Feast of St. Ignatius Loyola
July 31, 2016

            “Choose life.”  It is a command that comes to us at a time when many, so many, are preoccupied with, and in the service of, death, even in health care services and bioethics.
            “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ.”  It is a command to be unified at a time when the concern is not what individuals have in common, but “otherness” and “difference.”  For some, it is a threat to individuality, and portends the loss of self.  And even some famous American writers (e.g., Emerson) have told us that imitation is suicide.
            “Take up your cross and follow me.”  It is a command at a time in our culture when we are more afraid of suffering and pain than of anything else.
            These are three powerful commands not to self-realization, but to conversion of mind, soul, heart, and body.  They are commands to conversion of culture, country, church, and way of life.  To conversion, where God brings us back to God, to reality, which is not something we make, but something we discover (like “the pearl of great price” we heard of in this week’s gospel) and to which we are to be conformed.
            We are neither the architects of existence, nor the creators of ourselves.  This truth implies dependence, our dependence; and our dependence on God is our true worth and freedom.  Why?  Because freedom from the Creator—a kind of freedom for which we strive so often and in so many way—is not freedom.  It is sin and deception—deception which began in paradise with Satan, a liar from the beginning and his temptation, “Be like God,” which, unfortunately, sadly, the angels, Adam and Eve, and we interpret to mean “Be God.”  What a sure and certain way to personal destruction and loss of self!

Would that we could believe that God’s rule over us poses no threat to our identity, results in no loss of self, does not destroy personality, does not invade, combat, violate, or compete with, but enhances, brings to fruition, forms and informs our humanness!  For the more God enters into and the more conformed we are to God, to reality, the more we become our real selves.  Such union differentiates.
            Conversion opens us to be shaped by the truth—with a capital T and with a small t, which we discover, not make.  Conversion, then, is true realism, because we no longer seek our own success, prestige, and position; we stop constructing personal images—or monuments to ourselves; we know who and what we are really, whom and where we come from.  And the truth of this does not rankle, does not demean and stifle us, but places our human self-determination and creativity within God’s vision of us and the world.

            Moses learns all this in Egypt, and becomes the leader of the first Exodus.  St. Paul learns all this on the way to Damascus, and becomes the Apostle to the Gentiles.  And St. Ignatius Loyola learns all this early in his experience of conversion, when he seriously considered suicide himself (see autobiography), largely because of his terrible scrupulosity. But, thanks to some strong spiritual direction and God’s grace, Ignatian scrupulosity itself is converted into Ignatian spirituality, and Ignatius chooses life and a future full of service to God’s people.  He learns this, too, in Loyola, when, after being wounded at the Battle of Pamplona, he demands a painful operation because, as he says, he was determined to be a martyr to his pleasure and his vanity; when he who was a lady’s man and a young, pompous soldier realizes that he and his life were a dead end.  Years later, though, dictating his autobiography, Ignatius says that God, at that time of recuperation and conversion, was curing Ignatius of himself, teaching him as a schoolmaster teaches his students, and leading him to found “haec minima congregatio Jesu,” “this least Society of Jesus.”

            Our readings this Sunday, the commands of Moses, Jesus, and St. Paul, the life of St. Ignatius, the lives of all holy men and women, and the efforts of those who, like you folks, live out, still today, the gospel’s call the holiness—ALL are powerful, exciting examples and commands to our age’s enthrallment and love affair with historicity, to its contention that we are the makers of truth, to the ways we rationalize the truth away and reason that we cannot be saints ourselves, to the ways we mitigate and minimize the commands we hear, now, in the twenty-first century, from heaven—the commands to choose life, to be imitators of Christ, and to pick up our cross and follow Him.
            When St. Ignatius was recuperating at Loyola, he read the lives of the saints, particularly the lives of St. Francis of Assisi and St. Dominic.  He was so inspired, he said, “Si isti, cur non ego?”  “If these guys could do it, why can’t I?”  “If these guys could start religious orders that lived the vows of poverty, chastity, obedience and all of the evangelical counsels in new and exciting ways, doing so much for Christ and others, in the thirteenth century, why can’t I do the same in the sixteenth century?” 
            May we, likewise, in the skeptical twenty-first century, be inspired to take the Scriptures and Our Lord at His word, and the lives of holy men and women as our models!  May we get out of God’s way and our own way so that God may have God’s way with us, shape us and use us to bring others to God, to reality!
            St. Ignatius Loyola, pray for us and call forth from deep within us greater desires for holiness.  When we work, that we may give our all.  When we make plans, that we may plan boldly.  When we dream, that we may dream big.  When we pray, that we may offer our entire selves to God.  When we profess vows, that we may live them so as to be available to serve the Church and all of God’s people.   And do these and all things

For the Greater Glory of God             Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam.