Living with the Lord

                            “The secret of Father Arrupe’s popularity is his loyalty to all that is fundamental and his relevance to all that is modern.” (Fr. Parmananda Divarkar)

There are many ways of growing in one’s spiritual life. But for me as a Jesuit, I feel that the most important way of growing in my spiritual life to live the Ignatian way.  I try to understand the Ignatian spirituality  based on the Spiritual Exercises and the Spirituality for formation as found in the Constitutions. It is also important to refer and assimilate the writings and views of Fr. Pedro Arrupe, the modern dynamic Jesuit. His message on ‘Our Experience of God Today’ and ‘Challenges and Opportunities Facing Religious Life’ given in a conference on April 12th, 1977, in Madrid, is quite applicable even today. The closer one draws to God our Lord, generously surrendering to his sovereign Majesty, the more will one will experience the divine generosity and grow apace in capacity to receive more abundant grace. I also would like to add my own personal reflections in connection with the above sources.

Religious life and contemplative dimension

        The religious life is one of the ways of living a Christian life. It is a call to become free and creative; to love and be loved; to be in a community; to be prophets in God’s name and speaking on His behalf. It is to become free, so that one can consecrate oneself wholeheartedly to the actualization of God’s kingdom and of His dreams for a new humanity, a humanity which lives according to His original plan for mankind. It is just as Jesus lived his life abiding by the values till the end of his life, so is every religious ought to live. Religious life is a charism within the church, a charism of protest, of radical freedom and radical love. The spiritual renewal of the society must have an apostolic dimension which is at once a stimulus and a goal and this calls for an interior renovation both personal and communal. In order to achieve this goal four principle themes comes out in relation to the others. They are

ü      Experience of God in Christ ( God as “absolute" in our lives)

ü      Work for the salvation of the world (apostolic dimension)

ü      Habitual union with Christ (safeguards and progress of the spiritual life)

ü      Sharing with “companions” (community life)

Our personal encounter with God must give to our lives the stamp of totality, of radical exigency, of unconditional response.

Religious are followers of Jesus. The chief pre-occupation is to abide in Him. Religious life is thus a living out publicly, professionally, institutionally the values that are proposed by Jesus in the gospels. The supreme value of religious life is the singleness of purpose and the unity of desire of our mind. Our whole being, mind, heart and soul are centered on God and also in the very act of doing. In the words of Pope Paul VI, “What are the inner riches of religious life? It is the bond that unites us with Christ... It makes it possible to say in all truth with St. Paul, “for me, life means Christ” (Phil 1.21)…The principle and strength of religious life do not lie in a social or apostolic activity, however beneficent it may be, but in complete consecration to the Lord.” Thus there lies an important question that we need to ask ourselves, “What point have we reached in our experience of God?”

        Religious life cannot be sustained without a deep life of prayer. The religious who embraces a life of total consecration is called to know the risen Lord personally and in communion: “This is eternal life: to know the only true God and Jesus Christ whom he has sent” (Jn 17:3)

Like Jesus; the religious too need to pray for deepening of union with God. It is in the context of all important decisions and events (Lk 6:12-13) one needs to pray. This is the contemplative dimension, which the Church and the world have the right to expect of religious to pray by the fact of their consecration. It must be strengthened by prolonged moments of time, set apart for exclusive adoration of the Father, love of Him and listening in silence before Him. For this reason, Paul VI insisted, "Faithfulness to daily prayer always remains for each religious a basic necessity. Prayer must have a primary place in your constitutions and in your lives". A life of consecration to God and apostolic dynamism cannot thrust forward or even stand still, unless God acts in us and we, on our part, continuously open ourselves to that action. One must repeat over and over again to all Jesuits that their vocation itself obliges them to prayer, entirely independently of any rule or control. Prayer is always to be seen in relationship to other aspects of the life of God in us, and with the apostolic life. One must be able to see God in all things.

Words without action are empty; and action without thought is meaningless. The same saying is spelled out by Jesus in different words, “It is not by saying, Lord, Lord, that we enter the Kingdom of heaven, but it is by doing the will of Father.” (Mat. 7: 21). Here, the words of Jesus do not threaten; nor command or demand. Instead, they remind us to practice what we preach. In other words, they ask us to be ‘Contemplatives in Action’.

