Missionaries of Hope

Homily during the Province Mass of the Society of Jesus in the Philippines for the End of the Ignatian Year, Ateneo de Manila High School Covered Courts, 31 July 2022

Let us begin with a word of thanks. We thank God for this chance to be together again to celebrate the feast of St. Ignatius after two years. And we thank God for the gift of the Ignatian Year that we are about to conclude.

When Father General announced the Ignatian Year in September 2019, he had absolutely no idea that, a few months later, the whole world and all our lives would be completely overturned by a global pandemic.

Providentially, remembering St. Ignatius’ cannonball experience helped many of us hold on to hope during this challenging time. The upheavals we were going through were like what St. Ignatius experienced when the cannonball shattered his legs and his dreams 500 years ago. His story reminded us that trauma and the end of a world can become, by God’s grace, the beginning of something new. His story invited us to hope that, when Plan A collapses, God’s Plan B may be waiting to unfold.

As we end the Ignatian Year, perhaps it is the hope in Ignatius’ story that we need to take with us, as a gift and as our mission. Hope is in short supply these days. Very few of us face the future with optimism. If we were to use Ignatian language, many of us are in the grip of desolation, which Ignatius describes as “darkness of the soul, disquiet, not feeling hope and love.”¹ Understandably so. The pandemic is not yet over. We find ourselves in the midst of war, social division, an enormous environmental crisis, a fuel crisis, an increasingly serious food crisis. All over the world, democracy is in crisis, linked to perhaps the most serious crisis of truth that our world has experienced, because of the sheer magnitude and speed of disinformation. In Europe, many young people do not want to have children. “Why bring another human being into this doomed planet?”_² In China, millions of disillusioned young people have started calling themselves “the last generation.”³ These past weeks since I’ve been home, I have heard many people share about the heartbreak and disappointment, close to despair, of many young Filipinos, especially after the elections.

In such times, especially in such times, perhaps all of us in the Ignatian family are being called in a special way to become missionaries of hope, called to learn from the story of Ignatius how to live and how to share hope.

How can we become missionaries of hope in the face of such complex and difficult problems? Recently, I found very helpful a beautiful little book by a young French Dominican working in Egypt.⁴ The author, Adrien Candiard, insists that hope is different from optimism, that human expectation that things will somehow get better, or the magical thinking that believes a magician God will make everything bad just go away. Hope is not optimism; rather, hope is courage. First, it is the courage to face harsh reality, without seeking refuge in illusions. But second, hope too is the courage to believe in a God who promises, not quick fixes, but faithful presence; the God of surprises who, in raising Jesus from the dead, showed us that he is greater than our possibilities and imaginations. Third, because of this faith, hope is the courage to continue loving and serving, knowing that love alone is eternal, and so, no single act of loving service is ever wasted or fruitless.

We see these three elements of hope as courage in Ignatius’ story. He had the courage to face reality. Ignatius had no illusions: from his conversion experience, he saw that the human heart and human history are arenas of unending battle between Christ and the “Enemy of human nature.” Good and evil continue to battle, and the forces under the Standard of Christ, poor, humiliated, and humble, often seem to be losing. Yet, he had the courage to believe in the God who is ever present and who is ever greater. By the river Cardoner in Manresa, Ignatius saw all things new⁵: all reality shining with God’s love and presence, God active and laboring, God communicating and God giving himself, God, not looking from a distance or standing apart from life, but ceaselessly acting and entering into the world with love to renew it.

Thus, over and over again, Ignatius had the courage to set out on new paths of love and service. So many times, people and events sought to discourage him. From the very beginning, Ignatius recounts in his Autobiography how his brother in the family castle of Loyola, sensing Ignatius’ desire to begin a new life, sought to dissuade Ignatius, to discourage him from “throwing away his life.”⁶ Ignatius listened respectfully, but he was not deterred and he “set out,”⁷ not knowing all the details of the journey, but with the courage to risk the first step. Later, the Franciscans kicked Ignatius out of the Holy Land where he had hoped to serve. He would be silenced and forbidden to speak of things of God in Spain by the Dominicans. He and his first companions waited long months in Venice for a ship that would take them to Jerusalem, only to have this hope crushed by the war with the Turks. When the first companions arrived in Rome, they were persecuted and vilified. Each time a door was closed on his plans, Ignatius could have given in to discouragement and given up. But each time, he trusted in the God who is ever greater and set out once again on a new path. And because of that courage, that hope, we are all here today.

