Taken from an article by Fr Ron Rolheiser OMI. The original can be found here
When Pope Francis launched the Holy Year of Mercy, he promised that Christians could gain a special indulgence during this year. That left a lot of present-day Roman Catholics, and even more Protestants and Evangelicals, scratching their heads and asking some hard questions: Is Roman Catholicism still dealing in indulgences? Didn’t we learn anything from Luther and the Reformation? Do we really believe that certain ritual practices, like passing through designated church doors, will ease our way into heaven?
These are valid questions that need to be asked. What, indeed, is an indulgence?
Pope Francis in his decree, The Face of Mercy, (Misericordiae Vultus), says this about indulgences:  “A Jubilee also entails the granting of indulgences. This practice will acquire an even more important meaning in the Holy Year of Mercy. God’s forgiveness knows no bounds. In the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God makes even more evident his love and its power to destroy all human sin. Reconciliation with God is made possible through the paschal mystery and the mediation of the Church. Thus God is always ready to forgive, and he never tires of forgiving in ways that are continually new and surprising. Nevertheless, all of us know well the experience of sin. We know that we are called to perfection (Mt. 5, 48), yet we feel the heavy burden of sin. Though we feel the transforming powered of grace, we also feel the effects of sin typical of our fallen state. Despite being forgiven, the conflicting consequences of our sins remain. In the Sacrament of Reconciliation, God forgives our sins, which he truly blots out; and yet sin leaves a negative effect on the way we think and act. But the mercy of God is stronger even than this. It becomes an indulgence on the part of the Father who, through the Bride of Christ, his Church, reaches the pardoned sinner and frees him from every residue left by the consequence of sin, enabling him to act in charity, to grow in love rather than to fall back into sin.
The Church lives within the communion of the saints. In the Eucharist, this communion, which is a gift from God, becomes a spiritual union binding us to the saints and the blessed ones whose number is beyond counting (Rev. 7, 14). Their holiness comes to the aid of our weaknesses in a way that enables the Church, with her maternal prayers and her way of life, to fortify the weakness of some with the strength of others.  Hence, to live the indulgence of the Holy Year means to approach the Father’s mercy with the certainty that his forgiveness extends to the entire life of the believer.  To gain an indulgence is to experience the holiness of the Church, who bestows upon all the fruits of Christ’s redemption, so that God’s love and forgiveness may extend everywhere. Let us live this Jubilee intensely, begging the Father to forgive our sins and to bathe us in his merciful ‘indulgence’’’.
What’s the pope saying here? Clearly, he’s not teaching what has been for so long the popular (and inaccurate notion) that an indulgence is a way of shortening one’s time in purgatory. Rather he is tying the idea of indulgences to two things: First, an indulgence is the acceptance and celebration of the wonderful gratuity of God’s mercy. An indulgence is, in effect, the more-conscious acceptance of an indulgence, that is, the conscious acceptance of a love, a mercy, and a forgiveness, that is completely undeserved. Love can be indulgent. Parents can be indulgent to their children. Thus whenever we do a prayer or religious practice with the intent of gaining an indulgence the idea is that this prayer or practice is meant to make us more consciously aware of and grateful for God’s indulgent mercy. We live within an incredulous, ineffable mercy of which we are mostly unaware. During the Holy Year of Mercy, Pope Francis invites us to do some special prayers and practices that make us more consciously aware of that indulgent mercy.
Beyond this, Pope Francis links the notion of indulgences to another concept, namely, our union and solidarity with each other inside the Body Christ. As Christians, we believe that we are united with each other in a deep, invisible, spiritual, and organic bond that is so real that it forms us into one body, with the same flow of life and the same flow of blood flowing through all of us. Thus inside the Body of Christ, as in all live organisms, there is one immune system so that what one person does, for good or for bad, affects the whole body. Hence, as the pope asserts, since there is a single immune system inside the Body of Christ, the strength of some can fortify the weakness of others who thereby receive an indulgence, an undeserved grace.
To walk through a holy door is make ourselves more consciously aware of God’s indulgent mercy and of the wonderful community of life within we live.
                                    

Initiation

Taken from the daily email series by Fr Richard Rohr. You can subscribe by clicking here

Passing from Death to Life Now

How do we explain the larger-than-life, spiritually powerful individuals who seem to move events and history forward? One explanation is that they have somehow been "initiated"--initiated into their True Self, the flow of reality, the great pattern, or into the life of God. Initiation experiences took specific ritual forms in every age and every continent for most of human history. They were considered central to the survival of most cultures and to the spiritual survival of males in particular.

