart be at peace, quieted. Just be aware of the Lord, and let your gaze lift up to meet the eyes of Jesus and just see the look of love in His eyes for you.

And in this way, let Him say these words to you.

The word of the Lord came to me. Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you. Before you were born, I dedicated you. A prophet to the nations, I appointed you. The Lord answered me, Do not say, "I am too young." To whomever I send you, you shall go. Whatever I command you, you shall speak. Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you, oracle of the Lord.

Then the Lord extended His hand and touched my mouth, saying to me, "See, I place My words in your mouth. Today, I appoint you over nations and over kingdoms to uproot and tear down, to destroy and to demolish, to build and to plant."

The word of the Lord came to me. "What do you see, Jeremiah?" "I see a branch of the almond tree," I replied. Then the Lord said to me, "You have seen well, for I am watching over my word to carry it out."

A second time the word of the Lord came to me, "What do you see?" "I see a boiling kettle whose mouth is tipped away from the north." The Lord said to me, “And from the North, evil will pour out over all who dwell in the land.

"Look, I am summoning all the kingdoms of the North—oracle of the Lord. Each king shall come and set up his throne in the gateways of Jerusalem, against all its surrounding walls and against the cities of Judah. I will pronounce my sentence against them for all their wickedness in forsaking Me, in burning incense to other gods, and bowing down to the works of their hands. But you, prepare yourself, stand up, and tell them all that I command you.

Do not be terrified on account of them, or I will terrify you before them. For I am the one who today makes you a fortified city with strong walls that no one can pierce, a pillar of iron too strong to be brought down, a wall of bronze, again too strong to be crushed, against the whole land, against Judah's kings and princes, its priests, the people of the land. They will fight against you but not prevail over you, for I am with you to deliver you, oracle of the Lord."

As you pray with this passage, think back to the providence that brought you into this world—how your parents met, your grandparents, maybe as far back as you know, your great-grandparents. In my case, World War II brought my parents together in a way that would have never happened otherwise. And all the providence that God has brought into being over the centuries so that from eternity we would come into this world in the time in which we live, in these circumstances, and with God's call to a specific mission.

What is your call? What has God given you? For many of us, the answer will be marriage, fatherhood, motherhood, the concerns of the family, action, involvement in the world and the business world, in the marketplace, involvement perhaps in the parish in a number of ways or in other ways, involvement in the Church. All of this is the situation that God has given to us, as He gives His particular situation to the prophet Jeremiah. And God's answer-word to us is: Don't be afraid. You will be able to do it because I will be with you.

Saint John Paul II spoke over and over again of the dignity of the human person. Once you begin to see this—that each of us is, as he so often said, unique and irreplaceable, unrepeatable, unique and unrepeatable. Unique—there's no other you, and unrepeatable. There never will be another you.

And you are important in God's plan for the world, to bring human hearts to Him for eternity. And there's no one else who can do what God has called you to do. Just like when Mary says yes to the angel, there's no other Mary waiting in the wings.

And so our invitation is not to let fear stop us, and from our hearts to say yes to God's plan, to God's call, to the providential place He has provided for us in the world.

Jeremiah, like us, feels too weak. I do not know how to speak. I'm just a youth. And the Lord just answers, you know, if you look at the Scriptures, you'll see that Jesus and God in the Old Testament never argue with a person who says, I'm afraid. The answer is simply, no. Don't be afraid because I am with you. I am with you to deliver you.

Let the Lord say these words to you as you pray: I am with you to deliver you. I make you this day a fortified city, a pillar of iron, and a wall of bronze, for I am with you. Maybe focus on just imaginatively seeing each of those images and what they mean.

So as we pray in this stage of the Spiritual Exercises, setting and renewing the foundation, let the Lord speak to your heart again of the eternal love that has brought you into being, of the love that has given you a specific mission and call and a dignity in this world. Bring to Him any fears that may make you hesitate to feel that you really can live this, and hear His word in response: No, don't say that. Do not be afraid, for I am with you to deliver you.

That's the foundation every day, pretty much every day for exercise here in Denver where I live. I'll go out walking, and very often my route takes me by a block in the city where a new building is going up. I've watched them clear away the old building, level the land, and now I'm watching them dig down deep, beginning to pour the foundation. It's beautiful to see that. Once the foundation is solid, the rest of the edifice will stand and fulfill its purpose.

Pray, then, as we go through these days of the Spiritual Exercises, for a renewal of these fundamental, foundational truths that will bless us and guide us every day of our lives.

In God's Hands

I'd like to begin our sixth session by reading just a few sentences from a description of Saint Ignatius at prayer, written by one of his early Jesuit companions.

Ignatius loved the sky and the stars, and he would often go up on the terrace on the roof of their house in Rome just to be there, just to experience that. I lived in Rome myself for a number of years, and we had a five-story building. And Rome, if you know it, like most big cities, is pretty noisy with traffic and bustle. It was always very welcome to go up on the terrace on that upper floor and kind of get away from that, or above that, into a more peaceful space where you could pray.

So this Jesuit describes what happens. Ignatius walks up onto the terrace and the following takes place. He would stand there and take off his hat. Without stirring, he would fix his eyes on the heavens for a short while. Then, sinking to his knees, he would make a lowly gesture of reverence to God, some kind of a bow or genuflection.

After that, he would sit on a bench, for his body's weakness did not permit him to do otherwise. He was too weak at this stage to spend the time of prayer kneeling, for example. There he was, head uncovered, tears trickling drop by drop, in such sweetness and silence that no sob, no sigh, no noise, no movement of the body was noticed.

I don't know if we'll ever find a more lovely description of the transition from what precedes the time of prayer into the time of prayer itself. And Ignatius passed this on to us. It's this brief pause. It's not very long, but you can see what he's doing there. He's pausing before he enters into what is, at this point in his life, very deep recollection in prayer. He is pausing to become aware of God's presence, and as we've been saying, the look of love of God upon him. So the prayer immediately becomes relationship for Ignatius.

If you do this, you'll find—you know that sense we sometimes have when we start prayer? I just can't get into it today. I just can't get started. This is Ignatius' counsel on how to enter the transition into prayer in a way that very often will resolve that for us.

Now, this is how Ignatius describes this practice in his Spiritual Exercises.

A step or two before the place, so you can see the threshold quality even physically here, a step or two before the place where I am to contemplate or meditate, I will stand for the space of an Our Father. As I said earlier, that might be half a minute. No, it's not all that long. And what am I doing during that space of an Our Father? Space of an Our Father, because in Ignatius' day there were no watches, was a way to give an indication of time. What am I doing during that space of an Our Father? I will stand for the space of an Our Father with my understanding, my mind, my heart raised on high, considering how God our Lord looks upon me. So that's what I'm doing during that space, considering how God our Lord looks upon me. God is always present to me.

What do I see in the eyes of God as He looks upon me? And then another way to rephrase that question is: What did people in the Gospel, when they came with goodwill, with moral struggles and weaknesses, sinful lives, broken bodies, but they came with goodwill—what did they see in the eyes of Jesus that so fascinated them to follow Him? And Ignatius says, begin your prayer that way. Begin your prayer by becoming aware, for the space of an Our Father, of the love in the gaze of Jesus upon you.

Now, our passage this time is Jeremiah 18:1–6, and this is the image of the potter and the clay.

Having seen what God's plan is for us, now Ignatius invites us to pray with our response. So as you pray now again, let your heart be quieted. Let peace come. Lay aside the burdens, at least for a short time. Just open your heart to receive and hear the Word of the Lord.

And begin, as Ignatius counsels us, by seeing the look of love in the Lord's eyes as He is about to say these words to your heart.

So the prophet says, this word came to Jeremiah from the Lord: "Arise and go down to the potter's house. There you will hear My word." I went down to the potter's house, and there he was, working at the wheel.

Whenever the vessel of clay he was making turned out badly in his hand, he tried again, making another vessel of whatever sort he pleased. Then the word of the Lord came to me: "Can I not do to you, house of Israel, as this potter has done? Oracle of the Lord. Indeed, like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in my hand, house of Israel."

So we have heard in preceding sessions of the Lord's faithful love for us, calling us into being, giving us a purpose in our life.

And now, at this point in the Exercises, Ignatius invites us to pray with our response: to be as available to God as the clay is to the potter, who shapes and fashions it into something that is beautiful and of great service.

So maybe, if you want, in the imaginative approach, go and see. Watch. Watch the potter taking the lump of clay, shaping it on the wheel. If it doesn't turn out exactly as he wants, he redoes that part to get it the way that he wants it to be.

So I see him mold the clay, shape it, and reshape it. And I see the total availability of the clay in his hands, ready to be shaped as he chooses. "Behold, like clay in the potter's hand, so are you in my hand." Just watch the image, think about it, see it, and see the application to our lives. And ask for the grace to be completely available to God's action, to place no obstacles, to be ready to be shaped in the way that the Lord chooses.

I think of those times in my life when God's call has taken me away from things that I loved—not occupations, for example—and into places that I would never have chosen to be. And I can look back now, years later, and see the wisdom that I did not see at the time. "Behold, like clay in the potter's hand, so are you in My hand." The prayer is to be available to God's loving providence, to say yes. And I've mentioned other biblical figures, but above all, we can enter deeply here into the Heart of Jesus.

And we have this beautiful passage in Hebrews 10:5–7, which gives us the sentiments in the Heart of Jesus as He enters into the world in the Incarnation.

"Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired, but a body you have prepared for me." That's the Incarnation. "Then I said, behold, I have come to do your will, O God," and this governs everything in Jesus' life. The constant yes to His Father—that is the golden thread that gives meaning to all the different twists and turns of His hidden life, His public life, and then the culminating death and Resurrection. "Behold, I have come to do your will, O God."

Maybe say these words more than once to the Lord. Ask for the grace to really mean them, and ask for the grace to experience the joy of them.

We have in Dante's Divine Comedy these lovely words which really summarize all of this: "In your will is our peace." It's a beautiful thing to know that we are where God wants us to be, doing what God has called us to do, that we've said yes, and with all of our fragilities are doing our best to live this well. "In Your will is our peace." So as you conclude, ask which word in this Scripture or image has most spoken to you. What stirred in your heart? What is the Lord saying to you?

And I'll conclude with this. One of our priests, now with the Lord—he died when he was 59—was Father Greg Staab, who was really a saintly man. And I think those who knew him—the kind of man whose cause for canonization really could be introduced. He contracted multiple system atrophy, and normally the life expectancy from contraction to death is about six to eight years; it was eight or nine years in his case.

The last four of those years he spent in a hospital bed, and it was a remarkable thing to visit him. You know, you hear of saints who just never complain. I always wondered if that could really be true. I saw it in this case. There were visitors in his room all day long. He would say a Mass as best he was able as he got weaker, maybe just finally just touching an iPad.

After the Mass, he would leave the Blessed Sacrament exposed for an hour. People were always there for that Holy Hour.

But what I'm remembering is when I first learned that he had this illness, I met him once in the corridors of our house. And I realized then how serious this was. I just tried to say something to him about it, and he answered with Ignatius—Ignatius' Principle and Foundation that we've been exploring and basically what we've just seen.

And he said, well, Ignatius says if God wants us to have a long life or a short life, that's in God's hands. To be rich or to be poor, to be held in honor or to be held in low esteem, that's completely in God's hands. I've never forgotten that moment—a man who was really living that complete availability, like clay in the Potter's hands, and a beautiful life that really touched many hearts.

God's blessings now, this day, and as we continue our journey through the Exercises. Amen.

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.

Love Never Fails

Let's begin session eight with a few quotes from some of the saints to make a key point about this kind of personal prayer.

Obviously, if you're praying, let's say, the Rosary with a group of people, or you're at Mass, or you're praying the Liturgy of the Hours, there's a set trajectory for your prayer. And obviously, you stay in step with the others as you go through the Mass or the Rosary or the Liturgy of the Hours, or similar kinds of prayer.

But in personal prayer like this, where it's the individual with the Lord and there's freedom to let our hearts go where they feel drawn, where God is drawing them in the prayer, then the situation is different.

I want to read a quotation from Saint Francis de Sales and his Introduction to the Devout Life.

You know that Saint Francis was formed on these spiritual exercises, and so you'll see a deep harmony between his writing and what we're talking about in the Spiritual Exercises.

So let's give a case. Let's say you're praying with the eight Beatitudes and you have half an hour to pray. And the first Beatitude really speaks to your heart and really opens up. And you love what's happening, but something in you says, this is beautiful, but I'm not going to get through the text if I just stay right here.

What should I do in this kind of condition? Should I keep it moving so that I get through the entirety of the text, or can I let my heart just rest where it feels drawn? I think the answer is already obvious from the phrasing of the question, but let's watch how the saints address this.

So Saint Francis says, if your mind finds enough appeal, light, and fruit in any of them—that is, particular verses or points in the prayer, let's say the first Beatitude, to go back to that example—remain with that point and do not go further. So if God is giving grace in the first Beatitude or the third Beatitude, let your heart stay there as long as God is giving grace.

Look, if you're looking to meet a friend who is in one of five houses up the road and you knock on the door of the first house and the friend is there, why knock at the other doors? On another day, the friend may be in another one of those houses, but today this is where the friend is. So, applying that, the first Beatitude today is where God's grace is, and God is pouring out love and strength. So allow your heart to stay there as long as it desires.

And that will be more fruitful in your prayer than feeling an obligation, as it were, to get through the entirety of the text. If you do want to pray with the entirety of the text, there's always tomorrow and the next day. But give your heart the freedom to stay where it feels drawn.

And then Francis uses an image. He often speaks of bees. Imitate the bees, who do not leave a flower as long as they can extract any honey from it. But if you do not—you know, since reading this, I've done this—you watch a bee: it lights on a flower and is busily extracting the honey or the pollen that it can find there. When it no longer finds any there, it leaves and moves on to the next, and repeats the process. And that's what Francis is saying as you go through the various verses of a scriptural passage.

But if you do not come upon anything that appeals to you after you have examined and tried it for a while—so you pray with the first Beatitude and it's rich, but it doesn't particularly open up for you on this given day—then go on to another. But proceed calmly and simply in this matter, and do not rush yourself.

So there's great freedom to follow wherever the Lord is leading in the prayer, and that's the richest way to pray with this kind of meditative or contemplative approach that Ignatius is presenting to us.

So in this session, we're going to continue with the theme of seeking freedom from sinfulness and weakness so that we can be strengthened to love and serve the Lord more. And I'm going to propose two passages. I'm only going to read one, but I propose First Corinthians 13:4–7, which is Paul's description, that classic description of love. Love is patient, love is kind, and so forth.

And then a second passage from Saint Paul, which is Romans 7:15–25. And that's where Paul grapples with, as we all do, the "I want the good, but I do the bad that I don't want to do." You know, "Who will set me free from this?" And of course, it's "Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord," who is the Redeemer and the Savior. But it's a rich passage in which Paul puts into words the struggle that we often can feel.

This passage in First Corinthians 13, in which Paul describes the qualities of love—verses four through seven—is a very rich way to examine ourselves. I'd say, husbands, examine yourselves on this. These qualities—are they there in my life as I relate to my wife and my children? Wives, are these qualities there as you relate to your husbands and your children? Parents and children, as you relate to your parents, friends in the workplace, and in the Church. Are these qualities present?

So Paul says, love is patient. "Patior" from the Latin, it endures. It suffers. It doesn't give up. It stays the course. It does not take out frustration on others.

Is my love patient? This is the first quality of love that Paul gives when he sets out to describe what love is.

Love is kind. Could that word be applied to the way I relate to my spouse, to my children, to people in the workplace?

Love is not jealous. Could that be said of me? Are there places of jealousy in my life where it's hard for me to see others do well, and somehow I feel lessened by the fact that they do well? And could I ask God, if that's the case, for an increasing freedom from this and really to rejoice in the good that God does in others?

Love is not pompous. It doesn't set up, you know, take on airs or set itself up as better than others. When we meet truly humble people—and I don't mean people who have a poor image of self, but truly humble people like Mary or Jesus in the Gospel, or Thérèse, and so forth—we love humble people. There's something beautiful and attractive about them. Am I that way? Can I ask the Lord to grow in that?

Love is not inflated, just filled with its own self and its plans and its desires and hardly aware of others. This is John Paul II's law of the gift: that as long as we seek to be happy by insisting on my time, my plans, my programs to the exclusion of others, we'll never be happy. But when we make the gift of ourselves in love to others, a wonderful thing happens. We become happy.

Love is not inflated. It is not rude. Can that be said of me as I relate to my family members and others in my life?

Love does not seek its own interests, but looks to the interests of others. This is again the gift of self of which Saint John Paul II wrote so richly and so repeatedly.

It is not quick-tempered. Am I? Is there a place of healing to which the Lord is calling me there?

It does not brood over injury. Do I do that? Is it hard for me to forgive? Do things drag on in my heart—a sense of heaviness or something closed toward others where there’s been injury? Can something fresh happen there, something new, something healing?

Love does not rejoice over wrongdoing, never rejoices over evil, but rejoices with the truth. Love, Saint Paul says, bears all things. These habits or foibles of a spouse in a family, in the Church, believes all things, never gives up on anyone, hopes all things, always believes that God can turn a human heart toward Him and newness can happen. Love endures all things.

So it might be helpful at this stage of the Spiritual Exercises to take this passage. And if you get time, maybe just relisten again to what we've gone through or take the text and read it and let it be a kind of examination, self-examination on love together with the God who loves you so much, and inviting the Lord to show me, to show you, where He is calling us to grow in that love which is the heart of our whole Christian life.

If time allows, you might also want to move to this second passage, and that is Romans 7:15–25, which is a very rich biblical description of the struggle that we all undergo when we really seek freedom from sinfulness so that we can respond fully to God in lives of holiness.

Paul says, For I do not do the good that I want, but I do the evil that I do not want. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me. So then I discover the principle that when I want to do right, evil is at hand. For I take delight in the law of God in my inner self, but I see in my members another principle at war with the law of my mind, taking me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Miserable one that I am, who will deliver me from this mortal body? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ, our Lord.

So as you pray with this text with great confidence, turn to the love of the Heavenly Father, the Blessed Trinity, the Savior, the Lord Jesus, and pray for increasing healing from sinfulness and anything that would hold you back from complete availability to God.

Very shortly, Ignatius is going to invite us to move into that space in which we seek to respond as fully to Christ as we can. May that blessing be given to all of us. Amen.

Seeking Mercy

As we move into our ninth session, I'd like to continue just a little bit more on this point of removing all the hurry from prayer in this kind of personal prayer, when we're free to follow our own pace in meditation or contemplation. And let's just look at a few more saints.

So this is Saint Catherine of Siena, and this is a witness who writes about watching her as she reads spiritual things. "She was not concerned about reading a lot or saying many prayers. Rather, she would chew on every single word," so it's unhurried, and there's the freedom just to follow wherever grace is drawing her. "And when she found one she especially liked, she would stop for as long as her mind found pleasure praising there." That's perfect. That's exactly what Ignatius is inviting us to do.

And then Saint Philip Neri, his counsel along these same lines: "To get good from reading the lives of saints and other spiritual books, we ought not to read out of curiosity or skimmingly," just kind of quickly to get through, "but with pauses. And when we feel ourselves warmed—so here's the same point. "When we feel ourselves warmed," something really speaks to us and nourishes us. "We ought not to pass on, but to stop and follow up on the Spirit that is stirring within us. And when we feel it no longer, then to pursue our reading." That's the same point that we saw in Saint Francis de Sales the last time.

Finally, I'll share an experience of a man that I'll call George. I just say once for all that all of these experiences that I share are either published or shared with the permission of the person who shared them with me. And he, at this point in his life, goes to daily Mass, and he spends a half an hour in personal prayer every day. And on this particular day, he writes in his journal: "Today, as usual, I started by thanking God for allowing me to come and see Him." He's there before the Blessed Sacrament. "Then, as is my custom, I said that I came to adore Him, Creator of Heaven and Earth. After a minute or two—I think, but I am not sure of the time—I said to Him that I wanted to love Him more and more, that I know He loves me, and asked Him to show me how to love Him, as I did not know and needed His help. Then I had a surprise. I began to repeat, in a way that was both intense and spontaneous, that I loved Him, thanking Him for giving me the grace to love Him thus." And now, this is the reason why I cite this. "For some time, I could not move on to the next point but kept repeating that I loved Him and wanted to love Him more."

And with reverence, because we're on holy ground, that's exactly the point that Ignatius is making in the prayer. Wherever grace speaks to us, there's nowhere else to be. "I never passed on to the next point." Perfect. "I was held back at this moment of love and also had no desire to leave it." If your heart feels that way, I really want to stay here. Follow your heart. Your heart is telling you truly.

"The next point usually was that I wish to conform my will to His," but he never gets there this day. "After this, my custom was to ask for graces for certain persons who were suffering or who need God's help for various reasons." But on this day, he never gets there, and he knows that he has made the right choice by simply staying where his heart is being nourished.

