Ignatius presents us with a distinctive image of God in this contemplation: God works in and for our good in all created things on the face of the earth.

The sensibility to discern the God whose presence in our reality is expressed as a labor of love that we are each invited to encounter and unite with to make real and true the Kingdom of God in our lives and our world is what it means to find God in all things.

To do this Ignatius tells us, we ought to desire “an intimate knowledge of the many blessings received, that filled with gratitude for all, [we] may in all things love and serve the Divine Majesty” (Spiritual Exercises, 233). In the “Contemplation to Attain the Love of God,” he invites us to experience God as the One who is continually giving and always working at all times and in all things in our world, which is also a divine milieu where every encounter is a possible union between humankind and God.

Two experiences last week brought home to me in very moving ways this truth that God labors for the good of each and every person.

The first has to do with the oral exams my students had to sit for as part of the graduating requirements for the Philosophy of Religion course I teach. Over four long days, I listened to forty one students from a variety of disciplines present their syntheses of the course and answer the questions I posed.

Though many were apprehensive before the week of the final exams, they thoughtfully put together meaningful and relevant syntheses of the course. Several of them turned in sterling performances of philosophically insightful reflection that displayed ingenuity and creativity using Literature, Art and even the Spiritual Exercises that provided new lenses to better appreciate the possibility of using Philosophy to find God in these postmodern times. From all of them, I learnt new insights and ideas.

Examining them, I couldn’t help but appreciate God’s presence in their lives—how God labored with them during the orals and all its demands and rigors as they ploughed with perseverance and good humor through not only this exam but the many others they had to sit for as seniors. More fundamentally, I saw how their openness to the possibility of encountering God through Reason allowed them to better appreciate their own faith experiences. As one of them reminded me at the close of her presentation, our faith does indeed seek to understand in order that it is richer, firmer and more alive. Needless to say, the experience of listening to them last week left me greatly humbled and inspired.

The second has to do with the weekend recollection for ten Arrupeans leaving our community in the coming months. Most of them will move on to regency and new assignments. I went away with this small group as their facilitator to Arnold Janssen’s Spirituality Center. There, we had space and time to recollect and pray. After a night and a morning of silence reflecting on their years in our community and looking ahead to their new ministries, they came together in the afternoon to share. A distinct sense of gratitude for the many good and growing experiences each had as a person, Christian and Jesuit marked each individual sharing. This was remarkable because they acknowledged at the same time the challenges and difficulties they struggled with in studies and community, in prayer and the vowed life, during the past few years.

Listening to them I sensed how much God accompanied them during these Arrupe years. What their sharing taught me in my own daily search to find God, especially, in those long, painful and lonely days and nights when I try to understand the rationale behind a superior’s instruction or to get over the hurt a fellow community member inflicts when he ridicules Jesuits who teach Philosophy as being less of a Jesuit for the umpteenth time, is to appreciate God’s silent but ever-present accompaniment. I drew strength from their sharing for they helped me see that it is possible to look beyond the darkness and the difficult, and, more so, to know that others face the same challenges in religious life.

These experiences remind me of Joyce Rupp who writes:

One winter morning I awoke to see magnificent lines of frost stretching across my window pane. They seemed to rise with the sunshine and the bitter cold outside. They looked like little miracles that been formed in the dark of the night. I watched them in sheer amazement and marveled that such beautiful forms could be born during such a winter-cold night. Yet, as I pondered them I thought of how life is like that. We live our long, worn days, so unaware of the miracles that are being created in our spirits. It takes the sudden daylight, some unexpected surprise of life, to cause our gaze to look upon a simple stunning growth that has happened quietly inside us. Like frost designs on a winter window, they bring us beyond life’s fragmentation and remind us that we are not nearly as lost as we thought we were, that all the time we thought we were dead inside, beautiful things were being born in us.

I'd like to think that Rupp’s lines also point to the God who is always laboring in our midst and bringing about much that is good, true and beautiful in our human lives, silently but surely.

For me, the above make for an apt Lenten reflection this week for they remind me of the God who does labor for us limited and weak, sinful and flawed, beings simply because God wishes to uplift and redeem humankind in Love.

photos by toby deveson