Many cultures and religions saw the male, left to himself, as a dangerous and even destructive element in society. Rather than naturally supporting the common good, the male often sought his own security and advancement. The same could probably be said of many modern Western women, but historically, women were "initiated" by their subjugated position in patriarchal societies, by the "humiliations of blood" (menstruation, labor, and menopause), by the ego-decentralizing role of child-rearing, and by their greater investment in relationships.

For many years I have been studying, creating, and promoting men's rites of passage focusing mainly on destabilizing the ego. [1] As I am a man and have not studied women's journeys in particular, most of my comments this week will be focused on male initiation. Female readers, please use your best discretion to apply (or not) these principles to your own experience. I also want to emphasize that before you can let go of your ego, you first have to have one! The ego has an important place and role; it is simply not the whole story of who you are.

In the larger-than-life people I have met, I always find one common denominator: in some sense, they have all died before they died--and thus they are larger than death too! Please think about that. At some point they were led to the edge of their private resources, and that breakdown, which surely felt like dying, led them into a larger life. They went through a death of their various false selves and came out on the other side knowing that death could no longer hurt them. They fell into the Big Love and the Big Freedom--which many call God.

Throughout most of history, the journey through death into life was taught in sacred space and ritual form, which clarified, distilled, and shortened the process. In sacred space you can do things that would never work in secular space (e.g., male circumcision being the most common example). Since rites of passage have fallen out of favor in our consumer cultures, many people don't learn how to move past their fear of diminishment, even when it stares them down or gently invites them. I think this lack of preparation for the "passover," our lack of training in grief work and letting go, and our failure to entrust ourselves to a bigger life, is the basis and core of our culture's spiritual crisis.

All great spirituality is about letting go. Instead we have made it to be about taking in, attaining, performing, winning, and succeeding. True spirituality mirrors the paradox of life itself. It trains us in both detachment and attachment: detachment from the passing so we can attach to the substantial. But if we do not acquire good training in detachment, we may attach to the wrong things, especially our own self-image and its desire for security. Initiation is one's initial training in an essential letting go, in order to allow oneself to be reconstructed on a new foundation.

Reality is God's greatest ally; full Reality always relativizes us in a most essential way. Such an initiation into death, and therefore into life, rightly "saves" a person. Catholics call it the paschal mystery or the passion of the Christ. The word passion (patior) means to "allow" or "suffer reality." It is not a doing, but a being done unto.

Union with God, union with what is--that is to say, union with everything--has always been the final goal of any initiatory experience. One taste of the Real had to be given early in life to keep the initiate hungry, harmonious, and holy--so he could never be satisfied with anything less than what he once knew for sure!

References:
[1] The organization Illuman is now continuing the work I began with Men as Learners and Elders (M.A.L.Es), offering programs to support men in their inner work through ritual, teaching, and sharing. Learn more at illuman.org.

Adapted from Richard Rohr, Adam's Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation (The Crossroad Publishing Company: 2004), 1-5, 7-9, 29-30;
Beloved Sons Series: Men and Grief (CAC: 2005), CD, MP3 download; and
Beloved Sons Series: How Men Change (CAC: 2009), CD, MP3 download, DVD.

Life Is Hard

In my cross-cultural research on initiation rites, I have observed five consistent lessons communicated to the initiate. These lessons are meant to separate initiates from their thoughts about themselves and reattach them to who they really are. These messages are essential for a man to know experientially if he is to be rightly aligned with reality (and perhaps also for a woman, though in some cases women need to be taught the reverse first).
Life is hard.
You are not that important.
Your life is not about you.
You are not in control.
You are going to die.
I'll explore each of these in depth over the next several days, beginning with the first, "Life is hard."

Within each initiation rite I've studied, a major portion of the experience is grief work. The natural survival instinct for the male is to block suffering and pain. Somehow the young male has to be taught how to receive wounding and scarring (which was often done through circumcision) and to empathically connect with the pain of the world. In our archetypal psyche and memory, blood flowing from a man's body symbolizes death, which of course we're eager to avoid. When blood flows out of a woman's body, it points toward life, the ability to conceive and carry new life. Maybe this is part of the reason why women are not as afraid of pain as we men tend to be.

All great spirituality is about what we do with our pain. So the first lesson of initiation is to teach the young man not to try to get rid of his pain until he has first learned whatever it has to teach him. By trying to handle all suffering through willpower, denial, medication, or even therapy, we have forgotten something that should be obvious: we do not handle suffering; suffering handles us in deep and mysterious ways that ironically become the very matrix of life. Suffering--and sometimes awe--has the most power to lead us into genuinely new experiences.

