'Gentleness and Gratitude'
Homily for Feast of St. Ignatius of Loyola Mission Church, Santa Clara University, July 31, 2019
For our reflection on this Feast day—so important for any Jesuit institution—I would like to offer two points: one short of the typical three offered by Jesuits because it is summer and a picnic awaits! I invite us to consider two virtues steeped in the tradition of Ignatius: gentleness and gratitude.
These dispositions are found in Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises. The Exercises are Ignatius’ handbook of prayer, which he devised over a number of years during the course of his somewhat slow conversion experience. During these years of fairly intense prayer and service, Ignatius observed that God was working with him as a teacher deals with a student (certainly a fitting analogy for such a pivotal figure in the history of education). Ignatius thought this schooling of the spirit could be helpful to others, so he wrote down notes and produced a series of exercises for the mind and soul that might help others as he had been helped. These exercises were a mix of familiar practices and novel exercises of his imagination. The Spiritual Exercises are bookended by distinctive keys: on one end, gentleness, and the other, gratitude.
First, gentleness. In a preface of sorts to the Exercises, called plainly, “The Presupposition,” Ignatius offers this counsel to the one giving another person the Exercises. To paraphrase, “do all you can to put a positive interpretation on what the other is saying. If you cannot do that, then correct the person, pointing out the truth with love.” Why put such counsel at the beginning of the retreat, a presumption of the other’s good will?
Key to the Exercises is the relationship between the one giving the Exercises (the director, we can call them) and the one making the retreat. That relationship was above all to be one of encouragement. The guide was to direct or point the retreatant in one direction or another, following the lead of the Holy Spirit as much as possible. Above all, the director was not to get in the way between God and the person making the retreat. The Presupposition, which Jesuits short-hand as “the plus sign,” was to animate or fortify this helping relationship, as they both tried to discern the movement of the Spirit in the retreat. The relationship between director and retreatant was also supposed to model God’s relationship with each person: direct, personal, helpful, gentle.
Another reason scholars surmise that Ignatius insisted on this rule was because Ignatius himself had been treated poorly by the Inquisition when he was hauled before those courts a few times by people who did not quite understand his somewhat unique spiritual approach. Admittedly, Inquisition courts were not known for their gentleness! But Ignatius wanted his directors to be – and by relation, he wanted his educators to be.
The other bookend of the Exercises is a beautiful meditation called the “Composition on the Love of God.” Here, Ignatius defines love as the mutual communication between persons, admittedly not very poetic but certainly in keeping with the Presupposition. Mutual communication, mutual sharing and listening, a give and take founded in truth and in love—like a good teacher working with a student, an encouraging spiritual director with a retreatant, like how a loving God relates so personally to each of us. Seeing deeply with the eyes of the heart, we can see how God labors in all things, all people, all times, and places to help us—and this can only inspire gratitude in us. And that gratitude should fuel the most beautiful of offerings. Again, paraphrasing the prayer that ends the Exercises: “Lord, take all that you have given me, I return it to you, I offer everything in service to you and others. With your love and your graceful presence, I have enough. I empty myself so that I can fill others.” Put another way, at the end of the retreat, the person is ready to emulate one who lives the Presupposition, the “plus sing”: to be a loving, gentle, encouraging presence for others.
These opening and closing movements of the Exercises resonate here on our campus. Imagine if we were more gentle with one another, more willing to put the “plus sign” on another’s words or actions? Imagine if, when we had to correct someone, we pointed out the truth to them with conviction and clarity, yes, but also with love, not punishing or scolding but teaching the other or liberating the other for the purpose of some common aim? Imagine if we were more open to learn from another?
Imagine if we put communication with one another in the context of love: a mutual giving and receiving, a mutual learning from one another, realizing that no one has a monopoly on truth, and that truth is often revealed in that communication. Imagine if we lived more gratefully, realizing how we are steeped in God’s presence, particularly in other people who God sends our way, even those we disagree with or disappoint us. Imagine if we saw all parts of this campus as God’s playground, God laboring in our search for truth, our appreciation of beauty and our growing in goodness.
Imagine.
I offer this reflection not with naivete. Being gentle is hard given that we are surrounded with a politics that is so often coarse and divisive. Being gentle takes patience. Speaking the truth with love requires boldness and clarity of conviction. Being grateful is even hard because we are so busy and distracted, that we sometimes forget to be grateful or pass by God’s many gifts without even noticing them.
Yet, this feast day calls us to imagine. Imagination is a central way of praying in the Exercises and ought to be a central way that we do things here at Santa Clara. Because imagination is the font of hope, the source of what is possible. And hope breeds our own conversion, our own growing in faith, hope and love. And the tell-tale fruit of any conversion—large or small, slow or fast—is so often gentleness and gratitude.