LIS Associate Highlight  (December, 2011) JOAN C. TRIVETT Laguna Beach, California ISFP Graduate 2004 I was reading an Advent reflection the other day, about when Jesus turns to Andrew, who was then a disciple of John the Baptist, and asks, "What are you looking for?" (Jn 1:38). The author of the reflection goes on to say that these words were not a casual question, but rather one directed at the soul. When I came to LIS I was looking to answer that question for my own life. Finding my children grown and married, I retired early from a career in aerospace and began to consider what was next. Through a women's Bible study group, I was introduced to the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius.  That ignited a fire in my heart to learn more about Ignatian spirituality, which, of course, led me to LIS. Joining the first Ignatian Spiritual Formation Program in 2001, I knew I had found the answer to what I really wanted in life. I had discovered my life's purpose and passion, which is to share the deep joy and wonder of God's abundant and compassionate love with others through the gift of Ignatian spirituality.  The formation was profoundly transformative, deepening my relationship with God and challenging me to step into a world of ministry that required me to learn more about my faith and to be willing to live it out in new ways. In the years since, I have companioned people through the Nineteenth Annotation of the Spiritual Exercises, traveled to Colorado for weekend missions on Ignatian spirituality; taught about various aspects of Ignatian spirituality, especially, discernment; and given retreats and days of prayer with other members of the LIS team working with Deacon candidates and their wives, lay ministers from various parishes, individual parishes, public groups, and individuals. My life is full of purpose and deep joy. The staff and Associates at LIS are a source of wisdom, encouragement and fellowship. As is always true of the Lord, the more I try to give of myself in gratitude for God's grace, the more I am blessed and in debt to the One who cannot be out given. As Ignatius says, our lives are ones of grace upon grace. And that is enough for me.       A Christmas Reflection  Many years ago when I was a young Jesuit, I spent a year in a Jesuit brothers' juniorate program in Milford, Ohio, a small town about ten miles east of Cincinnati.  My purpose in attending this program was to be trained to be a kitchen manager.  things that year - about myself and about the Society of Jesus - but I also learned that I didn't want to be a kitchen manager.  My training took place at Good Samaritan Hospital, a large Catholic hospital in Cincinnati.  Each week on Sunday night, I made the trip from Milford to the hospital, where I would live and work until Friday afternoon, when I would return to Milford.  I was not able to return to Milford to celebrate Thanksgiving that year, but I was able to do so for Christmas.  I have many happy memories of Christmases I enjoyed as a boy, and I would enjoy many Christmases as a Jesuit in the years ahead.  But I can point to Christmas 1964 as the most wonderful Christmas of my life.  From one perspective, there was nothing that should have made that Christmas stand out above any other I experienced.  But to be so suddenly transported out of a situation at the hospital that had lost all meaning for me and which I was simply enduring and to be dropped into the midst of a celebration with Jesuits whom I had grown to love seemed beyond my wildest dreams.  I had never questioned my Jesuit vocation - it seemed like a wonderful fit from the very first day - but I look back to the winter of 1964-65 as the time when I had fallen head over heels in love with what it meant to be a Jesuit. In his book, The Restless Heart, Ronald Rolheiser makes an observation very pertinent to this: "In our day-to-day lives, when all is well, and health, friends, inner peace, and good cheer are in abundance, we tend to lose our awareness of reality as it really is. ... Put crassly, when times are good, and we are not lonely, we tend to worry more about our boat and our next vacation to Hawaii than about the wounds that bleed unattended and uncared for in our unfinished world.  But when we are lonely, when we come face-to-face with emptiness and lack of meaning, we are given a great opportunity to understand life and ourselves."  Long ago, an experience of loneliness and a struggle to find meaning in my life afforded me a graced opportunity to sort out my desires and to discover what I most deeply desired.  We all yearn for security and comfort in our lives, and we look forward to happy events with family and friends.  Yet if we are truly honest with ourselves as we look back over our lives, we invariably find that we grew most as persons when security and comfort were so terribly absent.  It is no small thing to be able to say that "everything works together for good for those who love God" (Rom. 8:28; emphasis added), yet this is truly a part of the good news we celebrate this Christmas.  Have a blessed Christmas!  Written by: Br. Charles Jackson, S.J.

 LIS Associates of the Month (November, 2011)

JACK GONSALVES and  DOLORES MARTINEZ

Jack R. Gonsalves

Cerritos, California

ISFP Graduate 2004

You may have heard that the Lord writes straight with crooked lines.  It was an experience of desolation and a significant trial in my life beginning the summer of 2000 that led me to LIS.  In desolation, I sought solace at El Retiro San Inigo, the Jesuit Retreat Center in Los Altos, California.  After spending a week there in quiet and prayer I found peace and consolation.  I discovered personally, and in a profound way, that God loves us even when we are broken and desolate, and accepts us right where we are at.  During my retreat my spiritual director, the late Fr. Dare Morgan, S.J., encouraged me to continue spiritual direction upon my return home, which I did through the Loyola Institute for Spirituality.  My spiritual director for the next 8 years was Sr. Jean Schultz, S.P., who invited me to take classes at the Institute.  For me the three years of formation at the Institute were life changing and transformative.  The Institute gave me a way of life that has led me closer and closer to God. 

