Christian

Book Review: Margaret Silf’s “Just Call Me López”

Steve · August 11, 2012 · 2 Comments

There’s an old chestnut of an icebreaker/conversation starter that goes something like this: What person, living or deceased, would you most like to spend some time with? (Go ahead, discuss…)

Margaret Silf’s “Just Call Me López: Getting to the Heart of Ignatius Loyola (Loyola Press, 144 pages) takes that question on a spiritual journey and allows us to come along for the ride, as long as we’re willing to suspend our disbelief in the impossibility of the premise of the book – the contemporary narrator’s months-long interactions with the 16^th century saint and founder of the Jesuits. Along the way, what we get is far more than a creative approach to Ignatius’ biography (his middle name was López) or an introduction to his famed spiritual exercises, although we get plenty of both. For those who know nothing or little of Ignatius’ life and approach to spirituality, this slim volume will serve as a fine introduction.

In this unlikely tale of a 16^th-century soldier-turned-saint and 21^st-century woman, we see what happens when one person opens herself to a real-life, real-time experience of the communion of saints. The two are as different as pen-and-ink and laptops are as writing instruments, but their conversations show us that life’s really important questions don’t change with the times and technology. And perhaps the most essential question we can ask as spiritual beings (what is God’s will and plan for my life?) is the question to which most of us continue to seek an answer. That introspective and prayerful approach to life is what lies at the heart of Ignatian spirituality.

Watching for Movement

Steve · July 29, 2012 · 4 Comments

daisy — Black-eyed Susans at Long Lake Park, by Steve Givens

Walking with Sue yesterday morning at Long Lake Regional Park in New Brighton, Minnesota, I was aware, as I always try to be when I walk in nature, of not only the beauty of everything around me but of its movement. For where there is movement there is energy and life.

Even the minutest movements illustrate the animation of life. With my camera I stop to capture a purple wildflower, only to notice the ever-so-slight movement of a pale yellow insect I would have otherwise missed, slowly and methodically working its way around the flower, doing what it is made to do with flowers. Energy and life.

Walking along a path, a flurry of brown and black motion catches my eye and I shift my attention and focus. It’s the rump of a chipmunk, hard at work digging in the soft soil, oblivious to us until we are nearly on top of it. Energy and life.

What We Have to Offer Each Other: Our Presence

Steve · May 12, 2012 · 4 Comments

candle1 — Being present to one another and to God. By Steve Givens

About a month or so ago I began volunteering for a local hospice organization called Heartland Hospice. My job is pretty basic: I visit with Margaret (not her real name) about once a week. We sit a foot apart, she in her wheelchair and I in a straight-backed chair. We look each other straight in the eyes and we talk. It’s pretty simple and Margaret makes it easy on me, as she’s quite the talker.

But our relationship is different from any other I have ever had and here’s why: From visit to visit Margaret doesn’t remember me, although she’s always enthusiastic about having someone to talk to. Like many older adults (Margaret is going to be 98 this year!), her memory is not good and so she often asks me the same questions multiple times during the hour of our visit.

And, of course, she tells me the same stories every time I visit because, after all, she’s never met me before. So I get to hear again and again about her early life in North St. Louis, about walking through Fairgrounds Park to get to the then-new Beaumont High School (where my parents would also attend a few years later), about her wanting to be a dancer but her mother refusing to allow her daughter to “take to the stage,” about her father calling her “tin ear” because she would be so engrossed in a book she didn’t hear him calling her to dinner. She talks about her two marriages (one of 40-something years and the other, later in life, of about ten years). She tells me of her two sons, one who died in his 40s and one who lives in Florida now. Or maybe Texas. That part of the story sometimes changes.

Solitude: Finding your own space and time

Steve · March 10, 2012 · 12 Comments

(The third of a three-part posting about seeking times and places of solitude in the midst of our busy lives)

“I should do myself a favor and memorize this line: To reach for God is to reach God….I should trust that God is present to me anytime I stretch out my feeble little spiritual arms.” -Fr. Mark Thibodeaux, SJ (from “Armchair Mystic”)

Shadow — Meeting Myself on the Path, Steve Givens

“To reach for God is to reach God.” Those are words of hope and optimism. For when it comes to prayer, we can sometimes think, “I just don’t know where to begin,” or perhaps, “What if I’m doing this wrong?” Fr. Thibodeaux’s quote is a good reminder that we can’t go wrong, if we only just reach out. God will see our effort and draw us the rest of the way to his presence.

So finding solitude in the midst of our busy lives is, first and foremost, always an intentional activity. We must choose to go away to a place in the country, to a retreat house, to a to a chapel, to a walking trail. Or we must choose to create a space of sacred solitude within our everyday lives, which is where we find ourselves most of the time. Those are the places that I write about today.

Solitude: Quieting the world and ourselves (part two)

Steve · March 3, 2012 · 6 Comments

(The second of a three-part posting about seeking times and places of solitude in the midst of our busy lives)

“A life without a lonely place, that is, a life without a quiet center, easily becomes destructive.” – Henri Nouwen

churchlight — Light at the Center of a California Mission, by Steve Givens

We all need times of solitude in our lives for three interconnected reasons: We need to quiet the world. We need to quiet ourselves. And we need to do both of those things so we can better listen for God as he whispers our names and quietly lets us know just what it is we’re supposed to be doing with our lives.

Many years ago, I attended a retreat given by a Marianist priest and writer named Quentin Hakenewerth. With one simple lesson and a flip chart showing a set of concentric circles, he taught me something I have never forgotten and which has largely shaped my approach to prayer and seeking the will of God for the past 30 years.

He said, in essence, that the world (the outermost and largest circle on his chart) is a big, busy, noisy place. It screams at us to pay attention. With the general noise pollution of the world and with a constant barrage of advertising and media and angry, yelling people of all sorts, the world just never shuts up. Never. And we do it to ourselves, too. We fill every possible moment of silence with noise – with mindless talk, with music, with phone calls and emails and texts and tweets and Facebook postings. Even if some of these things make no audible sound, they are noise nevertheless and obstacles to our solitude and peace.