Review for Religious - Issue 71.1 (2012)

Issue 71.1 of the Review for Religious, 2012. This was the final issue.Volume 71 2012 Editor Michael G. Harter sj Associate Editor Garth L. Hallett sj Book Review Editor Rosemary Jermann Scripture Scope Eugene Hensell osb Editorial Staff Mary Ann Foppe Tracy Gramm Judy Sharp e v i e w f o r r e l i g i o u s A Journal of Catholic Spirituality contents prisms 4 Prisms Ignatian spirituality 8 Were Not Our Hearts Burning within Us? We Are Sent Kathleen Hughes rscj explores the provocative parallels between the Four Weeks of the Spiritual Exercises and the four-part rhythm of the Eucharist as two ways we are caught up in the work of God in Christ, and two invitations to replicate the whole life, death, and rising of Jesus. This article was one of the keynote presentations at Ignatian Spirituality Conference V held in St. Louis, Missouri, July 21-24, 2011. 29 Without the Drama: The Transition from Third to Fourth Week Ronald Mercier sj explores how those who make the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius are invited to enter into a grand silence where they contemplate the empty space without answers that follows the crucifixion—the space that remains the context of our lives, the place of our ministries, and the space within which joy dawns for those who know the Risen Lord. Questions for Reflection 58 Finding or Seeking God in All Things: A Few Cautionary Notes Peter J. Schineller sj researches the phrase “finding God in all things,” common in writings about Ignatian spirituality, and discovers that it is rare in the writings of Ignatius. He finds that phrases such as “searching for and seeking God in all things” more accurately describe the Ignatian approach. 2 Review for Religious sharing experience 69 The Warmth, the Will, and the Way Ben Harrison mc is discovering that it helps him be more consistent in his spiritual journey if he is attentive to the warmth of the Spirit’s presence in his heart and to the vows as an expression of the will to move deeper in his relationship with God. 78 Getting with the Program A young man writes of his experience of coming to terms during the novitiate with his addiction to pornography. This article could be used profitably as a case study during a novitiate class or read as background for a community discussion. Questions for Personal Reflection and Group Study discernment models 86 Dialogue with the Radically Other: Models of Discernment in the Old Testament Ligita Ryliskyte md phd sje explores the rich imagery of the Old Testament and offers valuable paradigms to understand spiritual discernment as a dialogue with God. In this essay she describes four models of discernment that might be distinguished in Old Testament imagery. departments 100 Scripture Scope: Vocation and the Call to Discipleship: A Reflection on Mark 1:16-20 105 Book Reviews 71.1 2012 3 Review for Religious prisms 4 A wise man once said: “It’s a shame to waste a good crisis.” If that is true, Review for Religious is facing a moment of great opportunity. In recent years the number of subscribers has steadily fallen off, and the cost of publication has risen to the point that our future as a print journal is in jeop-ardy. The recent deaths of Fathers Fischer and Fleming have taken their toll. We have reached a critical point in our history. When my provincial assigned me to succeed David Fleming as editor, he gave me a specific mission: Assess the viability of the publication. So for the past year, the staff and our advisory board have taken that mission seriously even as we worked to meet our ordinary production schedule. While we all hoped to be able to keep this good work alive, the real goal of our discernment was not to save or to close the journal, but to explore ways to more effectively serve the church. In the past months we have consulted widely. We looked at the shifting demographics of reli-gious life and understood that younger reli-gious are getting more of their information on 71.1 2012 5 the Internet than through printed periodicals. We sorted through spreadsheets of detailed financial information. We looked hard at our available resources and realized that we could sustain publication of the journal in its present format for a maximum of three to five years. The hand-writing on the wall could not be clearer: Simply maintain-ing operations as they are will inevitably lead to closure. Maintenance, without change, is not an option. Part of our analysis took us back to look at our history. Our journal came into being in 1941 at a Jesuit theolo-gate in St. Marys, Kansas, where three enterprising faculty members—Augustine Ellard, Adam Ellis, and Gerald Kelly (later joined by Henry Willmering)—invited their students to edit and publish the papers they wrote as class assignments in what became the early incarnation of this journal which has served the church and religious life proudly for the past 70 years. Richard Smith, Daniel F. X. Meenan, Philip Fischer and David Fleming edited the publi-cation over the subsequent decades. Since Review for Religious was founded at a small theology school, we began exploring the idea that a theology center, rather than the confines of our office, would be a more logical site for the publication of this journal. As we realized that a network of theology centers around the world linked through the Internet could have great potential for producing articles and generating lively discussion, we began exploring that path. We contacted the moderators of Jesuit Conferences that have significant centers of religious formation in Africa, India, and the Asia-Pacific region—in parts of the world Augustine Ellard, Adam Ellis, Gerald Kelly, Henry Willmering Review for Religious Author • Title 6 where religious life is growing—to see if any of them would have an interest in assuming responsibility for the journal. As a result of our inquiries, we are engaged in a conversa-tion with just such a center about continuing the mission of Review for Religious. We are not looking to replicate the journal as it cur-rently exists, but are talking about re-envisioning and re-designing it with current and future generations of religious in mind. As a result of our discussions and discernment, we have determined that this copy of Review for Religious is the final issue that will be produced by our St. Louis office. Whether the journal remains as a print publication, or is redesigned for delivery on the Internet, or ceases publication altogether is yet to be determined. In the meantime, we are suspending publication and putting a moratorium on renewals or new subscriptions until our discernment is completed. To say that we have reached the end is premature. A hiatus or pause is a more accurate description. As Ron Mercier points out in his article in this issue, a rest is as important a part of a musical score as is a chord or a whole string of arpeggios. And such a time of waiting can be a rich moment. We are not sitting idly while the discussion goes on but are in the process of digitizing our entire collection. We plan to make every article, poem, and book review we have published available on the Internet. It should be an invalu- Richard Smith, Daniel Meenan, Philip Fischer, and David Fleming. 71.1 2012 7 able archive for anyone wishing to research the shifts in religious life during the past 70 years. I am grateful to our current staff: Mary Ann Foppe, who has been the office manager for the past 25 years; Judy Sharp, our receptionist, who has handled subscriptions; Rosemary Jermann, who has written the Bookshelf column; Garth Hallett sj, who has served as Associate Editor; Tracy Gramm, who has done layout and graphic design. I have appreciated Ed Hensell osb, Elizabeth McDonough op, Richard Hill sj, and Joseph Gallen sj, who have provided regular columns over the years, and Jean Read, Iris Ann Ledden ssnd, Regina Siegfried asc, Claire Boehmer asc, Joe Meek, and many oth-ers who have made major behind-the-scenes contri-butions. They have been an excellent staff. We are grateful to the countless number of con-tributors who have sent us manuscripts and poetry for our consideration. They helped us keep our finger on the pulse of religious life. And finally, we thank you, our faithful subscribers. We are grateful for your support, and we trust that we have been an important resource for you over the years. Please read the inside of the back cover of this issue. It contains details about how to keep informed about the progress of our discernment. We will notify each subscriber about the outcome of that discernment. Please pray that the Spirit will lead us to a good conclusion. Michael Harter SJ Rosemary Jermann, Mary Ann Foppe, Tracy Gramm, Judy Sharp and Michael Harter Review for Religious Were Not Our Hearts Burning within Us? We Are Sent I need to begin with a confession. I was given an assignment to speak about the Eucharist, particularly as it describes a way of life flowing from Weeks Three and Four of the Exercises. I am not an expert on the Spiritual Exercises, but I have been a student of the Eucharist for many decades, so I was happy to think about this topic. And, though the talk was still non-existent, a description had to be prepared for the program booklet. Many of you have prob-ably had the same experience. You make up a description of a talk right out of thin air, hop-ing to be sufficiently generic so you can talk about almost anything at all. kathleen hughes ignatian spirituality 8 Kathleen Hughes rscj, former professor of Word and Worship at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago and former provincial of her order’s United States prov-ince, is currently a mission consultant in the Network of Sacred Heart Schools. Her address is 541 S. Mason Road; St. Louis, Missouri 63141. 71.1 2012 9 But a funny thing happened to me on the way to the topic assigned. I took a detour. I stumbled onto what I regard as an amazing new insight about how the Eucharist and the Spiritual Exercises mirror each other. At first I thought I was the last to arrive. Then I checked with those who have far greater familiarity with the literature on the Spiritual Exercises, and no one had heard any reflection on such a topic. That, too, gave me pause and left me wondering how far out on a limb I was climbing. Nevertheless, here’s the insight I want to develop in the first part of this talk: there seems to be a quite provocative parallel between the Four Weeks of the Spiritual Exercises and the four-part rhythm of the Eucharist. The gathering rites of the Eucharist include elements of praise and penitence, as are typical of movements in Week One of the Spiritual Exercises; the Liturgy of the Word is the gradual unfolding of the person and work of Jesus Christ, as occurs in Week Two; the Liturgy of the Eucharist, the celebration of Jesus’ death for the life of the world, is