So for our prayer in this ninth session, I am proposing that we pray with the first part of Psalm 51. So that's Psalm 51:1-19: "Create a clean heart in me." This is the classic,Miserere as it's called from the Latin title, which is almost the model prayer in Scripture of a humble heart that recognizes its failure, its weakness, its sinfulness, and comes to God with great confidence and trust, humbly seeking the Lord's mercy to be healed and set free.

Biblically, this is given as the prayer that David prays after he has sinned with Bathsheba and Nathan the prophet has come to him and faced him with his sin. And then this is his heartfelt prayer for mercy from the Lord. This Psalm 51 has been deeply loved down through the centuries and repeatedly prayed throughout the history of the Church's spiritual tradition. And I'm just going to read a part of it here.

Again, let's begin in the way that Ignatius invites us to transition into the prayer. Take the time—maybe pause the app, whatever helps you—just to have that brief space to be aware of the love with which Jesus looks upon you.

If I were doing this, I would use that verse from Mark 10: "Jesus, looking upon him, loved him," and just allow my heart to sit with that and just to feel that as I begin the prayer. Then, you know, you can hear anything from the Lord when you know you're loved.

Here's my example of this: Here is a young girl—we'll say elementary school age—who has acted out at school, and let's say rather seriously, for her age, rather seriously badly.

And word has gotten back to her father, and she has just been dropped off, let's say, by the bus or however she returns. She is walking up the walk to the front door of the house. She stops and hesitates. She knows her father is inside, and she doesn't know how her father is going to respond to this. With some anxiety and nervousness, she finally opens the door, and she is standing inside the house now, and there is her father.

And her father doesn't say anything. He simply approaches her, looks at her with great love, embraces her, and says, I love you. Now she can tell him anything. And that's the dynamic Ignatius is inviting us to in this part of the Exercises. And I would say in a special way as we pray this Psalm 51.

So the psalmist, David, any one of us as we pray this, simply asks God for the mercy of healing.

"Have mercy on me, God, in accord with Your merciful love. In Your abundant compassion, blot out my transgressions" like they were never there. "Thoroughly wash away my guilt, and from my sin cleanse me. For I know my transgressions; my sin is always before me.

Against you, you alone have I sinned. I have done what is evil in your eyes, so that you are just in your word and without reproach in your judgment. Behold, I was born in guilt; in sin, my mother conceived me. Behold, you desire true sincerity, and secretly, you teach me wisdom.

Cleanse me with hyssop that I may be pure. Wash me and I will be whiter than snow. You will let me hear gladness and joy, and the bones You have crushed will rejoice."

This psalm begins in that space of humble acknowledgment of one’s sin, brought with great sincerity to God. And as it continues, there's an upward movement of increasing joy in receiving the gift of healing and forgiveness from the Lord.

At this point in the Exercises, I want to introduce a famous classic colloquy; Ignatius describes it. This is just from the Spanish "colloquio," which from the Latin means "to speak with." So this is just that time in the prayer when we find ourselves, having heard God's word, responding from our hearts to the Lord. And this is how Ignatius invites us to pray with this classic at this stage.

Imagine Christ our Lord present before you on the Cross. So that's the setting. There we are on Calvary. Jesus is there on the Cross, giving His life for us. And begin to speak with Him. So in some sense, yes, the others are there, but now it's your heart speaking to His heart. As we've said so often, your heart speaks to Jesus' Heart. Speak with Him, asking how it is that, though He is the Creator, He has stooped to become man and to pass from eternal life to death here in time, that thus He may die for me.

So here's the marvel, or here's the wonder of this prayer, this colloquy as Ignatius calls it. I just gaze on the Lord. If you have a crucifix, you can do it that way, or call up an image of the Passion, the Crucifixion, on your phone. And just look at the Lord on the Cross and be there and ponder, marvel, enter into the infinite love that leads the Creator to come into time, and the One who has eternal life to die in this world, as Ignatius says.

And feeling that love, then ask three questions, and these are going to lead us into the next stage in the Exercises.

I shall also reflect upon myself and ask: What have I done for Christ thus far in the years of my life?

What am I doing for Christ? What am I doing now for Christ, who has given His life, His very self, for me?

And then finally, Ignatius invites us to consider this question: What ought I to do for Christ? That's the question of the future. And as we'll see, that's where so much now in the retreat is going to lead. Everything that's happened thus far in this and the preceding sessions is praying for a heart that is prepared, that is well disposed, that is free, that is healed, that is ready—now to hear God's word, to see where He is calling us to live our vocation more deeply, and to grow in our response to Him. What ought I to do for Christ?

And then Ignatius concludes this by saying, as I behold Christ in this plight, nailed to the Cross, I shall ponder upon what presents itself to my mind.

Now, it's obvious that this prayer for freedom from sinfulness is all suffused with love. But it may be difficult in one aspect or another of our lives. You will find that if you stay with us, you'll find the healing coming, and blessing and grace.

You may wish also to consider, at this point in the retreat, the Sacrament of Reconciliation. If you know a priest who is willing to give you the time, and you could make even a special confession, that sacramental grace mingles with the daily grace of this kind of prayer in a way that's very beautiful, very healing, and very liberating. So that's something that you might want to consider at this point in the retreat.

And through the prayer, and if the Sacrament is there—if that's possible as well—you will find yourself eager and ready for the next stage in the Exercises. So we'll pray that that stage, too, will be blessed. Amen.

Longing To See

So, welcome to our next and tenth session as we go through the Spiritual Exercises.

Before we turn to the Scripture, I'd like to quote from the journal of Thomas Merton. This is in 1949, and it is December 23, so it's the day before the Vigil of Christmas, and he is very alive to the approach of Christmas. He has received from a friend a postcard with that famous painting of Fra Angelico of the Annunciation, where the angel and Mary are depicted, and he's looking at it in the silence of his room in the afternoon, and he writes this: "Fra Angelico's Annunciation on a Postcard, the quiet of the afternoon is filled with an altogether different tonality than the activity of the morning. The sun has moved altogether around and the room is darker."

It is serious. I take time out to pray and I look at the angelical picture, feeling like the end of Advent, which is today. For about eight minutes, I stayed silent and didn't move and listened to the watch and wondered if perhaps I might not understand something of the work Our Lady is preparing. It is an hour of tremendous expectation. I remember my weariness, my fears, my lack of understanding, my dimness, my sin of overactivity.

What is she preparing? What is coming up? She loves me. Her love shapes worlds, shapes history, gives birth to the City of God. I look at the serene, severe porch where Angelico's angel speaks to her.

Angelico knew how to paint her. She is thin, immeasurably noble, and she does not rise to meet the angel. Mother, make me as sincere as the picture, all the way down into my soul—sincere, sincere. Let me have no thought that could not kneel before you in that picture, no image, no shadow. I believe you.

I am silent. I will act like the picture. It is the end of Advent, and the afternoon is vivid with expectancy. Now, I quote that because there's a passage in this brief selection which illustrates very beautifully something that Saint Ignatius speaks about in prayer. It happens so naturally that you don't even really notice it, but let's highlight it now.

There's a passage at a certain point from imaginative activity. So this is really along the lines of imaginative contemplation. Merton looks at the painting of Fra Angelico. He looks at the figure of Mary, of the Angel, their various postures, and so forth. And all of this speaks to him of the mystery of the Annunciation and the Incarnation.

But at a certain point, there's a shift from the imaginative activity to direct address. So, Angelico knew how to paint her. She is thin, immeasurably noble, and she does not rise to meet the angel. So, this is imaginative activity. He's just drinking in the image of Mary and the angel, but now he shifts from the imaginative activity to speaking directly, in this case, to Mary.

"Mother, make me as sincere as the picture, all the way down into my soul—sincere, sincere. Let me have no thoughts, and so forth." Now, when we pray, that will happen at times. We'll be reflecting meditatively on a passage or imaginatively contemplating a passage, and at a certain point, just spontaneously, our heart begins to speak to the Lord. Blessed are the poor in spirit.

Lord, help me to live that. When we move from the reflective or imaginative activity to direct address, speaking to Jesus, to the Trinity, to Mary, let's say Saint Peter's in the passage, we speak to him. Then we have entered into what Ignatius calls the colloquy, as we said before, where our heart is simply speaking. At this point, God has spoken His word to us, and we are speaking our word in response to Him. Whenever that happens in your prayer, privilege that space. Never be in a hurry to move beyond it as long as your heart desires to speak to the Lord, because we are at the deep point of the prayer when that happens.

Ignatius invites us, in any case, to dedicate just a brief time at the end of every time of meditation or contemplation just for colloquy, just to let our hearts speak freely to the Lord.

Now, what I'd like to propose as a Scripture for this session is the encounter of Jesus with Zacchaeus in Luke 19:1-10. This is a beautiful illustration of Jesus entering into a broken life, a life beset by sinfulness and weakness, far from God, and yet a heart that longs in some way to encounter the Lord.

If you notice, Zacchaeus hopes for the least encounter with the Lord of any Gospel figure. It's not for healing. It's not even to get close to Him, let alone touch His garment as the woman with the hemorrhage and so forth. It's only to see Jesus from a distance. But that desire is all Jesus needs, and his life will be made anew.

So let's let our hearts rest, slow down, and simply be aware of the Lord. Or as Saint Anselm said, let our hearts just make a little time for God and rest a while in Him.

And aware of the love in the Lord's eyes as He looks upon us, let's let Him say these words to our hearts.

He came to Jericho and intended to pass through the town. Now a man there named Zacchaeus, who was a chief tax collector and also a wealthy man, and heard about Jesus. He was seeking to see who Jesus was, but he could not see Him because of the crowd, for he was short in stature.

So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore tree in order to see Jesus, who was about to pass that way. When He reached the place, Jesus looked up and said to him, “Zacchaeus, come down quickly, for today I must stay at your house.” And he came down quickly and received Him with joy. When they all saw this, they began to grumble, saying, “He has gone to stay at the house of a sinner.” But Zacchaeus stood there and said to the Lord. Now, after the encounter with the Lord, he's transformed.

Behold, half of my possessions, Lord, I shall give to the poor. And if I have extorted anything from anyone, I shall repay it four times over. And then Jesus says these beautiful words to him, "Today, salvation has come to this house because this man too is a descendant of Abraham."

Jesus restores to him the whole dignity that he had thought was lost. For the Son of Man has come to seek and to save what was lost.

So with reverence, we're on holy ground here. This is what we're asking of the Lord at this stage in the Spiritual Exercises: this kind of transformation. The courage, and I would say the hope, to bring our weakness—that part of ourselves that weighs on us, that burden that we never seem to be able to free ourselves from, that falling again and again, that lack of progress, that sense of being too self-centered, or whatever it might be. The invitation now is to bring that to the Lord and allow the Lord to respond, as Jesus shows us He always responds to that kind of sincere desire. He is present. He stays with us. He transforms us. He restores our full dignity and opens the path to holiness for us.

Now, rather than further commentary on this passage, what I want to do here is to share an experience. I'm going to call him Richard. Again, I'm grateful to Richard for allowing me to share this—an experience of actually praying with this passage.

So he writes, "I was at Sunday Mass and the Gospel reading was the encounter of Jesus with Zacchaeus. The homily moved me when the priest spoke about Jesus' desire to be with Zacchaeus. It touched something in me, and I knew that I would pray the next day with this Gospel." That's a very sure spiritual instinct there. If you are at Mass and a reading speaks to your heart, or something is said in the homily, or you're doing some spiritual reading or listening to a podcast and something speaks to you in a way that you know is a source of grace for you, it is very helpful to do what Richard does here.

He knows instinctively there's grace for him in this passage, so he knows he's going to go back to it in his personal prayer, which he does with great fruit. Don't just go by those moments when something speaks to your heart, because God is offering a grace. So he prays with it the next day. "When I did, I took the place of Zacchaeus." So this is pure imaginative contemplation. He becomes Zacchaeus. He's there in the tree.

"I was there in the tree waiting for Jesus to pass by. When I imagine the Gospel, I don't see things in great detail. I just had a sense of being in the tree waiting for Jesus to come."

That's the longing in the hearts of all of us for Jesus to fill the places that are too empty or the burdens that oppress us. I just had a sense of being in the tree, waiting for Jesus to come. Then He did come, and He stopped. I sensed that for Him at that moment, I was all that mattered. He was giving me His entire attention, and that was where the prayer stopped.

Jesus, looking at me with His whole attention—with warmth, with desire to be with me—and my looking at Him in response. And with a sure spiritual instinct again, Richard knows that there's no need to be anywhere else in his prayer right now. Just right here: the mutual gaze that is so healing for him. It was quiet and happy. It lightened my worry and self-doubt.

I knew that Jesus wanted to be with Zacchaeus regardless of Zacchaeus' sinfulness, and that by being with him—simply by letting him know that he was loved—Zacchaeus would be transformed. I felt that Jesus was with me in the same way, so heart is speaking to heart now. Then I heard Jesus say, "Richard, come down quickly, for today I must stay at your house." And we were together in the house without many words, just together."

So again, with reverence, because it's very holy ground here.

At this point, you can see that heart is really speaking to heart, as we've just said, and that another step in this man's transformation and growth toward God is taking place. What if we prayed like that every day? Ten minutes, fifteen, whatever we have. What if we did that every day? What would happen in our spiritual lives?

And what would we become for others as we bring Christ to them? Well, that's the next step that lies ahead now on our journey through the Exercises, and we'll pick this up in our next session. Amen.

Know the Lord

As we begin, I want to reread just two sentences from that text of Saint Anselm with which we began our first day. Let's just hear this lovely invitation again: O little soul, escape from your everyday business for a short while. Hide for a moment from your restless thoughts. Break off from your cares and troubles, and be less concerned about your tasks and labors. Make a little time for God and rest a while in Him.

Now, with our eleventh session, we move into a new step in the Exercises. Ignatius calls this the Second Week. It's the longest part of the Exercises, and it is all focused on praying with, getting close to, and assimilating Jesus as we see Him in the Gospels—His hidden life and His public life.

This is introduced in the Exercises by a classic meditation that Ignatius calls the Call of the King. And just to summarize it, basically what Ignatius invites us to do is to consider the most noble human leader we could ever imagine, who is engaged in the most noble task we could ever imagine, and who invites us to join with him in it.

Use whatever comparison you'd like. Let's say it's a doctor who is doing research that will solve cancer, for example, or someone who is working to resolve hunger in the world or to bring peace between nations. And this is a good and noble and upright leader in a noble, upright task and who asks us to share with him or her in the struggle so as to share also in the fruitfulness.

And then Ignatius says, if that is worthy of consideration, how much more the Eternal King, Christ the Lord, who invites all of us to dedicate our lives to joining in His task of redemption, and that is to overcome the real evils in the world: sin, death, evil, war, strife, and all the suffering and sorrow in the world, and to bring people to find the only true peace, which we find in God.

So that sets the tone for the whole of this part of the Spiritual Exercises. This is the human heart that is now prepared through what has preceded, is available, wants to respond, and essentially says, show me, Lord, where you are calling me to grow in my spiritual life, to enter more deeply into my vocation, to take the next step in growth and holiness, to serve you more fully in my vocation—in marriage, priesthood, religious life, the single condition, wherever God has placed me in life.

And the first of the contemplations—Ignatius turns above all now to contemplation in this stage of the Exercises—is the Incarnation. So the Gospel passage is the Annunciation, Luke 1:26–38.

And Ignatius does this with a broad sweep. It's a kind of triptych, if you've ever seen his—let's say, over an altar. And so there are three panels, as it were, three places of consideration. He invites us throughout, as we pray with the Annunciation of the angel to Mary and the Incarnation, to amplify our gaze to the whole of the world and all the suffering and sorrow. It could be as simple as when you read the paper or you watch or listen to the news. And a sense wells up in our hearts of all the sufferings, struggles, and sorrows in the world, and how desperately this world needs a Savior. For me, so often when I read the paper, that's my conclusion: this world needs a Savior.

So we see the world and its need for the Savior. Then Ignatius invites us, in some way, to be present to the ineffable mystery and communion of the Trinity, when from all eternity, the Persons of the Trinity decree the Incarnation of the Second Person of the Trinity to work the redemption of the world.

And then the third panel in the triptych, as it were, is the home of Mary in Nazareth and the encounter of the Angel and Mary.

Now in his text, when Ignatius describes to us how he invites us to pray with the Annunciation, he spells out for us the grace for which we are to ask, and it's the same grace that we will ask over the next number of sessions as we go through the hidden and public life of Jesus.

This is the grace for which we'll ask. This is to ask, Ignatius says, for what I desire. Here it will be to ask for an intimate knowledge of our Lord, who has become man for me, so that I may love Him more and follow Him more closely. So there are three steps in this very rich grace.

We ask for intimate knowledge of the Lord. That's why we pray with the Gospels. Intimate knowledge—we can get to know someone through reading about the person or through hearsay and so forth, but it's very different when we get to know the person through actual time spent with the person, in conversation with the person, sharing life together. And the Gospels are our privileged place to gain this kind of intimate knowledge of the Lord.

And we ask for that intimate knowledge so that as we get to know the Lord more on this deep level, our love for Him will grow. And consequently, our following of Him in our lives as we live our vocations will also grow: intimate knowledge, deeper love, more close following. That's the grace that we're asking for as we go through these contemplations of these events, what Ignatius calls the mysteries in the life of Christ. So let's look at the text.

In the sixth month, the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a town of Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man named Joseph, of the house of David, and the virgin's name was Mary. And coming to her, he said, "Hail, favored one, the Lord is with you."

But she was greatly troubled at what was said and pondered what sort of greeting this might be. Then the angel said to her, as so often in the Gospels, Do not be afraid. Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. Behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall name him Jesus. He will be great and will be called Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give him the throne of David, his father, and he will rule over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.

Mary said to the angel, “How can this be, since I have no relations with a man?” And the angel said to her in reply, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. Therefore, the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God. And now a sign: behold, and Elizabeth, your relative, has also conceived a son in her old age, and this is the sixth month for her who was called barren. For nothing will be impossible for God.”

Mary said, “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord. May it be done to me according to your word.” Then the angel departed from her.

So, is God calling you? Is God asking you to take the next step? Have you been aware for some time that God is leading your heart to make this choice—to let go of that thing which is not good spiritually for you, to take this new step toward living your vocation in marriage, priesthood, religious life, in the single in the world, wherever God has placed us? And can we ask for the grace to respond like Mary?

I want to quote from this famous classic homily of Saint Bernard, which the Church gives us in the Liturgy of the Hours during Advent. In the homily, what Saint Bernard does is speaking on the passage of the Annunciation, and the angel has just told Mary that God is asking her to be the Mother of the Lord, of the Christ, of the Messiah. He pauses the text at this moment when the question has been put to Mary and she has not yet replied.

And in the name of us all, he speaks to Mary. How all of us are begging Mary to say yes to this. Tearful Adam with his sorrowing family begs this of you, O loving Virgin, in their exile from Paradise. Abraham begs it. David begs it. All the other holy patriarchs, your ancestors, ask it of you as they dwell in the country of the shadow of death, and even the whole world asks this of you. This is what the whole earth waits for, prostrate at your feet. It is right in doing so, for upon your word depends comfort for the wretched, ransom for the captive, freedom for the condemned, indeed salvation for all the sons of Adam, the whole of your race.

And he turns to Mary and says, “Answer quickly, O Virgin. Reply in haste to the angel, or rather through the angel to the Lord. Answer with a word. Receive the Word of God. Speak your own word. Conceive the Divine Word. Breathe the passing word. Embrace the eternal Word." And then, in the conclusion of the homily, he quotes Mary's words—her yes: "Behold the handmaid of the Lord. Let it be done to me according to your word."

So Ignatius, in giving us this passage as we begin to contemplate the life of Jesus, asking for the grace of a deeper and more intimate knowledge of Him, consequently a deeper love of Him, and therefore a more close following of Him in our lives. Let the example of Mary—the call and her response—we can let that speak to our hearts, and ask:

Was there something in this passage that really spoke to my heart? Some word, some aspect of the interaction between the angel and Mary? What is the Lord asking me to take into the day as I live this day in communion with Him?

Amen.

Love and Follow

As we start our twelfth session, I'll share another one of these many counsels that Saint Ignatius gives for prayer with Scripture. Now, the presumption here is, of course, he is directly addressing the person who is making the retreat. But the presumption here would be a person who prays daily with Scripture in whatever setting or time or way that this can work well for the person.

Let's presume that the person begins the day with prayer like this, maybe gets ten minutes, fifteen minutes, twenty minutes at home before going to work or before the children get up, or gets to Mass—maybe daily Mass—twenty minutes ahead of time to have time to pray.

And what Ignatius suggests is that we choose the Scripture for prayer the evening before, which is a really helpful thing so that we're not getting to the time of prayer and at that point saying, well, now what will I focus on? But this has been chosen ahead of time. And this would only take just a minute or two. It doesn't take very long.

