KaTHleen HUGHes

Were Not Our Hearts Burning within Us?

We Are Sent

ignatian

spirituality

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 nonexistent, a description had to be prepared for the program booklet. Many of you have probably had the same experience. You make up a description of a talk right out of thin air, hoping to be sufficiently generic so you can talk about almost anything at all.

Kathleen Hughes RSCJ, former professor of Word and Worship at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago and former provincial of her orders United States province, is currently a mission consultant in the Network of Sacred Heart Schools. Her address is 541 S. Mason Road; St. Louis, Missouri 63141. <khughes@rscj.org>
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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, heres 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 Gods activity in these two parallel celebrations of the paschal mysterythese 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, challenge, and invitation to faithful living, parallel to leaving retreat and picking up everyday life.

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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 Ive 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 holiness and transformation. Both the Exercises and the Eucharist have a basic psychological rhythm that facilitates 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 Ignatiuss personal notebookconsoBoth the Eucharist and lations, desolations, graces the Spiritual Exercises receivedand this collection of insights developed interrupt our ordinary time into a practical manual as with extraordinary grace. Ignatius gave them to others 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 community 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.

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 distractions, 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 Gods goodness and Gods 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. Gods unconditional and ever-faithful love permeates our awareness in Week One. Each one of us has
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been blessed with divine life; Gods 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 inadequate response; we know that sin has hindered our relationships 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 Gods ever-greater love, mercy, and forgiveness. We reflect on our lives in light of Gods 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. Gods 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 living 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 forgiveness: Lord, have mercy. Then the Gloria is our hymn of praise after the words of absolution: May
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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 heres a second intriguing possibility with the Eucharist. There is a presidential prayer at the conclusion 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 todays liturgy, the Seventeenth Sunday, Year A, from icels 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

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and gladly forego all lesser gifts to possess that kingdoms 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 discernible. 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 Nazarethhealing, teaching, sharing meals, welcoming sinners, going about doing good, spending the night in union with his Abba, gathering 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 Marthas 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
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dear friend of ours also reveals to us the cost of discipleship, 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 disciples 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 sinners 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 Christians life that is shaped by the Exercises.2 Of course, those statements also describe a regular 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 salvation and offering us spiritual nourishment; Christ himself is present in the midst of the community through the Word proclaimed.3 The cycle of readings, highlighting first one evangelists portrait of Christ and then anothers in the threeyear cycle, invites our reflection on the life and ministry of Jesus, his proclamation of the Good News, his sayings and parables, his teachings and miracles, and, especially during Lent and the triduum, how his face was set to Jerusalem during his last days on earth. The Gospel is the highpoint of the Liturgy of the
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Word, and we mark it with various signs of reverence for the book and with the tracing of the cross on our forehead, lips, and breast, praying that our mind be opened, that our words be true, and that our whole being be exposed to the consolation and the challenge of a Gospel way of life. The homily follows. The General Instruction of the Roman Missal describes the homily as a necessary source of nourishment of the Christian life.4 In fact, for a majority of Christians it is often the only source of spiritual nourishment in a busy week. The Second Week of the Exercises illuminates the challenge to those who give the homily in the Eucharist. The point of the homily is identical to the grace sought in Week Two of the Exercises, namely, to enable the assembly to know Jesus more intimately, to love him more ardently and to follow him more faithfully. Nothing less! Not entertainment. Not exegesis. Not personal self-disclosure. Nothing less than knowing, loving, and following Christ, choosing his choices, becoming gradually and almost imperceptibly more like him, putting on his mind and heart. Just as one chooses discipleship at the end of Week Two, so too there is a choice at the end of the Liturgy of the Word. As we prepare to move from the Table of Gods Word to the Table of the Lords Supper, we join ourselves to Christ and ask that we too be transformed every bit as much as the bread and the wine, that we and they may become for us and for our world the Body and Blood of Christ.

