This reflection is a
reflection on the First Week (or the first stage of the spiritual journey)
grace in my life. According to
IgnatianSpirituality.com, “the first week of the
Exercises is a time of reflection on our lives in light of God’s boundless love
for us. We see that our response to God’s love has been hindered by
patterns of sin. We face these sins knowing that God wants to free us
of everything that gets in the way of our loving response to him.”
The time when I most clearly
experienced the grace of the First Week, was as I was learning about the
injustices in El Salvador, about my indirect and direct role in those
injustices and as I tried to discern what to do with this information that I
had learned. In a class I took at
Augustana, I learned about the Salvadoran Civil War, the atrocities of
massacres, assassinations, rapes, and the countless other injustices created by
a lack of food, shelter, medical care, and education for Salvadorans during the
war. Then I learned about the role the U.S.
played in these atrocities through sending weapons and funds and standing idly
by while thousands were killed.
This information deeply
disturbed me in part because this was perhaps the first time that I fully
realized my country’s participation in violence, in sinfulness. I was also disturbed to learn that similar
policies of violence continue today and I am essentially complicit in this
manifestation of sinfulness. What
further disturbed and upset me were the questions about God that flooded my
head after I learned about the Salvadoran civil war. I questioned how God could have let such
horrible things happen and I questioned if God was really present in me and if
God had been present in El Salvador.
For a while I tried my hardest
to keep the information about the violence in El Salvador abstract. I tried not to think of it as anything more
than something I read in a book about a far away place where people very
different from me lived. I did
everything I could to question what I had learned in hopes that maybe it wasn’t
true. I also made every effort to keep
this information and the questions it brought up about God separate from the
rest of my life. I compartmentalized
this as academic and when I closed the books or left class I tried to leave
these things behind. This went on for a
couple of weeks and for the whole time I was in such a state of inner-turmoil,
marked by guilt and stress but I didn’t realize the source at that time.
It wasn’t very long before I
stopped struggling to ignore and reject the sinfulness that I learned about and
my complicity in that sinfulness. I came
to accept that the evils of the Salvadoran civil war happened and similar
things continue to happen today and will continue to happen until the evil of
the world is overcome by the coming of the Reign of God. I accepted that the world is a very broken
place and my heart will be broken again and again by this brokenness. What truly helped me to embrace this fact is
that I recognized that one day the Reign of God will be present on earth and we
as humans are God’s hands and feet in bringing about that Reign. There is nothing that we as humans can do of
our own will to bring about the Reign of God, but through God’s mercy, grace,
and love God will bring about that Reign on earth.
I still recognize my sin and
my complicity in many manifestations of sinfulness in the world, but I no
longer feel plagued by guilt because of this sinfulness. Guilt is such a negative feeling and leads to
little except more guilt. I can’t
honestly say that I feel completely forgiven by God for my complicit
participation in the continuing violence in the world, but I do feel moved and
motivated to work to change what I can while accepting those things that I know
I cannot change. I think that the part
of me that does not feel forgiven is the part of me that feels that I must do
something to be forgiven. Intellectually
I know that this is not true, but I still feel somewhat unworthy of God’s love
and acceptance because of my personal sinfulness and because of the sins I have
been collectively involved in. I know I
have been forgiven by God, but I do not yet feel completely forgiven, so I
still have more to receive of the First Week grace.
My professor wrote a comment
at the end of my essay. He asked, “If
God were to address you with these feelings about being “somewhat unworthy of
God’s love and acceptance because of my personal sinfulness” etc., what might
God say to you?”
I know exactly what God would
say. Well… really I don’t know exactly
what God would say to me but I think I have a pretty good idea of what God
would say to me about all this.
For some reason I went all
out in imagining how God would respond to me.
I imagine God and I sitting
down in a nice cozy place, in a couple of comfy chairs next to a warm crackling
fire. We each have a drink- I have a cup
of hot chocolate and God is drinking tea (I’m not sure why but it just seems
that God would drink tea, but now I’m starting to wonder if really we would be drinking
some really good wine…). We begin with
small talk. “How was your day?” “Fine. And your day?”
And then the conversation
gets to the point where we both know it’s time to start talking about the thing
we are meeting to discuss. I open my
mouth to tell God what I have written in the essay above, but before I even
have the chance to say one word, God already knows all this and spares me the
task of explaining it all.
Then God says something like
this to me:
“Melissa, you’re being
ridiculous. I don’t know why you feel
unworthy and unforgiven. There is
absolutely no reason to fear that I haven’t or won’t forgive you or love
you. Of course I love you, I made
you. Of course I forgive you, my son
Jesus died for your forgiveness.”
And then Jesus walks in,
pulls up a chair to join us, and I know that it is true.
