My experience with the Spiritual Exercises
We still tease my brother Ed about his response to a TV reporter who asked him about the Gus Macker basketball tournament. He’d been attending for years and had recruited a bunch of new teams that season. When the camera found him, he said: “It was great. It was neat. It was really great.” He must have had something more articulate in him!
I’ve recently been walking in Eddie’s shoes. The few times anyone has asked me about my experience with the 19th Annotation, I’ve managed equally uninspired answers. At least I didn’t use the word “neat” — though I also didn’t have the stress of a TV camera.
It was "neat"?
So why is it so hard to say something coherent about my experience with the Exercises?
Part of it is that I’m embarrassed by my blessings. But lest you read that as overactive modesty, I’ll also confess that I feel a little sorry for everyone else who has ever completed or will complete the Exercises because my experience was singularly beautiful.
I recognized this feeling from somewhere. After my daughter was born, our childbirth educator organized a reunion for all the couples and babies in our cohort. My husband and I arrived with our adorable baby strapped to my chest like a badge of honor. We milled around, cooing and fussing over all the other babies, very deliberately trying to reassure the other parents that we understood their children had equal dignity and worth to our obviously most beautiful child. We knew they probably resented us — she was so clearly unrivaled in cuteness and intelligence — but we genuinely wanted them to be happy with their families.
Eventually, we lined up all the babies for a group photo. My husband and I probably should have excused ourselves before it was taken so the other parents wouldn’t have to suffer the comparison, but we didn’t think of it at the time.
Some weeks later we got the film developed, but we could not find our daughter in the photo. “Where is she? Wait — is that her? No… is that baby her? Oh, there she is!”
We seriously could not distinguish the cuteness. Such adorable babies, all of them. But that night at the party: we had been honestly embarrassed by the exceeding loveliness of our girl.
The exceeding loveliness of my experience
My husband and I laughed about that story again recently. When he asked what made me dig up the photo, I explained that the memory captures exactly how I feel about my experience with the 19th Annotation. “I’m sure my experience was so much cuter than anyone else’s.” He didn’t ask for more detail, but he understood what I was trying to say about being so lavishly blessed. And I was grateful.
I think I’m also slowly getting comfortable with owning the particularity of God’s love for me. I keep expressing embarrassment, and that’s real, but I’m moving toward acceptance. Jesus looking at me, and me returning his gaze.
There’s a line from Camus’ The Plague that keeps surfacing for me. It’s something I read almost thirty years ago in college: “In times of plague, love lost its egoism.” That feels fitting here. During the years when I was just hanging on in hope but plagued by desolation, I couldn’t allow myself to be loved by God personally, particularly, intentionally — because I felt so genuinely unworthy of it. Now, on the other side of the Exercises, I can’t deny the colorful, funny, particular ways that I am loved by God and by a vibrant community of saints.
Such embarrassing grace: me and you and the saints, all lined up together on a sofa. Indistinguishable in cuteness, but each one recognized and cherished.