"Jesuits Revealed!" - Fr. Carl Dehne, SJ - "Advice to a Candidate"

[lifeworld1977]

To become a Jesuit is to become ordinary? Not encouraging, at least to me. I have contemplated the idea of becoming a Jesuit out of an interest in Truth. Sure, Truth hides behind ordinary things, but God - I am sick of being Ordinary.

[gadgettts]

@lifeworld1977,

The "Ordinary Life" that Fr. Dehne is speaking of, and what our Constitutions call us to, is a life grounded in the ordinary. In other words, Jesuits are always invited to look around and bring out the truth of God in the things we find, rather than to approach every locale and community with the pretense of "bringing truth to the untruthed." -- It's a very Ignatian thing.

.

Peace,

Fr. Robert

[lifeworld1977]

@gadgettts Good response, Fr. Robert, and it comes to me with all the ambiguous blessings of synchronicity.... Just this morning, after mass, I had a discussion with my priest about the meaning of "ordinary time" and his sermon was driving at this very insight.... It's hard, though, isn't it? On the one hand, to be rightly attuned to the phenomena of ordinary life is to have cultivated through a kind of spiritual discipline that I entirely lack a capacity for actively noticing what is present...

[lifeworld1977]

@gadgettts On the other hand, you can't force or fake it, because will and ego can so easily distort and obscure that to which an over-active mode of perception is attuned. This is a fundamental ambiguity that Aristotle threw together in his concept of nous.... So hard.