the heart of Week Three; and the concluding rites of the Eucharist have an affinity with the rhythms of Week Four. In these pages I intend to develop this thesis in more detail, hoping in the process to give fresh insight into God’s activity in these two parallel celebrations of the paschal mystery—these two ways we are being caught up in the work of God in Christ. Then I will move to a focus on the Eucharist itself, as it flows from Week Three, incarnates the intimacy of Week Four, and remains the abiding experience of consolation, chal-lenge, and invitation to faithful living, parallel to leav-ing retreat and picking up everyday life. Review for Religious Hughes • Were Not Our Hearts Burning within Us? 10 Part I: Parallels Overview First, then, before we look at the Four Weeks of the Spiritual Exercises and the four parts of the Eucharist in more detail, let me offer an overview of the resonances I’ve discovered between them. Both the Eucharist and the Spiritual Exercises are a series of movements or stages that, negotiated with grace, realize the Christian ideal of identification with Christ. Both are invitations to conversion; both, at their heart, are offers of holi-ness and transformation. Both the Exercises and the Eucharist have a basic psychological rhythm that facili-tates growth in the spiritual life. The Exercises and the Eucharist as we know them only gradually evolved to their present form. The Exercises began as jottings in Ignatius’s personal notebook—conso-lations, desolations, graces received—and this collec-tion of insights developed into a practical manual as Ignatius gave them to oth-ers and learned from their experience. They remain a core series of spiritual exercises that are endlessly flexible as enfleshed in the lives of individuals. The Eucharist, too, is the result of a gradual evolution over time around the core of readings and the breaking of bread, making every age and every human commu-nity a fresh inculturation of a basic pattern. Happily, in our day the basic four-part structure of gathering, listening, responding, and sending has been recovered in the liturgical reforms of the Second Vatican Council. Both the Eucharist and the Spiritual Exercises interrupt our ordinary time with extraordinary grace. 71.1 2012 11 Interestingly, both the Exercises and the Eucharist are filled with words, indeed with dialogue, and with spaces of silence. Both also make appeal to all of our senses and stir up mystagogical insights in those who are attentive. Both the Eucharist and the Spiritual Exercises interrupt our ordinary time with extraordinary grace; they help us to make sense of our life as it is unfolding before the living God. And both the Eucharist and the Exercises send us to live, in deed, what we have just experienced in this time of encounter with the divine. Finally, both these patterns of prayer follow, for most of us, familiar and predictable dynamics and so, for each, we need the grace to pay attention, to move beyond the familiar in order to get inside the mysteries. The First Week and the Gathering Rites of the Eucharist We come to retreat or to Eucharist just as we are, and we bring our history and our particular world with us into this sacred time and place. We come, sometimes breathlessly, from the work we have just left behind and the preoccupations that fill our minds and hearts. We come always with unfinished business and with distrac-tions, even burdens, of body and spirit. We come with our crosses and our inexhaustible needs. We come because we are drawn to a time and space of intimacy and prayer, of encounter with the Lord who will tutor our hearts, of transformation to new and deeper life. We come to be nourished. We come remembering God’s goodness and God’s fidelity to us, no matter our own response. We come hoping to touch our finger to the flame once again, placing ourselves, for this span of time, on holy ground. God’s unconditional and ever-faithful love perme-ates our awareness in Week One. Each one of us has Review for Religious Hughes • Were Not Our Hearts Burning within Us? 12 been blessed with divine life; God’s creative activity has showered each of us in unique ways and has supported and sustained us throughout our lives. In face of the immense goodness of God, we acknowledge our inade-quate response; we know that sin has hindered our rela-tionships with self and others and, above all, with God. Week One provides the opportunity to recognize sin as our failure to respond with love to God always present, to express our own sorrow and repentance, and then to know God’s ever-greater love, mercy, and forgiveness. We reflect on our lives in light of God’s boundless love for us, knowing that God wants to free us of everything that gets in the way of a loving response. The focus is less on particular sins than on our relationship with God that has been damaged, perhaps even shattered. Yet it is a relationship always available, for God longs for intimacy with us far more than we could ask or even imagine. Our personal history gives us hope: God is filled with mercy and compassion, slow to anger, full of kindness. God’s response to our repentance is mercy and forgiveness. By the end of the First Week, we know ourselves as sinners, loved and rescued by a God who is so much greater than our hearts. These same heart movements are present in the gathering rites of the Eucharist. We generally begin the celebration with a hymn