Context is central to the Ignatian worldview. Before we can chart our path to a more just world, we must first understand where we are coming from as individuals and as a community. St. Ignatius began his own pilgrimage upon leaving his family home in Loyola. This image of home and place serves as our inspiration for this month’s reflection by Tony Cortese, Program Director for Ignatian Spirituality. Before he was St. Ignatius, he was Iñigo López de Oñaz y Loyola, an individual shaped by his context and carrying more than his share of baggage.

Rosie Dillion ‘22, a 2021 Jean Donovan Fellow in the Ignatian Center for Jesuit Education, offers an important message in her video as we take the first steps of our collective journey. She reminds us that before we can begin we must ask, “Who am I?” In examining our internal sense of self, shaped by our positionality, we are called to further reflect on the baggage we all carry through life. Only in understanding how privilege or oppression shape our worldview and experiences, and those of others, can we meaningfully begin our journey towards a more just world.

This pilgrimage of transformation begins not only with our internal dispositions, but also in the geographic realities that structure our home here at Santa Clara, in Silicon Valley, and beyond. As Willie James Jennings makes clear in a recent interview, justice and wholeness are fundamentally tied to place and the way we structure and inhabit those places. He asks if we see how we are “born into the long story of land takeover and land seizure that continues with the configuration of neighborhoods that keep certain people in and push other people out?” For “we have to understand that all of our efforts at changing the social fabric of this country must begin with changing the geographic fabric.”

Questions for reflection:

• As you gaze upon this painting of Ignatius' childhood home in Loyola, what feelings arise in you?
• Ignatius had a very complicated childhood, marked by both tragedy and privilege. He carried this "invisible baggage" with him the rest of his life, even after he gave up everything he owned. What is some of the "invisible baggage" you carry with you even to this day?
• How does your "invisible baggage" impact the way you show up for a more inclusive form of justice?