Faith-Transformation-St Ignatius of Loyola

HOMILY WEEK 17 03 – Year I

Priceless Transformation –

Memorial: St Ignatius of Loyola

(Exodus 34:29-35; Ps 99; Mt 13:44-46)

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The pearl is a very interesting analogy for life in the kingdom. Fred Sherrer, in a commentary on this gospel in an earlier Living with Christissue, explains: “Unlike other precious stones, the pearl originates in a living thing, a speck of foreign matter that has found its way inside the shell. Instead of the stranger being rejected, it is wrapped in ‘swaddling clothes,’ nurtured and in the end, becomes precious beyond our wildest dreams.”

This is how our loving God deals with us. God accepts us as we are and believes in who we can become. In sending Jesus his Son to us, God forgives us and longs to transform us into the likeness of Christ. In Jesus, God takes our sin and sinfulness, wraps it in forgiveness, compassion and healing and if we are willing, transforms us into pearls of great price.

This process is what our Eastern Rite cousins call divinization. This theology holds that we are being transformed, little by little, into God’s likeness. Our faith is dynamic, alive and transformative. That is what St. Paul asserts in Romans 8:29-30: “For those whom God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son. And those whom God predestined he also called; and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified.”

In his second letter to the Corinthians (3:18), Paul describes this theology of divinization in these words, “And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.”

Today we would speak of this process in terms of a healing journey. We are all invited to be on a healing journey of faith, love and repentance. One way to assure this is happening in our lives would be to live thoroughly the Twelve Step program of Alcoholics Anonymous. At Lac St. Anne, Alberta, the largest religious gathering of Indigenous people in North America, we are transforming a sobriety pledge into Step Seven candlelight healing prayer. That Step reads, “Humbly asked God to remove all our defects of character” to which I added, “and fill us with the gifts of the Holy Spirit,” with permission from the World Headquarters of A.A. in New York for my booklet Together We Heal. That is because I believe God heals us not so much by pulling negative attitudes and painful emotions out of us, as gently pushing them out by filling us with the gifts of the Holy Spirit. As participants come for prayer, holding a lighted candle and sharing their need for healing, they are making their pilgrimage a deeper transformative faith journey of forgiveness and inner healing.

That corresponds precisely to the two-fold mission of Jesus as the long-awaited for Messiah: to redeem and to sanctify, or more familiarly, to forgive and to heal. On the cross, Jesus forgave every sin we have ever committed or will commit – we just have to repent, open ourselves up to change, and come to him to receive that forgiveness.

But that is not all – he also wants to sanctify us, to heal us of our sinfulness, that which makes us sin – our painful emotions and our defects of character. Lucie Leduc, director of Star of the North Retreat Centre in St. Albert, shared with me a new insight. In one translation of Matthew 12:15, we are told Jesus “cured them all.” A cure is deeper than a healing – we can be healed of some manifestation of illness without the illness itself being cured. Jesus came to cure us, to renew us, to make of us an entirely new creation as St. Paul exclaims (2 Corinthians 5:17). I see this as an invitation to rethink the common thought, “There is no cure for addiction,” and a source of hope.

Along with the dimension of healing and transformation, the words of Jesus present us with a major life challenge – to make the kingdom of God a priority in our lives (the treasure in the field and the pearl of great price), and to practice wholeheartedly the spirituality of letting go (selling all we have) to ensure we are living in the kingdom.

That means letting go of any attachment to anything in our lives that does not line up with the will of God for us, and that might mean a huge sacrifice for some of some sin, emotion, attitude, habit, or behaviour. It means, as Richard Rohr likes to put it, “to die before we die,” which makes sense because when we do die, we cannot drag into heaven any bad habit, sin or unfinished business – it all has to go, and the sooner the better. That becomes an experience of purgatory for us now – the pain of entering heaven, and a letting go of the things of the earth.

The Church honors today someone who truly lived these readings, St. Ignatius of Loyola. He was born into a noble Basque family in northern Spain and raised as a gentleman destined for military service. In 1521, during the defense of the citadel of Pamplona, he was struck by a cannonball. During his convalescence, he read a life of Christ and the lives of the saints and found himself filled with joy and inflamed with the desire to serve Jesus. In a moment of graced insight, he realized in this state a stark contrast with the brief pleasure followed by sadness and depression he would feel after reading worldly literature. This insight led to him later developing his theory of the discernment of spirits.

Leaving home, Ignatius spent a vigil at Mary’s altar in the Benedictine monastery of Montserrat and then lived in the nearby town of Manresa, praying and serving the poor. During this time, he had mystical experiences and illuminations that later formed the basis of his Spiritual Exercises. After a brief stay in the Holy Land, naively thinking he would evangelize the world from there, Ignatius returned to Europe to acquire a formal education. He studied theology for eleven years and thus laid the foundation for his future work. He gathered together a group of students, including Francis Xavier, with whom he shared his eagerness of whole-hearted service of Jesus.

After ordination and a variety of apostolic experiences, Ignatius brought the group to Rome, where they offered themselves in service to the pope. Wishing to make their companionship a lasting one, they formed the Society of Jesus (Jesuits). Ignatius spent the rest of his life directing the rapidly growing order, writing its constitutions and refining the Spiritual Exercises. He was canonized in 1622 and is universal patron of retreats and soldiers.

The Eucharist is for us a source of joyful transformation, as it was for St. Ignatius of Loyola. May our celebration inspire and empower us to go out to evangelize and share this good news with all we meet.