Casting It Out

For the second time in the past month, I've been briefly sidelined by a cold. The first time, a mild variant of the flu swept through my community days after we all received our flu shots. This past week, I suspect somebody stashed a few pathogens in their hand luggage on the flight back from St. Louis. In any event, it's been an affliction that I've been wary of passing on– a few octogenarians in my community might not appreciate this form of generosity– and all too eager to cast out.

These interludes of illness, whose debilitating effects caused me no small amount of frustration and discomfort, reminded me of a key teaching that St. Ignatius puts at the beginning of his Spiritual Exercises. In a statement called "The Principle and Foundation," he writes that "Human beings are created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord, and by means of doing this to save their souls." He goes on to assert that everything in creation is provided to us by God to help us toward this goal, though what's helpful for one person might be a hindrance for another. So Ignatius preaches a deliberate and intentional indifference: "We ought not to seek health rather than sickness, wealth rather than poverty, honor rather than dishonor, a long life rather than a short one, and so on... we ought to desire and choose only that which is more conducive to the end for which we are created."

Elm Park, Worcester MA

In praying with these passages today, the first and last sentences caught and held my attention. How do I praise, reverence, and serve God? What is the end for which I am created? Obsessing over sickness, worrying about whether my job performance is adequate, and doubting the value and impact of my work and ministry is clearly not what Ignatius had in mind. Yet that's where I've been stuck for the past few days. It struck me as not only wildly radical, but also compellingly attractive, to possibly believe that my very existence is an expression of praise to God. No small part of my calling in life– even beyond my vocation to the Society of Jesus and the priesthood– seems rooted in fostering someone's recognition and appreciation of the divine beauty inextricably manifest in her or his being, and offering encouragement to pursue lives that share this treasure with their neighbors and the world. So I'm grateful for those fellow Jesuits, those friends, those people whom I meet, who allow me into their lives in order to experience and reflect their own light. And I'm challenged once again to accept and savor grace's presence, and potential for expression, in my own life.

It's no fun being sick, but it's hardly the end of the world. Being blind to the end for which I'm created, or deaf to the praise that can well up from within me, is something more serious. I know that this is a recurring weakness of mine, tied to my preoccupation with being productive, making a difference, and other action-oriented self-judgments. To a certain extent, such drivenness can be helpful, but taken to an unhealthy extreme, it becomes a spiritual affliction, a malady I wish I could cast out as readily as my immune system dispenses with a cold. To be "indifferent" with respect to my own drivenness is both a daunting challenge and an intriguing invitation... and I sense that working towards that goal will help me to better express my created purpose, and achieve the end for which I've been created.