Brendan Hurley, S.J.

The Stream Of God's Love

Father Hurley is director of Saint Francis Xavier House of Prayer in Baltimore, MD.

Last summer nearly 20 years after my novitiate long-retreat I returned to Wernersville, PA to retrace my first steps through the Spiritual Exercises, recall the 19-year odyssey that followed and to open my heart to be directed into the future. Ignatius of Loyola saw tertianship as a return to the ‘scuela del affecto’ after the many years of ‘diligent and careful formation of the intellect’. After a rich diet of studies and apostolic work both in the US and abroad I felt eager to come away for that month to spend time with the Lord. Underneath that eagerness was the private desire to be “knocked off” my horse of complacency so as to experience a radical conversion of heart. That had not happened in the novitiate and this time I was going to “do it right”.

The earth did not quake all around me nor did I fall down blind. Instead, the trickling stream of God’s love, always running through but often skipped over in my life, began to wash away the scales from my eyes. As Jesus hangs on the cross He cries. He cries not for himself. He cries for me, who would single-handedly strive to “do it right”. Feeling the tears fall upon me at the foot of the cross I am moved to feel all that I have done and will do that brings Jesus to that cross. He suffers such solitude to show me the depths to which love can reach, that love can reach to me.

Ignatius writes of Jesuits in tertianship, “that when they themselves have made progress they can better help others to progress for glory to God our Lord.” I am more compelled these days to give more freely of the gift that I have been given.