Let's say, for example, that a person prays with the Scriptures from the daily Mass, and a person might just look through those and find that the First Reading or the Psalm or the Gospel seems to speak to him or her most, or maybe still feels drawn to yesterday's Gospel rather than the Gospel that will be given today. So the person makes that choice the evening before.

And then Ignatius says, just before falling asleep, for the space of a Hail Mary. So again, there were no watches; this is just a way of indicating a very brief space of time. And he invites the person, for that space of the Hail Mary, just to think about that Scripture and to call it to mind, knowing that the person will be praying with this the next morning.

And then, upon awaking in the morning, instead of just having our thoughts turn wherever they will, to dedicate our thoughts to a gentle focus on that Scripture.

There's a kind of psychological reality here that somehow the seed is planted the night before; it germinates even through the rest of the night, and it's very present to the person upon arising. And you can see that a person who does this—and it really adds, at the most, a minute or two the evening before—is going to find it so much easier to enter into prayer with that Scripture when the time comes. So this is one counsel that's kind of classic for a person who does pray like this daily: just choose the Scripture the night before. Let it be present to you as you retire, and then let your thoughts turn gently to it as you awaken the next morning, and it will be that much easier to enter into the prayer.

Now we'll move in this session to the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem, and so I'll propose two different texts. The one that we'll look at is Luke 2:1-20, which is the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem.

Ignatius invites us to pray with this text so that we grow in intimate knowledge of Jesus, who chooses to be born in poverty, unknown, to be surrounded by people like the shepherds—intimate knowledge of Jesus so that we will love Him more and follow Him more closely in our lives.

So we let our hearts be at peace. Just be aware of the Lord. See again the warm, deeply personal love of the Lord as He gazes upon us. And in this way, allow Him to speak His words to our hearts.

In those days, a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that the whole world should be enrolled. This was the first enrollment when Quirinius was governor of Syria. So all went to be enrolled, each to his own town.

And Joseph too went up from Galilee, from the town of Nazareth, to Judea, to the city of David that is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and family of David, to be enrolled with Mary, his betrothed, who was with child. While they were there, the time came for her to have her child, and she gave birth to her firstborn Son. She wrapped Him in swaddling clothes and laid Him in a manger because there was no room for them in the inn.

And if you pray this contemplatively, you would just be there. I remember Saint John Paul II, in a Christmas homily one year, saying, we're here in Saint Peter's, but let's be less here and more in Bethlehem and present to these events as they take place.

Now there were shepherds in the region-living-in the fields and keeping night watch over their flock. The angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were struck with great fear.

And always the same answer, the angel said to them, do not be afraid. And now we can let our hearts hear these words, we who live in the modern world with so many troubles, where behold, I proclaim to you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. For today in the city of David, a Savior has been born for you who is Messiah and Lord.

And this will be a sign for you: you will find an infant wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger. And suddenly there was a multitude of the heavenly hosts with the angel, praising God and saying, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to those on whom His favor rests.”

Now I will read to you an experience of praying with this text in the course of the Spiritual Exercises, and I'll call this person Steve. And he begins by just these two words: hold me.

"As I knelt before the manger, gazing upon the newborn Infant lying in the straw," and so it's very clear that he is praying in the imaginative, contemplative way. He's there. He's present. Mary and Joseph, the newborn Child.

"Marveling at the wondrous notion that this tiny, fragile baby was at the same time the eternal Word of God made flesh for my salvation, I heard these words echoing in my mind: Hold me." So, an invitation unexpectedly surfaced in this prayer. "Initially, I hesitated. In the first place, I was not used to holding babies, having grown up as the youngest child in a very small family with no exposure to the world of infants and their ways. That alone made me feel a bit awkward. But the thought of picking up this particular baby, in whom dwelt the infinite majesty of God—well, the prospect was almost frightening."

So with reverence, because, again, we're on very holy ground here. In this imaginative setting, can you see that Steve is being invited to take a new step in closeness to the Lord? Grace is working.

"Nonetheless, the voice was persistent: Hold me. Nervous but obedient, I reached into the manger and picked up the Child, cradling Him in my arms. As I embraced Him and held Him close to my heart, I found myself suffused with an unearthly peace, the warmth of which penetrated my body and soul with a consolation that could only have come from Heaven." And Steve uses the very word that Ignatius himself uses: spiritual consolation, when our hearts are warmed with a sense of God's love and closeness. "For a time, I just sat there, delighting in the joy and peace that filled my heart as I held my Savior."

And again, this is perfect. Steve knows that this is the deep point. This is where he and God are close together in communion and love. And there's no hurry now, just to be here. "Such was the depth of my peace that I wanted to stay in that moment forever, but I knew that I could not do so, at least not in this life. At length, I handed the Child over to His smiling Mother and reverently made my way out of the cave, which served as their maternity ward, and walked away into the cold clear night."

Now Steve reflects on his experience. "The preceding is an account of a prayer experience that I had while meditating on the birth of Jesus as described in Luke 2:1–20. In accord with the instructions given by Saint Ignatius for meditating—he would more specifically say contemplating—upon the Nativity, I placed myself inside the Gospel story and imagined myself as a poor, little, unworthy servant watching the events of Jesus' birth unfold before my eyes in the cave outside of Bethlehem.

And in fact, in Ignatius' text, he invites us to do more than simply contemplate and watch and see and hear, as beautiful as that is. He also invites us to feel free to take an active part in the mystery. And so he invites us, and Steve quotes his words, "to see myself as a poor, little, unworthy servant"—maybe helping Joseph or assisting Mary in some way, or attending to one need or another as I contemplate them.

And something unexpected happens as Steve does this. "What I never expected to happen"—and this is just where you see grace at work—"was the moment in which I went from being an observer of the scene to a participant, when I heard the words, "Hold me," and I found myself picking up the newborn Jesus and holding Him in my arms. The unexpected direction my prayer experience took"—and this will happen to us as grace works in our prayer—"and the deep feelings of peace and consolation that followed left me with no doubt that I had had a genuine encounter with God in prayer."

I'll just read his final reflection here. "Eight years have passed since my profound experience of the newborn Christ in my Christmas meditation, but the fruits have remained with me to this day."

I'll again ask: What if we prayed with Scripture daily, in a realistic way that fits with the time and availability that we have? For some of us, it will be listening to an app, commuting to work, or picking up the children after school, or while we're doing laundry or getting a meal. Some of us will have more quiet time in the more formal sense.

But what if we did this every day? You can see that this is one invitation that flows from the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises.

"I can still vividly recall imagining Jesus as a tiny, vulnerable baby, and this image remains with me as a reminder of how much God loved me and all of humanity in His willingness to come to us in human form." So, as we have even briefly contemplated the journey to Bethlehem, the birth of the Savior in such simplicity and poverty, the exalting joy of the angels as Redemption has now come into the world today—a great joy for all the people: a Savior.

As we contemplate Mary and Joseph, the simple faith of the shepherds—simple in the deep Gospel sense of Gospel simplicity, openness, and availability to God—what word speaks to me? What is God saying to me? What grace has He given me? Does He want to give me?

And how is He inviting me to take this into my day?

Amen.

Set Out to Begin

As we begin, I'd like to say a word about the body when we pray.

Obviously, this is a theme of some significance because it's the whole person that prays—body and soul. What we do with the body can either help or hinder our prayer.

And Ignatius, he doesn't write in a formal, systematic way, but what he does do is address issues like this at various points throughout the Exercises. So, I'm going to look at two of the texts where he addresses physical issues.

Now, obviously, it's difficult to pray if we don't have the energy that we need, and so proper care of the body—to live in such a way that our energies are good—is valuable, of course, not only for prayer but for every aspect of living our vocation. But certainly this is true for prayer as well. It's just very difficult to pray when we're exhausted. So, in a general sense, wise and prudent care of the body really does make things a lot easier in the life of prayer.

But now, specifically, when we are—let's say one of us does have this time of quiet, maybe has twenty minutes every morning to pray with Scripture, or spends time before or after daily Mass praying with Scripture in church, or at some point in Adoration—what can we do in terms of the body in order to assist the prayer?

So Ignatius says, I will enter upon the meditation now kneeling, now prostrate upon the ground, now lying face upwards, now seated, now standing, always being intent on seeking what I desire. That is the grace that we're seeking in the prayer.

And Ignatius says, so two things should be noted. Now, the first thing is that Ignatius gives us an almost startling variety of positions. Essentially, what he's saying that any sufficiently dignified physical position is possible in prayer. The key is that it really be assisting our prayer. If the position is too demanding, it will distract us from our prayer. If it is too relaxed, it may also, in its own way, make prayer difficult for us. So Ignatius says to choose with great freedom a dignified position that really does help you to pray.

So if a person, for example, is kneeling and the effort becomes so demanding that it's hard to focus on the prayer, the person probably will do better to sit. And if a person is sitting and falling asleep, perhaps kneeling for a while may actually assist the person in the prayer.

So what essentially Ignatius is saying is: find the position that really is helping you to pray well. Then he goes on to say that we wouldn't change it too often, probably, during the time of prayer, so that we don't have too often interruptions in the course of our prayer.

Elsewhere in the Exercises, Ignatius briefly addresses the issue of the eyes in prayer and says, "One may kneel or sit, as may be better suited to his disposition and more conducive to devotion." Is it better to kneel or to sit when you pray? There's no single answer to that. The answer is: which position best helps you to pray? That's the better position for you.

So one may kneel or sit as may be better suited to his disposition and more conducive to devotion. He should keep his eyes closed or fixed in one position without permitting them to roam. So, two options for the eyes: either simply close them in a way that, maybe removes distractions and helps us focus on the imaginative or reflective activity, or keep them fixed on a single point. If you're in church, maybe the Blessed Sacrament, a crucifix, or whatever is helpful to us.

Now, obviously, all of this presumes that we do have that quiet space. If a person is praying this way, listening to an app while driving, obviously the situation is different.

The text that we'll choose for this session is the Baptism of Jesus, and we find this in Matthew 3:13–17. This is a pivotal moment in the life of Jesus, as it marks the transition from the years of the hidden life and the beginning of His public ministry. So I'll read the text, and then we'll go back over it.

Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan to be baptized by him. John tried to prevent Him, saying, “I need to be baptized by You, and You are coming to me?” Jesus said to him in reply, “Allow it now, for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.” Then he allowed Him. After Jesus was baptized, He came up from the water, and behold, the heavens were opened for Him, and He saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and coming upon Him.

And a voice came from the heavens, saying, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.”

So we let our hearts see the look of love in the Lord’s eyes as He gazes upon us.

And now we enter into the Gospel scene.

And I live with Jesus this moment when He leaves everything that has been familiar to Him for thirty years and sets out alone, supported only by His trust in the Father’s will, setting out to fulfill the mission the Father has given Him. Maybe I even think back to that time in my life when I set out, too, to begin a new life in the vocation to which God has called me and to which God calls me every day.

Then Jesus came from Galilee to the Jordan, Matthew writes. And I am there in Nazareth with Jesus. I watch as He senses that the time has come to depart. He is a man like us in all things but sin. What does this moment mean to Him?

What does it mean for His mother? How would they spend those last days together? What does she experience? And we can hear her saying again as her Son leaves, "Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord. Let it be done to me according to your word."

And now I walk with Him and the other pilgrims, this journey of three or four days down to the Jordan. The fame of the Baptist has spread, and people are gathering. I walk with Him. Maybe I even speak with Jesus. What is this like for You, to set out alone with no disciples, completely unknown, simply trusting in the will of Your Father, obedient to the will of Your Father?

And now we are there at the river. Crowds gather. The Baptist is there in the water performing the rite. We sense the hope in the people's hearts that something new is happening, that God is visiting His people. And I watch as Jesus also humbly submits to John's rite of baptism. And in His baptism, water itself is changed and given new power.

Maybe I ponder for a time the mystery of my own Baptism. When did it happen? Where did it happen? What did it mean in my life? What does it mean in my life?

And now I ponder this moment when the Trinity is revealed. Jesus comes up out of the waters, and the Spirit descends upon Him like a dove. And the voice of the Father is heard: "This is my beloved Son." The Spirit anoints Him, the Spirit whom the hymn describes as the Advocate, the Gift of God, Fire, Spiritual Anointing. Love, is poured into the heart of Christ, readying Him for His mission. That same Spirit who was given to me in my Baptism.

And here my heart slows, and I hear these words said with such ineffable love by the Father to the Son: This is my beloved Son. Words that are given to me, that were given to me and are given to me through my Baptism: You are my beloved son. You are my beloved daughter. I pause just to let my heart hear those words.

And I ponder. I seek to grasp, to understand, and embrace the mystery of the love given to me. Again, I pray for an intimate knowledge of Jesus so that I may love Him more and follow Him more closely in my life.

Jesus, what are you saying to me as I contemplate the mystery of Your Baptism? What do You wish to show to my heart? What do You wish me to take to this day?

And I'll conclude with a brief quotation from the spiritual journal of the French Catholic writer Julien Green, who died in 1998. After his death, his sister published a digest of the many volumes of his diary, and there's some really fascinating reading in them. And he is describing here praying with Scripture at the close of the day.

In a corner of one's room when the day is closing, when the sounds of the city and of life die down a little, when in us lies the silence of twilight where God is perhaps more perceptible than at other moments, that is the time to open the Bible and listen to what it is going to say to us, to talk to God with a heart still warm with happiness. How He must love to be told that He is loved. And the more we tell Him, the more He loves us. The Bible is a book that stays open forever since it speaks only of the eternal present, which is a lovely example of what it means to pray with the Scriptures daily and what it brings into our lives. And I pray that that grace and blessing be ours, certainly now as we go through these spiritual exercises, but always in our spiritual lives. Amen.

First of His Signs

As we begin, I'd like to address the question of the choice of a Scripture if we should choose to pray daily with Sacred Scripture. And I'll propose two different ways of choosing a Scripture. Obviously, whatever works best for you is fine.

One choice of the Scripture comes—and many people do this—from the daily readings of the Mass for that day. So someone might get, for example, the Magnificat publication, or there are all sorts of digital ways of getting this. And a person looks through the First Reading, the Psalm, and the Gospel, finds the passage that seems to speak most to him or her, and chooses that for the daily Scripture for the daily prayer.

Now, there are a couple of advantages to that. One is that you never have to cast about. It's there for every day, so you don't have to invent something every day. And then secondly, it harmonizes with the Church's prayer so that your prayer with Scripture harmonizes with the Mass of the day or the liturgical season—Lent or Christmas or Easter, or whatever it might be.

Another approach that some people choose is to go systematically through a Gospel or maybe all of the Gospels and just pray through them in that way. And I'll read to you a description of this. This is Robert, and he describes how he has done this just as a concrete example.

"Over these years, I've gone systematically through the Gospels one by one." So that's the nicest way to do it: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. "The evening before"—so he's following Saint Ignatius—"I read the Gospel I'm going through until a passage strikes me. I don't necessarily pray with the one that follows the last one I prayed with. I pray with the next one that strikes me." And I think that's a great idea as well. Choose the next passage that really speaks to your heart.

"Sometimes I choose a text based on what I'm experiencing that day, or it might be from something that strikes me in spiritual reading that I've done that day.

For example, one time I was reading about the Holy Eucharist, so I prayed with John chapter 6, which is all on the Bread of Life, and with the Last Supper. I stay with these texts as long as I find fruit. Sometimes I repeat a passage if it speaks to me. Another time I was reading a book on union with Christ. The author mentioned John chapters 14-16 and spoke about the Mystical Body of Christ.

So I spent two weeks praying with those chapters in John's Gospel. I went over them two or three times and felt them more deeply each time. When things strike me like this, I set aside the systematic prayer with the Gospels and pick it up again when I have finished. He continues, I go through the Gospels in order: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. When I finish, I start again.

The first two years, I jumped around quite a lot. Then I began this systematic way. Now I've been through the Gospels two or three times. I prepare for the prayer the evening before. I choose the Scripture, and then I read a short commentary on it—not a heavy intellectual one—"

And that's a useful thought. Most of us are not biblical scholars, and so to have a short spiritual commentary on the passage can be very helpful, and there are many of these. Just a short thing like that can help us to pray better with the text.

"I read the Gospel passage two or three times before going to bed. I do my prayer the next morning at the start of the day." So you can hear just how Ignatian that approach is.

So there are very serviceable ways of choosing a Scripture for each day. We choose the amount of time that we know is sustainable. And I'd say if you're in doubt about how much time is sustainable, choose less rather than more. You can always add more later on if it becomes apparent that you can do it. And then you're set for something that will make all the difference in your spiritual life.

Our text for this session, is, as we continue contemplating the life of Jesus, is now the first of His miracles, and that is the wedding feast at Cana.

So again, we let our hearts be quieted. We let our eyes meet the eyes of Jesus and see the love and the warmth that is there in His eyes and His desire to communicate to our hearts through His Word. We ask for the grace through this prayer to grow in intimate knowledge of Jesus so that we may love Him more and follow Him more closely.

On the third day, there was a wedding in Cana in Galilee, and the Mother of Jesus was there.

Jesus and His disciples were also invited to the wedding. When the wine ran short, the mother of Jesus said to Him, “They have no wine.” And Jesus said to her, “Woman, how does your concern affect Me? My hour has not yet come.” His mother said to the servers, “Do whatever He tells you.”

Now there were six stone jars there for the Jewish ceremonial washings, each holding 20 to 30 gallons. Jesus told them, "Fill the jars with water." So they filled them to the brim. Then He told them, "Draw some out now and take it to the head waiter." So they took it.

And when the headwaiter tasted the water that had become wine, without knowing where it came from—although the servants who had drawn the water knew—the headwaiter called the bridegroom and said to him, “Everyone serves good wine first, and then when people have drunk freely, an inferior one; but you have kept the good wine until now.” Jesus did this in the beginning of His signs in Cana in Galilee, and so revealed His glory, and His disciples began to believe in Him.

So this passage gives us another key moment in the life of Jesus: the first of His signs, the miracles, the healings that are going to draw crowds to Him and make Him known. So let's be there. Let's be there at the wedding.

You see the spouses, the crowd, the celebration, maybe the dancing going on. And I see Jesus there, and with Him the first of His disciples. And I'm there, a part of it. I see it taking place all around me.

And the moment is filled with deep meaning. God in Jesus, the Word made flesh, the Divine Bridegroom, has come to dwell with and be wedded to His people. They have no wine. The wine gradually begins to fail, and Mary is the one who sees it. And this is always true of Mary. She sees—she's the first one to notice—and she sees the need that is not even yet expressed.

And she reveals herself as profoundly sensitive to human situations and unspoken needs around her—alert, attentive. What if a parent lived like that as he or she related to his or her children? What if children related to their parents and grandparents in that way? Or a fellow worker or a fellow parishioner? And Mary does not simply notice; she becomes active.

She enters into the scene of need. She becomes involved. She brings the need to Jesus, and she is engaged and remains engaged until the end, until the need is met.

So what about me? Do I see the need and remain apart? Do I perhaps too easily simply assume that I cannot contribute or help?

And then this enigmatic answer of Jesus: "O woman, what have you to do with me?" But Mary is not deterred. She shows a kind of courage, and she is sure of her Son, Jesus. She does not give up, does not say, "Well, I've done all that I can," and withdraw.

She persists because she knows her Son. At times, you and I try to help and improve things, and it seems that our efforts meet no response. Do I give up? Do I say that I've tried and there's no use? And now I ask Mary to speak to me of her courageous and continuing involvement.

I watch as Jesus works the first of His miracles. I watch the servants as they fill the jars, the steward of the feast as he tastes the water made wine. And with the disciples, I see the glory of Jesus, and my faith deepens and grows together with theirs.

Is there anything in this passage that speaks to your heart? Is God saying anything? Is there some way in which, through it, He is inviting you to grow in intimate knowledge of Jesus, deeper love, and a closer following?

Finally, I want to quote from a letter of spiritual direction of the Venerable Bruno Lanteri to a married woman and mother of four children. A priest has just come into the area so that daily Mass is now available. Obviously, this is a very busy woman, and so he proposes the following to her.

You know, once I posted this at the beginning of Lent on Facebook, and the responses were really wonderful. Basically, they came down to this: "That's doable. I can do that." So he says to her, "It is important then to begin immediately to arrange with him for receiving Communion and to do so as often as you can."

So that's the first thing is: is daily Mass possible? Occasionally, every day, and the answers will be different for all of us. But if it is possible without excessive strain or failing to meet obligations and so forth, then it's the first thing to consider because it's the center, the source and summit, as the Council says, of the whole spiritual Christian life. "So his first counsel is: if it's possible to get to daily Mass, consider that and do that when you can.

Then you must be consistently faithful to meditation." Alright. That's the kind of prayer that we've been exploring over these days. "Consistently faithful to meditation and to spiritual reading, if it be only a quarter of an hour of meditation and a single page of spiritual reading." Well, you say, you know, I'm not a monk or a nun in a monastery. I can't go off for an hour and just leave my children or walk away from my work and pray like that. And Venerable Bruno knows that.

