by James Martin
During the next nine months, my father’s physical condition went steadily downhill, despite chemotherapy. Soon he was bedridden and began to rely on my mother to care for all of his physical needs at home. The last month of his life, when my mother could no longer help him out of bed, he said, “I think I should go to the hospital.” So we moved my father to a subacute care facility.
But while his physical condition declined, his spiritual condition seemed to improve.
Near the end of his life, my father started to talk more frequently about God. This was a complete surprise. While he had been raised Catholic and graduated from Catholic grammar school and high school, and while he attended Mass during important feast days, he had, as long as I had known him, never been overtly religious.
But as he neared death, he asked my Jesuit friends to pray for him, he treasured holy cards that people sent him, he mused about which family members he longed to see in heaven, he asked what I thought God would be like, and he made some suggestions about his funeral Mass. My dad also became more gentle, more forgiving, and more emotional.
I found these changes both consoling and confusing.
One of the last people to visit him was my friend Janice, a Catholic sister, who had been one of my professors during my theology studies. After his death, I remarked that my dad seemed to have become more open to God. In response, she said something that I had never heard but seemed to have already known.
“Yes,” she said. “Dying is about becoming more human.”
Her insight was true in at least two ways. First, becoming more human for my father meant recognizing his inborn connection to God. All of us are connected to God, though we may ignore it, or deny it, or reject it during our lives. But with my father’s defenses completely lowered, God was able to meet him in new ways. Whatever barriers that had kept God at a distance no longer existed.
This, not desperation, is why there are so many profound spiritual experiences near death. The person is better able to allow God to break through.
But there is a second way that Sister Janice’s insight made sense. My father was becoming more human because he was becoming more loving. Drawing closer to God transforms us, since the more time we spend with someone we love, the more we become like the object of our love. Paradoxically, the more human we become, the more divine we become.
This is not to say that God desires for us to suffer. Rather, when our defenses fall, our ultimate connection is revealed. Thus, vulnerability is another way in which we can experience our desire for God.
THESE EXPERIENCES, WHICH MANY of us have had—feelings of incompletion, common longings and connections, uncommon longings, exaltation, clarity, desires to follow, desires for holiness, and vulnerability—are all ways of becoming aware of our innate desire for God.
Anyone, at any time, in any of these ways, can become aware of his or her desire for God. Moreover, finding God and being found by God are the same, since those expressions of desire have God both as their source and goal.
Thus, the beginning of the path to God is trusting not only that these desires are placed within us by God, but that God seeks us in the same way we seek God.
That’s another wonderful image of God: the Seeker. In the New Testament, Jesus often used this image (see Luke 15:3–10). He compared God to the shepherd who loses one sheep out of one hundred, and leaves the other ninety-nine behind to find the one lost. Or the woman who loses a coin and sweeps her entire house in order to find it. This is the seeking God.
But my favorite image is one from the Islamic tradition, which depicts God as seeking us more than we seek God. It is a hadith qudsi, which Muslim scholars translate as a divine saying revealed by God to the Prophet Muhammad. “And if [my servant] draws nearer to me by a handsbreadth, I draw nearer to him by an arms-length; and if he draws nearer to me by an armslength, I draw nearer to him by a fathom; and if he comes to me walking, I come to him running.”
God wants to be with you. God desires to be with you. What’s more, God desires a relationship with you.
GOD MEETS YOU WHERE YOU ARE
When I entered the Jesuit novitiate, I was baffled about what it meant to have a “relationship” with God. We novices heard about that quite frequently. But what was I supposed to do to relate to God? What did that mean?
My biggest misconception was that I would have to change before approaching God. Like many beginners in the spiritual life, I felt I wasn’t worthy to approach God. So I felt foolish trying to pray. I confessed this to David Donovan. “What do I need to do before I can relate to God?” I asked.
“Nothing,” he said. “God meets you where you are.”
That was a liberating insight. Even though God is always calling us to constant conversion and growth, and even though we are imperfect and sometimes sinful people, God loves us as we are now. As the Indian Jesuit Anthony de Mello said, “You don’t have to change for God to love you.” This is one of the main insights of the First Week of the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius: you are loved even in your imperfections. God already loves you.
The Christian can see this clearly in the New Testament. Jesus often calls people to conversion, to cease sinning, to change their lives, but he doesn’t wait until they have done so before meeting them. He enters in relationship with them as he finds them. He meets them where they are and as they are.
But there is another way of understanding this. Not only does God desire to be in relationship with you now, but God’s way of relating with you often depends on where you are in your life.
So if you find happiness primarily through relationships, this may be how God wants to meet you. Look for God through friendship. If you are a parent, God may meet you through your son or daughter (or grandson or granddaughter). Just the other day a man told me that he was having a hard time being grateful. When I asked where he most found God, his face immediately brightened and he said, “My children!” It was easy for him to find God once he knew where to look.
Do you find joy through nature? Look for God in the sea, the sky, the woods, and the fields and streams. Do you engage the world through action? Look for God in your work. Do you enjoy the arts? Go to a museum, or to a concert, or to the movies, and seek God there.
