Discernment is only fully clear in hindsight

A Reflection for the Memorial of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, Priest

Find today’s readings here.

If you happen to be celebrating the feast of St. Ignatius in a Jesuit church or chapel, it gets promoted to the rank of a solemnity—which means, among other things, that we pray the Gloria and the Creed during the Mass. In addition to the normal two readings for Ignatius’ memorial, the Jesuit lectionary adds an Old Testament first reading for the solemnity, from Jeremiah 20:7-9.

That first reading begins with Jeremiah’s famous line that you probably remember better as “You duped me, O Lord, and I let myself be duped.” The current translation of the New American Bible renders it as “You seduced me, O Lord, and I let myself be seduced.” Other contemporary translations use “enticed” or “persuaded.” The change is to avoid a narrow implication of some kind of malicious deceit on God’s part, since the Hebrew word behind the translation is broader.

But no matter what word is used in English, the point remains that something other than straightforward “A leads to B leads to C” reasoning is going on in Jeremiah’s encounter with God. And when we read Jesus’ challenging words in the Gospel—“If anyone comes to me without hating his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.”—it is worth remembering that even when the Lord speaks starkly, God does not limit himself to writing only in a straight line.

St. Ignatius’ own life and ministry bears witness both to the utter clarity and convincingness of God’s demands (remember him asking St. Francis Xavier “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and to lose his soul?”) and to God’s willingness to take the long way round to drawing us to himself (remember that he spent years cajoling Xavier into making the Exercises and later described him as “the lumpiest dough he ever had to knead”). Ignatius himself was firmly convinced to decisively hand his life over to God—but his road to doing so ran through courtly romances and a book of the lives of the saints and daydreaming about what he could do for God that would match what St. Francis and St. Dominic had done. You seduced him, O Lord, and he let himself be seduced. For all of us who have been inspired by him, thanks be to God.

My own Jesuit vocation shares a bit of this story as well: After my first intimations that the desire of Ignatius and the first companions to “help souls” was the name for what I wanted to do, a realization that first hit me in the spring of my first year of college, I spent that whole summer trying to pretend that experience hadn’t happened. And I also spent the whole summer daydreaming about what I might do as a Jesuit. I’m grateful that I knew enough of Ignatius’ story, even at the age of 19, that I realized I would at least need to pray and talk about what that all meant.

The reality of discernment, whether it is about one’s fundamental vocation in life or about how one lives the vocation already committed to, is that it is often only fully clear in hindsight. On the way there, while we’re wrestling with the demands and costs and contingencies of how to hand ourselves fully over to God, God works with us according to our own capacities, seducing and enticing us to recognize, even if only in hindsight, that he is calling us to our own highest good in serving his greater glory.

The end of the first reading from Jeremiah in the Jesuit lectionary describes the way God ultimately hooks us:

I say I will not mention him,
I will no longer speak in his name.
But then it is as if fire is burning in my heart,
imprisoned in my bones;
I grow weary holding back,
I cannot!

So often in Ignatian spirituality, we are asked to pray with our deep desires. Maybe another way to put that is that we need to spend time with the fire burning in our heart, imprisoned in our bones, and find the courage to ask God what he will do with us when we let ourselves fall in love with him.

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