His question is, yes, you can't get an hour for most of us, but could you get fifteen minutes in the course of a day? As I've said before, if only when you're commuting back from work and you put on an app that helps you pray for fifteen minutes as you drive, or as you're going to get groceries, or alone in the kitchen getting supper, or mowing the lawn.

Is there any one of us who could not get fifteen minutes every day for this kind of prayer? Whether it's Ignatian meditation and contemplation, Lectio Divina, the Rosary, the Liturgy of the Hours—whatever way best helps us to pray.

And then he invites her to spiritual reading, if it be only a single page. Again, I'm so busy. I can't sit down for an hour and read. Let's grant that. But could you read one page from a spiritual book every day, or, correspondingly, listen to five minutes of a Catholic podcast every day? And who of us could not do that? Newness would be coming into our spiritual lives every day.

And the same also for the Examination of Conscience, which you can do while you are working. I'm so busy. I'm so tired at the end of the day. It's just hard for me to do the Examination of Conscience and review the day with the Lord.

Again, Venerable Bruno says, I grant you that. Is there a time when your hands are busy but your mind is free and you could do this with the Lord? You can see why people said, well, that's doable. Yeah. That spiritual program I can do.

Daily Mass when possible, fifteen minutes of meditation, one page from a spiritual book or digital resource, and then the examination of conscience—even while you're working if you have no other time.

And he concludes here: "Do not forget to raise your heart frequently with tenderness and peace to God." And he goes on.

So again, Ignatius, in leading us deeply into prayer, is inviting us to pray now and for the future in our lives of prayer. I really hope that that blessing will be there for all of us. Amen.

Into Deep Waters

As we begin our session this time, I'd like to introduce a second part of the teaching of Saint Ignatius, which is very closely linked with his teaching on prayer. Because when we pray, we already know this by experience: day in and day out, there are ups and downs. There are days when God feels close and there's energy in our prayer—what Ignatius calls spiritual consolation. And there are days, for reasons we often don't understand, when the bottom seems to drop out of that energy.

And then, if we're honest, on such days, it's hard to even want to pray. And if I may say it reverently, maybe we don't pray, or pray less than we really wish we would have prayed, or are not happy with the quality of our prayer. And all that energy for new steps in the spiritual life and growth, and entering more deeply into our vocations—everything that the process of the Spiritual Exercises is shaped to foster and facilitate within us—the attraction toward that just wanes, and we feel discouraged and without energy for such things. Now, there's absolutely no shame in experiencing these ups and downs. It's simply what it means to live the spiritual life in a fallen but redeemed and loved world.

But what Ignatius has done is to craft a set of 14 practical guidelines—he calls them rules—which help us make sense of this up-and-down daily experience and, above all, give us tools to respond well to it so that we're not harmed by the discouraging times. And if I may say this, there is a lot of this discouragement out there now—what Ignatius calls spiritual desolation—and there are reasons for it. If we look at what's happening in the culture and in the world, in the political situation, the sufferings of our Church. And I'm finding as the years go by that these 14 rules or practical guidelines of Saint Ignatius become increasingly valuable, so that once we start praying and start on the journey, we'll be equipped to stay on the journey and to see our time safely through what might otherwise be discouraging enough to cause us to pull back. And I'm simply going to mention the first of these rules this time, and I'm going to give this in my own contemporary language or rendering of Ignatius' sixteenth-century Spanish.

So Ignatius starts with a person, starting in the situation most far from God, and then he's going to work closer to our own situation. This will not be the situation of anyone listening and following this series, but it's helpful to get clarity on these basic things. From the second rule on, Ignatius will speak directly to our own experience. So when a person lives a life of serious sin—so you have a person like Augustine before his conversion, those twenty years, Ignatius during those thirty years when he's so far from God, or anyone living a life of serious sin—Ignatius explains how the enemy and the good spirit will act.

By enemy, he means obviously Satan and his associated fallen angels. He also means the wound of concupiscence, or the flesh, and then the third part of the classic triad, which is the world in the negative sense—those influences that will pull us away from God unless we resist them. And by good spirit, Ignatius means above all God Himself, the Holy Spirit, who works in the hearts of His children whom He loves. He means the good angels. He means the whole richness of grace implanted in us through Baptism, and then good influences around us, which abound in the world today and always.

So these are two actors in the spiritual life: the enemy and the good spirit. When a person is living far from God, how will these two actors work? The enemy, Ignatius says, will fill the imagination with images of sensual pleasures. Obviously, as long as the imagination is filled this way, the person will continue to live in this way, and it's enough to say this to realize how real this is today. The good spirit, on the contrary, stings and bites in the person's conscience—God's loving action calling the person back reverently, if any of us ever was in this situation.

We remember that sense of trouble, that lack of peace, that emptiness that almost compelled us to take the steps that brought us back to God. That's God's loving action in the hearts of those who are far from Him. God never stops pursuing His children. The most lovely literary description of this, to my mind, is the entirety of Francis Thompson's poem, "The Hound of Heaven," which is precisely about this action of the Good Spirit. Okay.

We'll be saying more about this as we go forward. Now, for this particular session, the text that I'm choosing with Ignatius is Luke 5:1–11, Peter and the catch of fish and the invitation to put out into the deep. So again, we allow the Lord's gaze of love to be upon us. And we look into His eyes and see the love, the welcome that is there, the warmth. And we open our hearts now to hear His word, to allow Him to speak to our heart.

While the crowd was pressing in on Jesus and listening to the word of God, He saw two boats there alongside the lake. The fishermen had disembarked and were washing their nets. Getting into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon, He asked him to put out a short distance from the shore, and He sat down and taught the crowds from the boat. After He had finished speaking—and we can see this again, the crowds pressing against the shore into the water—Jesus from the boat speaking the words that are so life-changing for them. And when He has finished and the crowds begin to leave, He turns now to Simon and says, "Put out into the deep, into deep water, and lower your nets for a catch."

Simon said in reply, “Master, we have worked hard all night and have caught nothing. But at Your command, I will lower the nets.” When they had done this, they caught a great number of fish and their nets were tearing. They signaled to their partners in the other boat to come to help them. They came and filled both boats so that they were in danger of sinking.

When Simon Peter saw this, he fell at the knees of Jesus and said, “Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man.” For astonishment at the catch of fish they had made seized him and all those with him, and likewise James and John, the sons of Zebedee, who were partners of Simon. Jesus said to Simon, “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching men.” When they brought their boats to the shore, they left everything and followed Him. So let's now be there by the lakeside.

It's the early morning hour. The fishermen have been fishing all night. The boats are pulled up on the shore. They're washing the nets, and the great crowd gathers and presses increasingly along the shore to hear Jesus. Maybe I'm there among them, and I hear His words, and I allow them to speak to my heart.

And now Jesus gets into Simon's boat, asks him to put out a short distance, and perhaps I'm there with Jesus in the boat, hearing His word close to Him. Maybe now I even take Peter's place if I feel so moved. And I hear the Lord say to me as He said to Peter, put out into the deep. Put out into the deep. Don't simply continue as you've been doing until now, but put out into the deep in your spiritual life, in your daily Christian life, in living your vocation.

It's time for something new. It's time for something deeper. As I said, the first request was not hard—to put out a little from the shore—but the second asks for more: put out into the deep. And maybe I ask the Lord now as I pray, are You calling me to put out into the deep in living my vocation, in my spiritual life, in my service? And where and how and what step are You inviting me to take?

I may share Peter's own sense of helplessness. We toiled all night and took nothing. I've tried and I've tried and I've tried, and still nothing. The same struggles, the same weakness. But now the moment of grace arrives—the moment of faith, of trusting the Lord's word with courage.

But at Your word, I will let down the nets. I will take the step. And like Peter and the fishermen, I experienced the astounding fruitfulness of simply trusting in the Lord's word, of putting out into the deep—the useless toil in a moment just changed into an overflowing abundance. My life can change. And I hear Jesus say to me as to Peter, Do not be afraid.

Maybe over and over again to my heart. And I hear Him give to me, as to Peter, a sharing in His mission. And Peter and the others, they leave everything, and they follow Him. Is there a word in this Scripture, a moment in this Scripture that speaks to your heart? What is the Lord saying?

Where is He inviting you to take the next step? I'll conclude by quoting—this will just be two sentences—from the chapter in his book, Crossing the Threshold of Hope, in which Saint John Paul II answers the journalist's question: You have been saying to the world for so long, "Do not be afraid." The question is essentially this, and it's a good journalist's question: How can you say that to the people of this world when there are so many wars and disasters and natural earthquakes, and all the broken nations, broken hearts, broken families, cultures struggling? How can you say to the people who live in this world, "Do not be afraid"?

And I won't go through the entirety of the Pope's answer. I will say that this chapter of this book is the text of John Paul II that I go back to more than anything else. But at one point he says this in reply: Have no fear of that which you yourselves have created. This was in 1995, and we can think of what's happened since. Have no fear of all that man has produced and that every day is becoming more dangerous for him.

Finally, and this is Peter and this is us, have no fear of yourselves. Have no fear of yourselves. That's Peter's fear. And if I may say this reverently, I believe that in the deepest place of our hearts, all of us share something of that fear. I'm not all that You want me to be, Lord.

I'm too weak. I don't respond fully. I indulge myself too much. I miss opportunities to help others. My spiritual life should be richer than it is, and we can go on with the various ways of expressing this.

But somewhere deep in our hearts is a sense of fear that I'm not what I should be. And then we need to hear John Paul II's words here: "Finally, have no fear of yourselves." And above all, Jesus' words to Peter, when he says, "Depart; I'm a sinful man." Do not be afraid. And the invitation through these spiritual exercises, and always in our prayer, is to share that place with the Lord.

That was the great lesson that Thérèse of the Child Jesus learned. And then our weakness, the place we are most afraid of, becomes the place that most brings us close to the Lord and helps us grow in holiness. May God grant us that blessing as we continue on this journey. Amen.

At His Feet

Let's look now at the second of Saint Ignatius' 14 rules, and this one is really key. When the person is living far from God, the enemy tries to make that comfortable, to keep the person in that state, and the good spirit, Ignatius says, stings and bites to awaken the person to a situation that deeply needs to change and to bring the person back to the only real source of our joy, which is God. Now, when a person is living in the other way—and that's going to be, if I may say this reverently, anyone who is a part of this journey through the Spiritual Exercises—you wouldn't be doing this if this was not where your life and your heart are. That is, the person who sincerely does not want sin and wants to grow in the love and service of God. Yes, the just one falls seven times a day.

The Scripture says that at every Mass, we need to ask God's forgiveness, and there's the Sacrament of Confession that we all need. But this is for the person who sincerely does not want sin and wants to love the Lord. This is you. You wouldn't be part of this if you did not want to live this way. Now, it's the enemy who's going to try to discourage, to gnaw, and to bite.

Ignatius uses that graphic word, and to sadden and to trouble with false reasons, and so forth. So remember, when Augustine wants to break the chain and begin to move toward God, he describes beautifully these voices that he hears in his heart. You want to break the chain? You want to turn toward God? How many times have you tried?

How long has it ever lasted? What makes you think it's going to be any different this time? You know yourself. You know you're too weak. You know this will never change.

Very reverently, have any of us ever heard that voice when we've wanted to let go of something which is not good for us spiritually or take new steps to grow toward God? Sure. We all have. I have. You have.

There's no shame in that. But what matters is to understand this so that we know how to reject it—that voice of the enemy. Here is a man who is at 8:00 a.m. Mass on Sunday morning, and he hears an inspiring homily in which the priest invites the parishioners to consider praying with Scripture for ten minutes every morning using the daily readings, we'll say. And this really speaks to his heart. He feels God's closeness.

He decides he's going to do it. And his wife has been doing this for a long time. He knows all he needs to do is ask her help and she'll get him started. So he resolves that tonight, when the children are in bed, he'll speak with his wife and get started the next morning. The day goes on—a discouraging email from work, let's say, a tense conversation at supper with his teenage son that doesn't resolve well.

And now, let's say it's 9:30. He's in his study at home, and he remembers that he was going to speak with his wife and get started. But there's the voice: Who are you kidding? You've never prayed with the Bible. What makes you think you're even going to understand it?

You know yourself. You get these little enthusiasms. They don't last. Why speak with your wife, get her all happy and excited, just to disappoint both of you a week later when it all falls apart? Okay.

Have we ever heard voices like that? Sure. And there's no shame in hearing them. But what matters is to identify them as the lies of the Enemy that they are and not let them stop us. And you see, a lot depends on this.

If this man speaks with his wife and begins the next day, or if he doesn't, this life of prayer is going to look very different in one case and the other. And in such persons, Ignatius says, the good spirit gives courage and strength, inspiration, showing the way forward. So it's the good spirit who shows this man, yes, I could start this, and I can do it if I speak with my wife, and I'm going to do it tonight. When Augustine hears that discouraging voice, he also tells us that there's another voice that speaks in his heart that says, no. Look, look at all these others who have done it.

They were no stronger than you. They had the same humanity that you have. It was God's strength. It's not your strength that matters here. Trust in Him.

He won't let you down. And that's what helps Augustine break the chain. So expect the discouraging voice of the enemy, identify it, reject it, and open your heart to receive the encouraging, life-giving, strength-infusing voice of the Good Spirit. Our text is the encounter of the woman with Jesus in the Pharisee's house when she washes His feet with her tears. So now let's just let our hearts be at peace and hear these words.

Jesus, looking upon him, looking upon her, loved him, loved her, loves him, loves her. And allow the Lord now to speak this word to our hearts so that we may grow in knowledge and love and a deeper following of Jesus. And let's be there as this happens in the Pharisee's home. The Pharisee invited Him to dine with him, and He entered the Pharisee's house and reclined at table. Now there was a sinful woman in the city who learned that He was at table in the house of the Pharisee.

Bringing an alabaster flask of ointment, she stood behind Him at His feet weeping and began to bathe His feet with her tears. When the Pharisee who had invited Him saw this, he said to himself, If this man were a prophet, He would know who and what sort of woman this is who is touching Him, that she is a sinner. Jesus said to him in reply, Simon, I have something to say to you. Tell me, Teacher, he said. Two people were in debt to a certain creditor.

One owed five hundred days’ wages and the other owed fifty. Since they were unable to repay the debt, he forgave it for both. Which of them will love him more? Simon said in reply, “The one, I suppose, whose larger debt was forgiven.” He said to him, “You have judged rightly.”

Then he turned to the woman and said to Simon, “Do you see this woman? When I entered your house, you did not give me water for my feet, but she has bathed them with her tears and wiped them with her hair. You did not give me a kiss, but she has not ceased kissing my feet since the time I entered. You did not anoint my head with oil, but she anointed my feet with ointment. So I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven.”

Hence, she has shown great love. But the one to whom little is forgiven, loves little. He said to her, "Your sins are forgiven." The others at table said to themselves, "Who is this who even forgives sins?" But he said to the woman, "Your faith has saved you. Go in peace."

So we are there, and we see the Pharisee’s house. It’s comfortable, well arranged, the room where the dining takes place, the table in the center, probably that U-shaped table the way they did, with the guests reclining around it. The servants bring food, and Jesus is there, and I’m there too. And then I see this woman of the city who was a sinner, and that’s the single way she is described. And I can see her alone, shunned, scorned, looked upon simply as a sinner.

And I feel the shame and the pain in her heart, her sense of failure. I see how each harsh word, each scornful look cuts deeply into her heart. I sense now the overpowering need in her for a heart that will not condemn, that will not reject, that will understand the pain and confusion, that will perceive and assist the desire to change. And perhaps in various ways in my own life, I too know that need. And she's heard of this new Rabbi who eats with sinners, who chooses to be with the poor and the weak, and a hope awakens in her, perhaps in me as well.

And the gesture of courage involved is remarkable. She enters the Pharisee’s house uninvited and not only unwanted, knowing that by so doing, she will bring upon herself the scorn and rejection of all. “If this man were a prophet, he would know what sort of woman,” and so forth. But she comes because of the great hope that she has that at least that one heart will not reject her.

And she says nothing. She approaches Jesus. She says everything with her actions. Her tears fall. And perhaps at this point, I may pause in the prayer just to consider those tears.

The tears of a heart that, for the first time perhaps in its life, knows itself understood, welcomed, received, accepted, healed, made new for a new life. I look upon Jesus’ face as He sees her tears. What does she see in His eyes as their gaze meets? What do I see in His eyes? She dries His feet with her hair.

She kisses His feet. She anoints them with the ointment. And I see all of this. And then I hear the parable to Simon: Simon, I have something to say. One who owed 500, the other 50.

Do you see this woman? Her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much. And then these beautiful final words to her: Your sins are forgiven. Go in peace. And I allow the Lord simply now to speak to me through this passage, to learn of Him as I see Him meet human weakness and sinfulness and desire to change, and how He pours love and blessing and healing into a heart that is burdened with pain.

We'll conclude by reading just the very beginning of the Dialogues of Saint Catherine of Siena. When I first read this, I was struck by the power of the way this begins. And she says—it just immediately moves into her text—a soul rises up, restless with tremendous desire for God's honor and the salvation of souls. She has for some time exercised herself in virtue and become accustomed to dwelling in the cell of self-knowledge. Sometimes you and I are afraid of self-knowledge because it seems to us that self-knowledge means principally having to acknowledge my failures.

Self-knowledge, rightly understood, is the happiest thing in our lives because if we know ourselves for what we truly are—as beloved in the Father's heart, beloved sons and daughters—then everything else will follow. Become accustomed to dwelling in the cell of self-knowledge in order to know better God's goodness toward her, since upon knowledge follows love. And loving, she seeks to pursue truth and clothe herself in it. And now Catherine points to prayer, which is the key way to proceed on this journey. But there is no way she can so savor and be enlightened by this truth as in continual, humble prayer.

Continual humble prayer. There is no way she can so savor and be enlightened by this truth as in continual humble prayer grounded in the knowledge of herself and of God. For by such prayer, the soul is united with God, following in the footsteps of Christ Crucified. And through desire and affection and the union of love, He makes of her another Himself. Nothing more beautiful could be said of us.

And may God grant us to move toward that realization in our lives. Amen.

In The Boat

Let's look now at the third of Ignatius' rules, and this is where he describes what he calls spiritual consolation, which are beautiful experiences in the spiritual life. When your heart finds joy in God, a sense of God's closeness and love, you are experiencing spiritual consolation. Open your heart to God's gift. So, spiritual consolation means an uplifting movement of the heart: joy, gratitude, peace, love, and so forth. And it's on the spiritual level, on the level of our relationship with God, on the level of faith.

So let's say a man who is discouraged is praying with the text that we just saw recently, Luke 5. He catches a fish, and he reaches this point where Peter, now aware that the Divine is close to him in Jesus, feels his sinfulness, his unworthiness, and he says to Jesus, "Depart from me, I am a sinful man." And as he's praying with this text, he focuses on Jesus' response, "Do not be afraid." And something is warmed in his heart.

Jesus, You see me in my failures and my weakness, and You tell me the same thing too. When, like Peter, I'm afraid, "Do not be afraid," and You confirm my belonging with You and Your mission. And his heart is lifted up gently and warm—a beautiful experience of spiritual consolation. Here is a woman who rises this morning. She's going to get the results of the biopsy this afternoon from the doctor.

And understandably, her heart is anxious. And as she walks down the corridor toward the kitchen to put on coffee and start the day, her eye just catches for a moment, as she walks down the corridor, the placard with the text of Psalm 23 that she's placed on the wall there. The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. Though I walk in a dark valley, I fear no evil.

You are with me with your rod and your staff. And her heart is gently touched. And she finds herself saying, Lord, I know you'll be with me. You'll see me safely through this spiritual consolation. Maybe one more example.

Let's say, well, let's say it's a man or woman who is going to Confession, and let's say she has something to share that she knows is going to be hard to say, but she is resolved to say it. She goes into the confessional and, with courage and some effort, she shares what she needs to share and is received with great kindness by the priest, and already his words begin to lift the burden. And when he pronounces the absolution, maybe just a tear begins to form in her eyes. Beautiful experiences of spiritual consolation. Now, I know as I describe these, that all of us can recognize times in our own spiritual lives when God has given us these joyful, encouraging, strengthening, uplifting movements of the heart on the spiritual level, on the level of our relationship with Him.

These are gifts of God's grace. Open your heart to receive them when God gives them, and allow the Lord to love and strengthen you through them. Alright. This time, for our text, let's take Matthew 8:23–27, which is the calming of the storm at sea. And again, now we let our hearts rest, become quiet, just become open to hear the Lord, to be with the Lord.

We look into the Lord's eyes and we see the gaze of warm welcome and love and desire to be with us. And we ask You, Jesus, through this prayer for an intimate knowledge of You so that we may love You more and follow You more closely in our lives. This Gospel scene begins by the lakeshore at nightfall after a long day of teaching and healings. Many of the people have gone home, marveling at what they've witnessed. Scattered, probably just small groups of people are still there along the shore of the lake.

