"The Final Word of Ignatius"

The following is the concluding section of the homily preached by Fr. General Adolfo Nicolas, S.J., at the Eucharist celebrated on July 12, 2009, at the Ateneo de Manila High School Covered Courts, on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the return of the Jesuits to the Philippines. The prayers and readings of the Eucharist were drawn from the Mass for the Feast of St. Ignatius. In a few simple and deeply personal sentences, Fr. General powerfully lays bare the heart of Ignatius' life and continued challenge to us, who dare to call him our patron and father. Happy feast to all!


"And the final word of Ignatius has always been: Give it all or go your way.

There is a poem of the Sufi mystic Rumi that says--and I paraphrase:
'This is the festival of love.
Give it all.
Or look for another festival.'

I am sure Ignatius could have made this poem his own if he had known it.

When I was elected General, I felt this was the last chance the Lord was giving me to finally 'Give it all.' I never contemplated the possibility. As the day approached and I began to see that things could get complicated, I was convinced I could easily decline and withdraw.

But when the hour came, I could not flee. Even now I am not sure I did the right thing accepting. But I felt deep down in my heart that this was the last call. You take it, or miss the flight of your life. It was time to give, time to love and serve, time to be grateful for everything received, time to give back, or rather, to let the Lord take back.

But this is not only relevant for the dramatic instant of being elected General. This is the call we all go through every time we approach the Lord with an open heart.

We might decide not to listen or to go on singing our own song. But the Lord is there giving, calling and waiting for us to say the final YES, the Ignatian YES, the YES that will finally make a difference.

One hundred fifty years is a good time to become aware of the fire that has kept the Province alive and creative and warm. But it also the time to realize that Lord is giving us another 150 years--on the condition that we say wholeheartedly the Ignatian YES and are willing to die as many times as our predecessors did . . . for the sake of the life of the Filipino people, of Asia, of the world.

Our imperfection, visible or invisible (although never invisible to our own selves) is our title of pride, as Paul would say. It is the best vehicle to share with people the ever life-giving goodness and mercy of God. We are not servants of a calculating and mean God, but of the life-giving God who can give life even to dead bones."

Adolfo Nicolas, S.J.
Superior General of the Society of Jesus
12 July 2009

Mourning Michael Jackson?

These past two days, I have contributed my modest share to the unprecedented spike in sales of Michael Jackson music and to the dramatic increase in Internet activity connected to him. I have been watching old music videos. I haven’t seen—or even thought of--the Black and White video in over twenty-two years, but now I find myself watching it repeatedly during my free moments—as I have various reincarnations of Billie Jean, Beat It and Say, Say, Say. Beat It and We are the World have my been on my Ipod since I got my first Ipod five years ago, and David Cook’s version of Billie Jean since last year, but in the past couple of days, Man in the Mirror, Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough, She’s Out of My Life, and, of course, Black and White have joined their company.

Last night, I went to Mass and dinner with a group of Filipino priests and sisters. But at the bus stop, on the bus ride to the Collegio Filippino and on the return trip to the Curia after Eucharist, my Michael Jackson Ipod playlist was playing over and over again. It seemed a bit strange to be listening to Michael Jackson as Rome ancient and modern passed before my eyes.

"What am I doing?" I asked myself. I actually didn't know.

When I got back to the Curia later that evening, I had to squeeze into a tiny elevator with two tall and amply built American Jesuits who got off on the floor before mine. I had taken my earphones off to engage in the normal friendly chat. As they alighted and before the elevator doors closed, one of them said in parting, “You can go back to listening to Michael Jackson now.” I was a tad embarrassed. It felt somehow like being found out. A fifty-year-old priest listening to Beat It (which the sharp ears of my companion apparently detected from my dangling earphones) seemed a trifle unseemly, for some reason.

“I’ve been mourning,” I managed to quip back before the elevator doors closed.

Is that what this is: mourning? And if so: for whom?

Maybe “mourning” is too melodramatic a word. I’ve noticed a similar thing happen to me when Jesuits die. People you live with and take for granted as part of the landscape are suddenly gone, and all of a sudden, it’s like you see them for the first time, and realize how good and gifted these men were. So, in a similar way, the stark realization that the King of Pop is gone forever has launched me into a retrospective review of his work, and I find myself almost shocked into realizing some things that I’ve somehow always known, but, like everyone else, kind of forgot in the course of the bizarre, repugnant circus of his later life: that this is wonderful music, complex, rich, and utterly enjoyable; and he was a great and dazzlingly gifted musician and performer, original in an epoch-defining way.

