While a student at Marquette University, I became good friends with a Jesuit priest who worked at the school’s department of campus ministry – Fr. Frank Majka, S.J.
Besides being a wonderful human being, Fr. Majka is also a very good writer – particularly in the mode of personal reflections. He has a knack for packing a tremendous spiritual punch into only a few paragraphs, making it the perfect content for our tech-crazy world to digest. You can subscribe to his monthly reflection email by visiting his site. For those in need of a preview, here is his December reflection entitled, “God at home.” Enjoy.
At the end of the Spiritual Exercises, St. Ignatius invites us to consider how God dwells with us in creation and in our hearts. Here are a few thoughts about the places God is at home.
St. Ignatius asks us to reflect that God dwells in creation in the elements, plants, birds, fish, and animals. They reveal aspects of his power and creativity. So the world itself, created and blessed by God, is the first revelation of God to us.
St. Ignatius also asks us to look at ourselves. Besides existence and life, God gives us souls, intellects, and wills. Because of these we can have a personal loving relationship with God, accepting his love and offering our own in return. We can find also God in the deepest part of ourselves because God’s Spirit is there. As St. Paul tells us, we are living temples in which God dwells.
Finally, though St. Ignatius doesn’t talk about this, God is at home in the communities of those who believe in him and the hearts which search for God, no matter what their explicit religious affiliation may be. The Second Vatican Council teaches that grace exists in all genuine religious traditions, and where there is grace, there is God. God is also with those with no particular religious affiliation but who search for truth and live good lives.
Paradoxically, God is also homeless, because God identifies with people who literally have no homes: refugees, the marginalized, or those excluded from participation in society — those whom the Hebrew scriptures called “the poor and the alien.” He shares their lives and their homelessness, so that when we make a home for them, we make a new home for God, too. (Fr. Frank Majka, S.J.)
- MW