As Simone Weil said, "Grace fills empty spaces but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void." [1] When life is hard we are primed to learn something absolutely central. Our wounds are God's hiding place and hold our greatest gifts. It is no surprise that a dramatically wounded man became the central transformative symbol of Christianity. Once the killing of God becomes the redemption of the world, then forevermore the very worst things have the power to become the very best things. Henceforth, nothing can be a dead end; everything is capable of new meaning. We are indeed saved by gazing upon the wounded one--and loving there our own woundedness and everyone else's too (John 3:14, 12:32, 19:37). We can dare to be mutually vulnerable instead of trying to protect ourselves and impress each other. This is the core meaning of the Christian doctrine of Trinity; the very character of God is mutual deference, recognition, and love, not self-assertion, much less domination or manipulation of the other.

The heart is normally opened through a necessary hole in the soul, what I call a "sacred wound." We see this enacted at Jesus' death: "One of the soldiers pierced Jesus' side with a lance, and out flowed blood and water" (John 19:34), which I would interpret as archetypal symbols of humanity and divinity. Our wound is the only way, it seems, for us to get out of ourselves and for grace to get in. As Leonard Cohen put it in his song, "Anthem," "There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in." Our wounds are the only things humbling enough to break our attachment to our false self and make us yearn for our True Self.

Followers of the Crucified One will pray for the grace to do what he did: hold the pain until it transformed him into the Risen Christ. If you do not transform your pain, you will almost certainly transmit your pain to others through anger, blame, projection, hatred, or scapegoating.

References:
[1] Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (Routledge: 2002), 10.

Adapted from Richard Rohr, Adam's Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation (The Crossroad Publishing Company: 2004), 32-33, 37-38, 46-47; and
Beloved Sons Series: Men and Grief (CAC: 2005), CD, MP3 download.

You Are Not Important

I think there are basically two paths of spiritual transformation: prayer and suffering. The path of prayer is taken by those rare people who consciously and slowly let go of their ego boundaries, their righteousness, their specialness, their sense of being important. In the journey of prayer, as you sink into the mystery of God's perfect love, you realize that you're nothing in the presence of God's goodness and greatness, and that God is working through you in spite of you. For many people, it is deep love which first allows them to pray. Authentic prayer is always a journey into love.

The path of suffering is the quicker path to transformation, but as I shared in yesterday's meditation, men are hard-wired to block suffering. The male psyche is, by nature, defended; we have a difficult time allowing events, circumstances, or people to touch or hurt us. Such blocking may have allowed us to survive--if you want to call it survival--the endless wars of history. But it has also restricted the male capacity to change. Most men don't change until we have to. Until economic disasters, moral or relationship failure, loss of job or health are forced upon us, our tendency is to project the incoming negative judgment somewhere else. We don't do shadow work well, because struggling with our dark side is humiliating, and we've been trained to compete and to win. When winning is the only goal, we can't admit to anything that looks like failure, or even allow basic vulnerability. We have to project weakness and failure onto others, making them the losers. Such dualistic thinking and resistance to change only guarantees more war and conflict.

Relationships, experiences, and mirroring change you much more than ideas. You cannot really do something until you have seen someone else do it. You do not know what patience is until you have met one truly patient person. You do not know what love is until you have observed how a loving person loves. We hold great power for one another--for good and for ill. Thus, rites of passage were communal, led by elders, father figures, and spiritual teachers, who could mirror the initiate instead of needing to be mirrored themselves.

Spiritual masters are not interested in social niceties or logical buildups, but in deep resonance. They say, as it were, "Deal with it. Be scandalized and shocked. Face your resistances and your egocentricity and let a greater truth unsettle you." They lead their students into a space of transformation, but they don't always lead them back immediately. They leave you alone, deliberately askew, without your usual mental protections--until you long for guidance and hopefully recognize that: 1) you are somehow the problem, 2) the answer is within you, and 3) you need help from a higher power.

It takes a wise master to teach you that you are not that important; otherwise, painful life situations have to dismantle you brick by brick, decade by decade. I suspect that the basic reason initiation died out is because there were not enough spiritual masters around. We had to settle for institutionalized priests and ministers, many of whom bore roles of outer authority without being people of any real inner authority. In other words, they were never initiated themselves.

