St Ignatius of Loyola left his home fired with a desire to respond to the God who not only saved his life but also called him to radical conversion. He wanted to follow great saints like Francis of Assisi or Dominic in the ways they followed Jesus, their King. Ignatius knew as much from his past life of chivalry as a courtier and soldier, and so he must have felt challenged to make the same offerings “of greater moment” to this God who called him to be His companion despite his sinful past. But alas it would take some mystical visions in Manresa for Ignatius to understand clearly that responding to God’s call properly is not simply a matter of willing it. Gradually, he learned that since it was Love who called him to conversion, then it would also be Love who would teach him how to respond in Love, i.e., in the same dynamic of Love in service.
We get our cue from what Ignatius proposes as the grace to beg for in the second week of his Spiritual Exercises: “to know Jesus more intimately, to be able to love him more intensely and to follow him more closely [Exx 113].” A popular interpretation of the Jesus story in the Broadway play Godspell used a simpler translation of this grace in one of its songs: “Day by day, three things I pray: to see Thee more clearly, love Thee more dearly, follow Thee more nearly, day by day.”
I’d like to propose that we use this same grace to give us a frame with which to understand how God draws us daily into loving service at Jesus’ side, into companionship-in-Christ’s-mission. We might consider this a pedagogy of sorts, the way Jesus places us “in-synch” with his vision of things, his way of loving, his ways of responding to his Father and to the people he and his Father love so much.
The first moment, the contemplative stance: “Tumitig nang may pag-ibig.” We allow ourselves to be taught the discipline to see, i.e., to fix our loving gaze on the world with God’s “long, loving look,” as Fr George Aschenbrenner once described the “look” of contemplation. Ignatius teaches us that this becomes possible only by constantly training ourselves to see the world in the loving eyes of the Trinity. Recall that in the Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius launches us into the second week with the Contemplation on the Trinity looking at the world and being moved to love and save the world from the trajectory of destruction set forth by sinfulness. The look of Triune Love is a look of connection, of unconditional acceptance; a look of mercy that heals and challenges and transforms; a look of empathy and compassion and disinterested self-gift for the well-being of the other.
A contemplative stance helps us to go beyond prejudice and bias in order to see the other as the other really is, and to see ourselves as we really are. We ask for God’s help to minimize our distorted views of reality–the ways we tend to make others small in order to make ourselves seem bigger; the ways we short circuit gratitude for God’s Providence by generating a sense of entitlement for all the good we have done for God through gifts that have also come from Godself; or the ways we tend to project our own needs into distorted images of others or of God, the ways we allow our fears to frighten ourselves from generous service; or the ways we succumb to feelings of despair when in God’s eyes, hope still springs.
The contemplative stance that tries to look at the world with the vision of the Triune God allows the love of God to broaden our view and to see in ourselves, in others, and in the world a stage in which God can continue to enact his project of redeeming love. When we can see with this clarity and intentionality, then our hearts become sensitive and pliant, our hearts quicken and become expectant when Love moves. And when Love moves, we are moved in turn and we follow.
The second moment, empathic response and compassionate care: “Maantig hanggang Mapaibig.” “Maakit, maantig, mapadala sa alab ng pag-ibig!” This second moment is when Love beckons us close, and quickens us into a loving response. Each of us may have our favorite disordered affections and attachments, and we tend to defend these until a greater Love moves us and our attachments fade under and then fade away. When we see clearly and honestly, when we are not given to deceptions and manipulations, God does not need any promotion. His Love can be irresistibly attractive. When in constant prayerful contemplation, we fix our gaze upon Jesus, his ways of looking at people, the way he cares and ministers to people, especially those who are left on the fringes, his ways of receiving a sinner or of healing those who suffer illness. When we gaze upon Jesus, we are moved by his deep compassion for people and a desire rises in us to follow him in his brand of loving and compassionate care for people.
