Many of you probably know
the story of St. Ignatius Loyola, whose feast day we celebrated in July—how an ambitious,
vainglorious young man in the service of the king found himself in 1521 leading
the defense of Pamplona against the most powerful army in Europe; how he
refused to surrender in the face of the most desperate odds; how a cannonball
shattered his leg as his army collapsed. You may have heard about how Ignatius
was carried back to Loyola—for two excruciating weeks over mountainous
terrain—to his ancestral home, where, while recovering from his wounds, he had
a “conversion” experience while reading the Life of Christ and
the Book of the Saints.
You can visit the room where it happened—it
is called the Chapel of the Conversion. Except that name is a misnomer. True,
Ignatius’ conversion began there, but it did not end there. Other Christians
may describe their conversion experiences as having occurred at a specific
moment. They may even pinpoint the exact date and time. But Catholics don’t
generally think about it that way. For most of us conversion is a process, a
series of moments, of advance and setback, and the process lasts a lifetime.
That was certainly true for Ignatius. He had resolved in his sickbed to serve
his earthly king no more, but rather, to follow the King of Kings. So he set
out to rival the greatest saints through extreme feats of prayer and
fasting—and nearly killed himself in the process. Ignatius was sincere in his
desire to become a new man when he left Loyola, but he was still pretty much
what he had always been—willful and ego-driven.
It was not until he reached Manresa, a
small town on the River Cardoner—where he was so distraught from the lack of
progress in his new life that he even contemplated suicide—that he finally gave
up his will to a higher power. At the banks of the Cardoner, he told God, in
effect: “I give up. I have done all I can. I have tried everything. I’m handing
it over to you, to do with it what you will.” And that’s the moment things
really started to change. In the days that followed, Ignatius’ eyes were opened
to mystical visions of God and creation that would nourish and inspire him for
the rest of his life. At Pamplona, he had refused to surrender and lost the
battle. At Manresa, he surrendered at last and won the war.
There is a big lesson in that: We are not
in ultimate control of our faith journeys, any more than we control our
ultimate destinies. It’s true that we have to put in the time and effort—God
can do little for us if we are unwilling to cooperate. But Christianity is not
a self-help group; it’s a God-help group. As long as Ignatius continued to act
out of his grandiosity—out of the belief that he was the origin and destination
of everything—then it didn’t matter which king he served. Yet when he finally
began to act out of gratitude—out of the acknowledgement that God is the origin
and destination of everything—then all things became possible. Indeed, things
came to be that Ignatius could never have imagined—like a worldwide company of
men and their lay colleagues laboring today to advance the kingdom of God on
nearly every continent and in every conceivable kind of good work, including
the many schools mentioned in this issue.
“Put to death, then, the parts of you that
are earthly,” St. Paul told the Colossians. “Stop lying to one another,
since you have taken off the old self with its practices and have put on the
new self, which is being renewed, for knowledge, in the image of its creator.”
Ignatius surely loved those words and would have seen his own experience in
them, just as surely he would have seen his younger self in the words “vanity
of vanities, all is vanity.” To all that he might have added this admonition, a
lesson forged in the crucible of his lifelong conversion: Stop lying to
yourself too. The One who is the way and the life is also the truth. And the
truth will set you free.
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