God can meet us anywhere. One of my closest Jesuit friends is a prison chaplain named George, who has recently started giving the Spiritual Exercises to inmates in a Boston jail. Not long ago, one inmate told George that he was about to punch a guy in the face, when he suddenly felt God was giving him “some time” to reconsider. He decided against violence. Here was God meeting an inmate in his prison cell.
Seek grace in the smallest things, and you will also find grace to accomplish, to believe in, and to hope for the greatest things.
—Blessed Peter Favre, S.J., one of the first Jesuits
God also meets you in ways that you can understand, in ways that are meaningful to you. Sometimes God meets you in ways like those I’ve just described, and sometimes in a manner that is so personal, so tailored to the unique circumstances of your life, that it is nearly impossible to explain to others.
One of my favorite instances of this in fiction comes from Gustave Flaubert’s luminous short story, “A Simple Heart,” written in 1877, which tells the tale of a poor servant named Félicité.
For many years Félicité, a goodhearted young woman, patiently bears up under her grim employer, the imperious Madame Aubain. At one point in the story, Madame Aubain gives her hardworking maid a brightly colored parrot named Loulou, really the only extraordinary thing that Félicité has ever owned. (This is the eponymous bird in Flaubert’s Parrot, by Julian Barnes, the English author who “misses God.”)
Then disaster strikes: her beloved Loulou dies. In desperation, Félicité sends the bird to a taxidermist, who stuffs him. When it is returned, Félicité sets it atop a large wardrobe with other holy relics that she keeps. “Every morning,” writes Flaubert, “as she awoke she saw him by the first light of day, an
d then would recall the days gone by and the smallest details of unimportant events, without sorrow, quite serenely.”
After her mistress dies, Félicité grows old and retreats into a simple life of piety.
“Many years passed,” writes Flaubert.
Finally, at the moment of her own death, Félicité is given a strange and beautiful vision: “When she breathed her last breath she thought she saw, as the heavens opened, a gigantic parrot, hovering over her head.”
God comes to us in ways we can understand.
Let me give you an example of this from my own life: At one point during my Jesuit training I spent two years in Nairobi, Kenya, working with the Jesuit Refugee Service. There I helped East African refugees who had settled in the city start small businesses to support themselves. At the beginning of my stay, cut off from friends and family in the States, I felt a crushing loneliness. After a few months of hard work, I also came down with mononucleosis, which meant two whole months of recuperation. It was a trying time.
Happily, I worked with some generous people, including Uta, a German laywoman with extensive experience in refugee work in Southeast Asia. After I had recovered from my illness, our work flourished: over time Uta and I would help refugees set up some twenty businesses, including tailoring shops, several small restaurants, a bakery, and even a little chicken farm. Together we also founded a small shop that sold the refugee handicrafts, located in a sprawling slum in Nairobi.
It was a remarkable turnaround—from lying on my bed, exhausted, wondering why I had come there, anguished that I would have to return home, puzzled over what I could accomplish, to busily working with refugees from all over East Africa, managing a shop buzzing with activity, and realizing that this was the happiest and freest I had ever felt. Many days were difficult. But many days I thought, I can’t believe how much I love this work!
One day I was walking home from our little shop. The long brown path started at a nearby church, on the edge of the slum, which was perched on a hill that overlooked a broad valley. From there the bumpy path descended through a thicket of floppy-leaved banana trees, thick ficus trees, orange day lilies, tall cow grass, and corn fields. On the way into the valley I passed people silently working on their plots of land, who looked up and called out to me as I passed. Brilliantly colored iridescent sunbirds sang from the tips of tall grasses. At the bottom of the valley was a little river, and I crossed a flimsy bridge to get to the other side.
When I climbed the opposite side of the hill, I turned to look back. Though it was around five in the afternoon, the equatorial sun blazed down on the green valley, illuminating the long brown path, the tiny river, the people, the banana trees, the flowers, the grass.
Quite suddenly I was overwhelmed with happiness. I’m happy to be here, I thought. After the loneliness, the sickness, and the struggles, I felt that I was exactly where I was supposed to be.
It was a surprising experience. Here was God speaking to me where I was—physically, emotionally, and intellectually—and offering what I needed on that day.
Was it clarity? Uncommon longing? Common longing? Exaltation? Hard to say. Maybe all of those things. But it was especially meaningful to where I was at the time.
God speaks to us in ways we can understand. God began to communicate with Ignatius during his recuperation, when he was vulnerable and more open to listening. With me, on that day in Nairobi, God spoke to me through the view of that little valley.
God can also meet you at any time, no matter how crazy things may seem. You don’t have to have a perfectly organized daily life to experience God. Your spiritual house does not need to be tidy for God to enter.
In the Gospels, Jesus often meets people in the midst of their busy lives: Peter mending his nets by the seashore, Matthew sitting at his tax collector’s booth. Just as often he encounters people when they’re at their absolute worst: an adulterous woman about to be stoned, a woman who has been sick for many years, a possessed man not even in his right mind. In each of these situations God said to these people, busy, stressed out, worried, frightened, “I’m ready to meet you, if you’re ready to meet me.”