Typically it is the prophets who deconstruct the ego and the group, while priests and pastors are supposed to reconstruct them into divine union. True masters, like Jeremiah and Jesus, are both prophets and pastors. As Yahweh said in the inaugural vision to Jeremiah, "Your job is to take apart and demolish, and then start over building and planting anew" (see Jeremiah 1:10). The only reason masters can tell you that you are not that important is because they are also prepared to affirm your infinite and unearned importance. The prophetic charism has been out of vogue for many centuries now in Western religion, thus the ego is out of control.

Every master's lesson, every parable or spiritual riddle, every confounding question is intended to bring up the limitations of our own wisdom, our own power, our own tiny self. Compare that, if you will, to the Western educational approach of parroting answers, passing tests, and getting grades, which make us think we do know what is important and, therefore, we are important. Information is seen as power, as opposed to the beginner's mind, which wisdom deems absolutely necessary for enlightenment. Jesus called it "receiving the kingdom like a little child" (see Luke 18:17). To submit to being taught means accepting the wonder and largeness of truth and our own smallness in relationship to it. Eventually we must learn to hold the paradox of our finite self held within the eternal and infinite Love.

Sacred cultures could tell individuals they were not that important because they knew they were inherently and intrinsically very important. Secular cultures like ours keep telling individuals how special and wonderful they are--and they still don't believe it--and thus have to run faster and faster! Do you see why we need some form of initiation now more than ever? We are an uninitiated society, except for those who love deeply, pray deeply, or suffer deeply.

References:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Beloved Sons Series: Men and Grief (CAC: 2005), CD, MP3 download;
Beloved Sons Series: How Men Change (CAC: 2009), CD, DVD, MP3 download; and
Adam's Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation (The Crossroad Publishing Company: 2004), 52-56.

Yours Life Is Not about You

One reason we Christians have misunderstood many of Jesus' teachings is that we have not seen Jesus' way of education as that of a spiritual master. He wants to situate us in a larger life, which he calls the "Reign of God." But instead we make him into a Scholastic philosopher if we are Roman Catholic, into a moralist if we are mainline Protestant, or into a successful and imperialistic American if we are Evangelical. Yet the initiatory thrust of Jesus' words is hidden in plain sight.

Study, for example, his instructions to the twelve disciples, when he sent them into society in a very vulnerable way (no shoes or wallet, like sheep among wolves). How did we miss this? Note that it was not an intellectual message as much as it was an "urban plunge," a high-risk experience where something new and good could happen. It was designed to change the disciples much more than it was meant for them to change others! (See Matthew 10:1-33 or Luke 10:1-24.) Today we call it a reverse mission, where we ourselves are changed and helped by those whom we think we are serving.

When read in light of classic initiation patterns, Jesus' intentions are very clear. He wanted his disciples--then and now--to experience the value of vulnerability. Jesus invites us to a life without baggage so we can learn how to accept others and their culture. Instead, we carry along our own country's assumptions masquerading as "the good news." He did not teach us to hang up a shingle to get people to attend our services. He taught us exactly the opposite: We should stay in their homes and eat their food! This is a very strong anti-institutional model. One can only imagine how different history would have been had we provided this initiatory training for our missionaries. We might have borne a message of cosmic sympathy instead of imperialism, providing humble reconciliation instead of religious wars and the murdering of "heretics," Jews, "pagans," and native peoples in the name of Jesus.

When we could not make clear dogma, moral code, or a practical war economy out of Jesus' teaching, we simply abandoned it in any meaningful sense. His training of novices has had little or no effect on church style or membership, by and large. When one throws out initiatory training, the whole latter program and plan of life is left without foundation or containment. Now we seek a prize of later salvation--instead of the freedom of present simplicity. I am told that the Sermon on the Mount--the essence of Jesus' teaching--is the least quoted in official Catholic Church documents.

However, there were always people like Francis of Assisi, Simone Weil, Menno Simons, Peter Waldo, George Fox, Catherine of Genoa, Peter Maurin, Mother Teresa, and Dorothy Day who made Jesus' Gospel their life map. They knew that lifestyle was more important than theories, intellectual belief systems, or abstruse theology. Once you know that your life is not about you, then you can also trust that your life is your message. This gives you an amazing confidence about your own small life--precisely because it is no longer a small life, it is no longer just yours, and it is not all in your head. Henceforth, you do not try to think yourself into a new way of living, but you first live in a new way, from a new vantage point--and your thinking changes by itself.

"I live no longer, not I," Paul shouted with his one daring life (Galatians 2:20). And this one-man show turned a Jewish sect into a worldwide religion. Paul allowed his small life to be used by the Great Life, and that is finally all that matters. Your life is not about you. It is about God and about allowing Life and Death to "be done unto me," which is Mary's prayer at the beginning of her journey and Jesus' prayer at the end of his.

References:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Adam's Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation (The Crossroad Publishing Company: 2004), 62-64, 66.

You Are Not in Control

To be in control of one's destiny, health, career, or finances seems to be an unquestionable cultural value. On a practical level it may be partially true, but not on the bigger level. Our bodies, our souls, and especially our failures, teach us this as we get older. We are clearly not in control. This is not a negative discovery, but a thrilling discovery of divine providence; being led, used, and guided; having an inner purpose and a sense of personal vocation; and owning one's destiny as a gift from God. Learning that you are not in control situates you correctly in the universe. You know you are being guided, and your reliance on that guidance is precisely what allows your journey to happen. What freedom and peace this can bring!

But I must warn you: initially this new empowerment will feel like a loss of power, almost a step backward. You will now need a deepening of faith to go forward. The Twelve Step programs have come to the same counterintuitive insight. You must get through that most difficult first step of admitting that you are powerless before you can find your true power. As Gerald May, one of my own teachers, so rightly said, willfulness must become willingness in the world of Spirit:

Willingness implies a surrendering of one's self-separateness, an entering-into, an immersion in the deepest processes of life itself. It is a realization that one already is a part of some ultimate cosmic process and it is a commitment to participation in that process. In contrast, willfulness is a setting of oneself apart from the fundamental essence of life in an attempt to master, direct, control, or otherwise manipulate existence. More simply, willingness is saying yes to the mystery of being alive in each moment. Willfulness is saying no, or perhaps more commonly, "Yes, but. . . ." [1]

The needed virtues in the first half of life are quite rightly about self-control; in the second half they are about giving up control. That is a major switch and why I wrote the book Falling Upward. Initiation rites attempted to give a young man the essential life messages early, even before he was fully ready to hear them. Such rites universally tried to prepare a young man for what I call the great defeat, the necessary recognition that you are not really running the show, and any attempt to run it will ruin it. The intense self-will of the autonomous ego must eventually be disillusioned with itself.

Having control is a major desire and need in the early years of life, yet many hold on to it until their last breath. Try practicing to release control early; it will make your second half of life much happier. Practice in small ways, such as contemplative prayer itself, which is habitually "consenting to God's presence and action within," as Thomas Keating puts it. Gradually you will be ready for greater surrenders to grace, until you are finally ready for the big letting-go called death.

Powerlessness was often taught by subjecting the young seeker to periods of extended silence and solitude, usually accompanied by fasting--experiments in surrender, under-stimulation, and nonperformance--so one could plug into another and deeper Source. This normally had to be done in nature, so the young man could participate in something inherently greater than himself. The young man was also trained in very practical ways--shocking to us--by various forms of trial, communal life, and hierarchy. Somehow he had to practice not always getting his own way. The lesson was too central and crucial to wait for his marriage and children, failing health, or deathbed to teach him.

Surrendering to the divine Flow is not about giving up, giving in, capitulating, becoming a puppet, being naïve, being irresponsible, or stopping all planning and thinking. Surrender is about a peaceful inner opening that keeps the conduit of living water flowing. It is a quiet willingness to trust that you really are a beloved son or a beloved daughter, which allows God to be your Father and Mother. It really is that simple, which for the human ego is very hard.

References:
[1] Gerald G. May, Will and Spirit: A Contemplative Psychology (HarperSanFrancisco: 1982), 6.

Adapted from Richard Rohr, Adam's Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation (The Crossroad Publishing Company: 2004), 67-71, 163.

You Are Going to Die

As Ernest Becker argues so compellingly in his book, The Denial of Death, the heroic projects of men are mostly overcompensations for a paralyzing fear of death, powerlessness, and diminishment. Until men move into death and live the creative tension of being both limited and limitless, he says they never find their truth or their power. As Becker shockingly puts it, we are overwhelmed that we are somehow godly and yet "gods who shit." [1] Too often, egoism, performance, ambition, and bravado in the male proceed from a profound fear of failure, humanity, and death. The heroic project never works for long, and it finally backfires into anger, depression, and various forms of scapegoating and violence. In avoiding death, a man ironically avoids life. This central insight animated the various rites of passage in primal cultures, hoping to lead men into real life early in life.

Every initiation rite I've studied had some ritual, dramatic, or theatrical way to experience crossing the threshold from life to death in symbolic form. We cannot experience rebirth, being "born again," without experiencing some real form of death first. Most "born again" churches do not seem to have recognized this. The old self always has to die before the new self can be born, which is the Passover experience we resist. In the language of John's Gospel (12:24), "The grain of wheat must die or it remains just a grain of wheat; but if it dies bears much fruit."