And Jesus, now tired at the end of this day, as He does from time to time, asks His disciples to take Him to the other side of the lake to be alone. He got into a boat, and His disciples followed Him. Suddenly, a violent storm came up on the sea so that the boat was being swamped with waves, but He was asleep. They came and woke Him, saying, "Lord, save us. We are perishing."

He said to them, "Why are you terrified, O you of little faith?" Then he got up, rebuked the winds and the sea, and there was great calm. The men were amazed and said, "What sort of man is this, whom even the winds and the sea obey?" So we are there by the lakeshore, and we see Jesus, wearied at the end of this day, get into the boat, and his disciples also enter into the boat with Him, and maybe we join them. And we're there with this group of disciples in this small fisherman's boat.

And we set out now from the shore, and everything is peaceful. The fishermen take out the oars to row away from the shore. When they are sufficiently out on the water, they ship the oars and set up the fishermen’s sail. The wind catches it, and the boat heads out from shore. We see the shoreline recede behind us, the lights of these small towns along the shoreline.

And gradually, peace comes into the scene. I look back and see Jesus has fallen asleep in the stern of the boat. A man like us in all things but sin, as we read in the Letter to the Hebrews. But now, as can happen on this lake because of the shape of the surrounding hills and the nature of the water, the storm begins to arise, and it arises rapidly. The wind grows increasingly strong.

The waves begin to form and beat against the boat. They begin to even splash into the boat as well. And I see these fishermen who, precisely because they are, so to speak, the professionals of the water and understand well. This is not the non-sailor's fear because he or she doesn't know what to do in this situation. They do know, and they know the seriousness of it, and that's why they're afraid.

The danger is real. It is imminent. It is serious. With them, I feel the power of the wind as it screams now across the rigging of this small boat, buffeted now by the waves and the wind and the water crashing in. And I think of the storms in my own life—maybe in the past, maybe now in my life—those times when suddenly everything seems out of control, headed toward darkness, ready to collapse and give way.

And I have felt like the disciples’ fear in my heart. I feel like I've done everything I know how to do, and the situation remains. And Jesus sleeps. I see them draw near to Jesus as the boat rolls and pitches on the waves, tossed by the storm. And with them, I too cry out, “Lord, save us.”

We are perishing. That is a prayer that most of us probably know and have made at times out of fear and desperation to the Lord. He awakens, and before He does anything to calm the storm—and the peril is real and imminent—He says to them and to us, Why are you terrified? Why are you afraid, O you of little faith? And now, maybe as I pray, I hear the Lord say this to me personally.

Why are you afraid? And from my heart now, I take the time to answer. I am afraid, Lord, because of this situation. I am afraid because of this struggle in my life. I'm afraid that I am too weak to deal with it.

I am afraid of all that I see around me in the world. I tell the Lord of the storms in my own life. And I hear His invitation to trust, to have faith. And now they, and I with them, watch as Jesus stands and with a mere simple word commands the wind and the sea, and they grow calm. And I begin just to glimpse the power in this man, Jesus—in the Lord Jesus—to resolve the storms in my life.

And now, perhaps, I just take time to be quietly with the Lord, to tell the Lord all that stirs in my heart—my fears, my storms—and to ask Him to be with me in them and to guide me safely through them. I want to quote a commentary of Saint John Chrysostom on this passage, and he's commenting actually only on four words from this passage: "But He was asleep." It's a lovely example of what we mean by meditation. So, Saint John Chrysostom says this: "But He was asleep. Therefore, He sleeps."

So what he's going to look at is why, here they are in imminent, desperate danger, crying out to Him, and He's sleeping. Why does He do this? Really, you can see that what Saint John Chrysostom is dealing with here is these situations in our lives when we are in desperate trouble, and we cry out to the Lord and He doesn't seem to respond. It seems like He's sleeping. Why does the Lord allow them, and allow us, to go through such situations?

Therefore, He sleeps. For had He been awake when it happened, either they would not have feared. So if we were never asked by the Lord to go through these situations, we would never learn of the Lord's power and closeness in the same way. If the disciples had never been through the storm at sea when Jesus sleeps, would they ever have learned of His power in the same way? And you can know that from this point on, as they go forward in life, they will go forward with a new confidence.

We can look back over our own lives and see those times when we felt so alone in the midst of storms. And we see more clearly now, at a distance, how the Lord brought us safely through, and our confidence grows. Or they would not have besought Him. They would have never made that desperate prayer from the heart. We've all made such prayers at times when we feel completely helpless.

We turn to God and just say, help me, because I can't do anything. And something is growing in us as we pray this way. Or they would not so much as have thought of His being able to do any such thing. They would have never known that He could resolve, heal, settle even such seemingly impossible situations as this. They've learned that now because He's called them to go through this as He sleeps.

And so he sums this up. Therefore, he sleeps to give occasion for their timidity and to make their perception of what was happening more distinct. There was a kind of spiritual learning about God's providence and grace and power that we never forget when we've been through the storms and Jesus seems to have slept, ultimately always bringing us through the storm. So may God grant us that confidence. May that grow as we continue to pray with these exercises.

Amen.

Bringing Our Needs

In the fourth of his rules, Ignatius deals with spiritual desolation, exactly the opposite or contrary of spiritual consolation. A spiritual consolation is an uplifting movement of the heart. On the spiritual level, then obviously spiritual desolation will be a heavy, a downward or a heavy movement of the heart on the spiritual level. So, heavy movements of the heart—discouragement, hopelessness, sadness, and so forth. Okay.

So Ignatius is speaking about those times when, in our spiritual lives, we feel this kind of heaviness or discouragement or sadness on the level of faith, the level of our relationship with the Lord—let's say our life of prayer and living our vocation. I cannot say too often: there is no shame in experiencing spiritual desolation. I'll repeat it: there is no shame in experiencing spiritual desolation. Every saint who has ever loved the Lord has.

Read Thérèse's Story of a Soul. Read Ignatius's Spiritual Diary. This is simply what happens, as I've said, in living the spiritual life in a fallen but redeemed and loved world. What matters is to be aware of it when we're experiencing it, to be able to name it for the discouraging lie of the enemy that it is, and to apply the tools to reject it. If we can do that, wonderful things happen in our spiritual lives.

I've been teaching these rules now for about thirty-five years, and I've loved through all these years to see the difference that these make. It's my belief that for most dedicated people—and if you are listening to this, you are among them—for most dedicated people, for most of the way on the spiritual journey, it is precisely spiritual desolation that is the main obstacle. That is when we get discouraged and disheartened and can begin to pull back in various ways. So, the text of Rule Four.

When your heart is discouraged, you have little energy for spiritual things, and God feels far away, you are experiencing spiritual desolation. Resist and reject this tactic of the enemy. Let's go back to our man who hears the homily at the 8:00 AM Sunday morning Mass, has that wonderful sense of God's closeness, spiritual consolation, and the inspiration to speak with his wife and dedicate ten minutes to prayer with the daily readings every day. And let's say that he begins. Six months have gone by.

He’s been doing it pretty faithfully. He loves what’s happening in his own life and his relationship with his wife. He senses how his prayer is coming more alive. But this particular day at work, there’s a difficult interchange with a fellow worker, and it leaves him angry and discouraged. Normally, as he rides in the car home from work, he would listen to the Rosary app, but he’s so discouraged by this and burdened that he just doesn’t do it.

And let's say at supper, something happens in the conversation that is also difficult, and feeling the way he does, he doesn't respond well, and there's a tension that doesn't really resolve. And now it's 10:00. He's alone in his study. This is the time when he prays with the Scriptures and makes an examination of conscience. But tonight, he doesn't feel God's closeness at all.

He feels no energy for prayer. There's no sense of delight, energy, or drawing toward spiritual things. He is experiencing spiritual desolation. There is no shame in this. He is experiencing spiritual desolation.

No shame, but it matters that he recognized this. And here, just a few inches in front of one hand is the Bible. Nothing in him now wants to reach out for it. And here, just a few inches in front of the other hand on the desk is the phone. And everything in him now wants to reach out for it in a way that he knows can become, to use Ignatius' words, low and earthly.

And one touch becomes 50, becomes 200. You can see that this matters. If the man picks up the phone in that way, what's in his heart when the day ends, when he rises the next day? But if the man, with his eyes open spiritually and with some courage and God's grace, picks up the Bible as he always does and never touches the phone that evening, now it's in his heart as he resides, as he goes to sleep that evening, and as he rises the next day. So we will all experience times of spiritual desolation.

There's no shame in it, but it is so liberating to name it for the discouraging lie of the enemy that it is and firmly to reject it. With his next rule, Ignatius will begin to equip us to do that. Our text is Matthew 14:13–21, the Feeding of the 5,000. So again, as we begin, let's let our hearts be at peace. Let them slow down, as it were, in some way and become receptive.

When Jesus heard of it, that is, the martyrdom of John the Baptist, which really touched His heart so deeply, He withdrew in a boat to a deserted place by Himself. The crowds heard of this and followed Him on foot from their towns. They could see the boat from the shore. They saw where He was heading, and they hurried along the shore to precede Him. When He disembarked and saw the vast crowd, His heart was moved with pity for them, and He cured their sick.

When it was evening, the disciples approached Him and said, “This is a deserted place, and it is already late. Dismiss the crowds so that they can go to the villages and buy food for themselves.” Jesus said to them, “There is no need for them to go away. Give them some food yourselves.” But they said to Him, “Five loaves and two fish are all we have.”

Then he said, “Bring them here to me.” And he ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass. Taking the five loaves and the two fish and looking up to Heaven, he said the blessing, broke the loaves, and gave them to the disciples, who in turn gave them to the crowds. They all ate and were satisfied, and they picked up the fragments left over, twelve wicker baskets full. Those who ate were about five thousand men, not counting women and children.

So let's walk into the scene and be there. And I'm there by the lake. I see the boats, the water, the crowds, Jesus and the disciples. And news reaches us now of the death of the Baptist, who is Jesus' own relation and is so intimately linked with His own mission. Jesus feels this deeply.

He feels our human need to be alone at such times. He gets into the boat, the disciples with Him, I join them. And I live with Him and the disciples on this journey across the lake. I look at Him. I hear their conversation.

Maybe I take part in it. What does my heart want to say to Jesus in these circumstances? The crowd sees the boat, and thousands hasten along the shore to the place where the boat will land. And they come with their need for healing, seeking a new teaching, hoping. And I see them, and I perceive their great need.

And I too join them, moved by my own great need. The boat now draws near to the shore, and I see this moment when Jesus lifts up His eyes and sees this enormous crowd. They're awaiting Him. And I see His face as He looks upon them, which expresses the compassion that stirs in His heart. This visceral stirring so deeply touches Him that He is already involved in their need. I feel His response to my own need.

And I am there, close to Him among the people, as He moves through this enormous crowd—healing here a paralytic, restoring sight to a blind person, helping another to walk again, healing wounds, healing broken bodies, restoring—and I see the scenes of astounding joy that surround Him. Maybe I ask for healing as I need it in my own life. The hours pass as Jesus moves through the crowd, the sun begins to set, and we are thousands of people out in the desert with no food. The disciples make the human response: send the people away. But that's not enough for the Lord.

You give them something to eat. They express their sense of inadequacy, as we so often share it with them. We only have five loaves and two fish. How can we possibly feed this crowd? How can I meet my children's needs?

How can I assist my spouse in the way he or she needs? How can I help respond to the huge needs in the culture and in the Church? My resources are so few, feel so weak. The task is just too great. And yet the Lord asks, you feed the crowd.

And He takes the little that they have, blesses it, and gives them power to feed the whole crowd. I share and I sense their amazement, their awareness of the miracle as they pass through the crowd, giving food. They marvel at what they are able to accomplish with His power. And the hunger of the crowd is satisfied. The disciples gather twelve baskets of food that remain.

And now, I just speak to the Lord, sharing with the Lord what has stirred in my heart as I have prayed with this feeding of the 5,000, bringing my own needs, my own fears, my own desires to the Lord. We'll conclude by reading just a short excerpt from these lovely catechisms that Saint John Vianney would give when the crowd of pilgrims pressed upon his parish, such that people were waiting even three days in line to get to confession to him. Literally, over 100,000 people a year were coming to this small parish. Toward the end of the morning, after his Mass and already many hours of hearing confessions, he would go up into the pulpit and simply from his heart, because he no longer had time to prepare, give these catechetical talks that people grew to love. And in one of them, he said this: My little children, reflect on these words.

The Christian's treasure is not on earth, but in Heaven. Our thoughts, then, ought to be directed to where our treasure is. This is our glorious duty: to pray and to love. If you pray and love, that is where our happiness lies—those two things.

What if they were the two pillars of our lives: to pray and to love? Prayer is nothing else but union with God. When one has a heart that is pure and united with God, he is given a kind of serenity and sweetness that makes him ecstatic, a light that surrounds him with marvelous brightness. And then a beautiful image here: in this intimate union, God and the soul are fused together like two bits of wax that no one can ever pull apart.

Take two bits of wax, melt them, unite them—you can never pull them apart. This union of God with a tiny creature is a lovely thing. It is a happiness beyond understanding. And then here's His call. I often go back to this text.

My little children, your hearts are small. My little children, your hearts are small. And it's true. None of us has the patience that he or she needs, or the love that he or she needs, or the courage. My little children, your hearts are small, but prayer stretches them and makes them capable of loving God.

My little children, your hearts are small, but prayer stretches them and makes them capable of loving God. And that's what will happen in our lives if we continue to pray faithfully in the way that God is calling us to do. May God grant us that blessing. Amen.

Take Courage

We reach now Saint Ignatius' classic, and I'd say famous, Rule Five. I love speaking about Rule Five, and I would say this: if you were to forget everything else that we are saying about the Spiritual Exercises—you won't, but it's just a way of making a point—I would beg of you, please, never forget Rule Five.

Rule Five will get you safely through almost any spiritual darkness you may ever encounter. And it reads as follows: In time of desolation, never make a change. Eight words that have blessed men and women for five hundred years: In time of desolation, never make a change. When you are in spiritual desolation, never change anything in your spiritual life.

So if I fill out Ignatius' words a little more, what he's saying is this: When you know that you are in spiritual desolation, don't ever, while you are in spiritual desolation, make any changes to anything you had planned to do in your spiritual life before that desolation began. So, for example, here is a man who has it on his calendar to go to Confession at 4:00 in the parish on the coming Saturday. And this is his usual routine periodically—Saturday Confession. And then, let's say during the week, something difficult happens at work or there are some problems at home, and he doesn't really respond well to these.

He's letting his prayer slip. He doesn't feel God's closeness, doesn't feel much energy for spiritual things. And now it's Saturday morning, and he's remembering that he planned to go to Confession at four. And he finds himself thinking, you know what? I don't know that I'm really in the best shape to go to Confession today.

Maybe it’d just be better for me to go next week when I’ll be better prepared. Okay. Two questions. Is he in a time of spiritual desolation? Heaviness of heart in the spiritual life.

Yes. Is he in a time of spiritual desolation, thinking of changing a spiritual proposal that was in place before the desolation began? Yes. And whenever the answer to those two questions is yes, Ignatius' answer is very clear: In time of desolation, never make a change.

What should this man do at 4:00? Get himself to Confession exactly as he had planned. And if he does, very likely, that Confession itself will break the burden of the spiritual desolation. Of course, the enemy will try to get us to change our spiritual proposals in time of spiritual desolation. Here is a man who—well, let's make it a woman.

And she prays for twenty minutes with Scripture at seven in the morning, let's say every day, and that works well for her. And let's say again, something in the family hasn't gone well. Maybe she's worried about some physical things—whatever the human vulnerabilities are. And now some spiritual desolation has come in there. Prayer has been slipping.

She doesn't feel God's closeness. She's trying, but it's hard. And she gets up this morning and something in her just says, I don't know. You know, she thinks about the prayer at 7:00 AM. It just seems too difficult.

And she finds herself thinking, you know what? Maybe I'll do it after work this evening. Two questions: Is she in a time of spiritual desolation? Yes.

Is she in a time of spiritual desolation? Thinking of changing a spiritual proposal that she had in place before the desolation began? Again, yes. Whenever the answer to those two questions is yes, what does Ignatius tell us in Rule Five? In time of desolation, never make a change.

And very likely, if the woman does pray at seven as usual, that's going to do much to lift the burden of the spiritual desolation. So I beg of you—we could go on with this—but I beg of you, please never forget Rule Five. If you want, I'm going to say those eight words again. You can say them out loud with me if you wish: In time of desolation, never make a change.

Let's do it once more. In time of desolation, never make a change. And those eight words will bless you forever. I cannot tell you how grateful I am to Ignatius for Rule Five in my own life and how many poor decisions I have not made because of Rule Five, and you'll find the same thing as well. Our text this time is Jesus walking on water, and this is in Matthew 14:22–33.

So again, we pray for an intimate knowledge of Jesus so that we may love Him more and follow Him more closely. And we let our hearts find peace, slow down a bit, and become aware of the gaze of love in the Lord's eyes as He looks upon us as we begin this prayer. Then He made the disciples get into the boat and precede Him to the other side while He dismissed the crowds. After doing so, He went up on the mountain by Himself to pray. And when it was evening, He was there alone.

Meanwhile, the boat, already a few miles offshore, was being tossed about by the waves, for the wind was against it. He came toward them, walking on the sea. When the disciples saw Him walking on the sea, they were terrified. "It is a ghost," they said, and they cried out in fear. At once Jesus spoke to them, "Take courage."

It is I. Do not be afraid. Peter said to Him in reply, “Lord, if it is You, command me to come to You on the water.” He said, “Come.” Peter got out of the boat and began to walk on the water toward Jesus.

But when he saw how strong the wind was, he became frightened. And beginning to sink, he cried out, “Lord, save me!” Immediately, Jesus stretched out His hand and caught him, and said to him, “O you of little faith, why did you doubt?” After they got into the boat, the wind died down. Those who were in the boat did Him homage, saying, “Truly, you are the Son of God.”

And now we're there, the other side of the lake. The 5,000 have been fed. Evening has fallen. And I hear Jesus send the disciples across the lake in the boat, and I see them go. And with great goodness, Jesus also sends the 5,000 home.

And now he is alone, and this is one of those times when we are privileged just to glimpse the deep mystery, the deep love, the deep source of joy in the Heart of Jesus. That's what prayer means for Him: communion with His Father. And He is alone now, up on the hillside under the night sky. And reverently I watch, I accompany Him as He goes into the hills to pray. And now I watch Him pray.

In some way, I sense the deep joy in His heart, in His communion with the Father, the thrill of mutual love between the Father and the Son, which draws Him into prayer. As the quiet hours of the night pass, hour after hour, He is deeply enveloped in prayer. I'm going to interrupt the commentary for a moment just to say, if we ever want to know what prayer most deeply is, we see it here. And our prayer is just to share in this. We are so privileged to share in this.

In silence and with reverence, I watch now this mystery of prayer, of the deep communion of Jesus with His Father. But in the boat, the disciples are struggling. As the night hours pass, the wind and the waves are against them, and they struggle. That struggle is familiar to me too in my own life, when I want to progress toward a goal and things don't seem to work out. And in some way now, I'm there with them in the boat.

I see their tiredness. I hear their disheartened words. And you and I have spoken words like this at times too. But Jesus does not leave them alone, does not leave us alone. He comes to them, walking on the water.

He approaches them, but they don't recognize Him. And these are the times when Jesus is right there in our lives, but we haven't seen Him yet. And so they're terrified. They cry out in fear. And quickly He speaks to them as He does to us.

Take heart. It is I. Have no fear. Take heart. It is I.

Have no fear. I hear Him say these words to me, and I listen to them again and again and again. My heart responds. And I see the courage in Peter. Lord, if it is You, bid me to come to You on the water.

And I ask for that same courage from the Lord to come to Him when I sense His call to step out of the comfortable, to step out of the boat, not to hold back. And Jesus replies; I hear His invitation, "Come," invitation to Peter and to us. I see Peter leave the boat and begin to walk on water with his gaze fixed on Jesus. And I watch as Peter becomes aware of the wind, of the human insecurity of his position. I sense his courage fail and his fear rise.

He begins to sink and he cries out, Lord, save me. I too have cried out in fear at times. And immediately, the Gospel tells us Jesus responds. And their two hands meet: the hand upstretched in fear of Peter as he sinks, and the divine hand stretched down to him, which grasps his, holds him up, and saves him as it saves me. O man of little faith, why did you doubt?

O man, O woman of little faith, why do you doubt? Why do we doubt? I asked Jesus for a simple faith and a great faith. Jesus and Peter join the others in the boat. The wind dies down.

Peace returns. And they lift their hearts in adoration. And I join with them as I too say, truly, you are the Son of God. I'll conclude with just a very brief quotation from one who knew Blessed Solanus Casey, this man who died in 1957 and was a porter for so many years at Saint Bonaventure in Detroit. And he said words to her that she never forgot and was able to quote long after.

Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger. Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers. Pray for powers equal to your tasks. Then the doing of your work shall be no miracle, but you shall be a miracle.

