Using and Leaving; finding out what helps or hinders
As everything on the face of the earth exists to help us fulfil our purpose,
we must appreciate and make use of everything that helps,
and rid ourselves of anything that is destructive to our living in love in his presence.
Ignatius of Loyola, Principle and Foundation
Image: Yuri Yuan, Vertigo
Ignatius, in. the Spiritual Exercises, talks about ‘using’ or ‘leaving’ all the things that make up our life: material possessions, friends, activities, abilities, natural gifts, thoughts, desires, decisions, and circumstances. They are all gifts. God hates nothing that God has made – and they are all for our use. They need not be an obstacle between God and us.
But we do have choices about ‘using’ or ‘leaving’ them – to the extent they help or hinder us in living freely, congruently, relationally. It matters whether I live selfishly or for others, freely or enslaved. It matters whether I am living out of my true self, or not. If I live out of my true self, I experience a certain peace. If I don’t, I experience agitation, anxiety and fear.
Perhaps the most important little word in the spiritual life is HOW. Of course it is important to look back and explore what has contributed to who I am: but the really important question is to ask ‘How am I living now? Is it in such a way that leads to life, or away from life, towards freedom or imprisonment. For the one thing we do know is that we all feel the pain and effect of making destructive or life denying choices.
Get in touch with the purpose(s) of your life.
Ask yourself what helps or hinders your from living these.
If you hear yourself blaming your circumstances, try and move from ‘out there’ to ‘in here’.
Let your feelings reveal underlying (and often hidden) attitudes.
We discover the origin of our thoughts and feelings by seeing their orientation.
So ask: Where does this thought or feeling lead, or take me?
Does it lead to life, peace, a closer sense of God’s presence
or away from God, and toward more anxiety, lack of peace etc?
Here is an opportunity to become clearer about ‘ends’ and ‘means’. If our life is seen in the light of God’s love – God’s purpose for us – ‘living in love in God’s presence’- then everything else is a means to this end. Being rich or poor, having health or being ill, having a long or short life – these are the means to fulfilling our purpose. Yet all too easily we make an end out of one of these means.
The question before me, now that I
am old, is not how to be dead,
which I know from enough practice,
but how to be alive…
Wendell Berry
Image: Yuri Yuan, See You on the Other Side
The images in this post are of paintings by the American artist Yuri Yuan, whose work captures the moment of making a choice about which path to take. More of her work can be seen at Yuri Yuan.
In this season of Advent we are offering music that speaks of our longing for the coming of God’s light into the world.
Kindle the flint, the tinder
Liven the hearth the stone
Shelter the dying lantern light
Gladden the shadowed home
Into this wilderness of shadows
Come, Light original
Answer our famine yearning
Nourish our blighted fields
Raise all our fallen storehouses
Leaven the bitter yield
Into this emptiness, this hunger
Come, Bread all bountiful.
Out of the blowing starlessness
Over the frozen sea
Into our barren midnight
Up from the fruitless trees
O come
Loosen the cloaks of journeymen
Mend all the broken roads
Wake us from fitful forest sleep
Lighten the lonely load
Into this pilgrimage, this journey
Come, Home perpetual.
Gregory Thompson on Lamentations by Bifrost Arts
For a printable PDF of the text of this meditation please click on the link below.
