This Easter season, I attended a convention of Mission Formation Officers within the Jesuit College Community; I used to be within the organizing committee. As I watched the committee’s year-long work lastly come collectively, enhanced by the power and keenness of the members, I felt the promise of the long run and the paschal pleasure. Even now, weeks later, I am having fun with the grace. However I am additionally working by way of that torpid feeling that inevitably happens when a spirit-filled week involves an finish. I’m wondering if the disciples felt this manner after they’d that “excessive retreat” after seeing Jesus up shut on the highway to Emmaus after which seeing Him go away them once more.
A couple of years in the past, in my second submit on this web site, I wrote a few sensible Jesuit priest who grew to become an instance for me of what deep contemplation and intimate relationship with God appeared like in apply. Throughout the convention, surrounded by ministers each Jesuit and obsessed with persevering with the mission of each the Catholic Church and the Society of Jesus, I as soon as once more felt the presence of Johnny Edwards, SJ, in addition to a number of others who had gone earlier than me. I shortly realized that lots of the members additionally remembered the information and classes that each the Jesuits and people steeped in non secular apply had imparted upon them. Each dialog I had about missions appeared to replicate what every of us had realized from another person earlier than.
As we head into the ultimate days of the Easter season, I’m nonetheless doing my finest to maintain my dedication to lean deliberately in my friendship with God. And in an actual, tangible manner, I felt that God was again in each the individuals who had journeyed with me in life and those that had gone earlier than me in dying. Though I can not ask a number of of my mentors for steerage and counsel, I really feel robust of their knowledge and powerful of their assist, and it connects me greater than ever to the Risen Jesus.
Generally I want I may really feel what the apostles felt at Pentecost. Regardless of how terrifying it sounds, I may really feel a violent rush of air the place I sat and see tongues of fireplace above my head and the heads of these round me. I can do not forget that the phrases that got here out of my mouth weren’t my very own however the phrases of the Spirit that declared in a manner that enabled all to listen to the excellent news.
Then I feel that typically the Spirit comes by way of raging wind and fireplace, and typically the Spirit is available in a quiet whisper that spreads from coronary heart to coronary heart. The expertise of being amongst my colleagues in Ignatian schooling, together with the true presence of these we love and have misplaced, was a quiet whisper for all of us to proceed working earnestly.
