Prayer and Reflection 

For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.  

- Corinthians 13:12

St Ignatius is an example of a person whose way of looking at the world turned around to face the other way. At the start of his autobiography, which was dictated to a secretary, he says 'until the age of twenty six, he was a man given to the vanities of the world'. By the end of his days, he had realized that the world was given to him, and for a purpose. A vain person's favourite view is the one in the mirror. But, slowly Ignatius stopped looking at himself, then started to look at the world and finally came to be enthralled by the loving way God looks at the world. In his spiritual exercises, he asks people to share the 'tri-une gaze', to be with God as God sees and loves us for who we are, with all our shortcomings and blindness. Ignatius said that God taught him as a schoolmaster teaches a child. As an older person, Ignatius used to go onto the roof of his house in Rome at night and hold up his hands as a gesture of wonder at the stars. He was looking further than the mirror. 

It remains now to talk of what we feel as we learn from God Our Lord... It often happens that Our Lord moves and forces us interiorly to one action or another by opening up our mind and heart, i.e speaking inside us without any noise of voices, raising us entirely to His divine love, without our being able to resist his purpose, even if we wanted. 

- St Ignatius, Letter to Teresa Rajadell, 1536

Mr Damian Kenniff

Mission & Spirituality