Newsletter Vol. 1 Issue 2

January 13, 2021

The Freedom to Love

This email is unlike any other you have received today. Discernment Series: Racial Justice is really like a retreat in your daily life. To center yourself, go ahead, close your other tabs. Feel free to sit in a comfortable position with your back straight. Try and take three deep breaths, and remember that we are always in the presence of God.

The First Week of the Spiritual Exercises asks us to consider that, though we are sinners born into a world broken from centuries of harmful behavior, we are still, and always, loved by God. This First Week is about freeing ourselves. As the late Dean Brackley, SJ writes, “to respond with love to a world which seems to have gone wrong in fundamental ways, a broken world, we must get free to love – we need to find a way to love better and over the long haul.”

So often, we let fear rather than freedom drive our actions. We sometimes grasp on to idols, false gods, and narratives that can warp our thinking and trick us into feeling that we are in total control. We can sacrifice ourselves to the pursuit of money, power, and status. We lose ourselves in the current of sexism, classism, clericalism, nationalism, and racism (and other “isms”) which harm both the victim and the perpetrator. As Diana Hayes writes, “the freedom and beauty of a spiritual life, closely connected with and inseparable from one’s everyday life, has been twisted and turned into a neatly defined package of teachings, beliefs, and acts that must be adhered to at all costs.”

Yet, despite all of this God still loves us. God wants to be close to us, to walk with us. Speaking of "womanist" spirituality, born out of the lived experience of black women in the United States, Hayes writes that it is a spirituality:

“grounded in their faith in a God who affirmed their worth as human beings created in God’s own image and likeness...which arises from a deep and abiding faith in a God of love, a wonder-working God who walked and talked with them, giving them the strength to persevere. This God in whom they placed not only their trust but also their very lives as slaves and second class citizens in the United States for over four hundred years was a God transformed and transforming.”

Following the path blazed by black women, we place our trust and our lives in God. We pray this week the Examen, a daily prayer that reflects on where we’ve seen God, and asks us to consider the ways in which we have and have not responded to God’s love.

This week's meditation

I give thanks to God for all that I have received today.

I ask the Spirit to be with me so that I may see myself and my day with God’s grace.

I slowly review my day from the moment I awake to this present moment. I make note of any particular emotions that stand out. I look to find where God has been present in my day. I ask myself “how have I responded to God’s presence?”

I pause to reflect on the moments where I have kept God out, whether in my thoughts, in my words, in my deeds; in what I have done, or what I have failed to do.

I ask to bring all these moments up to God and ask for God’s forgiveness. I ask God to heal and to strengthen me.

I pray for the grace to be more available to God who loves me and affirms my worthiness.

I end my Examen in praying the Our Father.