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The Third Week and the Liturgy of the Eucharist The focus of Week Three is both the Last Supper and the Passion. So, too, these two themes are conflated in the Liturgy of the Eucharist: the Sacrifice of the
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Cross and its sacramental renewal in the Mass, which Christ the Lord instituted at the Last Supper and commanded the apostles to do in his memory, are one and the same, differing only in the manner of offering, and . . . consequently the Mass is at once a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, of propitiation and satisfaction. 5 The first meditation of the Exercises in Week Three is on the Last Supper in its entiretyincluding the preparations, the choice of place, the arrangements for the meal, the assembling in the upper room, Christs washing of the apostles feet, the supper itself, Christs giving of his body and blood in Eucharist as the ultimate expression of his love for them, and his final words, his last will and testament, that they continue this same action in his memory. Much of this finds a resonance in the Liturgy of the Eucharist. There is, of course, first the preparation of the table and the gifts, the preparation of the altar itself and then of the offerings of bread and wine. There is the washing of the hands of the presider, a ritual of cleansing and interior purification in readiness for all that will follow. There is the prayer over the gifts, a simple and focused petitiona second prelude, if you will, asking in a variety of ways that the gifts we have placed on the table will become holy and that we ourselves will be caught up in this action and be made holy to the praise and glory of God. Then the great prayer of praise and thanksgiving, the Eucharistic Prayer, begins. We tell the story of Jesus life, death, and rising. We enter into Christs liturgy, the endless self-giving of Christ into the hands of the One he called Abba, from whom he receives back his life. Our worship is an offering of our whole selves with and in Christ to God. That is our participation in the paschal
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mystery of Christs obedience unto death, our identification with Christ in his radical obedience to God. Have you ever used one of the Eucharistic Prayers for your meditation during Week Three? The Eucharistic Prayer is addressed to God the Father. Could we not think of it as a colloquy with the One Jesus called Abba, our own intimate conversation with God, as we ponder the mystery of the Passion? By turns, the Eucharistic Prayer colloquy offers thanksgiving to God for the whole work of salvation realized in Christ; it implores the action of Gods transforming Spirit; it tells the story again of the night before Jesus died when he offered his body and blood, gave the apostles to eat and drink, and left them a command to perpetuate this mystery; it recalls the events that followed the supper, especially the blessed Passion of Christ together with his victory over sin and death; it makes an offering to God not only of the spotless victim but of ourselves so that day by day we might be perfected through Christ the mediator and be brought into unity with God and with each other when God may be all in all.6 It is a perfect prayer; it is a perfect condensed statement of what we believe and what we long for; it is a colloquy, if you will, that gathers up and gives expression to the faith of the community in Jesus salvific death and rising and our participation in that mystery. There is no better word at the end of the Eucharistic Prayer, or at the end of our Third Week meditation on the Passion as we dwell in the silence of God, than the word Amen. So be it.

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Week Four and the Communion and Concluding Rites We are ready for Week FourJesus resurrection and his apparitions to his mother, to the women, to the disciples, to Mary in the garden. Always the message is
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the same: do not be afraid; peace be with you; go now and tell the good news; go now to feed my lambs. And as peace is the gift of the Risen One, we beg that same peace for the whole human family, and we ask for mutual love among ourselves. We approach the table of the Lord and receive the one Bread of Life, which is Christ who died and rose for the salvation of the world. Our Communion makes us one with the Risen Christ, and the last presidential prayer, the prayer after Communion, is a final preludea petition that we might go forth and live, in deed, what we have just done in word and ritual action. Please make this Communion take! this prayer seems to beg. We become what we eat. Through the Communions of our lifetime we are gradually being transformed into God. We know that we ourselves and our world have been radically changed by Jesus resurrection, and we embrace his commission to become the Heart of God on earth. In contemplating the love of God in the concluding exercise of Week Four, we pray an intimate prayer of thanksgiving to the One who has shared his life so completely with us that we are filled with gratitude and with a desire to make a generous return of love. Take, Lord, receive, we say, and in so doing we express our availability before God for whatever we will face, relying simply and completely on Gods grace. We know ourselves as blessed and sent. Thus far I have been developing the ways that the Eucharist and the Spiritual Exercises mirror and sometimes illuminate aspects of each other. As a transition to the second part of this reflection, I suggest pausing over the words of the Anima Christi using David Flemings translation. It was David who said that this prayer is a summary of the dynamics of the whole movement
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of the Exercises, and he also described the prayer as a summary of the transformation wrought through the Eucharist.
Jesus, may all that is you flow into me. May your body and blood be my food and drink. May your passion and death be my strength and life. Jesus, with you by my side enough has been given. May the shelter I seek be the shadow of your cross. Let me not run from the love which you offer, but hold me safe from the forces of evil. On each of my dyings shed your light and your love. Keep calling to me until that day comes, when, with your saints, I may praise you forever. Amen.7