of praise and thanksgiving. We are then invited into a time of silence before the liv-ing God, and we cannot but realize our unworthiness and our experience of sin. In the language of the new Missal we own our complicity in sin “through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault,” and we join with one another in begging for mercy and for-giveness: “Lord, have mercy.” Then the Gloria is our hymn of praise after the words of absolution: “May 71.1 2012 13 almighty God have mercy on you, forgive you your sins, and bring you to life everlasting. Amen.” We begin the Eucharist knowing ourselves as loved sinners, disposed to open our hearts to the word proclaimed in our midst. There are two additional striking parallels between the First Week of the Exercises and the gathering rites of Eucharist. The first has to do with the cross of Christ, for the cross is prominent at the beginning of both experiences. The retreatant is invited to make a first meditation before the cross; similarly, when we gather for the Eucharist, the entrance procession places the cross at the very beginning of the celebration. There is nothing like the cross of Christ to sharpen our focus, to bring us to the sober reality that relationships have consequences, that the paschal mystery of Jesus’ life, death, and rising is what has made it possible to draw near to the throne of grace. And here’s a second intriguing possibility with the Eucharist. There is a presidential prayer at the conclu-sion of the entrance rites, another at the preparation of the table and the gifts, and a third after Communion. These are all, essentially, prayers of petition; they each ask for a specific grace that is dependent for its focus on the place of the prayer in the rite. We really could think of these prayers as “preludes” that name and ask for a specific grace as we move from one week to the next, from one part of the Eucharist to the next. For example, the opening prayer for today’s liturgy, the Seventeenth Sunday, Year A, from icel’s Missal of 1998, reads: God of eternal wisdom, You alone impart the gift of right judgment. Grant us an understanding heart that we may value wisely the treasure of your kingdom Review for Religious Hughes • Were Not Our Hearts Burning within Us? 14 and gladly forego all lesser gifts to possess that kingdom’s incomparable joy. We make our prayer through Our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son Who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit God for ever and ever. Amen.1 What a perfect presidential prayer to open our hearts to the Word of God; what a perfect prelude to move to Week Two of the Exercises. The Second Week and the Liturgy of the Word The parallels between the Second Week of the Exercises and the Liturgy of the Word are easily dis-cernible. Both focus on the scriptures, and both invite decision; both are grounded in the Gospels and in the Mystery who is Christ; both the Spiritual Exercises and the Liturgy of the Word, over time, offer an intimate encounter with Jesus of Nazareth—healing, teaching, sharing meals, welcoming sinners, going about doing good, spending the night in union with his Abba, gath-ering disciples and forming their hearts. We reflect on scripture passages, in retreat as at Mass, one after another, not in order to know the scriptures better but to discover ever more fully the One whom they disclose to us. During the Second Week of the Exercises, like Martha’s sister, Mary, the retreatant sits at the feet of Jesus, the teacher, drawn to his person, absorbing his attitudes and values, his choices, his preaching of the dream of God for the world, for humankind, for each of us. The Second Week, of course, is not full only of the consolation of spending time with a dear friend. That 71.1 2012 15 dear friend of ours also reveals to us the cost of dis-cipleship, the misunderstandings, the disappointments, the gathering storm of criticism and anger. We take in the whole of the life of Jesus Christ and are drawn to know him more intimately, to love him more ardently, and to follow him more faithfully. We choose to be dis-ciples of the perfect disciple. Empowered by the love of God experienced in Week One and by Jesus’ friendship, which deepens for us in Week Two, we choose an ever closer relationship with him, no matter what. Loved sin-ners become loving servants, embracing and following Jesus, setting our faces, with him, to Jerusalem. It has been written that during the Second Week “We find ourselves drinking in the experiences of Jesus, so that we begin to assimilate his values, his loves, his freedom. This style of praying provides the necessary content of decision-making or discernment, which forms an essential part of the Second Week and is meant to be an abiding part of a Christian’s life that is shaped by the Exercises.”2 Of course, those statements also describe a regu-lar pattern of solitary prayer in daily life that reaches its summit in the Eucharist. God speaks to our hearts, opening up for us the mystery of redemption and salva-tion and offering us spiritual nourishment; Christ him-self is present in the midst of the community through the Word proclaimed.3 The cycle of readings, highlighting first one evange-list’s portrait of Christ and then another’s in the three-year cycle, invites our reflection on the life and ministry of Jesus, his proclamation of the Good News, his say-ings and parables, his teachings and miracles,