Every day you will wonder at yourself, at the richness of life which has come to you by the grace of God. And that's what prayer can do. May God grant us increasingly that blessing as we continue to pray with the Exercises. Amen.

Listen to Him

Let's look now at Saint Ignatius' Rule Six, and Ignatius is now speaking to the person who is experiencing the discouragement of spiritual desolation. So here is the woman who, let's say, works in the mornings while her children are at school. Work didn't go so well. She returns. It's early afternoon.

Her husband and children are not home. She's discouraged. Normally, she picks up the Bible and prays at this time. She has no desire to do it. There's the remote control.

There's social media. There's YouTube. There's Netflix. Ignatius is speaking to her, and we've already spoken. Let's take the man at 10:00, alone in his room after a discouraging day. And there's the Bible that he usually reads at this time—no energy for it.

Again, there are all the evasions, the smartphone and the rest. When you are in a time of spiritual desolation, Ignatius says, here are four tools to use that will help you get through it much more easily—in fact, to help you not only get through it safely, but actually grow spiritually as you go through the time of desolation. So when you are in spiritual desolation, use these four means. Prayer. Now, this is simply prayer of petition.

Ask for God's help. As the woman sits there at 1 PM alone in her house, discouraged, not wanting to pick up the tasks that she really should be doing, not wanting to pray; as the man sits there at 10:00, poised to reach out for the phone in a way that can easily become low and earthly, here is the first thing: ask for help. We have a promise: Ask and you will receive.

It can be as simple as, “Jesus, be with me.” “Heavenly Father, I need You right now.” “Holy Spirit, strengthen me.” “Mary, be close to me,” or whatever favorite saint or your angel. That's the first thing.

Is that too obvious to say? Do we think to do that when we're in that discouragement? Ask for help. And I will tell you, from many years of doing this, I have grown to love this simple and powerful means—advisedly the first—because I've seen so often the difference that it makes. Secondly, Ignatius says meditation, and that is a meditation specifically focused on rejecting the spiritual desolation.

So call to mind those biblical verses that help you know that God is with you. The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. Though I walk in a dark valley, I fear no evil; you are with me, with your rod and your staff. What if the woman or the man call these to mind?

Let those words come to mind right in the desolation. Psalm 27: The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom should I fear? I can do all things in Him who strengthens me. Philippians 4.

Each of us will have his or her own favorite biblical passages. Have them ready. Call them to mind. Think about them. That's the meditation that Ignatius has in mind.

Maybe also memories of times that you've been in the darkness before and you've seen how God has always brought you safely through. Think about these things. That's the meditation Saint Ignatius has in mind. And then examination. And here are two questions to ask when you find yourself in spiritual desolation.

What am I feeling? If you can get to the point where you can name it, this whole overwhelming gray, heavy, dark cloud shrinks down to size. Okay. I'm experiencing spiritual desolation. That sets you free to start doing something about it.

And here's the second question. How did this begin? And the woman remembers, actually, this morning when I got up and had my prayer time, I was pretty happy. In mid-morning, when I was—let's say she's a special ed teacher—working with that student who was so difficult, it was pretty discouraging. And that's where this got started.

Okay. Now you can do something about that. I can talk with my supervisor, we can strategize what to do with it, and the cloud begins to lift. And then finally, what Ignatius calls suitable penance. Don't just give in to the escapes.

They only—they don't help. The aspirin wears off. The symptoms are still there, and the escapes these days are very often digital. So it may be social media, Netflix, YouTube, television. It might be just a gossipy conversation, refrigerators, and on and on.

Instead of that, Ignatius says, stand your ground with small, suitable gestures of penitential courage. Smile at the last person you want to smile at. Perform that service for someone who’s been waiting for a week for it to happen. Answer that email from the person who needs to hear from you. In small, suitable ways, resist the flight into gratification that doesn’t resolve anything.

So, prayer of petition, meditation, examination, and suitable penance. Do it, and you will see the difference that this makes. Our text for prayer this time is the Transfiguration, and we'll take this from Matthew 17:1–13. So again, let's let our hearts be at peace. Let us become aware of the infinite love and warmth in the eyes of Jesus as He looks upon us, as we open our hearts to hear His words.

After six days, Jesus took Peter, James, and John his brother, and led them up a high mountain by themselves. And He was transfigured before them. His face shone like the sun, and His clothes became white as light. And behold, Moses and Elijah appeared to them, conversing with Him. Then Peter said to Jesus in reply, “Lord, it is good that we are here.”

If you wish, I will make three tents here: one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah. While he was still speaking, behold, a bright cloud cast a shadow over them. Then from the cloud came a voice that said, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to Him.” When the disciples heard this, they fell prostrate and were very much afraid.

But Jesus came and touched them, saying, "Rise, and do not be afraid." And when the disciples raised their eyes, they saw no one but Jesus alone. So six days have passed, and we can feel with the disciples the trouble of heart. They don't fully understand, but from Jesus' words those days before, they understand that something dark, painful lies ahead. And how often we find ourselves in that same situation in our spiritual lives.

And Jesus, who is so aware of human hearts, knows what they're feeling and chooses now this way to strengthen them for the time of the Cross, to strengthen us for the time of the Cross in our lives. And so I join them now. We join them, and we walk with Jesus and the three disciples that He takes with Him. With them, we climb this high mount, rising, leaving everything else behind. And now there is only Jesus.

And with deep affection and awe, we watch as He is transfigured before us, His face, His garments, white as light. The glory of His divinity is shown, is revealed in the radiance and the beauty of His person. And with the disciples, we feel the fascination of the divine, and our hearts are drawn to the One that we love. And we say from our hearts, Lord, it is good that we are here. Think of those times in prayer when you have most felt God's closeness, when everything is stilled and all you desire is just to be there, just to experience the Lord.

And now multiply that more than we can say, and we catch just a glimpse of what the disciples here experience. And their hearts say, as ours do at such times, “Lord, it is good that we are here.” We want to pray. We love that communion with the Lord. And perhaps as we pray even now, we say those words over and over to the Lord.

Lord, it is good that I am here with You. And those words reveal to us the deepest meaning of our lives, the deepest love. Now Moses and Elijah appear, and they speak with Him. And then the cloud, which biblically is the image of God's presence, the cloud of the majesty of God, overshadows them, overshadows us. And we feel with reverent awe how close we are to the Divine.

And in this moment of revelation, each of us personally, we hear the voice of the Father speaking of the greatest of all loves and the fountain of every love: This is my beloved Son. Words given to us in our Baptism: You are my beloved son. You are my beloved daughter. And then the Father's voice says, Listen to Him.

And as we pray, we ask the Lord to teach us how to listen to Him every day. And we ask for a great desire to listen to Him. And then Jesus says to the disciples and to us, "Rise, and do not be afraid." So often in these Scriptures, we see the disciples' hearts afraid. So often in our own lives, we are afraid.

And once again, Jesus responds, "Rise, and do not be afraid." What fills your heart with fear this day? What are the anxieties, the worries, the burdens? Rise. Do not be afraid.

And then Matthew writes that they saw no one else but Jesus alone. And I ask as I pray that this become real in my life too, that in all the many events of my life, in all the encounters with so many people in my life, my prayer is to see Jesus and to respond to Him in everything. Now they come down from the mountain with Him, and we walk with them. The scene below is the same, but everything has changed. And I ask the Lord to help me to live now as one who daily comes down from the mountain, from frequently renewed times of close communion in prayer with Him.

What speaks to me most in this passage? What is the Lord saying? What is He asking me to bring from it, from this prayer to my life, to this day? I'll conclude by sharing an experience of a man whom I'm calling Charles, who has just begun to pray with Scripture. So this is still new in his life, and we'll see it in his description.

This is from interviews that I did when I was writing a book on this, and the persons gave me permission to share them. So Charles says, I try to pray with Scripture as often as I can. I do it when I find time for it, usually about once every two days. I pray before the Blessed Sacrament if I can for about thirty minutes. If I pray at home, I do it before going to bed.

I have found that nighttime works best for me when I pray at home. During the day, my mind is filled with thoughts of work. So you can see a man who has begun to pray with Scripture is still searching to find a rhythm that will work for him and, with very good will, trying different things. I choose the Scripture by opening the Bible and flipping through it. So again, he has not yet found his set way of doing this.

He's searching for it. I always take something from the Gospels. I'm still new at this. I haven't done it a lot, and the Gospels are the texts I can pray with best. And that may be true for many of us—that if we're beginning to pray with Scripture, the Gospels may be the most accessible for us.

So Charles is finding his way well. He's making many good choices, and you can see that as he continues this, he's going to find his way. And I pray that that be true for all of us. Amen.

Washing Feet

Let's look now at Ignatius' Rule Seven, in which he provides another tool for anyone who is experiencing the discouragement of spiritual desolation. So, our woman alone in the home in the early afternoon, the man at 10:00 in his study, in discouragement, not feeling God's closeness that week when it's been so difficult and you just don't have energy for spiritual things. And here is a thought to call to mind, Ignatius says, that will greatly help you to get through the desolation. When you are in spiritual desolation, think of this truth—consciously call this to mind as you sit there alone in the kitchen, or alone in your study, or driving to work with discouragement in your heart: God is giving me all the grace I need to get safely through this desolation.

I'll say that again. This is the truth. God is giving me all the grace I need to get safely through this desolation. There is what I sometimes call the litany of spiritual desolation, and that litany of desolation runs like this: I can't.

I can't. I can't. I can't. And keep multiplying the can'ts. I can't pray today.

Reverently, have you ever felt that? I can't go to daily Mass today. I can't make the effort to reach out to that person again. I can't go on in this situation. I can't continue with this activity in the parish, and on and on and on.

And when that is the voice of spiritual desolation, Ignatius says, no. Call to mind, think about this: you can, because God, even though you don't feel it, you know with the certitude of faith that God is always giving you all the grace that you need to get safely through the desolation. Call that to mind in the darkness of desolation, and you'll be greatly strengthened to get through it because you'll know that you can. Now, at this point in the Spiritual Exercises, we move into the third of Ignatius' weeks, or the third stage. At this point, God has spoken to our hearts in various ways.

Certain things have stirred. We've had a sense of where the Lord may be inviting us to grow in this or that way. So Ignatius now invites us to pray with the Passion of Jesus, to walk through it, as it were, with Him as a strengthening, so that we can take the newness that's being born in our hearts to life, and we'll have the courage and the strength and the energy and the confidence to carry it through. And this is the grace that he invites us to ask for in these contemplations of the Passion of Jesus. This, he says, is to ask for what I desire.

In the Passion, it is proper to ask for sorrow with Christ in sorrow, anguish with Christ in anguish, and that is to live intimately with the Lord, to share with Him in some sense in our prayer His Passion. Anguish with Christ in anguish, tears, and deep grief because of the affliction Christ endures for me. And so, to get very close to the supreme self-giving of Jesus, and again, for me because of His love for me, and to live in some sense with Him His Passion so that we will be strengthened to live that same pattern, which is the pattern of all Christian living. If anyone would be My disciple, let him take up his cross each day and follow Me. Not alone.

Take up His cross, yes, but not alone. Follow Me. Be with Me. And that's the grace and strengthening that we pray for at this point. The first of the Scriptures that I'll offer is the washing of the feet at the Last Supper, and we'll take this from John 13:1–17.

So we let our hearts be at peace now, at rest, and simply open to hear and receive the Lord's word. You see the love in the Lord's eyes as He gazes upon us as our eyes meet His. And we are there in the Upper Room at the Last Supper on Holy Thursday evening. We see the table. We see the disciples.

We see Jesus. Before the feast of Passover, Jesus knew that His hour had come to pass from this world to the Father. So we reach now the supreme moment in the redemptive mission of Jesus. He loved His own in the world, and He loved them to the end. The devil had already induced Judas, son of Simon the Iscariot, to hand Him over.

Fully aware that the Father had put everything into His power and that He had come from God and was returning to God, He rose from supper and took off His outer garments. He took a towel and tied it around His waist. Then He poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples' feet and to dry them with the towel around His waist. He came to Simon Peter, who said to Him, "Master, are you going to wash my feet?" Jesus answered and said to him, "What I am doing, you do not understand now, but you will understand later."

Peter said to Him, "You will never wash my feet." Jesus answered him, "Unless I wash you, you will have no inheritance with Me." Simon Peter said to Him, "Master, then not only my feet, but my hands and head as well." Jesus said to him, "Whoever has bathed has no need except to have his feet washed, for he is clean all over. And you are clean, but not all," for He knew who would betray Him.

For this reason, He said, “Not all of you are clean.” And now Jesus explains what He has done. So when He had washed their feet and put His garments back on and reclined at table again, He said to them, “Do you realize what I have done for you? You call Me Teacher and Master, and rightly so, for indeed I am. If I, therefore, the Master and Teacher, have washed your feet, you ought to wash one another’s feet.”

I have given you a model to follow so that as I have done for you, you also should do. So we are there now in the Upper Room, Jesus and the disciples, and we look now at Jesus in this supreme moment of His self-giving. Having loved His own who were in the world, He loved them to the end. His own. And I thank Him that He has called me to be His own.

And I ponder this love. He loved them to the end—that is, to the last moment of His life, to the utmost degree of love. And now, as I watch, Jesus expresses the whole meaning of His life of service—a life lived, as Paul will write, in the form of a slave—with this symbolic gesture, the washing filled with meaning. I see Him rise from the table, gird Himself with a towel, take a basin with water, kneel at the feet of one disciple, then another, then another, and wash their feet. Can I allow Him to wash my feet, to love and serve me to that degree, to all that it symbolizes?

And I see Peter resist. He struggles to allow the Lord to kneel before him, to serve him so humbly, and to love him in this way. It's a struggle that we too, at times, experience. Lord, do You wash my feet? What I am doing, you do not know now, but afterward you will understand.

And how often this is true in our lives too. What God is doing now, we do not understand, but later we will come to see. And Peter says, “You will never wash my feet.” “If I do not wash you, you will have no part in Me.” And then Peter, with that generosity which is so typical of him, “Lord, not my feet only, but my hands and my head.”

And Peter surrenders his resistance and allows the Lord to love him. Can I allow the Lord to love me, to serve me, to kneel at my feet, and wash and cleanse me? Jesus asks, do you know what I have done for you? And do we really know? If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another's feet, for I have given you an example.

And we ask the Lord now to understand deep in our hearts His example of service, of love, the way He loves His own to the very end. My spouse, my children, the people God has placed in my life. And now, simply, I let my heart speak with the Lord deeply, unhurriedly, sharing what stirs in my heart. And I'll just share briefly as we conclude Carol's experience. She made an Ignatian retreat sometime earlier and has been trying to pray with Scripture daily since then.

And she says, I usually pray in the evening. I can't in the morning because of family needs, but often I am more free in the evening. I shut the door, and I have a quiet space. I have a book on the Spiritual Exercises that I like, and often I find my Scripture there. Sometimes I take the Gospel reading of the coming Sunday.

Whether it's one way or the other, it has to be something that moves me. If nothing does, if nothing particularly attracts her, then I pull out the Spiritual Exercises. I look for one of the Scriptures there and choose one. So Carol too, we have the sense that she is praying daily with Scripture. She has found the time of day that works best for her.

She's still searching a little bit to find her way for her Scripture, the Scripture that works best, but she is very, very much on target. As she looks through these various books and resources, she identifies the Scripture that really speaks to her heart, and she knows that she's found the one for her prayer for that day. And again, may God grant us that blessing in our daily lives. Amen.

Bless and Break

Let's begin by looking at Ignatius' Rule Eight, and again, Ignatius is giving a further tool for the person who is experiencing the discouragement of desolation, which, as I said earlier—and I believe it's true—is the main problem for most dedicated people on the spiritual journey. I'm speaking to everyone who has followed along with us through these prayers. I've come to love this rule in my own life, and year by year it means more and more to me. When you are in spiritual desolation, be patient, Ignatius says. That is to say, stay the course. Patient, from the Latin verb, which means to endure, to stay the course, to bear up, not to give in.

Be patient. Lord, I promised You thirty minutes of prayer. I'm not going to give You twenty-nine, and this is in a time of desolation. When you are in spiritual desolation, be patient, stay the course, and here is something that will help you do it: remember that consolation will return much sooner than the desolation is telling you.

Desolation—that is the liar. The enemy will always try to claim power over the future and will always try to tell you that the discouragement you're feeling now, the heaviness, is just going to go on and on and on. If you believe that lie, then the desolation gets very heavy. So Ignatius says, remember the truth. When you are in spiritual desolation, remember that this desolation is going to pass, that consolation is going to return, and this is going to happen a lot sooner than the desolation wants you to believe. You know that feeling when sometimes you get up in the morning and maybe you didn't sleep well, or the preceding day was difficult, or some things lie ahead in the day that you don't look forward to, and you have that global sense that this whole day is just going to be hard.

And then I remember Rule Eight. This desolation is going to pass, and it's going to pass a lot sooner than this desolation wants me to believe—and it always does. Maybe just an hour or two later, already the day looks very different than it did in that moment. Remember, when you are in desolation, that it will not last forever. Consolation will return, and that surety will strengthen you greatly to get through the desolation.

Our next Scripture now is the institution of the Eucharist. So we are again at the Last Supper, and this time we are looking at the Gospel of Luke, chapter 22, verses 7 through 30. And this is Jesus’ gift of His Body and Blood to us. And so again, we pray as Ignatius invites us. We pray to share with the Lord in the pain and the sorrow of His Passion and be strengthened as we do it.

And here to experience the gift—well, the greatest gift of all those that Jesus gives us—because it is the gift of His Body and Blood itself. I see the love in the Lord’s eyes as He looks upon me as I begin this prayer. And suffused with that sense of love, now I enter the Upper Room again with Jesus and the disciples. When the day of the Feast of Unleavened Bread arrived, the day for sacrificing the Passover lamb, He sent out Peter and John, instructing them, “Go and make preparations for us to eat the Passover.” They asked Him, “Where do You want us to make the preparations?”

And He answered them, “When you go into the city, a man will meet you carrying a jar of water. Follow him into the house that he enters and say to the master of the house, ‘The Teacher says to you, Where is the guest room where I may eat the Passover with my disciples?’ He will show you a large upper room that is furnished. Make the preparations there.” Then they went off and found everything exactly as He had told them, and there they prepared the Passover.

Truly beautiful to see how prepared the Eucharist is. When the hour came, He took His place at table with the Apostles. He said to them, "I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer. For I tell you, I shall not eat it again until there is fulfillment in the Kingdom of God." Then He took a cup, gave thanks, and said, "Take this and share it among yourselves."

For I tell you that from this time on, I shall not drink of the fruit of the vine until the Kingdom of God comes. Then He took the bread, said the blessing, broke it, and gave it to them, saying, “This is My Body, which will be given for you. Do this in memory of Me.” And likewise the cup after they had eaten, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in My Blood, which will be shed for you.” Jesus tells Peter and John to go into the city and prepare the Passover meal.

And I'm often struck as I read this by how carefully prepared the Eucharist is. Nothing happens by chance. And I watch Peter and John as they go into the city, and as they follow Jesus' instructions, they make preparations for the meal. Spiritually, I prepare with them for what is about to happen. And now the hour of Jesus has arrived.

Evening falls, and He is there with the disciples in the Upper Room. I see the table, the dishes, the wine, the Passover lamb. I gather with the disciples, and our hearts sense that something profound, some great mystery, is about to take place. I have earnestly desired to eat this Passover with you. As I hear Jesus say these words, something of the depths of Jesus’ heart is revealed to me.

I have earnestly desired this meal. And I linger here in my prayer. I sense the great desire in Jesus to give the gift of His Eucharistic Body and Blood to His disciples and to me. I speak to Him of the desire in His Heart and in mine. And I am there.

I watch each detail, each gesture, with profound reverence. I see Jesus take the bread, break it, and give it to His disciples and to me. And I hear His words: This is My Body. And I realize, just a little at least, the magnitude of the gift—what this gift means in my life: the gift of the Eucharist, Mass, Eucharistic Adoration, Holy Communion. He takes the cup.

This cup is the new covenant in my Blood. And again, I sense the richness, the fullness, the greatness of the gift that is given—the gift of His Body and His Blood, of His whole being given to the Church and to me. I pause now, and my heart speaks in response to Him. And the disciples, and we with them, struggle to grasp and to accept the gift. Luke tells us of the betrayer, of the dispute that arises among the disciples as to who is the greatest among them.

And Jesus, who is with them as one who gives Himself, tells them, which is greater, one who sits at table or one who serves? But I am among you as one who serves. Now my heart becomes quiet. My soul is stilled. I turn toward the Lord, aware of the gift of His presence, of His Body, His Blood.

I simply gaze upon Him. I simply receive, and silently, I give my own heart. And I bless the Lord for the gift of all that the Eucharist is in my life. The words of the Psalm come to my heart: O God, You are my God.

For you, my soul is thirsting. My body pines for you, and your Body and Blood are there. Nourish, feed, and strengthen me. What speaks to my heart as I pray with the gift of the Eucharist? What is the Lord saying to me?