When we fix our gaze upon Jesus teaching, with his ways of simplifying truths in stories and parables, his ways of engaging people with simple day-to-day images and situations, and his ways of teaching with authority, with integrity and consistency, his humble ways that don’t seek the limelight and attach him to power or privilege. When we fix our gaze upon Jesus, and allow our hearts to be moved into attraction and then conversion and transformation, gradually, we become what we contemplate, not simply by Jesus’ words, but by the person that he is and above all by His Spirit that animates us and transforms us.
We begin to love him with a love greater than what our sins and attachments pleasure us with or promise to give us. We begin to love him in a way that expands our hearts and transforms our petty desires into the more profound desires of God. We allow ourselves to be stretched to love beyond our comfort zones. Then we become more tolerant of pains involved in loving. Before we know it, we have grown in loving to the point that we can offer our lives to our friends, as Jesus did for us. As our attraction to Jesus grows into devotion and real commitment, then our love for Jesus becomes a gathering point of all our desiring, and the focus of all our apostolic energies. We find our whole person able to move “in-synch” with God’s desires, someone Ignatius would call “an instrument intimately conjoined with God’s hands,”—pliable, docile, totally available for God’s missions.
The third moment, bending my heart to do your will: “Tumindig, kumatig, sumandig.” In many ways, we can perhaps see our hearts as our modern-day navigators that point our way to the destinations we register as our desired destinations. When we take a wrong turn, the navigator says “recalculating” and then redraws the map of the correct path by reconnecting with the signals from the satellite and the mapping that is registered in the cloud. I find consolation in this possibility of constant “recalculating” and redrawing God’s map so we may reach our rightful destination. The third moment of this “Ignatian pedagogy” is precisely this: “bending my heart to do your will” as the Psalmist of Psalm 119 utters in his prayer. Where our hearts are sometimes inclined to follow compulsions and misdirected inspirations, we beg God to bend our hearts so that the pursuit of God’s will becomes our prime mover in life.
And as “bending my heart” connotes quite a physical movement, an inclining, a redirection of our heart’s mechanism so that it is God’s will that becomes the source and signal for our heartbeat, I should say, this third moment is the way God’s stirrings are embodied in our “flesh and blood choices.” When in the past, God’s visions represented distant ideals much like guiding stars, we are now drawn to put our bodies on the line so we may appropriate God’s values and loves into our own valuing and loving. This third moment is the time when we as disciples are drawn to walk our talk, as it were. “Pinangangatawanan, pinaninindigan” in our Filipino language describes values which go beyond ideals and become real convictions and commitments, values which are repeatedly proclaimed, chosen and cherished, values which have become vectors in our struggle to live them out amidst other competing values. In living out God’s Word in our lives, as the Gospel teaches, we become less like “houses built on sand” and more like “houses built on rock” (cf. Matthew 7, 24-27); we become the “seed that was sown on good soil” and thus grow to yield a hundredfold of fruit (cf. Matthew 13, 1-23).
However, the pursuit of God’s will can be tricky, especially for people who are relatively good and loving persons and active apostles. We can be driven by many good values we have kept in our lives since childhood. We may have even developed quite stable images of God with whom we relate. Sometimes we end up listening to our own selves, following our time-tested maps of religious and apostolic directions, instead of taking the time to quiet down and listen to God’s voice. We may be pursuing very good plans but they are still not God’s will. Our following thus needs to take the form of pagkatig and pagsandig, of constantly being led by God and constantly surrendering to God the reins that control and direct our lives.
The person who genuinely loves God pursues God’s will and desires, in the same way that loving couples do—quite intuitively and naturally. But my familiarity with the desires in God’s heart needs to develop through years and years of genuine relationship, until constant loving and consulting with God gift me with an interior knowledge, a felt sense of what God wants, what God desires from me and what God desires for the world where I live and love and serve. When I commune with God’s desires, I sense God’s presence in my life with deep consolation. I can almost feel God’s delight with much relish. When I resist God’s desires, I would feel desolate and dissonant. I would even feel tepid and lacking in meaning or direction. In other words, the years of constantly pursuing God’s desires and allowing God to incarnate God’s Spirit in us would have transformed our persons into a marker of God’s presence. Then we would become ourselves a navigation mechanism. By our constancy and fidelity, we can also begin to help others find their way to God and to God’s missions.