If God meets you where you are, then where you are is a place to meet God. You don’t have to wait until your life settles down, or the kids move out of the house, or you’ve found that perfect apartment, or you recover from that long illness. You don’t have to wait until you’ve overcome your sinful patterns, or you’re more “religious” or you can pray “better.”
You don’t have to wait for any of that.
Because God is ready now.
Chapter Four
Beautiful Yesterdays
Finding God and Letting God Find You
FOR IGNATIUS AND HIS friends, finding God often meant noticing where God was already active in their lives. And we can notice God not only in peak moments, like the ones we just discussed, but also in daily events where God’s presence is often overlooked. God is always inviting us to encounter the transcendent in the everyday. The key is noticing.
This insight—that finding God is about noticing—helps the seeker in two ways. First, it makes the quest straightforward. As I mentioned, Walter Burghardt, S.J., defined prayer as “a long, loving look at the real.” Contemplating the real, rather than trying to grasp an abstract concept like the transcendence of God, or trying to puzzle out a complicated philosophical proof, is an easier place for most people to start.
This is not to deny the appeal of the intellectual path. In his book A Testimonial to Grace, first published in 1946, Avery Cardinal Dulles, a distinguished theologian and the first American Jesuit named a cardinal, wrote that his own religious awakening was encouraged by Greek philosophy, which helped him to see the world as an ordered whole. “The Platonic ideal of virtue,” he wrote, “had enormous consequences in my personal philosophy.”
Still, this most rational of men was finally moved to recognize God when he linked the philosophical idea of God with the natural world. His epiphany came as an undergraduate at Harvard, while he was walking along the Charles River in Cambridge and spied something more commonplace than a philosophical proof—a “young tree.”
On its frail, supple branches were young buds attending eagerly the spring which was at hand. While my eye rested on them the thought came to me suddenly, with all the strength and novelty of a revelation, that these little buds in their innocence and meekness followed a rule, a law of which I as yet knew nothing.
“That law came from God,” wrote Dulles, “a Person of Whom I had no previous intuition.”
That brings us to the second reason for the importance of noticing, like Avery Dulles’s awareness of that tree. Noticing helps you realize that your life is already suffused with the presence of God. Once you begin to look around and allow yourself to take a chance to believe in God, you will easily see God at work in your life.
At this point you might be saying, “That’s fine. But how do I do this?” Here’s where the way of Ignatius can help.
THE EXAMEN
In the Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius includes a prayer designed to enable believers to find God in their lives. (Actually, it’s more accurate to say that he popularized the prayer, since versions of it had been around for some time.) He called it the “examination of conscience.” And he used to say that it was so important that even if Jesuits neglected all other forms of prayer in their day, they should never neglect this one.
The prayer goes by many names today. The Jesuit George Aschenbrenner, a spiritual director and writer, popularized the term “examination of consciousness” or “consciousness examination,” since he feels that the English word “conscience” has “narrow moralistic overtones” that push people to focus primarily on their sinfulness. (In other languages, like Spanish and Italian, that single word expresses both meanings: conscience and consciousness.) Many Jesuits refer to the prayer by its original Spanish name—the examen. English-speaking Jesuits pronounce it “examine.” Which is not such a bad w
ay of thinking about it. Because what you’re doing is examining your day for signs of God’s presence.
The examen is a simple prayer with five easy steps.
It can be done once a day (usually before going to bed) or twice (usually during midday and evening). Here’s how it goes:
As with every prayer, you prepare by asking for God’s grace. It’s a way of consciously inviting God to be with you and reminding yourself that you are in God’s presence.
The traditional first step is gratitude. You recall the good things that happened to you during the day, and you give thanks for any “benefits,” as Ignatius wrote. This is an essential step. As David Fleming, S.J., an expert on spirituality, recently wrote me in a letter, “Ignatius saw the examen as prayer, not just focused on the person, but as directed to God. That’s why the examen begins with thanks to God, establishing the focus. It’s not simply self-examination or dreamy introspection, it is a way of prayer, a way of being with God.”
Ignatius meant “benefits” in the broadest possible sense. Obvious things would include any good news, a tender moment with a spouse, finishing an important project at work. But also less-obvious things: the surprising sight of sunlight on the pavement in the middle of a bleak midwinter’s day, the taste of a ham-and-cheese sandwich you had for lunch, satisfaction at the end of a tiring day spent caring for your children.
For Ignatius many things—no matter how seemingly inconsequential—are occasions for gratitude. You recall them and you “relish” or “savor” them, as he would say.
Savoring is an antidote to our increasingly rushed lives. We live in a busy world, with an emphasis on speed, efficiency, and productivity, and we often find ourselves hurriedly moving on to the next task at hand. Life becomes an endless series of tasks, and our day becomes a compendium of to-do lists. We become “human doings” instead of “human beings.”
Savoring slows us down. In the examen we don’t recall an important experience simply to add it to a list of things that we’ve seen or done; rather, we savor it as if it were a satisfying meal. We pause to enjoy what has happened. It’s a deepening of our gratitude to God, revealing the hidden joys of our days. As Anthony de Mello said, “You sanctify whatever you are grateful for.”