WEEKDAY 17 03 – Year II
The Pearl of Great Price:
Memorial of St. Ignatius of Loyola
(Jer 15:10,16-21; Ps 59; Mt 13:44-46)
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Friends, today Jesus offers two parables about the kingdom of heaven. Let’s focus on the first one: “The Kingdom of heaven is like a treasure buried in a field, which a person finds and hides again.”
Sometimes God’s love is found that way. There’s a saying: “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” Sometimes in the course of our everyday lives, something happens that vividly and surprisingly summons us to union with God. We realize, in a flash, what it’s all about. We weren’t particularly looking for it, but it found us.
That’s what Jesus is getting at today. The parables about the hidden treasure and pearl of great price remind us that God’s grace is so beautiful and eternity with him so valuable that it should move us to sell all we have to pursue it. As we walk through the fields of life, we need to be open to the inrushing of grace when we least expect it. And when it comes, to give up anything that holds it back – any selfishness or sinfulness on our part.
St. Ignatius of Loyola
The Church honours today someone who truly lived these readings, St. Ignatius of Loyola. Ignatius 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.
Once he recovered, Ignatius renounced his past ambitions and turned his relentless zeal toward the quest for holiness. Out of love for Christ, he rigorously pursued prayer, penance and contemplation. 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. In 1522, he confessed his sins, gave away all his find clothes and possessions, and left his sword at an altar in the shrine at Montserrat. Together with several companions, including Francis Xavier, with whom he shared his eagerness of whole-hearted service of Jesus and wishing to make their companionship a lasting one, they formed the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) in 1539 and brought many people to faith in the Lord.
After ordination and a variety of apostolic experiences, Ignatius brought the group to Rome, where they offered themselves in service to the pope. 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.
A pearl is produced by an oyster in which a grain of sand becomes lodged. Instead of rejecting it, the oyster begins a process of coating the particle of sand with a substance that hardens around it and forms a pearl. That process reflects what happened to St. Ignatius. A shattered leg in battle became that abrasive grain of sand that took him out of his world of possessions, prestige, power and pleasure, and slowly but surely refined his temperament to that of a man focused only on believing in and serving the Lord.
The Eucharist we celebrate and which sustained St. Ignatius is for us also a hidden treasure and pearl of great price, a source of divine life and goodness that both forgives, heals and nourishes us.
May our celebration strengthen our faith to imitate St. Ignatius in his single-minded pursuit of holiness and service of the Lord.
