Lent Exercises - An Invitation to Love

I was exhausted.  It was summer 2020.  In March, I’d transitioned our ministry online while helping our high schoolers adapt.  In April, I launched my first book.  In May, George Floyd was killed by police, catalyzing and energizing a racial reckoning.  Meanwhile, our church, was imploding over a sudden leadership transition.  

Desperate for a spiritual life robust enough to combat the challenges, Sophia and I began meeting with a spiritual director.  We asked him to lead us in the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius.  

These exercises changed my life.  Joe, our spiritual director recently commented, “do you notice how much more settled, peaceful, and confident in God’s love, you are now compared to when we first started meeting?”  He’s right.  

I notice that many of us long for life with God in the midst of our fragmented world.  This series is an invitation to open your heart to God.  These imaginative reflections are designed in the spirit of the Spiritual Exercises.  They draw us into God’s love.  

Take this section of Psalm 139 for example.  

O Lord, you have searched me and known me.
2 You know when I sit down and when I rise up;
    you discern my thoughts from far away.
3 You search out my path and my lying down,
    and are acquainted with all my ways.
4 Even before a word is on my tongue,
    O Lord, you know it completely.
5 You hem me in, behind and before,
    and lay your hand upon me.
6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me;
    it is so high that I cannot attain it.

Can you imagine what it is like to be seen, known, and loved like this?  I imagine the chocolate smudged face of a toddler poking her finger into my eye, to ‘see if I was awake.’  The brightness in her eyes, stickiness of her hands, and dark sweet smell of her breath told me she’d found the cake.  Before being fully conscious, I knew her.  

I like to think I’m more sophisticated than a 3-year-old.  I Reach for a phone to soothe my anxieties, instead of sniffing out chocolate cake first thing in the morning, but the impulse is the same.  We’re both looking for something, a spark of pleasure, an aroma of delight, a sensation of discovery.  We both know it’s not the right time.  We do it anyway.  

These are innocuous examples, but extend the impulse through uses of money, sex, status, or power, and the seeds of human grief are plain to see.  

How does God respond?  Before anything else, God sees, knows, and loves us.  If I, selfish and groggy, can love the toddler smudging chocolate crumbs into my eye, how much more does God, who is limitless in love, know and love us?  

Can you sit today for 3 minutes with no other agenda except to allow God to love you?  Try breathing in, “Lord you know and love me.”  Breathe out, “help me to know.”