And so, I suppose there is an element of mourning pervading all this: sadness that an artist who gave the world such delight should have been so deeply unhappy and ended up this way, a cautionary tale about our capacity for self-destruction. Sadness too about this perverse tendency in me, and perhaps in others, to appreciate things or people only when they are gone. As Michael Jackson sang (and I quote this from memory):

Now I know that love’s not possession,
And now I know that love can’t wait.
Now I know that love needs expression—
But I learned too late.
--She’s Out of My Life

But I think the point that really hits me is that I am revisiting songs that I never really listened to that closely when they were new. I don’t think I ever owned a single Michael Jackson record or cassette. And so the mysterious thing is: how do I know all these songs? I know the riffs, the lyrics, the vocal inflections, where the musical interludes should be. I am proud to say I never owned a record of Ben, and yet I am embarrassed to admit that I can sing the lyrics practically by heart. How did I end up memorizing the lyrics of She’s Out of My Life (which came out when I was a senior in college)—including my favorite phrase about “damned indecision and cursed pride”? How is it that Say, Say, Say, Beat It, Billie Jean, Rock with You, We are the World are all burned into some part of my internal hard drive, all filed in the folder “Old Favorites”? I can even sing the first part of You Are Not Alone, which came out, I think, in the early ‘90’s, by which time I had already stopped listening to popular music.

The only convincing explanation I can think of is that this was music that was so intertwined with my life world in the ‘70’s and ‘80’s. To put it more simply, Michael Jackson’s music was the soundtrack of those years. His music came at me from everywhere: from the FM radio we listened to at home or while driving to and from the Ateneo; from the MTV’s I watched on TV; from the parties and the programs that were part of my teens and twenties. It was like the air. It surrounded you, and you breathed it in, hardly aware you were doing so.

So his music was intertwined with my youth, and the pleasure his music brought underscored and enhanced the heedless, unnoticed joy of being young.

And so, if there is an element of mourning, I suppose there is a bit of mourning for one’s irretrievably lost youth. The day Michael Jackson died, I read somewhere, the ‘80’s died. He is gone; those years and all they represent are gone; the world and I have grown old.

But lest that sound too maudlin and self-indulgent, I hasten to add that that the tinge of sadness is just that: a tinge. Mostly what I have experienced in my return to MJ music is pleasure. And gratitude: for good music, for the technology that makes access to it so effortless, and for the way that music brings back a time that, I realize now (again: the theme of not being present to one's own life as it happens!), was unburdened with regret, filled with possibilities, and uncomplicatedly happy. That Michael Jackson lives on in his music, and that there was such a time in my life are more than enough to assuage the sadness.

Holy Thursday Reflection, 9 April 2009

BLOOD COVENANT

"'Then he took the cup, and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them saying, "Drink of it, all of you; for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins."' Have we done it so often that we have forgotten to be shocked by it?

When Jesus holds up the cup and offers what is in it as the fluid of forgiveness, he is not talking to people with a short list of minor sins. He is talking to people who will turn him in, who will scatter to the four winds at the first sign of trouble, and who will swear that they never knew him. He is talking to people who should have been his best friends on earth, who will turn out not to have a loyal bone in their bodies, and he is forgiving them ahead of time, as surely as if he had said, 'I know who you are. I know you will not be innocent of the blood in this cup, but I will not let that come between us. Look, here, I bless it. I make it my gift to you. Let it mean life to you, not death. Let my life become your life, through the blood of this covenant.'

The death cannot be overlooked, but it is the life that is being offered, the life that rushes out of that cup like a spring of living water. It is the new covenant and the last one--new because it is offered to us fresh each day and last because there is nothing more that God can say or do. This is as close as God can get: blood kin, indissoluble union, friend bound to friend for life, forever. 

When we lift the cup to our lips and drink, we accept the gift, renewing the covenant and reminding ourselves that we do not live for ourselves alone. We are possessors of a double life, having taken our friend's life and nature into ourselves. Inside of us God rides our bloodstream straight to our hearts where the covenant is written: I shall be your God and you shall be my people."