The initiate must be led to the edge of his normal resources, so he is forced to rupture planes and gain access to his Larger Self. Often this takes the form of solitude, silence, and suffering over an extended time, which are the only things strong enough to break our ego attachment to the false self and move us to a new level of awareness and identity.

Inside the sacred space of initiation, there were invariably ritual enactments like drowning, dipping, burying, entrance into one's tomb, all of which come together in the Pauline notion of baptism (see Romans 6:3-11). Men lay naked on the earth in ashes, which is the one obvious remnant of ancient initiation rites still practiced inside organized Christianity (still an embarrassment to some) on Ash Wednesday. There were sacred whippings and anointings for death and burial, which became the harmless slap (which we dropped) and anointing of Confirmation. The old Benedictines used to lie prostrate before the altar at their final vow ceremony, the funeral pall and candles placed over them, while parts of the requiem Mass were sung over their "dead" bodies.

Some ritual of death and resurrection was the centerpiece of all male initiation. It is probably why Jesus sought out and submitted to John the Baptist's offbeat death and rebirth ritual down by the riverside, when his own temple had become more concerned with purity codes than with transformation. It is probably why Jesus kept talking to his disciples, three times in Mark's Gospel, about the necessity of this death journey, and why three times they changed the subject (8:31-10:45). It is undoubtedly why Jesus finally stopped talking about it, and just did it, not ritually but actually. Death and resurrection, the paschal mystery, is the theme of every single Eucharist no matter what the feast or season. It takes us many seasons and even years to overcome our resistance to death.

The transformational journey of death and resurrection is the only real message. It makes you indestructible. The real life, God's life, is running through you and in you already. But allowing it to flow freely doesn't come easily. When you do, the spiritual journey really begins. Up to that moment it is just religion. Everything up to then is creating the container, but you have not yet found the contents; you are creating the wineskins, as Jesus says, but you are not yet drinking the intoxicating wine.

References:
[1] Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (Free Press: 1973), 11 et passim.

Adapted from Richard Rohr, Adam's Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation (The Crossroad Publishing Company: 2004), 8, 101-103, 173; and
Beloved Sons Series: Men and Grief (CAC: 2005), CD, MP3 download.

                                           

‘Because you give me hope’

An article by James Hanvey SJ from the ThinkingFaith.org website. The original can be found here