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Part II: Living the Eucharist David Fleming also called the Anima Christi a summary of the living of the Fourth Week in the everyday, so it is to that topic we turn, the living of the Eucharist. Many years ago I read a book by Gregory Dix called The Shape of the Liturgy, a very long, very erudite history of the Eucharist by an Anglican clergyman and liturgical scholar. At the conclusion, around page seven hundred something, the author shifts from liturgical history, archeology, and philology to spirituality. He quotes the words of Jesus at the Last Supper, Do this in memory of me, and then poses an intriguing question: Was ever another command so obeyed? Dix paints an extraordinary picture: Century after century, spreading slowly to every continent and country, to every race on earth, this action of Eucharist has been carried out in every conceivable human circumstance and for every conceivable human need, from the heights of
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power to places of poverty and need, for royalty at their crowning and for criminals going to the scaffold, for a bride and bridegroom in a little country church, for the wisdom for the Parliament of a mighty nation, for a sick old woman afraid to die, for Columbus setting out to discover the New World, for a barren couple hoping for a child, by an old monk on the fiftieth anniversary of his vows, and on and on. Dix lyrically enumerates these and scores of other instances in which the Christian community has been faithful to Jesus command, Do this.8 Over the centuries the Eucharist has been celebrated by innumerable millions of entirely obscure faithful women and men like you and me, people with hopes and fears and joys and sorrows and sins and temptations and prayers every bit as vivid and alive as yours and mine are now. Week by week, on a hundred thousand successive Sundays, faithfully, unfailingly, the followers of Jesus have done just this for the remembrance of him.9 This is an extraordinary picture of the sacrament that constitutes the community, of the event that binds us together, one with another and with Christians of every age, place, race, tongue, and way of life. The Eucharist has been like a wave of grace rolling over the community again and again across the centuries of Christendom, hollowing out spaces for the divine in the midst of the everyday. Was ever another command so obeyed? But after pondering Dix, I realized that when I considered that Last Supper of Jesus and his friends, there was another question on my mind. When Jesus said do this in remembrance of me, what did he mean by the this? Surely not just the Jewish pattern of the meal, though we know a lot about Jewish rituals, the blessing of bread, the number of cups, the style of blessing said over both. Surely the this is something more. What are
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we being asked to do? to be? to embrace? to celebrate? What commitment do we make when we say Amen? Scripture supplies two directions toward an answer: one in the Synoptic accounts of the supper and Pauls First Letter to the Corinthians, and the other in the Gospel of John. Recall the words of Paul describing the Last Supper: I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, This is my body which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me. In the same way also the cup, after supper, commitment do we make saying, This cup is when we say Amen? the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me (1 Cor 11:23-25). Do this in remembrance of me. But what is the this? Have you ever considered that the Last Supper was precisely thatit was the last. The Last Supper was the last of a whole series of Jesus meals recorded in the Scriptures. Jesus never played the pious ascetic, keeping away from celebrations. He loved a good feast. He used that image of feasting as a metaphor of the reign of Goda great banquet. It was said of him, This man is a glutton and a drunkard. An even more shocking accusation was whispered behind his back: This man sits down at table with sinners, with the morally dubious, with the outcasts of society, with those living on the fringes. On nearly every page of the Gospels there is a meal or a reference to food. Jesus calls out to Zacchaeus, Get down from that tree. Im coming to your house for
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lunch. There is the story of Simon who threw a dinner party but was an inattentive host, and of the woman who slipped in to minister to Jesus as he sat at Simons table. There is the story of Peters mother-in-law who is cured only to get up and wait on them. There is the Syrophoenician woman who would not take no for an answer, who spoke about crumbs that fell from the table and who expectedand receivedmore than crumbs from this man. There are the feeding miracles that tell us something of the utter lavishness of the banquet and that everyone will receive enough and there will still be something left over for another day. There are parables of feasts, of great abundance, of jockeying for places at table, of appropriate attire, of filling the room with those drawn from the highways and the byways. Even the risen appearances of Jesus include meals. Peace be with you, Jesus says. Whats for dinner? On the shore, in the upper room, on the way to Emmaus, they recognize him in the breaking of the bread. How do you recognize someone? Even at a distance, you recognize the timbre of a voice, or a particular gesture, or the slight tilt of the head so characteristic of an individual. The disciples recognized Jesus for what was most characteristic of him: the way he broke the bread. What is the this that we are to replicate? It is the whole life and ministry of Jesus at table. Scripture scholars refer to this as Jesus ministry of table fellowship. To share food, in Semitic times, was to share life itself. And Jesus shared life with an astonishing assortment of people. Everyone was welcome to sit with him at table, to tell stories and to break the bread. Jesus ministry of table fellowship is a ministry of universal reconciliation, no exceptions. The Last Supper recapitulated the attitudes and values of Jesus, who opened
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his table and his heart to everyone, who offered hospitality to all, who was himself at home with all manner of people, who knew the human need for nourishment of body, mind, and spirit and who was always present to the otherwelcoming, reconciling, offering life. Do this in memory of me. The Gospel of John offers a second answer to the question What is the this? In John there is a very different institution narrative. It is the account of the foot washing. We know the story so well. Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God, rose from supper, laid aside his garments, and girded himself with a towel. He poured water into a basin, and began to wash the disciples feet, and to wipe them with the towel. Peter resisted this tenderness until Jesus pressed: If I do not wash you, you have no part with me. Peter relented in typical Peter fashion: Not my feet only but also my hands and my head! When Jesus had completed the washing and resumed his place, he said to them, Do you know what I have done to you? You call me Teacher and Lord; and you are right, for so I am. If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one anothers feet. For I have given you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you (Cf. Jn 13:1-15). You should do as I have done. In other words, Do this in memory of me. I had an experience when I was studying at the University of Notre Dame that colors my understanding of the washing of the feet after the manner of Jesus. Notre Dame has a reputation for the excellence of its liturgical studies program and, at least when I was there, for the perfection of its liturgical celebrations: every
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minister rehearsed; every detail on a checklist; every liturgy perfect. And, during the sacred triduum, the liturgies were even more perfect! It was Holy Thursday and time for the foot washing. Twelve people moved forward, probably having prepared for the foot washing by carefully washing their feet! Then, seemingly from nowhere, a very unkempt man started up the aisle, staggering Foot washing is not just a way a bit, perhaps under of life but an attitude of heart, the weather. It was one of those stunning a kneeling before the other moments. Time stood in reverence still. Then the deacon walked down the aisle to help the man forward and assist him in taking off his shoes and socks. What is the this? Tender and loving care for the other; accepting our mutual vulnerabilities; choosing to open our hearts to all, even the one staggering into our life and upsetting its plans and perfections. Foot washing is not just a way of life but an attitude of heart, a kneeling before the other in reverence. Foot washing is embracing a way of service after the manner of Jesus, simply, generously, not counting the cost. Do this: Embrace my attitudes and values as your own. Love those I love, and be my heart to them. Welcome the stranger, the one on the margins, the disenfranchised. Become vulnerable with one another. Kneel in reverence, especially before those whom society shuns. Nourish one anothers bodies and spirits. Rejoice with those who rejoice, and weep with those who weep, both here at home and half a world away those in Norway who are paralyzed by a massacre they

