23 July 2018
Monday of the Sixteenth Week in Ordinary Time
No Sign but Christ
Many institutions readily promote the Jesuit saying “finding God in all things,” but the spiritual reality that it indicates requires a faith that cannot be reduced to easy slogans. Indeed, Ignatius himself does not make “finding God in all things” a public slogan at all. In his letters Ignatius speaks more frequently of “seeking God in all things” (e.g. Ep. 1854) or “ordering all things to God’s glory” (Ep. 776) which is what Ignatius invites all of us to do when, in his principle and foundation, he declares that “all things are created to help us live out the end for which we are created, which is to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord” (SpEx 23).
There are a few ways in which detaching “finding God in all things” from its original Ignatian context can cause problems. One problem is the problem of suffering deliberately and gratuitously evil acts: can one find God there? As important as this question is, let us set it aside for now and point to another problem: which god does one presume to find in all things? Christianity teaches that the one true God reveals himself in Jesus Christ in a way that God cannot be known in any other way. Does Ignatius’s “finding God in all things” bypass this revelation? In fact, it does not: there is a reason why Ignatius wanted his order to be known by the name of Jesus and by no other name. For Ignatius, the purpose of his Spiritual Exercises is to come to a deep personal knowledge of the true God revealed in Jesus Christ and to let one’s life be guided and reordered by that true God which one now claims as one’s Lord. Only at the end of a full month of exercises, and in the very last contemplation, does Ignatius really begin to propose that one can find God in all things. And that God who can be found in all things is the God of Jesus Christ, who freely descended into the most meaningless depths of our evil and suffering so that it might begin to find meaning through his Love.
In Matthew 12, “an evil and unfaithful generation seeks a sign,” and it is looking for God in all the wrong places. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that it is looking for the wrong god in the right places. In any event, those who wish to “find God in all things” in the way that Ignatius intends should bear in mind that the only sign that God intends to give “in all things” is that of the Son of Man to whom Jonah points to, the Son who descends into the heart of the earth for three days. Let us contemplate Jesus’s life so that by his grace we might begin to know the life that he offers to us in all things.