Dear Pope Francis, I think you are a humble man. When you read this letter you will have washed the feet of other kids like [me]. I am writing this letter because you give me hope. I know one day with people like you us kids won’t be given sentences that will keep us in prison for the rest of our lives. I pray for you. Don’t forget us. 
(Letter to Pope Francis from a young boy participating in the Jesuit Restorative Justice Initiative in a juvenile detention centre in Los Angeles)
When Jorge Mario Cardinal Bergoglio SJ emerged onto the balcony as Pope Francis, asking the people gathered in St Peter’s Square to bless him, there was a refreshing sense that something was different. His humility was evident immediately, and in the weeks since his election it has become increasingly clear that his public persona is not just part of a subtle strategy to lure us into a more sympathetic acceptance of papal and hierarchical authority; it has the character of something that is deep, interior and sincere, and it speaks to atheists and believers alike.
Even if we are still in a ‘honeymoon’ period, Francis’ impact on the Church, and especially our understanding and experience of the papacy, looks set to be very significant. Whatever struggles and disappointments lie ahead, genuine humility does not get stale. Francis himself may not be fully aware of how the Holy Spirit will inspire others through him but, just as he has done to the juveniles at the LA detention centre, he gives us hope.
Already Francis has created a fresh ecclesial climate which includes a new way of modelling leadership. He has begun to deconstruct the monarchical model of papacy and the increasingly rococo affectations that surrounded it. Both Franciscan and Ignatian ways of leading are uncomfortable with such things. If leadership is congruent with the values it professes to support, then it has freshness; it is attractive and, somehow, it allows us to imagine how we might also act in ways that are congruent and true. Genuine humility, focused on the needs and service of the other, has a freedom to change, adapt and take risks, to step out beyond the usual zones of safety and comfort. It does not worry about image or ego. Leadership which lives from compassion is not weakness, nor is it indecisive; it is another sort of generous strength. Even so, if we are not to mistake its attractiveness for a transient novelty, we need to ask about its sources: how might Francis of Assisi and Ignatius of Loyola inform this papacy and what resources do they offer the one who carries its responsibilities? I think we can identify three particular influences: an emphasis on recovering interiority, Franciscan love and Ignatian wisdom.
Interiority
St Francis and St Ignatius made Christ the primary source of their lives. Though called in different centuries with different challenges and cultures, they both understood that only in him could answers be found, creative energies released and new ways envisaged. Both are charismatic innovators: they show us how Christ is not a restriction or a limitation but an adventure for every age. Christ sets us free from the captivities of will, intellect and imagination because he remains the Truth by which we can take our bearings in the constant movement of history: this is the Truth, forever generative, that sets us free. Together, Francis and Ignatius show us that our primary responsibility is to him and faithfulness to his way alone, which makes visible new paths through the impasses that each age has to face. They teach us that if imitatio is not mere surface performance, it has to be rooted in an intimate, daily, personal friendship with Christ and service of those whom Christ loves. They illuminate the corporal and spiritual works of mercy as enactments of the Beatitudes, quietly radical acts which challenge all that imprisons the spirit or degrades human dignity. Although both great saints were men of action, they grasped the primacy of the interior life as the condition of its fruitfulness.
This is something Pope Francis always returns to in his homilies and talks. It is not just a call to piety, but a profound challenge to our frenetic culture which evacuates our interiority and wearies the soul. Constantly surfing our life, we can never possess it. If we are spiritually homeless then we are vulnerable to exploitation under the illusory promise of autonomy. Defending and developing our interiority is not only our act of resistance, it is reclaiming our freedom. St Ignatius and St Francis show us that the interior sanctuary of our life is not an empty space but a personal presence – ‘make your home in me as I make mine in you.’ To find this place and sustain it takes time; it takes faithfulness and a rhythm of life. Pope Francis invites us to discover this interior place, where our souls are nourished and our minds refreshed, from which we can go out into the world.
Franciscan love
Francis of Assisi is attractive not just because of his humility and poverty, but because these values make him so accessible; they place him at the service of all living things. St Francis is so in touch with the immensity of the love that flows from the Crucified Christ – its mercy, forgiveness and understanding – that in his person, words and deeds, he makes that love tangible for us. The fact that he understands himself to be the one who needs this love the most means that he never places himself above us, whatever our condition: no matter how poor we are, or degraded we may feel, he shows us that the love of the Crucified Christ is never ashamed to serve us, to restore our dignity. By his own life, St Francis shows us how such a gift of love comes without any complications: God’s love is totally innocent; it restores our innocence in receiving it. Such a gift never humiliates or diminishes us but treats us with infinite ‘courtesy’ as Julian of Norwich would put it. Il poverello helps us to understand that in the presence of such love all we can do, all we need to do, is simply receive it. He shows us that ‘the love which moves the sun and the stars’ must also move us beyond all the laws of nature to reach out to the unloved, the contaminated and despised, anointing them with the dignity of Christ. This is love at its most gracious.
With Francis of Assisi we encounter a new humanism – not a return to our natural or even self-constructed state, but a humanism of the life of grace. He understood that only in self-forgetting service and abandonment to God’s care does our dependence, our nakedness, become a magnificent freedom to be open. This is why the love of the Crucified Christ placed Francis in a new personal relationship not only with women and men, but with all creation. The world ceases to be a place that we master and abuse; it becomes our home, our ‘sister, mother earth’, to be cherished, preserved and healed. When we live in this deep humility and grateful poverty before all created things, the violence of our primal alienation and the insatiable destructiveness of our desire to conquer and master creation are overcome. But Francis was no proto-romantic, he was an apostle: the birds of the air, the fish in the sea and the trees of the forests also have a right to hear the gospel preached through our caring actions and persevering reverence.
