I am writing this column just after completing my annual eight-day silent retreat, which this year was focused on my upcoming final vows as a Jesuit. When this column is published online, I will be about a week and a half away from professing those vows, and by the time the print edition with this column reaches mailboxes, I will have just done so, God willing.

I will profess my final vows during a parish Mass on the Sunday before Thanksgiving at the Church of St. Francis Xavier in New York, where I have been helping as a priest over the past nine years. On that last Sunday of the liturgical year, we will be celebrating, to give it its full formal liturgical name, the Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe.

I was not aiming for a particular date within the liturgical calendar for my vows. After expressing my hope for my vows to happen at a regularly scheduled Sunday Mass in the parish where I regularly serve, the rest of the timing was a matter of overlap between the schedules of my provincial, who will receive my vows, my responsibilities at America, and picking a time when my family could come. But I am glad they landed on the feast of Christ the King by happenstance or providence, since the “Call of the King” meditation in the Spiritual Exercises, which helped me recognize my vocation in the first place, has only grown more important to me over the years.

The meditation’s full title is actually a description of its method, in St. Ignatius’s distinctive prose style: “The call of the temporal king, as an aid toward contemplating the life of the eternal king.” Ignatius invites the exercitant to imagine a human king summoning his followers and subjects to an arduous and taxing military campaign, with the king advising them that “whoever wishes to come with me has to be content with the same food I eat, and the drink, and the clothing which I wear, and so forth. So too each one must labor with me during the day, and keep watch in the night, and so on, so that later each may have a part with me in the victory, just as each has shared in the toil.”

Ignatius assumes that this kind of invitation and challenge will be innately and automatically attractive, and so offers it as a way to energize us and our natural desires so that they may be transposed to Jesus, counseling “that all those who have judgment and reason will offer themselves wholeheartedly for this labor.”

In an age when most kings have been overthrown and in which royal power, where it does persist, has been rendered largely ceremonial and symbolic, the meditation as Ignatius lays it out does not always work so smoothly. Jesuit adaptability has led many directors to propose alternate starting points: Imagine an activist, or a saint, or even a politician, calling people into a campaign for justice or reform. I have prayed this meditation with Dorothy Day as the “temporal king,” for instance; I have heard others describe imagining Martin Luther King Jr. in that role.

The heart of the meditation, however, lies for me not in finding the best possible king-analogue figure as a starting point but instead in connecting to that desire to share in the toil and be part of a larger mission, and in recognizing that the desire for a purpose is meant and made to be fulfilled in the purpose of the kingdom of God. What makes the imagined figure of the temporal king attractive—even for Ignatius—is not the king’s unlimited authority and power but the contrast in which that power, which could stand apart from and over its subjects, instead invites them to labor with him, sharing both hardship and triumph together.

In this model for prayer, kingly power humbles itself through service, struggle and suffering, and so lifts up those who join in the mission of the kingdom.

In the United States, we are in the midst of a crisis over how to properly constrain and balance political power and whether or not our historical forms for doing so can hold. Recently, we saw a day of demonstrations and protests under the banner “No Kings.” As I have been thinking about and praying with the Call of the King, I suspect that this crisis is not just about the constraint of power and what kinds of authority we ought to reject, but also a collapse in our ability to imagine together how power ought to be used in service.

Celebrating the feast of Christ the King, and asking to be joined to his mission, offers a starting point for beginning again to imagine power being used well to seek justice and uplift those who are cast down. Pope Leo XIV’s first apostolic exhortation, “Dilexi Te,” provides an excellent model here, quoting from Pope Francis’ own first exhortation, “Evangelii Gaudium,” and reminding us that the kingdom of God “is about loving God who reigns in our world. To the extent that he reigns within us, the life of society will be a setting for universal fraternity, justice, peace and dignity. Both Christian preaching and life, then, are meant to have an impact on society. We are seeking God’s Kingdom.”

May we offer ourselves wholeheartedly for this labor.

This article appears in December 2025.

Sam Sawyer, S.J., is the editor in chief of America Media.