Ignatius Loyola’s gift to the Church was about choice: how to make the best decision in our lives. In the celebrations for Ignatius Loyola the readings speak of choice and of the mission that follows the choice. Ignatius invites us to say ‘no’ to the self that is focused on itself: the surface self, the small, fearful, insecure self. By contrast the Gospel reveals the sacred, unique, individual self, the person created and sustained in life by God, loved as a son and daughter, whom Jesus wants to be saved.
How can we know the will of God in our lives? How can we make the decision that God wants? Freed from the small, insecure self, one is ready for mission. The will of God is that we choose life. How can we do that in the small decisions and in the large decisions of our lives and so become free for mission?
When he wrote the Spiritual Exercises, the guidebook on how to make a decision for life, Ignatius was a layperson. This feast of the Church is for all who share the Ignatian vision and his universal mission. “We must be global Christians, with a global mission, because our God is a global God.”
We Jesuits do not join a Province, we join the universal Society. Our mission is beyond frontiers. Our God who calls us is beyond frontiers.
Our last General Congregation 35 asked us to consider our mission in a new context, a call to new frontiers:
Serving Christ’s mission today means paying special attention to its global context. This context requires us to act as a universal body with a universal mission, realising, at the same time, the radical diversity of our situations. It is as a worldwide community – and, simultaneously, as a network of local communities – that we seek to serve others across the world. GC35 D2 #20
Thirty years ago exactly, 1981, Pedro Arrupe, then General of the Society, was here on campus at the Ateneo de Manila to celebrate a mass just like this, in thanksgiving for the first arrival of Jesuits in the Philippines 400 years before. Arrupe looked and acted remarkably like his passionate and energetic Basque predecessor, Ignatius. This was to be his last visit outside Rome. After Manila, he had one more stop. On 6 August, the Feast of the Transfiguration, he celebrated in Thailand with Jesuits serving the refugees. 6 August is also Hiroshima Day. Don Pedro had been right there in Hiroshima in 1945 when the bomb exploded. For him, the refugee crisis was like Hiroshima, not only because of the hundreds of thousands of victims, but because each explodes on the imagination of the world. You feel the same with the Japanese tsunami, Cyclone Ondoy, and now with the current famine in the Horn of Africa. These gigantic tragedies touch our hearts and set before us a choice. How can we possibly express the compassion we feel in our hearts? Don Pedro gave an example of reading the “signs of the times”. He responded to the refugee crisis of his time, he claimed, “as Ignatius would.”
From this was born the Jesuit Refugee Service. Thirty years later, JRS, whose motto and method is to “accompany, serve and defend the rights of refugees”, is at work in some 60 countries, directly serving over half a million refugees and displaced people. It is one of the supra-national Jesuit works to which every Province contributes, joined by people and institutions from around the world who are inspired by the same Ignatian mission.
In face of the enormity of the challenge, and so many prior institutional commitments that seem to tie us down, how do we choose? With so many people making a claim on us, how do we decide whom we shall serve first? For Ignatius there is a way to decide. By asking a series of questions we eliminate the options: Where is the greater need? What will give the greater fruit? What is more urgent? Where do others not go? What will benefit the greater number? Prefer spiritual benefits over material. (Const. 623) Answering these questions we chisel out a shape for our decisions. They are the yardstick we know as the magis.
The Ignatian mission is a mission of the head, the heart and the hands. JRS is an example of a response that expresses our traditional inspiration in a modality appropriate to our times. Pedro Arrupe spoke for us all when he said, in connection with JRS, “The plight of the world so deeply wounds our sensibilities as Jesuits that it sets the inmost fibres of our apostolic zeal a-tingling.”
The violence and consequent hunger we witness in Somalia, the suffering and displacement that follows violence in Mindanao or in Sri Lanka, the struggles of the urban poor in Manila, all this not only wounds our sensibilities; these are a sign of our times. We live in a broken society, a world where too many take from others what they want, where people are treated not as human beings but as commodities. The Spiritual Exercises put into relief the choices that are before us in our lives, helping us to see Jesus in the people we meet along the way, choosing to go on the way to Jerusalem with him, receiving his mission.
Ignatian education is a formation for decision and for mission: education of the head, the heart and the hands. Of course, education’s core business is the mind: education in competence and critical thinking. But in Ignatian pedagogy reflection is central. That is, pausing and digging deeper, allowing meaning to surface from human experience. That makes the difference. That kind of critical thinking should often have usquestioning our own actions and way of life.What are the root causes of mis-spending and corruption? Why am I so fortunate when others go without? What can I change in the way I live my life and spend my time?
Second, Ignatian education is education of the heart. We want our students first of all to know where is their heart, to become large-hearted,whole-hearted, and to speak from the heart in truth and with integrity; to own that their heart’s desire is to love and serve their God, a God discovered most immediately in our brothers and sisters – especially in those who are the least, the lost or the last.
Third, education of the hands: this surely includes those psychomotor skills used in art, music and sport. Beyond these, Ignatian education prizes generous hands that put gifts and talents at the service of others; strong hands that will take up the fight to uphold justice when delayed or denied; compassionate hands that will welcome and tend those who, in their need, have the greatest claim on us.
Our Ignatian and our Jesuit mission is a universal mission that looks both to those who are near and those beyond our shores: “a worldwide community – and, simultaneously, as a network of local communities – that …seek(s) to serve others across the world”
“…For whoever would save their life, will lose it; and whoever loses their life for my sake, will save it…” Luke 9
“…I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; therefore choose life, that you and your descendants may live, loving the Lord your God, obeying his voice, and cleaving to him…” Dt 30
Mark Raper
President, Jesuit Conference of Asia Pacific
31 July 2011