Having traveled down miles of highway and through acres of airport during my first six months as Provincial, it feels like I have been searching for Christ in all those ten thousand places of which Hopkins speaks—and finding Him, lovely in limbs and lovely in eyes not his, more often in the people I meet on-the-go than in solitude and silence. And yet, this is the Jesuit way, to encounter God even while running on what Fred Allen once called the “treadmill to oblivion.” For the majority of us—most of the time—grace comes not in great cathedrals, but in supermarket lines and at the office, around dinner tables and just before our head hits the pillow. Grace comes to us at the crossroads, moments of epiphany when God’s Spirit suddenly bumps into us from a direction we had not expected and reveals the divine presence in the midst of our ordinary lives.
Perhaps the most profound experience of crossroads in these last months came during the Advent Novena, in which we invite benefactors and friends to send in their intentions. Having written the letter inviting these, I decided to say each Mass in the evening, just before going to bed, and took the stacks of prayer requests that came each day and placed them before me on the altar. Often I prayed this mass alone— something I rarely do—or with one other person. At first, I thought of it mostly as fulfilling a promise I had made. But as I stood there at the altar and read each card, pausing after each one to pray over the intentions named, I saw lives of hope and pain, of love and service unfolding before me in a moment of profound grace. In prayers for peace and for healing of loved ones, in prayers for reconciliation with children and among nations, in prayers for strength in the midst of depression and for employment in the midst of trial, in prayers for the reform of the Church and the protection of the Society of Jesus, I suddenly found my duty becoming God’s grace and my task becoming my salvation. As in the Incarnation itself, in those crumpled cards and in doing my job, Word became flesh to dwell among us. Crossroads.
Of course, not all the crossroads in life are quite as profound as this, but they are more common than we might imagine-and the more we attend to them, the more they seem to appear. For example, they may come in conversations, which seem quite normal until grace appears. This happened recently when I spoke to the novices about the Holy Father’s invitation to the Society to serve the needs of Catholics in Russia. Suddenly, one of the first year novices, a Costa Rican by birth and upbringing, spoke up, and with an availability and generosity that can only come from God, said: “I’ll go, if they need me!” At first, I thought he was joking, but then it was clear he wasn’t. No, this young man’s response was another crossroads, an encounter with Christ who frees us for His service; and though we’ll wait a few years to finish this man’s formation, I hope he will always be as ready to meet Jesus at the crossroads and have his life turned in surprising new directions when the call of Christ comes. Whenever the early Jesuits would enter a new town, they would look for the busiest corner, and there they would set up shop. Unlike older, monastic orders, they did not seek mountaintops or secluded alcoves to set themselves aside in prayer; rather, these followers of Ignatius sought crossroads, believing that amid the hustle and bustle of ordinary life the surprising grace of God would constantly intrude. It is amazing how true this has proved for the Oregon Province! Today, as we begin a new moment in our history with the opening of the Loyola Jesuit Center, we pray to remain, both physically and spiritually, at the crossroads—and we pray, as well, that you, our companions and our friends, will join us here sometimes on your way to the Kingdom of God.
John D. Whitney, S.J.
Provincial |
