Today marks the feast day of St. Ignatius of Loyola, who has long been one of my favorites, though the reasons for that have changed somewhat over the years. When I was in college, I read his autobiography and was impressed by both his zeal and the way he used knowledge of self to deduce his call to holiness and see more clearly the places where God was working (and not working) in his life. It’s fairly short, if you’re looking for some beach reading. While those aspects of St. Ignatius’ life still appeal to me, I turn to him more often now in search of understanding how he went about such a massive undertaking in the midst of what must have been great discouragement.
It would be absurd to compare this era of parish level discernment in the Archdiocese to Ignatius’ founding of a religious order that would take the Gospel to the literal ends of the earth. Still, in the face of a massive undertaking where spreading the Gospel is on the line, Ignatius prayerfully persevered through setbacks, confident that God would lead him to where he needed to be, even if he had to make a few mistakes along the way. With that in mind, I would ask that everyone in our Family of Parishes meditate on two principles from the life and spirituality of St. Ignatius: “He who sets out to reform the world must begin with himself, or he loses his labor.” Like it or not, we are in a time of reform in our local Church, much as the work of reform is constantly taking place in the Church around the world. We just celebrated our 200th anniversary as an Archdiocese, and when we get to our 250th anniversary, what we are doing now in our parishes will be a big part of the story we pass on. None of this reform of our systems, buildings, schedules, et cetera, will add up unless it begins with true interior reform. In those moments when we think about how we would like our parishes to grow, change, or remain the same, it’s worth looking inward and prayerfully asking how God might be calling us to grow, change, or remain the same in various aspects of our life.
In the moments when the going gets tough, we would do well to ground ourselves once again in Ignatius’ Suscipe prayer, which reminds us of the true source of our strength. O my God, teach me to be generous; to serve you as you deserve, to give and not to count the cost, to fight and not to heed the wounds, to toil and not to seek for rest, to labor and not to look for any reward, save that of knowing that I am doing your holy will. This is painted in a stairwell at St. I’s school, and it was a pleasant reminder to me as I meandered through the school, bothering students and teachers alike, that the greatest reward for generosity in serving the Lord is not recognition or human thanks, but the simple joy of knowing that we are following God’s plan for us, and hopefully walking with others in His will for them as well. We still live in a city where people use parishes as a means of ascertaining where someone grew up, and that speaks to the wonderful Catholic history we have. We can dream of a world where the divisions that often go hand in hand with parishes disappear as we grow into one family. If we commit to reforming ourselves, and surrendering everything to God as we see in the life of St. Ignatius, the future of parish life can be even more wonderful and edifying than it has been in the past.