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could never have imagined, those who are starving from the drought in Africa, those who are terrified of nuclear contamination in Japan, those who are caught up in trafficking around the globe or denied asylum here at home, those who have lost the ones they love and all they owned in fire, flood, tornado, or earthquake. Make a habit of roaming the globe in prayer so that you do not remain distant from the joys and pain of the world. Send those waves of grace once again across continents and cultures to bathe our world in the love and mercy of Eucharist. Do this in memory of me.
Conclusion Week Three invites us to experience the Last Supper, to place ourselves there in the upper room, to look around at the faces, to listen to the words, to ponder them in our hearts as we watch the immense tenderness of the Lord with those he loved even to the end, whose hearts he was tutoring even on the night before he died. And we have stayed with him, watched and prayed with him, and accompanied him as he gave up his life. Then we have simply dwelt in silence. That same intimacy and presence to one another marks Week Four, a time of tenderness and affection with the risen Jesus who shares his love and his joy with us but does not let us cling to him. He sends us as apostles, empowered by his Spirit, to continue his saving presence, to be his heart on earth. And day by day, week by week, the Eucharist continues to draw us into these mysteries. The heart of the Eucharist is Jesus Christ. The heart of it is the celebration of Jesus life, death, and rising every time we gatherand the merging of our daily living and dying with his and with one anotherfor the life of the world.
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The heart of it is joining ourselves to Christ, the perfect sacrifice, to the praise and glory of God. The heart of it is begging that the Spirit will transform each one of us just as really as the bread and wine so that we become more and more Christs Body in truth, not just in name. The heart of it is learning over and over again to say Amen to all of these realities andat least sometimesactually meaning it. Meaning Amen, meaning yes I will try to live, in deed, in the coming days, what we have just enacted in word and ritual action. I conclude with a favorite reflection of mine on the word Amen.
Be careful of simple words said often. Amen makes demands like an unrelenting schoolmaster: fierce attention to all that is said; no apathy, no preoccupation, no prejudice permitted. Amen: We are present. We are open. We hearken. We understand. Here we are; we are listening to your word. Amen makes demands like a signature on a dotted line: sober bond to all that goes before; no hesitation, no half-heartedness, no mental reservation allowed. Amen: We support. We approve. We are of one mind. We promise. May this come to pass. So be it. Be careful when you say Amen. 10
Notes Cf. Sunday Celebration of the Word and Hours (Ottawa: Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, 1995). This book contains the Sunday collects prepared by the International Committee on English in the Liturgy for the Missal of 1998, since withdrawn.
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2 David L. Fleming sj , The Ignatian Spiritual Exercises: Understanding a Dynamic, in Notes on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola (St. Louis: Review for Religious, 1981) 11. 3 General Instruction of the Roman Missal, 2003, 29, paraphrase. 4 GIRM, 65. 5 GIRM, 9. 6 GIRM, 79. 7 David L. Fleming sj, The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. A Literal Translation and a Contemporary Reading. (St. Louis: The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1978) 3. 8 Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy (London: Dacre Press, 1945) 744-5, passim. 9 Ibid. paraphrase. 10 Barbara Schmich Searle, Ritual Dialogue, Assembly 7:3, February, 1981.

