The first time I really encountered Ignatius Loyola’s story was as first-year student in an Ignatian Spirituality course taught by Matt Stewart, S.J., at Regis University in Denver. At the time, I was struck by Ignatius’ deep desire to serve his Lord, but also by the myriad ways that Ignatius seemed to “get it wrong”: by chasing vainglory, in going to Jerusalem only to be kicked out, to his imprisonments and many attempts to figure out how he would serve God – and by just how many times a new door of opportunity slammed shut in his face. Even though I wasn’t particularly chasing God by abandoning my entire life like Ignatius was, I felt a deep affinity with this pilgrim and his ability to get it “wrong.”
As the Ignatian Year began back in May, I remember being slightly embarrassed that I was oblivious to the anniversary of Ignatius’ injury at Pamplona. After all, I was teaching theology at a Jesuit High School, how could I not have known?! Getting over my embarrassment, I reflected on how Ignatius’s life had impacted mine from my first semesters at Regis up to that point, and I made something of a New (Ignatian) Year’s resolution to follow this year as more of a pilgrim in the tradition of Ignatius.
As with many New Year’s resolutions, I have more often forgotten my resolution – to be fair I have been quite busy. Within the first three months of the Ignatian Year I finished teaching in Denver; got married; moved out of Colorado for the first time by trailing behind my wife – both of our cars filled with belongings – as we drove in caravan across the country; found housing in Boston, site unseen; arrived in Massachusetts, lived out of two friends’ homes and an Airbnb for two weeks before we moved into our apartment; and began our lives as married people in a new city while I also began a graduate program at the CSTM. We were in a whirlwind that we’ve only just come down from, and I certainly have not been attentive to the Ignatian Year in the ways I had hoped to be.
That said, Matt Stewart offered many analogies in that Ignatian Spirituality course, one of which feels particularly apt at this moment. Matt described that in discernment, like in driving a car, the wheels have to be turning in order to turn around. It’s not necessarily about moving in a perfect direction, but about being sufficiently in motion to follow the Spirit. I haven’t paid as much attention as I had hoped to to the Ignatian Year, but I was also living something of the pilgrim experience – something of the necessary motion, even if that means getting it “wrong” at times. The 19-year-old me learning about Ignatius’s life was enamored by the idea of being truly in motion, even if the path wasn’t quite clear; I think he would recognize something of that motion in the winding journey of my life since that class, and especially in this Ignatian Year.
As I look toward the end of the year, the next few years of graduate school, and seeking to be authentically myself as a minister and theologian, I hope to keep moving. That is, I hope to be willing to risk getting it “wrong” in my journey so as to live attentively to the Spirit. I pray that in doing so, my life, like that of Ignatius, will illuminate a pilgrim’s path full of wrong turns, almost-there’s, and faithful seeking that will change my life and world in meaningful, if sometimes unforeseen, ways. Perhaps most of all I hope to see these wild seasons of my life as the 19-year-old me would see them: as symbols of a life lived in abandon, in the style of a wandering Ignatius seeking to serve his Lord.