Guess what! After I hatched the plan for my Birthday Exercises, I found out I'd have the opportunity to undertake the actual Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola! The annotation my cohort is using was designed by St. Ignatius for busy ordinary working folk who weren't able to go on retreat for 30 straight days. Instead, the reflections are interspersed through everyday life over a 30 week period.
Today was the day I had planned for my first moment. I was looking forward to a quiet evening in the apartment and actually spent a few minutes fantasizing about which pair of fuzzy slippers I could wear for the event. When I got home, however, I found that the apartment was much more abuzz than I had expected. There were roommate-lease-renewal discussions to be had; my tortellini took much longer to cook than I had the patience for; my neighbor's frenetic progressive jazz band had chosen this night for rehearsal, and I discovered many wrinkled blouses in need of ironing in my drawer.
As I folded up my ironing board, I listened to my roommate's animated voices as they each finished phone calls in the hall or kitchen. This definitely wasn't the cool-cotton, soft-pajamas evening I had planned. And then my roommate cried into her phone, "Yay! Come over!" and explained that our concert pianist friend and neighbor was going to come over and practice on our piano. "If that's all right," she added, and we agreed.
What I ended up with tonight was a chance to try out the idea that peace doesn't come from fuzzy slippers, or from pants without a tight waistband, or from the complete absence of honking or bachata or jazz music bleeding through windows and walls. I grabbed my pillow, my journal, and my guide to the Exercises, and I sat next to my roommate on the couch. I chuckled at the introduction that instructed me to "select an environment that will provide you some quiet and privacy," and dove in, while the joyful sounds of Débussy and Chopin fell around us.
WHAT I LEARNED TODAY:
"Our longings and desires, though often expressed in very ordinary ways, are signals to us for our deep desire for God." I'd heard a few times, from Ignatian spirituality, that our desires give us clues about our vocation or the ways we can best use our gifts. But reading this statement reoriented that attitude. Our desires aren't just clues to our happiness, which God surely wants for us; but rather our desires indicate the paths that will bring us to know God more deeply - and through knowing God more deeply, know joy deeply, too.
"Seek the Lord while he may be found." Of all the quotations and passages for reflections in this week's reading, I kept coming back to this one. It made me remember yesterday's experience of finding God in the Torah and the moments of joy that, with luck and grace, await.
HOW I LEFT MY COMFORT ZONE:
I carried my journal and a prayer book into a room that was currently occupied by two other people.
I was actually scared to commit myself to 20 minutes of prayer, without using a to-do list or a noisy environment as an excuse to skip it for the night. And I'm a bit intimidated by the commitment to do this over the next 32 weeks!
Quotations from Carol Ann Smith, SHCJ and Eugene F. Mertz, SJ, Moment by Moment: A Retreat in Everyday Life, Notre Dame, IN: Ave Maria Press, 2000.
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