23 May 2018
Wednesday of the Seventh Week in Ordinary Time
Within his Spiritual Exercises, Saint Ignatius of Loyola proposes that a person begin each time of prayer with a preparatory prayer in which we ought to pray that “all our intentions, our actions, and our operations be purely ordered to the service and praise of God’s divine majesty” (SpEx 46). By beginning every time of prayer with this request, we are acknowledging that we cannot even have properly ordered intentions without God’s help, let alone act rightly either interiorly (operations) or exteriorly (actions), except through the gift of God’s grace. Without the humble request for God to purify and guide us from within, our prayer period risks devolving into a merely personal experience or some sort of virtuoso performance before God. But what God actually invites us to is a relationship of indwelling in love, and our humble request to be guided and supported by God disposes us to find our grounding in a relationship in which even our intentions and our interiority are more rightly ordered by God’s grace.
What Ignatius proposes within the Spiritual Exercises, Saint James proposes with regards to our understanding of where we stand in a providential world. So often we think that we have significant control over the events and circumstances in which we find ourselves in the world, and this is not completely wrong. But as a spiritual disposition, it is not fundamentally right either. The world and its circumstances, even down to the concrete minutiae in which we live our lives, are primarily in God’s hands, not our own, and so we should never act as if our future is our own to dispose of. Instead, as Saint James exhorts us, each of us should at least think, even if we do not always say it aloud, “if the Lord wills it, I shall…” (James 4). And we should let this aspiration become a constant prayer, to which we append in our hearts and before God’s divine majesty, “thy will be done.”