Years ago on a pilgrimage I was speaking with a fine Catholic woman who had a delightfully self-deprecating sense of humor.  She was lamenting her own tendency to miss the ways that God was acting in her life.  “I could trip over a miracle,” she said, “and not even see it.”

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Is this true of many of us?  Might we be oblivious to a gift that God bestows with astonishing regularity in our spiritual lives?

I am referring to what St. Ignatius of Loyola calls spiritual consolation, described in the third of his First Week rules for the discernment of spirits.  In this rule he describes several kinds of experiences of consolation—some that are unmistakable and others that we might indeed trip over without noticing.

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First, Ignatius calls it consolation “when an interior movement is aroused in the soul, by which it is inflamed with love of its Creator and Lord, and as a consequence, can love no creature on the face of the earth for its own sake, but only in the Creator of them all.”

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Have you ever had an intense experience of God’s love, such that nothing else seemed to have meaning outside of him?  Not to notice such an experience of consolation would be almost impossible, and the experience would be difficult to forget.

 

Ignatius likewise calls it consolation when “one sheds tears that move to the love of God, whether it be because of sorrow for sins, or because of the sufferings of Christ our Lord, or for any other reason that is immediately directed to the praise and service of God.”

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A seminarian was once contemplating Christ’s agony in the garden.  As he watched Jesus pour out his heart to the Father, the seminarian noticed himself sweating and becoming pale.  He was frightened that he would desert Jesus at the moment of his arrest just as the apostles did.  Unexpectedly, he found himself walking up to Jesus and asking him for a pair of handcuffs.  He wanted to cuff himself to our Divine Master so that he wouldn’t be able to run away.

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It was then that the seminarian realized for the first time in his life that he truly did want to remain with Jesus in his Passion.  The conversation that followed, in which he “shed tears because of the sufferings of Christ his Lord,” as well as the impact that this time of prayer had on his relationship with Christ, were far more important than the vividness of the scene that he had imagined.

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Finally, Ignatius describes experiences of consolation that are the most ordinary: “every increase of faith, hope and love, and all interior joy that invites and attracts to what is heavenly and to the salvation of one’s soul by filling it with peace and quiet in its Creator and Lord.”

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“Every increase.”  This includes gentle consolations that we may not even recognize as such.  That the God of the universe would touch us so often in this way is enough of a miracle.  More amazing still is that such consolation is not an advanced spiritual state to which only some are privy; it is ordinary spiritual experience for anyone living a life of faith.

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My recent annual retreat began with a desire for deeper communion with God, together with a familiar fear of where such communion might lead.  On the first morning of the retreat, as I prayed near a ravine that offered a vista of the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, I realized that there was a very simple way of showing God that I trusted him and truly desired union with him: to return to the same spot the following morning.

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There I sat the next day at sunrise, awaiting the encounter.  Soon, I picked up a shadow coming from my left—undoubtedly another retreatant who had decided to invade “my” space.  Just as I was tempted to think, “What a turkey,” I realized that it was a real turkey.  A few moments later another wild turkey came from my right to rendezvous with his friend a few feet away.

I turned back to prayer for a few moments, until a much bigger shadow approached from the left.  "This one must be human," I thought, until our eyes met and I saw that his head was the kind that comes with antlers.  After inquisitively staring at me for a few moments, the deer joined his two fowl friends at the edge of the ravine.

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As I watched the nature show that God had provided, there was an interior voice that paraphrased the words of the blind man’s friends in Mark 10: “Take courage; you have nothing to fear from him.”  The experience made me willing, even eager, to return to the same spot for prayer each morning for the last six days of the retreat.

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This was one miracle I wouldn’t have to trip over to notice.

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