 Since completion of formation in June 2004, I have been involved in a variety of ministerial activities including guiding others through the 19th Annotation of the Spiritual Exercises, teaching the Ignatian style of prayer, and giving retreats and days of prayer.  I have found that ministering to others and being a companion to them on their journey to God has been the most enriching and grace-filled experience of my life.  I feel as though the Lord has been drawing me nearer and nearer to His sacred heart as I witness His gracious love at work in others.  It is a wonderful gift Jesus shares with us in ministry, when we are open to His grace, because He enables us to see what He sees, to hear what He hears, to feel in our hearts what He feels, and then respond as He would respond, with love and compassion.  What a gracious and wonderful gift it is to witness God's constant labor of love in our lives, and what a profoundly humble and trusting God who would invite us to pabrticipate in this labor of Love.  I am very, very grateful for all that the Lord has done, is doing and continues to do in us.  God is indeed, very, very good!  Alleluia!!

Dolores Martinez ' 

Santa Ana, California

ELI Graduate 2003 

I came to LIS by the Lord's grace. I was working with someone at the Diocese of Orange and they kept insisting that I go to L.A. to take some spiritual direction courses. At the time I didn't want to go alone so I invited a good friend to join me but after talking it over with her we felt that L.A. was too far  a drive for us to go to take these courses, so we never ended up going. 

 Several days after this program ended the same person at the Diocese of Orange asked me, “When are you going to take the spiritual direction courses,” and I said, "when they're offered in Spanish and five minutes away from my house." Little did I know that by saying this my course in life would forever be changed. A few months later I received a call from Fr. Tacho Rivera, S.J., who was working at the Loyola Institute for Spirituality, and he asked me if I would be interested in taking some spiritual direction courses in Spanish that he would be directing.  Well of course I couldn't say no, and so my path led me to LIS and to a group of people who have shared great moments with me during the course of ELI, which is the Latino Ignatian Team.

 LIS is very enriching, especially for people who are not able to leave their parish because many cannot drive; others have to take care of their families; and it's difficult to attend retreat centers. What LIS does for people is bring the retreat to them, in their environment, near their home. They truly do bring spirituality to life in that sense.

 Silence

 "Be still and know that I am God."(Psalm 46:10) 

One of the first things of which we become aware when we embark on our spiritual journey is that we live in a world pervaded by noise.  We may find the noise pleasant, or annoying, or simply neutral but, regardless of its form, it is still noise.  More importantly, we can become addicted to noise and find ourselves unsettled and restless if we are without the familiar background noise of a television, radio, CD player or whatever.  God's action in our lives can be very subtle and is often recognized only by our being quietly attentive to him.  If we are truly desirous of developing our relationship with God, we need to foster a comfort with and a desire for quiet in our lives.  There are many means toward this end, yet a simple but very effective one is to create small pockets of quiet in our lives - by taking a quiet walk in a nearby park or around the neighborhood, or by sitting quietly at our desk for a moment or two, or by doing nothing more than driving home with the radio turned off - not to be quiet with our thoughts, but simply to be quiet.

 Not all the noise in our lives, however, stems from the world outside us.  There is also the noise that arises in our inner world: the voice within us that incessantly comments, speculates, judges, compares and complains; or our mind that incessantly revisits the past or rehearses a possible future through our imagination.  When we become consciously attentive to a thought, we become aware not only of the thought itself but also of ourselves aware of the thought.  We thus sense a conscious presence - our deeper self - beneath the thought.  Surprisingly, the result of this is that the thought loses its power over us and quickly subsides.  The thought has no meaning for us and quickly vanishes.  We thus experience a discontinuity in the mental stream - a gap of what Buddhists call 'no mind.'  At first, the gaps will be short, a few seconds perhaps, but gradually they will become longer.  When these gaps occur, we will experience an inner stillness and peace.  With practice, this sense of stillness and peace will deepen.  It is the pervasive quiet we yearn for.

 Written by: Br. Charles Jackson, S.J., Associate Director 

A Harvest of Wholeness

As we wend our way through the waning days of summer, it may seem that we have our gaze focused in two directions at once—one longing look back at the days of warmth, celebration, and seemingly all-too-brief relaxation that remind us of the fruitfulness of life and the earth; and another anticipatory look that guides our thoughts to the upcoming season of harvest, when the quiet march to winter is brightened by the gathering of the riches of our work and that of our communities. Yet we know our life is not lived in the past or the future, but only in the power of the present moment. What is it that we hold in this ‘space between?’