Where is He leading me? What newness is He inviting me to in my spiritual life? And once more in this session, I'll share a further experience of a person who prays with Scripture. And this is Monica. Monica has been praying with Scripture for many years, and you'll see the maturity that has developed as she's been doing this over the years.

And she says, I follow the Lectionary in choosing my Scripture for daily prayer. The Lectionary, that's the book with the readings for the daily Mass. Every so often, I may use a different passage if one suggests itself, and this is the way to proceed well with daily prayer with Scripture: structure used with flexibility. Without structure, things just won't continue.

We can't sustain creativity every day that way. But structure without flexibility asphyxiates prayer. And so Monica has done this perfectly. She has a basic structure, so she's never casting about, but she also has the flexibility when her heart is drawn to a different passage.

It is not always easy for me to find a place to pray. I work three nights a week, and it's often hard to get up even in time to help the children. So I can't get a consistent time for prayer in the morning. I look at my agenda and set a time. I can look ahead and set a time for the next day.

Wonderful practice in a very busy and shifting schedule. Sometimes when I take the children to soccer practice or karate, I can sit for forty-five minutes and do it. So as you can see, Monica has grown, and her prayer is maturing. She makes wonderful choices here in a way that allows her to pray daily with Scripture even in a very busy and constantly changing schedule day by day. Again, it's my prayer that as we've gone through these Ignatian spiritual exercises and continue to go through them, that the question may arise in your heart as to whether God might be inviting you to continue this kind of prayer in the way that we see people like Charles and Kathy and Monica doing, and in a way that so blesses them and, through them, the people in their lives.

May God grant that grace. Amen.

Keep Watch

In his ninth rule, Ignatius continues to provide assistance to the person who is struggling with spiritual desolation, and he does this by addressing a fundamental question—one that all of us have asked of the Lord, sometimes with real anguish in our hearts when God permits us to go through times of darkness and discouragement. The question is essentially this. I'll just put it in my own words: Lord, I'm doing the best that I can. Yes, I struggle and I have my weaknesses, but you know how sincerely I do want to love You.

I do want to live my vocation well. I do want to make my life a response of love and service to You. Why do You ask me? Why do You permit me to go through these difficult times of darkness? Basically, the question is this: couldn't a God who loves us, and whom we are seeking to love, spare us these times of discouragement and darkness?

It's an important question, a very real question, and one that Ignatius' rules would be incomplete if they did not address. And so Ignatius says, well, let's be clear about this: God never gives spiritual desolation. God does ask us to carry the cross of struggles with health or relational issues, and so forth, from familial issues. But these discouraging lies of the enemy are only and always of the enemy. However, God will permit the enemy to visit us at times with spiritual desolation because if we go through it well—understanding it, resisting it, not giving in to it—then we grow in some wonderful ways in the spiritual life.

And all of us know this. We look back over our spiritual lives and we recognize the growth that has come through spiritual consolation, when our hearts have found joy and energy in the Lord and we've taken, sometimes, just wonderful new steps in the spiritual life. But if we look back, we'll also recognize that oftentimes it's the times of darkness that have caused us to take the most helpful steps, even in our spiritual lives. That is to say that God's providence is always at work, whether giving us spiritual consolation or permitting the enemy to visit us at times with spiritual desolation. So Ignatius says God may permit us to experience spiritual desolations at times when we've grown negligent in one or another area of the spiritual life.

Maybe prayer, maybe sometimes not even as a conscious choice, just busyness and so forth. Prayer has diminished or regressed in some way. God may permit an experience of spiritual desolation, which serves as a wake-up call. Oh, I don't feel the same closeness to the Lord, and I want that back. I'm going to resume tomorrow again with my usual rhythm of daily prayer.

And sometimes Ignatius says God may permit spiritual desolation when there's no negligence at all on our part, but simply as a trial, because as we go through it faithfully, we grow in wonderful ways in the spiritual life. How do we grow in the virtue of patience? By being in situations that require us to be patient and exercising the virtue. How do we grow in prayer? By praying day after day.

How do we grow in love of difficult people, for example? By being in situations that are not easy for us and that require us to exercise that kind of love. And how do we grow in the ability to resist spiritual desolation? By being in the experience of spiritual desolation and actually resisting it. And if it's true, as I've said earlier, that for most of us, spiritual desolation really is the main issue, this is one of the greatest gifts that God can give us to increase our freedom to love and to serve Him.

And finally, Ignatius says God may sometimes permit spiritual desolation because it keeps us humble, and it helps us recognize that all spiritual consolation is not our doing but God's gift and grace. And for Ignatius, that rich biblical space of humility is the most fruitful space that opens us to all other growth in the spiritual life. So why does God permit spiritual desolation? To heal us from negligence, to provide an opportunity for growth, and thirdly, to enable us to avoid a kind of complacency in the spiritual life that would limit possibilities of growth. Basically, God permits spiritual desolation to use the enemy against himself if we resist the spiritual desolation.

Our text now is Jesus in the Agony in the Garden, Matthew 26, verses 36 through 46. And again, I let my heart settle and be receptive. I see the love in the Lord's gaze upon me. I ask for the grace to share with Him in His Passion and so grow closer to Him and be strengthened in my own living out of His Word. And I am there now.

Then Jesus came with them to a place called Gethsemane. And He said to His disciples, "Sit here while I go over there and pray." He took along Peter and the two sons of Zebedee and began to feel sorrow and distress. Then He said to them, "My soul is sorrowful even to death. Remain here and keep watch with Me."

He advanced a little and fell prostrate in prayer, saying, “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me; yet not as I will, but as You will.” When He returned to His disciples, He found them asleep. He said to Peter, “So you could not keep watch with Me for one hour? Watch and pray that you may not undergo the test.”

The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. Withdrawing a second time, He prayed again, "My Father, if it is not possible that this cup pass without my drinking it, Your will be done." Then He returned once more and found them asleep, for they could not keep their eyes open. He left them and withdrew again and prayed a third time, saying the same thing again. Then He returned to His disciples and said to them, "Are you still sleeping and taking your rest?"

Behold, the hour is at hand when the Son of Man is to be handed over to sinners. Get up. Let us go. Look, my betrayer is at hand.

So we walk now with Jesus as He enters His time of sorrow, of burden, the time of the Cross. And we ask Him to show us through His Cross the meaning of our own sorrows and burdens, the cross in our lives. We join Jesus and the eleven as they walk through the streets of the city now as night has fallen, and then up alongside the city walls and over to the Garden of Gethsemane. It is night, and we hear the quiet sounds of the night. We feel the heaviness in the hearts of the disciples, and our hearts too know times of heaviness and foreboding.

My soul is sorrowful even to death. With great reverence, I ponder the sorrow of Jesus, the deep sorrow that nearly overwhelms His life itself. What is stirring in His heart? What stirs now in my heart? I speak to Him of sorrow in my own life.

And now I see Jesus go a little farther into the garden, and He is alone. The three near Him sleep. Humanly, He is utterly alone in His time of need. My heart, too, knows what it means to feel alone, and I speak to Him. Now His energy fails Him.

He simply falls down upon the earth, and the cry rises with anguish from His heart to His Father: If it is possible, let this cup pass from Me. There is in Jesus—so like us in all things but sin—a deep, deep desire to be freed from the burden, the pain, and the suffering that lie ahead. If it be possible, let this cup pass from Me. And how often we have made prayers like this: let this cup pass—the cup of physical weakness and pain, perhaps, of responsibilities, of struggles and relationships.

And I am there with Jesus, prostrate on the earth. Yet not as I will, but as You will. Two wills: as I will, as You will. And though it costs His humanity so much, Jesus bows His will to the will of His Father. And now I ask of Him the courage to accept the Father's will in my own life.

He comes out of deep need, seeking companionship and support from those close to Him, and they are sleeping. But now I do not sleep. I speak to Him. I watch as a second time Jesus repeats His acceptance of His Father's will: My Father, if this cannot pass unless I drink it, Your will be done.

And again, a third time, and still He is alone. But now He is ready. Get up. Let us go. Look.

My betrayer is at hand. His prayer has strengthened Him, and He is ready to face the Cross. I ask of Him for that same strength in my own life. What speaks to my heart as I pray with Jesus in the Garden? What is the Lord saying to me?

Where is He strengthening me, enlightening me? In what way is He calling me to take the next step? In our preceding sessions, we have looked at some concrete experiences of people who pray with Scripture, and I'll look at a final one as we conclude this session. And this is Brian. Brian also is someone who has prayed with Scripture daily for many years and has found his own way, the way that helps him best to do this.

Each of us will find his or her own way. And what Brian does is focus on the Gospel from the Sunday Mass throughout the entire week. I pray with the Sunday Gospel throughout the week. I spend my prayer time on Friday and Saturday preparing this Gospel. Then I look at a Bible which has wonderful study notes, and there are wonderful Bibles like this.

And I read the notes for this Gospel. Finally, I look at a commentary. Though by this time, I may already be reflecting on the text. So he's really dedicating this Thursday, Friday, and Saturday to getting deeply into the text and understanding it. Although, as he says, he's already beginning to pray with it as he's doing this.

On Sunday, I hear the Gospel proclaimed and the homily, and that too becomes part of my preparation. Then from Sunday through Thursday, so the next five days, I pray on this Gospel. I need that many days to pray with it. I'm usually not finished with it after I pray. When I come back to the same Gospel, I am reminded of the readings I've done about it, or I may sit with another part of it.

Things that happen during the week come into the prayer, and that's a beautiful thing when the daily prayer with Scripture enters into life, and what's happening during the day also enters into the prayer. Let's just note Brian's comment on a commentary. I've mentioned this before: a spiritual, devotional, brief commentary on the daily readings can be very helpful for us as we pray. There is a place for more academic commentaries, and they have their place in study. Probably for prayer, something a little shorter and more geared toward prayer itself would be helpful.

My best time for prayer is in the afternoon or evening when the others are out and the house is quiet. I'm at my best in the evening. I have a comfortable chair in my room. I call it my God chair. I have a table there with a candle, my Bible, and the other readings I've done.

I usually pray for about half an hour. Each of us will find his or her own way. It's beautiful to see these men and women who have found this as they've prayed over the years. May God grant us that blessing. Amen.

Carry It

In the tenth of his rules, Ignatius provides yet another tool to assist us in the discouraging times of spiritual desolation. And the rule reads as follows: when you are in spiritual consolation, remember that desolation will return at some point and prepare for it. Now, this reveals a presupposition that for Ignatius is a given in the spiritual life, and that is that there will be alternations of times of spiritual consolation and spiritual desolation—that this is normal in the spiritual life. So if you find that at times your prayer feels alive and God feels close and there's a warmth of God's love in your heart, and at other times all of that's gone and maybe there's just discouragement or lack of energy and so on, you are experiencing what is absolutely normal in the spiritual life. And there's no shame in this. There's no surprise in this.

What does matter is exactly what Ignatius is equipping us to do, and that is to know how to respond, identify the one and the other, and to know how to respond. So when we are, maybe for the last several weeks, prayer has been very consoled, God has felt very close, and there's been wonderful energy in the spiritual life. And we drink in that strength, and we're growing with it. A further benefit of that time, Ignatius says, can be to take some time just to remember that spiritual consolation won't last forever. At some point, spiritual desolation will return, and to store up strength for it and prepare for it, which will make all the difference.

It's like Egypt; it's like Joseph in the Book of Genesis. You have the seven years of plenty. Joseph stores up grain that he does not need, but which is crucial for survival in the seven years of famine that follow. So that's kind of the dynamic: looking ahead and preparing so that when desolation comes, it's much easier to get through it.

So, some concrete suggestions of things we might do in these days or weeks of spiritual consolation: maybe when you're just out walking, while you're exercising, during a quiet time sitting in chapel or alone in your room with the Lord, or maybe even a husband and wife talking together as they share the spiritual journey.

We can pray. We can pray for strength in future times of spiritual desolation. Ignatius told us in Rule Six we could do this in desolation itself, but we don't even have to wait for the desolation. We can do it in the peace of spiritual consolation. And also in the peace of spiritual consolation, we can meditate on those biblical verses or memories of God's fidelity in the past that will be therefore right at our spiritual fingertips when we need them in the spiritual desolation that will come.

In times of consolation, we can think about the value of spiritual desolation for growth, which is why God permits it. One author writes, without spiritual desolation, we would remain spiritual children, and there's a lot of truth in that. So just thinking about this in consolation will help us see the desolation much more clearly when it does return. We can also reflect on our own personal experience of how the dark, discouraging times in the past in our lives have often led to some wonderful growth, which was why God permitted them.

And having seen that in the past, when the desolation returns, we're much more likely to see that more quickly in the desolation itself. When we are in the peace of consolation, we can call to mind Rule Five: In time of spiritual desolation, never make a change, and confirm within ourselves the determination not to make such changes when desolation returns. We can also review these 14 rules, and I warmly encourage this. There are many resources.

We'll mention them before we end this series. Get familiar with the rules, learn more about them—whether through the written page or digital resources—and then review them from time to time so that they're fresh when you need them. And then finally, if there are specific situations in which you often get tripped up into spiritual desolation, plan ahead for them. Plan ahead even before they happen, and take in strength so that when those situations happen, we'll be better prepared for them. Rule 10 is another gem for the journey.

Prepare ahead of time, and spiritual desolation will not weigh nearly as much, and we'll get through it much more easily. And we will grow each time we do this. Our text for prayer at this time is the Crucifixion, Jesus on the Cross, and the whole of the text is Luke 23, verses 26 through 49. And I'm just going to read part of that text now as we share our prayer together. So again, let your heart be at peace.

Let it simply be open to the Lord. And again, see the infinite love, the warmth of that infinite love in the Lord's eyes as He looks upon you as you begin your prayer. When they came to the place called the Skull, they crucified Him and the criminals there, one on His right, the other on His left. Then Jesus said, "Father, forgive them. They know not what they do."

They divided His garments by casting lots. The people stood by and watched. The rulers, meanwhile, sneered at Him and said, “He saved others; let Him save Himself if He is the Chosen One, the Messiah of God.” Even the soldiers jeered at Him.

As they approached to offer Him wine, they called out, "If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself." Above Him, there was an inscription that read, "This is the King of the Jews." Now one of the criminals hanging there reviled Jesus, saying, "Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us." The other, however, rebuking him, said in reply, "Have you no fear of God, for you are subject to the same condemnation?"

And indeed, we have been condemned justly, for the sentence we received corresponds to our crimes, but this man has done nothing criminal. Then he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” He replied to him, “Amen, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise.” It was now about noon, and darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon because of an eclipse of the sun. Then the veil of the Temple was torn down the middle.

Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Father, into Your hands I commend My spirit.” And when He had said this, He breathed His last. The centurion who witnessed what had happened glorified God and said, “This man was innocent beyond doubt.” When all the people who had gathered for the spectacle saw what had happened, they returned home beating their breasts. But all His acquaintances stood at a distance, including the women who had followed Him from Galilee and saw these events.

And we are there now on Golgotha. The Cross. We see it in Jesus' life and in our own. And let us now accompany Jesus in His supreme moment of self-giving and ask Him for the courage to carry our cross too, to be faithful to the end as He is. We join the crowd as it pushes through the narrow streets.

I see the bustle, the agitation. I hear the clamor, the cries as we climb toward Golgotha. And I see Jesus scourged, crowned with thorns, condemned, rejected, mocked, carrying the Cross step by step along the way. I gaze at Him slowly with great attentiveness of heart. The image of Jesus carrying His Cross penetrates my soul.

And I remember the words: If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow Me. His Way of the Cross is mine as well, but not alone—with Him. Simon assists Him. What would that moment mean for Jesus, for Simon? The women weep for Him.

And astoundingly, even now, Jesus is not absorbed by His own pain but continues to be alive to the needs of others. Do not weep for Me. Weep instead for yourselves. And now He is crucified. I see the painful stripping.

I see the nailing of His hands and then His feet, the raising of the Cross. I hear His tormented breathing, and I think of the times that I have felt, or maybe even now feel, crucified in some way, stripped of what is dear to me, nailed helplessly in situations of pain when each day brings its burden and its pain. And I know that I am not alone. "They will look upon Him whom they have pierced," we read in Scripture.

And now I do this. I look upon Him whom they have pierced. I look upon the crucified Lord, and He looks at me. Our hearts speak. I hear His first word: Father, forgive them, and I linger here.

I ponder the forgiveness in the Heart of Jesus, and I ask for that forgiveness. And I ask that forgiveness be my first thought as well. But one heart turns to Him in faith: Jesus, remember me when You come into Your Kingdom. And I hear the wonderful response: Today you will be with Me in Paradise.

Now darkness falls. The curtain in the temple is torn. Jesus cries out with a loud voice, "Father, into Your hands, I commend My spirit." He gives up His life, faithful to the end. He has given all, everything now for me.

I thank Him. I speak to Him, perhaps of the many deaths in my own life, the losses of letting go. And now, in silence and stillness of heart, I contemplate the One who loved me so much that He gave His life for me. I remember a man telling me once that when he was praying with this moment of the Crucifixion, he found himself seated at the foot of the Cross. And as he sat there, the whole scene grew silent, and the presence of the others around him simply faded away.

And he was alone there with Jesus on the Cross. And as each drop of blood fell to the ground, he heard the soft sound that it made as it touched the earth. And each time he heard that sound, it told him how infinitely he was loved. And he stayed there, and his prayer continued at length. Ask for something of that grace.

Let each action of Jesus in His Crucifixion, each drop of blood, tell you how infinitely you are loved, how you are never alone, how God's grace blesses you and accompanies you in all the struggles and trials and crosses of life. And now as you pray, ask the Lord to show you what He is saying to your heart, how He is strengthening you, the newness to which He calls you, the assurance of being loved that He pours into your heart. May that blessing fill this day and always. Amen.

Go and Tell Them

Well, with this session, we reach the final stage of the Spiritual Exercises, which Ignatius calls Week Four and which is centered on the Resurrection of Jesus. So you've persevered this far. It's wonderful to see it, and we enter the last stage now of the Exercises. But before we approach that, as we've been doing, I want to just briefly mention Saint Ignatius' Rule 11. And this is what I would call the portrait of the mature person of discernment, where Ignatius pulls together everything that he has said thus far into a single picture.

And so the text reads: the mature person of discernment is neither carelessly high in consolation nor despairingly low in desolation, but humble in consolation and trusting in desolation. Now, we're not always either in the joy of consolation or the discouragement of desolation. There's also what Ignatius calls the tranquil time. That is, sometimes we may kind of look at our heart, as it were, and we would say, I don't feel like I'm in the joy of consolation, but neither do I feel like I'm in the discouragement of desolation. Things just seem to be kind of on an even keel in terms of where my heart is.

And this is a wonderful space, this tranquil time in which we can love and serve the Lord. But having said that, Ignatius now is looking at the times of spiritual consolation and spiritual desolation, and this is what we are attempting to grow into so that, let's say we go through a week or several weeks or days of spiritual consolation, the person doesn't become naively and carelessly high, as it were. You know, all the problems are over, everything is fine, it's all clear sailing from here. And on the other hand, when the person is in the heaviness of spiritual desolation, the person doesn't become despairingly low: it's over and nothing's going to change.

I have just done poorly in this spiritual life. I have to reduce my expectations. But on the contrary, in the joy of spiritual consolation, the person remains humble with that rich biblical space that we call humility. And on the other hand, in times of spiritual desolation, we don't become despairingly low, but confident and trusting that God's grace will see us well through this time. Humble in consolation, trusting in desolation.

And that is the, as I've called it, the portrait of the mature person of discernment toward which we are all striving to grow. So, as I mentioned, we enter the fourth week, the final stage of the Spiritual Exercises. Having walked with Christ through the struggle and suffering of His Passion and His Death, Ignatius now finally invites us to live with Christ, to share with Christ, to contemplate together with Him the joy and victory of His Resurrection, which is the final word of everything in the Christian life. And in so doing, to be strengthened and encouraged and filled with new hope as we live our daily lives with the newness that the prayer has brought. Now, our text for this particular time of prayer is the encounter of Jesus with Mary Magdalene, and we find this in John chapter 20. It actually begins in verse 1, but we'll read verses 11 through 18.

So again, we let our hearts be at peace. We let them simply be open and receptive and aware of the Lord. Again, we let our hearts receive the infinite love and warmth in the gaze of Jesus upon us. And we allow Him now to speak His word to our hearts. So Mary has gone down to the tomb early on Easter morning and has seen the stone removed from the entrance into the tomb.

She immediately runs to find Simon Peter and the other disciple whom Jesus loved, that is, John, and she tells them about this. Peter and John immediately run down to the tomb. Mary goes with them. They enter the tomb and leave, but Mary remains alone now at the entrance to the tomb. But Mary stayed outside the tomb, weeping.

Now her tears, if we can approach this with reverence, express something that you and I have all experienced. She can't leave the tomb because it's the last link to the one she so loves, but she is also afraid to look into the tomb. If you notice in the text, she hasn't done that yet because she is afraid that to see the emptiness of the tomb will mean the severing of the last link again to the one whom she loves. And so Mary does what you and I often do in such situations. She stands frozen.

