Parish: 'the thought' - July 16, 2019

July 16, 2019

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A Call To Depth

Carissimi:

As Saint Ignatius Day approaches, I want to share with you the recently promulgated Four Universal Apostolic Preferences of the Society of Jesus for the coming ten years. It’s going to take five installments!

These preferences are important for Jesuits and their partners throughout the world, for our collaboration with each other at St. Ignatius, and for our own personal growth as contemplatives in action. As Fr. General has written:

"The Universal Apostolic Preferences are orientations, not priorities. A priority is something that is regarded as more important than others; a preference is an orientation, a signpost, a call. Preferences are not just about doing but about being; they involve our entire life."

The preferences are more than a call to do more good things. They are a call to depth ; to understand the context in which we are living globally, nationally, locally; and to discern together not only what we are called to do, but who we are called to be.

We aren’t do-gooders offering services and expertise. We aren’t selling anything. We are striving to be Companions of Jesus who continue the mission of Jesus—to walk with others in all their sorrows and joys in the hope that others will choose to walk with us.

The Jesuit way of proceeding is rooted in the transformative experience of the Spiritual Exercises and is marked by disciplined creativity, calm passion, experience-based reflection, determined compassion, intellectual rigor, humor, and common sense.

More to come

From the Church Around the World...

Dear Sisters and Brothers...

Letters to the American church from Christians around the world.

Much of the New Testament is actually other people's mail.

Read the ancient biblical letters carefully and you’ll find what still fills envelopes today: thank-you notes, appeals for money, travel updates (paired with excuses for not visiting sooner), and even requests to send along items left behind on previous visits: “When you come, bring the cloak that I left with Carpus at Troas, also the books, and above all the parchments,” writes the author of 2 Timothy.

These letters—affectionate, critical, encouraging, or exasperated—also evidence an intimacy among the members of the early church that transcended political borders. Even their frustration with each other points to the kind of crazy-making that only comes from family: “I have been a fool! You forced me to it,” Paul writes to the church in Corinth.

What would it be like if churches around the world still wrote letters like that to each other today? If we’re honest, most Christians in the U.S. don’t have much of a relationship with our global siblings. And to the extent we have communicated with Christians in other countries, we have far too often been the ones talking.

So we invited Christians from around the world to write letters addressed to the church in the U.S.; the subject matter was entirely of the authors’ choosing. We received letters, which we’ve reprinted here, from India, Honduras, Pakistan, France, Argentina, Kenya, South Africa, and the Wakka Wakka nation in Australia. Like the New Testament epistles, they offer a mix of pastoral advice and prophetic challenge—and a window into the global body of Christ. —The Editors READ MORE