In the tradition of the Old Testament, the Sabbath was a time of rest each week, a day in which the preoccupations of work and society were set aside to acknowledge the gifts of God and to rest in the knowledge of life’s ultimate abundance. After a ‘week of years’ (6), the land was to be left fallow for the 7^th year, as a Sabbath rest for the earth. After a ‘week of Sabbath years’ (7), the 50^th year was a time in which everyone and everything rested—indebted lands were returned to their ancestral owners, indentured servants were freed, and the equality of all within the society was reaffirmed. This cycle of cycles acknowledged the deep-seated human need for periods of rest, but also for a sense of restitution or equilibrium in life and society.

Perhaps as we move into the concluding months of 2011, we might adopt a bit of the Jubilee spirit, recognizing the need we have to enter into days of diminishing light and lowering temperatures with an inner awareness of the personal and social rhythms that can encourage us to balance the fecundity of summer energy and the limiting interlude of winter. We need not simply “load our harvest into barns” and batten down the hatches for storms or long, chilly nights. We can affirm this ‘space between’ as an invitation to welcome equanimity, to search for those aspects of our communal life which promote generosity, mutuality, and bonds that nurture our common future—rather than merely ‘waiting-out’ the time between visions of beaches, mountains, or family excursions, and the first, tentative nudging of spring growth and a welcoming breath of warming air. Our Jubilee will not be a comprehensive religious, legal, and political redistribution of resources and relationships, but it can offer us an opportunity to realize that the cycles of life, like the cycles of nature, thrive when we allow the ‘space between’ to blossom with its own vitality and promise.   

Written by: Fr. David C. Robinson S.J., LIS Associate Director

I Was a Stranger

We are all familiar with the famous lines of Jesus from Matthew's Gospel: "I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me..." (Mt. 25:35).  Of course, Jesus is not speaking of direct ministry to himself. Rather, he states that "just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me." (Mt. 25:40) Perhaps we have occasionally felt a twinge of regret that we have not responded often enough to God's family with the simple gestures of care which are highlighted in this gospel passage. However, as Jesus emphasizes repeatedly to the disciples, the call of God is not to look backward, but to be awake to what is inviting us in the immediacy of the present moment.

Contemporary culture praises the months of summer as a time to kick-back, grab-the-gusto, and indulge ourselves. Certainly, relaxation and family fun are values we need to cultivate in a world all-too-given to the excesses of schedules and exploding calendars. Nevertheless, during the times of enjoyment, we can keep both eyes and hearts open to the sudden strangers in our midst. A casual invitation or unexpected occasion can provide us with a miraculous opportunity to offer a moment of nourishment or belonging to someone we might readily pass by without even a glance.

Last month, I was invited by a friend to accompany a group of middle-school students on a class outing to HomeBoy Industries and the MOCA exhibit of Art in the Streets in Los Angeles. The majority of these students come from complex and difficult family and social environments, not unlike the gang-family at Homeboy, or the artists whose works are on display at MOCA. Dealing with cognitive and behavioral challenges, these students are not the ones invited to participate in field trips or school outings. They are the 'strangers' in their own schools. There were certainly enough complications and nay-sayers to torpedo the whole project, but a handful of volunteers were inspired to take the risk, and to accompany these students on what was for most their first off-campus school activity.

As might be expected, there were delays, glitches, and occasional misunderstandings. Yet, it could not be denied that something transformative had taken place. One boy embarked on a photo-shoot throughout the day, capturing people and geography in colorful and creative ways. Another student, semi-autistic, began the excursion sitting by himself at the back of the bus, and not interacting with his classmates. By mid-day, he was immersed in the group, and creating his own photo-narrative of his experiences.  This was a collective of strangers, on the way to discovering the meaning of community. They are now putting together a video/DVD of their adventures, gathering their insights and inspirations, to be shared with families and the wider school community.

Were there projects and unfinished work, or the call of summer relaxation, that beckoned the faculty, staff counselors, and volunteers who journeyed with this hopeful band of strangers? Yes. Were there some who only saw the difficulties and breaches of schedule that inevitably occurred? Yes. Was there, nonetheless, a breakthrough experience that pointed to the truth Jesus taught so many generations ago--What we do for the strangers among us, we do for him and all the people of God? Most emphatically, yes!

We, each and all, are met on our ordinary paths by the faces of the ones who need just a bit of nourishment, something to lessen their inner thirst, or a welcome home to a world that no longer labels them strangers. What a miraculous way to share a portion of our summer days.

Written by: Fr. David C. Robinson S.J., LIS Associate Director