The tense used in the Greek tells us that this goes on for some time. She stands frozen and her tears fall. Then all the details are given to us in the text: But Mary stayed outside the tomb weeping. And as she wept, she bent over into the tomb.

This wonderful woman of God has the courage to look into the emptiness, to look into the darkness, to face what she had feared, and finds out that the tomb is not as empty as she had feared and that a process begins that will lead to a whole new reunion with the Lord. And as she wept, she bent over into the tomb and saw two angels in white sitting there, one at the head and one at the feet where the body of Jesus had been. And they said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” That's a question we can let the Lord ask us, whether with physical tears that express that weeping or just the heaviness of heart. Why are you weeping?

Woman, why are you weeping? She said to them, "They have taken my Lord, and I don't know where they laid Him." When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus there but did not know it was Jesus. And here again is another place for prayer. Her heart is filled with pain for the absence of the Lord whom she so loves, and the Lord is there with her.

But she doesn't yet recognize Him. And Jesus said to her, "Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?" She thought it was the gardener and said to Him, "Sir, if you carried Him away, tell me where you laid Him, and I will take Him." Jesus said to her, "Mary."

She turned and said to Him in Hebrew, "Rabbouni," which means Teacher. Jesus said to her, "Stop holding on to Me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to My brothers and tell them, 'I am going to My Father and your Father, to My God and your God.'" Mary of Magdala went and announced to the disciples, "I have seen the Lord," and what He told her. So we are standing outside the tomb together with Mary early on this Easter morning.

We see her tears. She's frozen, feels helpless—a situation that our own hearts have often known. And we marvel at her courage. As she wept, she stooped to look into the tomb. She faces her pain, her fear.

She looks into the darkness of the tomb, and as I said, finds that it's not as empty as she feared. Why are you weeping? Yes. Why, why are you weeping? Why is your heart heavy as you live this day?

Live day by day. And then she sees the gardener, and we see the gardener, but we don't recognize yet that it's Jesus there already with her, even as her tears fall. And this is a rich moment to contemplate when we feel so alone, so helpless, so frozen, and all the time Jesus is there. Why are you weeping? Whom do you seek?

Maybe I just answer that question. I pause here in the prayer: Whom do you seek? And I tell the Lord of my search for Him. And then we witness this most personal of all the apparition appearances.

Jesus said to her, “Mary.” Just one word, but it's the word she most needs to hear said by that voice—her name—which tells her there is no distance between us. I am not lost to you. The personal relationship between us remains even beyond the death of Good Friday, and nothing will ever shatter it. And it is deeply and intimately personal, Mary.

And likewise, she responds with just one word, pronouncing His name as the Teacher, Rabuni. And in those two words, everything is said between these two hearts. And who can guess at the joy that begins to well up in this woman's heart as she knows that nothing now will ever separate her from her Lord? He is alive, He is with her, He calls her by name. And now the encounter becomes mission: Go and tell My brethren.

Go to my brethren and say to them that I go to my Father and your Father. And this will always be the case. The deep encounter with the Lord in prayer will always send us out in mission. And she does it. She goes to the disciples and she tells them, I have seen the Lord.

And again, can we just glimpse the joy, the delight, the energy with which she proclaims the Risen Lord? I have seen the Lord. Beautiful words. I speak now about them with Mary Magdalene, and I speak now with Jesus as my prayer slows. And I ask that this too, in faith, be the central reality of my life and the heart of my message to the world.

Perhaps if we feel so moved at this point, we might simply sit with Mary and just look upon her radiant face and the joy and the peace and the surety that we see there. The deep happiness which is ours too, of knowing that in the heart of the resurrected, risen Lord, we are infinitely loved and forever. What speaks to our hearts as we pray with this passage? Where is the Lord leading us? What does He ask us to bring to our lives?

And I'll close by reading just a few lines from the document, the apostolic letter that Saint John Paul II gave to the Church at the end of the Great Jubilee of the year 2000. This is always special to me because I was there at the Mass in Saint Peter's Square—the Mass of conclusion of the Jubilee Year—when he signed this document. And what I'll always remember is it was an overcast, rainy day throughout the Mass. But when the Mass ended and he went over to the table placed at the side of the altar to sign this document, the sun broke through the clouds and shone on him as he signed it. And he writes: this training in holiness that the new millennium calls for.

This training in holiness calls for a Christian life distinguished above all. So let's hear that: above all, distinguished in the art of prayer, which is what this whole series has been about and is about. But we well know that prayer cannot be taken for granted. We have to learn to pray.

And Ignatius is a master for us in this. We have to learn to pray, as it were, learning this art ever anew from the lips of the Divine Master Himself, like the first disciples who say to Jesus, “Lord, teach us to pray.” Yes, dear brothers and sisters, our Christian communities—think of our parishes, our homes, what the Church calls the domestic church of the family and the home—our Christian communities must become genuine schools of prayer, where the meeting with Christ is expressed not just in imploring help (which is certainly a part of prayer: ask and you will receive), but prayer can expand to be so much more. Not just in imploring help, but also in thanksgiving, praise, adoration, contemplation, listening, and ardent devotion, until the heart truly, as he says, falls in love.

Mother Teresa, in a phrase often quoted, said everything starts from prayer, and it's true. And may God grant us that blessing every day. Amen.

Burning Hearts

We reach now Saint Ignatius' Rule 12, and this is another one that I love, and another one that, if we keep it in mind, will save us a great deal of suffering in the spiritual life. In the last three of his rules, we have a slight shift. Thus far, Ignatius has been dealing with spiritual desolation, this tactic of the enemy who brings discouraging lies to weaken our energy in the spiritual life. In the last three rules, Ignatius shifts to the other—I'll call it garden-variety—tactic of the enemy, which is temptation: just deceptive suggestions of the enemy. Heaviness of heart on the spiritual level is spiritual desolation; deceptive suggestions of the enemy, that is temptation.

Now, garden variety doesn't mean that these are not potentially very harmful. Obviously, if we give in to them, they will cause us harm and even potentially great harm. But garden variety in the sense that there's nothing dramatic about this. This is just everyday experience in the spiritual life. There's no shame that we experience it.

As I said, it's simply what happens in living the spiritual life in a fallen, redeemed, and loved world. But what makes all the difference is the discernment to which Ignatius is guiding us: that it's to recognize both of these tactics as of the enemy and to know what steps to take so that not only do we not give in to them and be harmed by them, but we actually grow as we resist them. It's all about setting captives free from the discouraging lies and tactics of the enemy. So, Ignatius' Rule 12: resist the enemy's temptations right in their very beginning. This is when it is easiest.

Here's a high mountain covered with snow. And here at the mountain peak, a snowball is just getting started. You can put out a finger and stop it. Let it get halfway down the mountainside, gaining mass and speed, and it'll run you over.

So let's take our man at 10 PM in that time of desolation, and there's the Bible that he normally prays with for ten minutes before going to bed. And there, just a few inches in front of his hands on the desk, is the Bible, but he has no energy or desire to do that now. And just a few inches in front of the other hand is the phone, and everything in him wants to reach out for that in a way that he knows can become, as Ignatius says, low and earthly. It may start with news sites, maybe sports, and then it will go on from there and go on and on. And one touch of the screen becomes 50, becomes 200.

And we recognize readily how the longer he allows this to go on, the heavier the temptation becomes. When is it easiest for him to resist that temptation? Right at the very beginning, before he even touches the phone. And then, if he stops the snowball at the top of the mountain, he'll never have to deal with the snowball halfway down the mountainside. And that's why I've really come to love Rule 12 and sharing it with others, because if we observe this—if we're willing to stand firm right in the very beginning with God's grace—the rest of the temptation and its burden will never even take place.

Rule 12 is a jewel for the journey. Stop the snowball at the top of the mountain. Resist the temptation in its very beginning. If you're tempted to pick up the phone and speak with that other person and you know it's going to become gossip and negative toward others, don't even pick up the phone at that point. Okay.

Stop it immediately and so much gets easier in the spiritual life. We move in this session to the apparition of Jesus to the disciples on the way to Emmaus in Luke 24, verses 13 through 35. And again, we let our hearts be calmed and just receptive. We see the love in the Lord's gaze as He looks upon us, desirous of sharing with us the richness of His word and its message in our lives. Now that very day, two of them were going to a village seven miles from Jerusalem called Emmaus.

And they were conversing about all the things that had occurred. And it happened that while they were conversing and debating, Jesus Himself drew near and walked with them. But their eyes were prevented from recognizing Him. He asked them, "What are you discussing as you walk along?" They stopped, looking downcast.

One of them, named Cleopas, said to Him in reply, “Are you the only visitor to Jerusalem who does not know of the things that have taken place there in these days?” And He replied to them, “What sort of things?” They said to Him, “The things that happened to Jesus the Nazarene, who was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people, how our chief priests and rulers both handed Him over to a sentence of death and crucified Him. But we were hoping that He would be the one to redeem Israel. And besides all this, it is now the third day since this took place.”

Some women from our group, however, have astounded us. They were at the tomb early in the morning and did not find His body. They came back and reported that they had indeed seen a vision of angels who announced that He was alive. Then some of those with us went to the tomb and found things just as the women had described, but Him they did not see. It seems, then, that the fact that they go down to the tomb and find it empty is the final confirmation for them that this is all over.

We had hoped. We hope no more. And reverently, as we're going through this passage, is there any place in your heart that had hoped but finds it difficult to hope anymore? Then let the Divine Stranger, the Divine Pilgrim, join with you on the road. Open your heart to Him.

And now, Jesus, now that they've shared all that's in their heart, Jesus speaks. And He said to them, "Oh, how foolish you are. How slow of heart to believe all that the prophets spoke. Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things?" Then, beginning with Moses and all the prophets, He interpreted to them what referred to Him in all the Scriptures.

They approached the village to which they were going, and as they approached it, He gave the impression that He was going on farther. But they urged Him, "Stay with us, for it is nearly evening and the day is almost over." So He went in to stay with them. And it happened that while He was with them at table, He took bread, said the blessing, and broke it. With that, their eyes were opened and they recognized Him, and He vanished from their sight.

Then they said to each other, “Were not our hearts burning within us when He spoke to us on the way and opened the Scriptures to us?” So they set out at once and returned to Jerusalem, where they found gathered together the Eleven and those with them who were saying, “The Lord has truly been raised and has appeared to Simon.” Then the two recounted what had taken place on the way and how He was made known to them in the breaking of the bread.

What stirs in our hearts as we walk with these men on the road and the Divine Pilgrim joins us and invites us to share our hearts, share the sadness, the diminishing of hope, the sense of something over, and an unhappy regression to what was before? What stirs in our hearts as He breaks open the Scriptures to us and the slow heart gradually becomes a burning heart and, filled with energy, goes back to the community as witnesses of His Resurrection?

Speak with the Lord now about what stirs in your heart, and allow the Lord to bless that with His courage, with His grace, with His hope. Earlier in this series, I quoted from John Paul II in Crossing the Threshold of Hope, and his answer to the question: Why should we have no fear, we who live in a world in which so many fear-filled things do happen? And I want to read to you now just a few lines in which the Pope answers that question squarely. Why should we have no fear? Because we have been redeemed by God.

In the Redemption, we find the most profound basis for the words, “Do not be afraid.” So this is something fundamental for us who live in a world that is shaken in so many ways and whose future can seem so uncertain in so many ways. If we anchor our lives on the Redemption—that is, the fact that God, the Second Person of the Trinity, came into this world in the Incarnation, lived in this world in Nazareth in His hidden life, and then the years of His public ministry working miracles and teaching—and then, in the culminating moment of His mission of Redemption, died and rose again victorious over death and sin. If we keep that in mind, that this reality has entered into history, we have the key to living without this kind of fear.

In the Redemption, we find the most profound basis for the words, "Do not be afraid." For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son—John 3:16. And let's hear these words now. This Son is always present today as we share this time together every day. This Son is always present in the history of the world as Redeemer.

The Redemption pervades all of human history. It is, quote, the light that shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. Center your hearts and spiritual life on the Redemption that Jesus Christ has wrought, and you will live with hope. May God grant that blessing. Amen.

Feed and Tend

We reach now the next-to-last of Ignatius' 14 rules, and this is his classic Rule 13. Now, earlier when I spoke of Rule Five, I begged of us never to forget Rule Five, saying that Rule Five—don't make changes in desolation—would get us safely through almost any darkness in the spiritual life. Now I'll amplify that statement. I beg of us never to forget Rules Five and Thirteen together, because these two rules together will get us safely through any spiritual darkness we may ever experience in life. Don't make changes in the darkness, and don't be alone with the burden.

Find a wise and competent spiritual person and speak about it. If you do those two things, you're going to get safely through any spiritual darkness you may ever encounter along the spiritual journey. So in my rendering of Ignatius' text, when you find burdens on your heart in your spiritual life—temptations, confusion, discouragement—find a wise and competent spiritual person and talk about it. In one of the books that I've done, I call this rule "breaking the spiritual silence," because the enemy will try to get you not to talk about it.

So here’s, you know, that experience—if I may describe this very reverently. I would feel so free to accept Your love, Lord, and to respond to it as my heart desires were it not for—and there’s the burden. There’s the thing that weighs upon us. And maybe, if I can speak with great reverence, something in the past that we’ve never spoken about and that weighs on us in our relationship with the Lord; maybe something in the present; maybe just something that surfaced more recently in our lives. But there’s the burden.

And the enemy's whole urging will be: you can talk about other things, but not about this. Because as long as we don't talk about it, the burden will go on. And so Ignatius' counsel is: when you experience burdens like this in your heart, don't be alone with them. Now, he doesn't just say find anybody and talk about these things, but a wise and competent spiritual person. Who might that be?

Maybe a priest that you know through the Sacrament of Confession or in some other setting, and you know that this is a wise and competent spiritual person. I think Rule 13 is one more indication of why the Sacrament of Confession is so valuable to us, because you find a good confessor who is a wise and competent spiritual person, and you'll always have a place, at least briefly, in which you can speak about these burdens. Regular confession is a wonderful blessing in so many ways, but also from this perspective of a place to talk about the spiritual burdens in our hearts. It might be a trained spiritual director. It would be somebody who is wise and competent, knowledgeable about the spiritual life.

Find that person and talk about the burden on your heart, and you will be walking in a beautiful way on the path to liberation. Perhaps the most beautiful experiences over the decades of my priesthood have been those times when I have been privileged by God's grace to be the person or the space, let's say, in which people have been able to put these kinds of burdens into words. You see before your eyes captives set free. It's a beautiful thing. So don't make changes in the darkness of desolation, and don't be alone with the burden.

Find a wise and competent spiritual person and speak about it, and you will love what will happen. We'll take for this session yet another of the apparitions of the Risen Lord, and this is in John 21, verses one through 19—the encounter by the lakeshore, and then the dialogue with Peter. So let's again let our hearts be at peace, just open to the Lord. And again, as Saint Ignatius invites us to do before every prayer, allow our hearts to see, our eyes to see the gaze of love in the Lord's eyes as He looks upon us now as we begin this prayer. After this, Jesus revealed Himself again to His disciples at the Sea of Tiberias.

He revealed Himself in this way. Together were Simon Peter, Thomas called Didymus, Nathanael from Cana in Galilee, Zebedee's sons, and two others of His disciples. Simon Peter said to them, "I am going fishing." So, as they awaited the Lord, they returned to the familiar. They said to him, "We also will come with you."

And there's a wonderful spirit of harmony there among them. So they went out and got into the boat, but that night they caught nothing. And we can join with them in the boat. We can be there as hour after hour of fruitless toil under the darkness of the night sky passes, and there is no fruit; they catch no fish, and their tiredness and discouragement grow.

Does that seem familiar? Have we ever been in that space in our own daily lives? And certainly we have. When we've made effort after effort and nothing seems to change—the problem in the family, or at work, or in our relationships with others as we work in the Church, and so forth—these seem unchanged.

When it was already dawn, Jesus was standing on the shore, but the disciples did not realize that it was Jesus. And again, we have this situation which takes place in so many of these Resurrection apparitions of Jesus present to His disciples, but they don't know it, and present to them in the time of their need, even desperate need, when everything in them wants Him to be present. And He is present, but they haven't yet seen it. What would happen in our lives is the space between the time when we call out to the Lord in our need, and He is there, but we don't see it, and the later time when we recognize that He was there, if that space were to diminish, and more and more we were able to see the Lord in the moment. Ignatius, in his famous phrase, calls this finding God in all things.

Jesus said to them, "Children, have you caught anything to eat?" Jesus has an almost maternal quality in this passage. He speaks of His disciples as children. He prepares the breakfast for them. They answered Him, "No."

So he said to them, "Cast the net over the right side of the boat, and you will find something." So they cast it and were not able to pull it in because of the number of fish. So the disciple whom Jesus loved said to Peter, "It is the Lord." And here's the moment of insight when their eyes are opened, and they realize that all the time they are waiting for the Lord, needing the Lord, their labor seems so fruitless, yet He's right there. What if we had those eyes to see Jesus in our daily lives?

And I'll just say parenthetically that what can really help us in this is the daily exercise of the Examen prayer, which is a way, a kind of examination of conscience which we pray daily for some minutes, but which also looks at things like discernment. Was there spiritual desolation? Was there spiritual consolation? Where was the Good Spirit active? Where was the enemy trying to discourage us?

So you have this beautiful moment. The disciple whom Jesus loved said to Peter, "It is the Lord." When Simon Peter heard it was the Lord, he tucked in his garment, for he was lightly clad, and jumped into the sea. This is always the energetic Peter. The other disciples came in the boat, for they were not far from shore, only about a hundred yards, dragging the net with the fish.

When they climbed out on shore, they saw a charcoal fire with fish on it and bread. Jesus had prepared the meal for them. Jesus said to them, "Bring some of the fish you just caught." So Simon Peter went over and dragged the net ashore, full of 153 large fish—the superabundance of the fruitfulness of our work when Jesus blesses it. Even though there were so many, the net was not torn.

Jesus said to them, "Come, have breakfast." And none of the disciples dared to ask Him, "Who are You?" because they realized it was the Lord. This is a moment where we may wish to pause in prayer. This moment when the disciples are seated around the meal together with Jesus by the lakeshore, and there is silence.

No one speaks. No one asks, "Who are you?" because they know, and they know that all they need to do is simply be with the Lord. Jesus came over and took the bread and gave it to them, and in like manner the fish. This was now the third time Jesus was revealed to His disciples after being raised from the dead. And now we have this threefold dialogue between Jesus and Peter through which Jesus so sensitively heals Peter of the threefold denial.

And this is another thing I always love about—oh, this is Jesus throughout the Gospels—the sensitivity of Jesus to pain in the human heart. There are no recriminations here. “Peter, how could you have said that? How could you—” none of that's there.

All Jesus does is heal his heart by allowing him to express the love which both of them know is so real. When they had finished breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, "Simon, son of John, do you love Me more than these?" He said to Him—and he has no hesitation—"Yes, Lord. You know that I love You."

He said to him, "Feed my lambs." He then said to him a second time, "Simon, son of John, do you love me?" He said to him, "Yes, Lord. You know that I love you." He said to him, "Tend my sheep."

He said to him the third time, Simon, son of John, do you love me? Peter was distressed that he had said to him a third time, Do you love me? And he said to him, Lord, you know everything. You know that I love you. Jesus said to him, Feed my sheep.

So what stirs in our hearts as we read this passage and pray with it, as we are there with Jesus and the disciples, as we think of the times of fruitless labor in our own lives, the times when Jesus was always there but we didn't see it until later, those blessed moments when our hearts know that the Lord is with us. It is the Lord. The tender, sensitive love in Jesus' heart as He prepares the meal, as He heals Peter's bruised heart. What is the Lord saying to us? Where is He leading?

And I'll conclude now by returning once more to the Pope in Crossing the Threshold of Hope, and I want to focus essentially on one sentence. Because this one sentence, of all that Pope John Paul II said and wrote over twenty-seven years as Pope, is the one that I go back to more than any other. And I would beg of us never to forget it, because it will change the way we look at the world. So why should we have no fear? And we've heard the Pope say, because of the Redemption, because God came into human history, because this was not just in the past, because it's every day, it's the heart of human history.

The victory is certain because of the Redemption. And this leads the Pope. He speaks of the light. This is the light that shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. And then he says the power of Christ's Cross and Resurrection—that's the Redemption.

The power of Christ's Cross and Resurrection is greater than any evil we can or should fear. Say that again. The power of Christ's Cross and Resurrection, the Redemption, is greater than any evil we can or should fear, and I love the realism of that. Yes. There are evils in the world that we can fear.

Even more, there are evils in the world that we should fear, and we are well aware of them. But there is a power in this world that is greater than any of them, and it is the power of the Cross and Resurrection of Christ that is the redemption that is real every day of human history. May that hope bless us always on the journey. Amen.

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.