1. Thank you for your prayers during my retreat. My vacation with the Lord has been helpful in growing up. It was a time of being schooled in prayer, that is, learning to pray better with and in the Lord, or, as I’ve understood what I’ve been taught, to become more of the Jesus pray-er.

    I’ve learnt many lessons during this challenging time and especially in these two days since it ended. The main lesson is that our God is kind and gracious. He has more mercy and forgiveness towards us than we can ever know. All too often, we are stricter and harsher on ourselves (as we are on others too) than God is on our failings to live the good and happy life.

    I realized this when I was asked to make an honest profile of the way I think God sees me today, listing and ranking the things in me that God would like and dislike. This was part of my prayer during the First Week of the Spiritual Exercises. Bringing this to prayer, I found the encounter with God—seeing myself from His point of view—vastly different. In fact, God is most compassionate. I’d like to believe that what matters more to God than our failings and flaws are our deepest desire to love Him more dearly with each step we take and the effort to realize this.

    A good friend reminded me once that God sees more light than darkness in each of us and he can indeed make crooked lines straight. What matters is whether we are prepared to give God the space to work out these entanglements in our lives. I’ve tried to be as open as possible to let God do this during my retreat, as I will continue to let Him do so in the coming months.

    An unexpected grace of this retreat is finding within me the capacity to write poetry again. It has been many years since I've put pen to paper poetically. The following is an attempt to capture the experience I’ve described above:

    Your Eyes See

    His eyes darted upwards, as if transfixed unexpectedly on a glint of something heavenly -- may be a rich azured streak aflamed by a yellowing dawn.

    Only his eyes seem alight; much of the rest of him remains hidden in the recesses of a fading night.

    One can’t help, I remarked, to see in the faint outline of his lips, slightly crooked, a certain imperfection, almost an unwholesomeness.

    Looking honestly at this portrait, You lead my gaze with your finger through the shadows to the slight, almost imperceptible quiver of surprise, there, at the edges of his mouth.

    Then, into my ear You whisper: no, how human the longing in your gaze is, and how divine your need to confess, yes!

    photo by david niblack

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  2. I shall call out to you;
    call you out to that secret space,
    wherein, we shall dwell in each other’s gaze.

    There, I shall stoop,
    with a mother’s heart to her crying babe,
    and in loving whispers that nourish,
    speak my quiet, certain name into your being.

    Then, you shall know more truly,
    and desire more ardently,
    me who Loves.

    And though I elude all naming,
    your finite utterances in reply
    echo enough joyful thanks
    in this reality we dwell in
    -- for this is life as it truly is, together.

    by ad_sj

    I will be away for my annual retreat from Friday, 16 March to Saturday, 24 March. Please keep me in your prayers, as I will keep you in mine. God bless.


    photo of dalhouise homestead ruins, south australia by jeff drewitz

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  3. If you read Ignatian or Jesuit texts and websites, you will have come across this phrase. Its origins are to be found in the “Contemplation to Attain the Love of God” that St Ignatius of Loyola closes the Spiritual Exercises on.

    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

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"Bukas Palad"
"Bukas Palad"
is Filipino for open palms
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Peace and welcome, dear friend.
I hope you will find in these posts something that speaks to you of the God who loves us all and who always holds us in the palm of his hand. Blessings!
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"Nothing is more practical than finding God, that is, than falling in love in a quite absolute way final way. What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will affect everything. It will decide what will get you out of bed in the morning, what you do with your evenings, how you spend your weekends, what you read, who you know, what breaks your heart, and what amazes you with joy and gratitude. Fall in love, stay in love, and it will decide everything."

Pedro Arrupe, sj, Superior General, 1965 - 1983

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is a 50something Catholic who resides in Singapore and works for the Church. He is a priest of the Roman Catholic Church.
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