Bringing It All Back Home: Suscipe, Magis and Other Assorted Thoughts

This week has been a week of transition here at ISN; our new executive director, Chris Kerr and program director, Kim Miller, are here to get oriented to the organization. Its an exciting time for ISN and as I get set to head out of town next week, I am beginning to reflect a bit on my time here at ISN with gratitude. I am reminded of what I think is one of the greatest prayers of gratitude in our tradition:

Take Lord, and receive
all my liberty,
my memory,
my understanding,
and my entire will --
all that I have and call my own.
You have given it
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.

--St. Ignatius of Loyola

This prayer - sometimes titled "Suscipe" (Latin for 'receive') - comes at the very end of the Spiritual Exercises during the Contemplation to Attain Greater Love. And I have been fascinated with this prayer for awhile. All we have belongs ultimately not to us but to the One who has encompassed us in a loving, giving embrace. What is interesting to consider is that this embrace is ongoing, continuous. I was once on retreat and I told someone that I couldn't 'feel' God loving me. He looked at me and said, well, don't you think that its not something you can really feel if it is always happening? If its all you know, its easy to take it for granted. Certainly, the Christian life is about coming to consciousness of this love and to make it a practice daily to acknowledge that all we have received is gift and that truly receiving it means to use these gifts for God's greater glory. And even more obvious, this is an ongoing task that remains challenging because our example of perfect gratitude is Christ and that is an admittedly difficult act to follow.

All of this is to say that towards the end of my time, I am grateful for my work with ISN and even more so for the work ISN does as an organization. Our work with the Jesuit parishes, although seminal, is an effort to contribute to a great organization with a vision for how to join with one another in the service of faith and the pursuit of justice. To use an Ignatian buzzword - this work has been something that contributes to the Magis - the more. Sometimes, this word is misconceived as an attempt do more, almost for the sake of doing more. However, it is more subtle - it is modelling ourselves after St. Ignatius to always seek the greater glory of God (one finds the Latin translation of this throughout the Jesuit world: ad majorem Dei gloriam). Seeking the magis is responding to the call of the kingdom, to discern continually where God is calling us to name the grace present in the world. For ISN, this occurs in many areas, but our work with parishes is the particular niche in which I have helped with the discernment process.

I think a further insight to be made is that the Magis is a group activity - the kingdom is a collective and collaborative effort. And so with the Jesuit parishes, ISN asks: what should we be doing as an Ignatian family to strengthen parish life and social ministry? How can Ignatian spirituality serve as a guide to our discernment? What have others within the tradition offered that can help us discern the scope and possibilities of parish work? What can we offer together that will be for the greater glory of God? For the greater awareness of God's glory among those within the Church and the world? Finally, what can each parish do locally and globally to participate in this work of the Spirit?

Answering these questions in the concrete will mean collaborating together in pursuit of the Magis. In the words of a respondent to a survey ISN sent out about interest in a stronger Jesuit parish network: "I believe a stronger network with other churches would provide moral support--the sense that we are all in this together, and we're not each a lone voice on the fringe of the establishment. We could provide each other with the courage and resources to address the same issues in a respectful yet challenging manner and feel the weight of our combined forces."

With Ignatius, we pray:

You have given it
all to us.
To you, Lord,
We return it.
Everything is yours;
do with it
what you will.
Give us only your love
and your grace.
That is enough
for us.

Amen.

Resources

I thought that I would share some resources that I have been looking at to gather some ideas; some are more related than others, but I thought they were all worth sharing:

• John W. O'Malley's The First Jesuits: This is a historical text that I have found helpful just getting to know the Society of Jesus in its first 20 or so years of existence during the 16th century. Very thorough and O'Malley is tops.
  
• Jon Sobrino, Ignacio Ellacuría and others, Companions of Jesus: a collection of writings from the Salvadoran martyrs and Jon Sobrino (the 7th Jesuit of the house who was away in November 1989 when the Jesuits were killed) which includes Ignacio Ellacuría's brief speech on "The Task of a Christian University" which I quoted in the first post of this blog (the title of the blog is a quote from this speech). A good resource for getting to know the martyrs.
  
• The documents of the Jesuits' 35th General Congregation held in 2008 - click here for access to the documents. In particular, Decree 6 - "Collaboration at the Heart of Mission" - has been a great resource for looking at how the Jesuits are moving forward in their 'way of proceeding' in collaboration with laity and people of other faiths. It also provided a pretty good description of organizations like ISN, which means we are on the right track here!
• Adolfo Nicolás, SJ, "Depth, Universality, and Learned Ministry:
  Challenges to Jesuit Higher Education Today" - can be found here. The Superior General for the Jesuits, Fr. Nicolás gave a talk for a conference in Mexico on networking and the context of globalization. An interesting read and informative for universities!
• Joseph Owens, SJ "Radical Parish Communities" and John O'Malley "The Future of Jesuit Parishes: Reflections on Past and Present" - can be found here. Here, there are some musings about the parish as an alternative community that is in line with Ellacuría's vision for universities - in a sense, it is a brief apologia for Jesuit involvement with parishes. Also, O'Malley checks in with some historical background on Jesuits and parishes and clarifies some misconceptions as well as pointing forward to some further considerations for the future. Well worth looking into and thinking about.
  
• The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius are always in the background of all things Jesuit, so of course, they are an influence here. There are many different published copies of the Exercises.