One senses that Pope Francis understands that his namesake does not write a theology of the Crucified Christ, he performs it. When the Pope washed the feet of young prisoners, including a Muslim woman, did we not see the Franciscan inspiration in action? Although some found it shocking, what the Pope was doing was giving us a glimpse of the magnitude and scandalous freedom of the Crucified Christ who washes daily the feet of everyone who bears his image.
Ignatian wisdom
Ignatius absorbed much from St Francis of Assisi and although there are obvious differences between them, there is much that converges. We expect that as a former Jesuit novice master and Provincial, the Holy Father is well aware of this. Like St Francis, St Ignatius is committed to the Crucified Christ, but he also has a sense of the Resurrected Christ, the consoler, who calls us to join him in his mission from the Father. This is why, at the heart of Ignatian spirituality, the question of our freedom is made explicit: how are to use it in the service of Christ and his Church? How can we come to a truly apostolic and ecclesial freedom? This is where the wisdom of discernment comes into play.
Discernment is not some technique for making good decisions; there are plenty of textbooks about how to do that. What Ignatius offers is not only method but wisdom. Although discernment needs all the natural practices of experience, judgement and reflection, it also needs something else: not just the intellectual but the affective and spiritual sense of how God is ‘labouring and working’ in ‘people, places, times and circumstances’, to use a phrase from the Jesuit Constitutions. For all his attention to our self-knowledge and desires, Ignatius is theo-centric not ‘ego’- or ‘me’-centric. Only in this way can we be servants of God’s kingdom and not our own. As a theocentric practice, discernment is a graced seeking – almost an aesthetic sense – for the movements of God’s salvific action present in all our relational dynamics: formal and informal, personal or institutional, wherever our passive, receptive and active agency is in play. Freedom is our obedience to the ‘gravitational force’ and pattern of God’s grace at work. It is our desire to co-operate, to make the choices which try to secure the more universal good and resist the false values which distort or damage that good. It is an operational wisdom that comes from knowing to whom we belong, where our heart really lies. It asks us to be attentive to the movement of the Spirit, both in the world and in ourselves, especially to be alert to whatever makes us deaf or distorts.
At the centre of the Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius places a special exercise which helps us clarify our understanding, develop our attentiveness and purify our freedom to choose. It is called The Meditation on the Two Standards – Las Dos Banderas. It is a way of coming to see who or what we are really serving: the values of this world with their illusions of security, reputation and power; or the values of the Crucified Christ and his way of working, in humility, obscurity, apparent powerlessness. In the Two Standards, Ignatius captures the fundamental drama of our freedom, what is at stake in our choices, which the eternal call of the Crucified and Risen Christ within history activates and illuminates: the presence of his mission for the kingdom in our existence and history.
Creating new spaces
The Christ who meets us in St Francis and St Ignatius does not offer us a strategy for improvement or a programme for success. He offers us himself. Only that intimate, personal relationship with him makes sense of the choices which the wisdom of the world judges as total foolishness. Both Francis and Ignatius agree that only a total love can make sense of trusting a crucified God.
Pope Francis has laid claim to these two great spiritual masters of the Catholic Church. As his papacy unfolds he will certainly need both wisdom and love if he is to preserve the Church in faithful mission and in consolation. Already, however, he has begun to open up new possibilities, new spaces where consolation may be found. I think it is possible to suggest two of these spaces:
Memory and Truth: We know Pope Francis comes from a world of political upheaval, division and torture, haunted by the memory of ‘The Disappeared’. He comes to the papacy knowing the shadows that cast their darkness over the Church, whether in the US, Europe or Latin America. Yet he has spoken simply and eloquently of God’s untiring mercy and the ministry of reconciliation which comes in humility and love, in justice and in truth. He now has the opportunity to remind us of the Christ that calls us to this way, this ‘Standard’ which begins in the Church itself and flows out to a suffering world. If the Pope can somehow encourage, initiate or affirm that movement for justice, truth and reconciliation within Argentina, it has every hope of bearing fruit through Latin America and the rest of the world, in the Church and in secular society.
A New Transcendence: Speaking in the meetings before the conclave, Cardinal Bergoglio cited the last pages of Henri De Lubac’s meditation, The Splendour of the Church. He identified the danger of a Church trapped in a ‘spiritual worldliness.’ This is a self-referential Church, refusing to go beyond itself. We might observe that one of the dangers of this Church is its preoccupation with the recovery of transcendence which it believes it can produce through a pseudo-elevated sacred language, or a liturgy which confuses the aesthetic of silence, reverence and prayer with the manufactured mystique of worldly majesty that only colonises the sacred while pretending to defend it.
Francis and Ignatius lived by a different transcendence: transcendence of self and of the narcissistic seductions of control, power and success. It is the transcendence of following a crucified Christ, whose glory is in self-giving service of the despised and rejected. This transcendence creates a new space of redemption beyond the vacuous re-enchantments of the false prophets. It is an open space of honest, personal, intimate encounter. It begins in trusting the other, offering a hospitality which is not only physical but intellectual and spiritual, going out to meet them with generosity, treating them with dignity and simplicity. It looks into a human face, not an abstraction or an ideology; it seeks to listen and understand before judging. It knows that it must seek forgiveness before it offers to forgive. These are the spaces where the Holy Spirit is quietly at work and the Church is reborn.

James Hanvey SJ holds the Lo Schiavo Chair in Catholic Social Thought at the University of San Francisco.