Contemplation is fundamentally a theological response of faith, hope, and charity, by which the believer opens up to the revelation and communication of the living God through Christ in the Holy Spirit. Today many of us, the religious, do not have the profound faith-experience and genuine integration of spiritual life and apostolate (faith and mission) that ought to penetrate and energize every aspect of our life. In other words, today we need to give a very concrete meaning to the phrase “contemplative in action.” It must not be merely a slogan, but a living reality.

Fr. Arrupe clearly brought out the important dimension of contemplation, “The 32nd GC clearly expects that each Jesuit will have an integrated interior life that is both deep and personal. Indeed, the very ‘ideal’ of an apostolic mission, as it is presented by the 32nd GC, differing in no way from the Formula of the Institute, which the Congregation sought to translate into contemporary terms, as it cannot be thought of, let alone expressed, without that integration.”

        The Mission Statement of Saint Ignatius declares that our “Jesuit spirituality … seeks to find God in all things.” The GC states that we are “inspired by the rich tradition of the Church and enlivened by the Second Vatican Council,” according to which “all (every faithful) in the Church, are called to holiness”.

The Integrated Life

The integration of our spiritual life will lead us to greater love, respect and humility towards one another. Our common goal is to grow together through our maturing relationship with God. We are, thus, enabled to accept the wisdom and experience of others very gracefully, and to share our own gifts readily with others. We are companions of Jesus who rejects all narrow provincialism and nationalism. Interior liberty to accept the direction of Holy Spirit is absolutely necessary for adaptation and apostolic renewal. A man who is entirely free can set his apostolic course without fear of anyone in anything. A person who has integrated the spirituality must cherish poverty as a mother and occasionally experience what it means in practice. A man in whom God is at work always manifests the life of God.

How can we securely strengthen our spiritual life and our apostolate, welding them into a perfectly integrated whole so that what we do really flows from the Gospel and gives effective witness to Jesus Christ Today? Though Fr. Arrupe put forth this question some years ago, it is still a very challenging question that demands an answer from every Jesuit.

The God Experience: Challenges and Opportunities Today

 The radical development of Science and Technology may change the face of the earth and the thought pattern of the People; but it can never change the demands that St. Ignatius asks us to do in ‘our way of living’ and our way of following Jesus today as Jesuits. Though we may live amidst the people of different mentality and various life styles, we should not be influenced by their life style. Our life, as Jesuits, should be molded and guided only by the words of our master, Jesus Christ. We must constantly be in touch with his relation and mainly with his mission. It is possible, only when we are able to integrate our daily prayer life and our actions.

 ‘Work’ is a means of union with Christ and of deepening it through the radical mortification of oneself. Work produces this effect, provided it is accomplished in charity, i.e., by a love which is continuously given to us from God.

Our spiritual and apostolic life is authentic, if it frees and makes us available to be ‘in the image of the Son.’ Without a deep experience of God, without a deliberate personal identification with Jesus Christ (Gal 2: 20; Phil 1: 21) in our life and apostolate, we would be incapable of the apostolic availability the Society asks of us; and this complete availability is the best offering we can make to God, the ideal disposition and context for all prayer and all apostolic work (Const. 813- 14) It is here that Ignatius insists so confidently on combining our prayer and our works.

Personal reflection

I personally believe that the contemplative dimension is the real secret for renewing the religious life. It vitally renews the following of Christ, because it leads one to an experiential knowledge of Him. This knowledge is needed for the authentic witness to Him by those who have heard him, have seen him with their own eyes, have contemplated him, and have touched him with their own hands (cf. 1 Jn 1:1; Philip 3:8).

The more open religious are to the contemplative dimension, the more attentive they will be to the demands of the Kingdom, intensely developing their theological depth, because they will look on events with the eyes of faith. This will help them to discover the Divine Will everywhere. Only those who live this contemplative dimension will be able to see the salvific plan of God in history and to accomplish it in an effective and balanced way.

 

                                                                                                                           

Sandesh   Gonsalves

Satya Niyalam

Chennai

II Year Philosophy

 

 

 
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