When the Story Ends in Death
Chapter 10: The Ignatian Myth & Narrative Project
In the Third Week of the Spiritual Exercises, we are invited to contemplate the suffering and death of Jesus the Christ. The grace that Ignatius suggests we pray for is “sorrow, compassion and shame because the Lord is going to his suffering for [our] sins.” (SE 193)
The great Canadian Jesuit John English notes in his classic text Spiritual Freedom: From an Experience of the Ignatian Exercises to the Art of Spiritual Guidance that this week and the following may be considered the “‘unitive way,’ for the grace being sought is union with Christ, first in suffering and then in glory.” This is the moment “when we move out of ourselves toward Christ in much the same way Jesus moved out of himself all through the Passion. Jesus gives himself for others; he forgets himself.” (p. 218)
And at this point, you may be saying, “Okay—hold up. I didn’t ask for a theological treatise. I thought we were getting something about myth.”
Fair enough.
As we’ve moved through this Ignatian myth and narrative project, we’ve looked at Jesus the Christ as our mentor figure—our proverbial Gandalf the Gray or Glinda the Good Witch—who is tasked with showing us how to navigate the so-called “upside-down world.” Our friend and mentor, Jesus, invites us to live in a way and in a place that we’d not previously thought to consider. And in so doing, our gifts and talents, our fears and anxieties, are tested. We’ve walked that road of trials; we’ve had our fun and games.
But now, as we enter Holy Week, we prepare to watch our friend and mentor die. We know it’s coming. We know that we’ll be left alone, that we’ll helpless and pained as we witness the inevitable. And then what?
To be honest, for as much as I’ve planned this miniseries on myth and narrative (read: not at all), this week is a bit off script. Because as I was reflecting on what to approach and how to approach it, my old friend and long-time spiritual director, Fr. Jim Bowler, SJ, passed away.
Jim, for me, has been a key guide through my own proverbial upside-down world, the one who has helped me to hear the call to adventure of my vocation and discern how to respond. He told me in late fall last year that he was sick, that things didn’t look good. I saw him in January for what we both knew would be the last time. And now, earlier this week, he went home to God.
I can’t help but see his passing through the lens of Holy Week. His death, like Jesus’, was expected; we saw it coming. And yet, that foresight did not make news of his death any easier. There’s an absence in my world that will be felt for a long time. (I’ll have more to say on Jim in this week’s upcoming “Now Discern This.”)
And so, I return to this project, thinking about the loss of the mentor figure. Jim taught me much of what I know about Ignatian spirituality. But he has now stepped out of the story, so what does that mean for me? I think for all of us, whenever we reach a moment such as this, we have a responsibility to reflect on how that guide shaped our life. What legacy has been left behind and what role do we have in passing it on to another?
If the Third Week is an invitation to unite ourselves to Christ, then in this moment of darkness and death, our challenge is to discover who we’ve now become as a result of the journey we’ve been on, to see ourselves more clearly now that we’re forced to stand alone. To discover how Christ has died in us. The Third Week of the Exercises is expected in all of our stories—we all face death and suffering, whether our own or that of another.
The challenge, then, is to allow that suffering and death to affect us, to allow ourselves to be moved, to be brought to tears, to be overwhelmed by grief.
In a meditation I discovered going back through old emails this week, Jim sent me a brief page from a book he had on this particular moment in the Exercises. The chapter it’s from is called “At the Journey’s End.”
The author writes: “Prayer on the sufferings and death of Jesus can bring a person face to face with the ability to be for others. At that fragile moment, one is called to forget one’s own concerns in order to be present as best as one can be to the needs of another. The passion and death of Jesus is the school of generosity and sincerity on the spiritual journey!” (p. 290)
The death of our dear friends, our mentors, somehow makes us more available to minister to those around us. Part of me feels silly typing this—Oh, really?—but another, bigger part of me knows that Jim Bowler would be quite pleased if his death meant folks worked harder to make manifest the love of a radically inclusive God to those most in need.
So, perhaps, this moment in our story, this moment in the Exercises, is a moment of transformative grief, grief that runs deep into our own selves, our own vocation, and then flows outward toward others. And, as we hope to discover on Easter, those outflowing tears of grief somehow become redemptive. From there, something rises, something is born, something new occurs that we’d not yet dared think possible.
This is the tenth part of a limited series I’m calling The Ignatian Myth & Narrative Project. If you want to get caught up, read:
My condolences, Eric. May he rest in peace and continue helping you on your journey.