Brothers and sisters, at the close of the Ignatian Year, let us ask the Lord for the gift of the courage of hope so that, like Ignatius, we can be missionaries of hope to our brothers and sisters who struggle in these tough times.

We ask for the courage to accept reality, to accept that things are challenging and difficult. But we ask too for the courage to see all things new like Ignatius, to see that God is ever present and active in surprising ways in our world. Some of you have heard me quote these sentences from the Biblical scholar Eugene Peterson, but they are worth repeating. “We underestimate God and we overestimate evil. We don’t see what God is doing and so we conclude that he is doing nothing. We see everything evil is doing and we think it is in control.”⁸

I think this is why Pope Francis during this pandemic has never tired of trying to get us to see and to celebrate all the people selflessly trying to help and to serve: health workers, teachers, government leaders, parents, neighbors.⁹ If it is true that the pandemic has unmasked many serious problems in our world, Pope Francis also speaks of an “eruption of fraternity”¹⁰ that has taken place during this pandemic. All of us can share stories from all over the world of people generously, creatively seeking to help each other. To pay attention to this “eruption of fraternity” is not simply to celebrate the human spirit, but to seek to glimpse the active loving presence of God in our world. If we do not do this, we risk underestimating God and imprisoning ourselves in desolation.

Finally, catching sight of God at work, we pray for the courage to set out in love and service. We can be overwhelmed by the all the challenges before us. Perhaps the way to start is the way of Ignatius, simply to “set out,” to take a first step, to do the good that presents itself before us every day. In our Gospel today, Jesus tells the parable of the builder and the king waging war (Luke 14: 28-32), both of whom must determine whether they have the resources to build or to wage war. To build and to wage war: aren’t these precisely what we are called to do as missionaries of hope? To build with Christ the Eternal King: to build up persons, faith, friendship, community, capacity, structures of justice and care. To wage war under the standard of Christ: not in the violent way of the world, but, with the weapons of truth and love, to battle against all within us that weakens hope and commitment, and against all the forces that would oppress and divide the human beings God loves.

A few months ago, I attended a webinar in which the former General of the Dominicans, Fr Timothy Radcliffe spoke. He described a moving visit to the city of Homs in Syria. The city had all but been destroyed by the war. In that city, the Dutch Jesuit Frans Van der Lugt had been murdered. Amidst the bombed out ruins, Fr. Radcliffe discovered a school for the disabled, and in it, he saw one elderly Egyptian Jesuit who continued to teach the children. The sight of this old Jesuit still teaching in a place that seemed to have no future moved Fr. Radcliffe deeply.¹¹ Perhaps it was because he saw in this Jesuit a missionary of hope, someone who, despite everything, had the courage to love and serve, the courage to battle against ignorance, the courage to build the future by teaching children who are the future.

In the end, hope is the courage to love taught us by Jesus, which we remember at every Eucharist. On the night of the Last Supper, when there seemed to be no future except betrayal and absolute failure, Jesus continued to love and serve, to give everything away, saying to his friends, “This is my body, given up for you.” “This is my blood poured out for you.” The Father took that courageous gift of love, and made it unimaginably fruitful.

Our true reason for hope is this courageous love of the heart of Christ. The conversion of Ignatius is the triumph of this love, the love of the Good Shepherd who sought the lost sheep and brought him home. If we feel somewhat lost during this uncertain, disorienting time, perhaps the best thing we can is to let the love of Christ find us. May we let ourselves be found by the searching love of the heart of Christ, so that placed with him, we may, like Ignatius, become missionaries of hope.

1 Spiritual Exercises, Rules for the Discernment of Spirits, Rule 4.

2 Timothy Radcliffe, OP, “Does Europe Need Missionaries?” SEDOS Bulletin 2022, Vol 54, p. 16.

3 Cf. https://www.insider.com/anger-brews-among-chinas-disillusioned-last-generation-2022-5

4 Adrien Candiard, OP, La Speranza non è ottimismo: note di fiducia per cristiani disorientati, Verona: EMI, 2021.

5 “All things seemed new to him.” Cf. Autobiography of St. Ignatius, no. 30.

6 Autobiography, no. 12.

7 Autobiography, no. 13.

8 Cf. https://lifesomethings.blogspot.com/2018/11/eugene-peterson-tribute-to-author-of.html.

9 Cf. his homily at the Te Deum of 31 December 2020: https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/it/homilies/2020/documents/papa-francesco_20201231_omelia-tedeum.html    

10 Cf. Pope Francis, Let Us Dream: the Path to a Better Future, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020.

11 Radcliffe, “Does Europe Need Missionaries?” 18.