--Barbara Brown Taylor

Holy Week Reflection, 8 April 2009

JUDAS AND JESUS

"Whatever Judas's degree of guilt and whatever his motive, it is extremely important to note that Jesus identifies his betrayer by feeding him. Not by turning over the table and casting him out. Not by tying him to his chair so he cannot carry out his plan, but by feeding him--dipping a morsel into his own cup and giving it to Judas, whose feet he has just washed.

Knowing who Judas is and what he is about to do, Jesus does not throw him out. He bathes hm and feeds him, which means that Judas is never--never--excluded from the circle of friends. He is included until he excludes himself.

Jesus went on giving himself away to the one who would give him away, because his faithfulness did not depend on theirs. When he dipped the morsel in his cup and handed it to Judas, he not only revealed who Judas was, he also revealed who he was. The one who feeds his enemies--who goes on treating them as friends--loving them to the end."

--Barbara Brown Taylor

Holy Week Reflection, 7 April 2009

EVEN PETER, EVEN US

"Peter said a number of important and good things but he also said some very foolish things. Here is what Peter said to Jesus after the Last Supper: 'Even if I must die with you, I will not deny you.'

Have you ever disgraced yourself like that? Of course you have; we all have. Think how many times you and I have said, 'I would never do what that other person is doing. I would never lie, steal, eavesdrop, hit and run, cheat on an exam, slap my child or drive drunk . . .,' whatever.

Now here is a question for us. How did this episode get saved by the Church? It could have easily been suppressed. Why wasn't it? Here's the reason. Peter himself wanted it to be there. Peter wanted the church to remember.

Until the cock crowed, Peter had never really looked into himself. He had never known what he was capable of. He had not seen his dark side clearly. He had believed his own words. Now he is unmasked, not only in the sight of the Lord, but in his own sight.

And so we come to Easter morning. "Go and tell his disciples and Peter that he is going before you to Galilee; there you will see him, as he told you." (Mark 16:2-7)

. . . and Peter! Have you ever heard anything more wonderful than that? All the disciples had failed Jesus, but Peter had failed him the most, because he had been the biggest braggart of them all. Yet it is Peter who received the message of the Resurrection specifically, by his own name. We can translate the Greek to read, 'even Peter!'

Sometimes people speak of what happened in terms of Peter's sin being forgiven. That's true, of course. But it isn't really strong enough."

--Fleming Rutledge

Holy Week Reflection, 6 April 2009

THE PROPHET MARY (John 12:1-11)

"No one notices that Mary has gone until she comes back holding a slender clay jar in her hands. Without a word she kneels at Jesus' feet and breaks the neck of the jar, so that the smell of spikenard fills the room--a sharp scent somewhere between mint and ginseng.

When Mary stood before Jesus with that pound of pure nard, for a moment--just for a moment--it could have gone either way. She could have anointed his head and everyone there could have proclaimed him a king. But she did not do that. When she moved toward him, she dropped to her knees and poured the salve on his feet, which could mean only one thing. The only man who got his feet anointed was a dead man, and Jesus knew it. 'Leave her alone,' he said to those who would have prevented her. 'Leave her alone.'

So Mary proceeded to rub his feet with ointment so precious that its sale might have fed a poor family for a year, an act so lavish that it suggests another layer to her prophecy. There will be nothing prudent or economical about the death of this man, just as there has been nothing prudent or economical about his life. In him, the extravagance of God's love is made flesh. In him, the excessiveness of God's mercy is made manifest."

--Barbara Brown Taylor

Holy Week Reflection, 5 April 2009

THE VOICE OF LOVE

"By noon he was panting on a cross, receiving the fury of those whose values he had offended. They worked things he had said to them into their insults, so that his own words came back at him like rocks. Even those who were crucified with him got in on the act. So they insulted him too, filling his ears with filth and hate while he strained--strained--to hear the voice of love that had sustained him all his life. If there were ever a day he needed to hear it--but there was no sound from heaven, no sound at all.

"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" It was all he had left in him, and when it came out of him he died. 

Why him, why this, why today? I wish I knew. All I know is that, because of it, none of us ever has to feel what he felt again. Because he was alone, and most forsaken by God, we have this companion who has been there and will be there with us. If we say, 'Where are you, God? I'm all alone here,' he said it first. 

Jesus died talking to his Abba, who would not talk back to him. In his suffering, he is the comfort of those who have no comfort. In his abandonment, he is the God of those who have no God. Hearing no voice of love, he cried out, making a sound that--for many--became the voice of love."

--Barbara Brown Taylor