ronald mercier

The Transition from Third to Fourth Week of the Spiritual Exercises

Without the Drama:

Obedience You have had my yes for years and I have had yours since the sun, the seashells, and the storms at sea.

But now, ah . . . you and I are more than yes. As time moves with, within, and around, this yes of ours takes on wings, takes on colors I never imagined, challenges that strengthen and soften me, glory that stills me, stirs me, extends and opens me. It becomes a murmur of love that we share. Love that frees me and compels me to choose you again and yet again . . . that I might respond as I wish to respond . . . openly, knowingly, even a little mysteriously . . . as the bush in the desert responded to flame.

travinskys Rite of Spring caused a furor when it was first performed in 1913, but the more I listen to it, the more I think it expresses something important, and not only from a musical point of view. At the tail end of the piece, the Sacrifice, Stravinsky tries to capture the human spirit in its paganpureform. You might want to find a recording of it and play it before you read further. Cacophonytheres no other way to describe it! Bad sound. It assaults the senses. It builds to a crescendo and with the violence of spirit that leads to the sacrifice of a human, a woman who dances herself to death for the

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Kimberly M. King rscj

Ronald Mercier sj is associate professor of theology at Saint Louis University and rector of the community where Jesuit scholastics pursue the study of philosophy and theology. This article was originally given as a keynote presentation at Ignatian Spirituality Conference V on July 22, 2011, in St. Louis, Missouri. Comments can be addressed to him at Bellarmine House of Studies; 3737 Westminster Place; St. Louis, Missouri 63108. <rmercier@sjnen.org>
71.1 2012

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Review for Religious