An overwhelming sense of gratitude...

From my view out of the chapel window at the novitiate house, depending on the time of the year, I can watch the beauty of the sun rising in the morning and the different colors of the sun reflecting off the clouds in the evening as it sets. One recent evening as I was admiring the pinks, purples, and oranges in the clouds as the sun set, I began thinking in amazement of all of God’s creations throughout the world including in each one of us. In that moment felt an overwhelming sense of gratitude thinking of all the gifts I have received and all the different ways He is constantly walking with me.

This gratitude is a gift I have been living more profoundly since experiencing the thirty-day Ignatian Spiritual Exercises, in the beauty of the mountains and valley of Loyola, Spain in February and March of this year. It was a time where I became more consciously aware of the unconditional and overflowing love and mercy God has for me and His invitation to me to live from His love.

I imagine it as a painting, the painting of my life, one that I have been slowly adding strokes to over time. Over the past twelve years as I had been discerning a call to religious life on and off, I had slowly been adding different strokes, different colors, sometimes with more intention, sometimes subconsciously, yet I never had a sense of what that picture was supposed to be. The desire to join the Religious of Jesus and Mary eventually became obvious to me. I felt a deep sense of feeling family, a feeling of this is where I am supposed to be, and this propelled me to take the step to begin my formation journey, but why?

Over the course of the exercises, I felt like the blind person in the bible to whom Jesus took his own spit and kept slowly and gently wiping my eyes, each day, each moment, allowing me to see more and more clearly Him in my life, to see him as the focus of my painting. Through His love and forgiveness for me, I felt him pour into me the desire to open the space in me to allow him to be the center, the desire to walk humbly and poorly with Him and Him in.

With my eyes open to this new sight, this new way of looking at the world through and with God, feeling the pain and suffering in the world, in me, in my family and friends is still very present and maybe felt even more deeply, but what fills me, is his love in everything, his desire for us to live as Jesus lived, in kindness and compassion. Calling me to live beyond my human logic, instead in His logic of free and overflowing love and forgiveness from the cross. From this love felt by Christ the desire to, in everything, love and serve him.

And in this desire to love and serve him, to live out this call from God, was through and with the congregation, in a way that it seems I have always belonged, it was always here that I was meant to be.

Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty,

my memory, my understanding,

and my entire will,

All I have and call my own.

You have given all to me.

To you, Lord, I return it.

Everything is yours; do with it what you will.

Give me only your love and your grace,

that is enough for me.

Saint Ignatius Loyola