“The life of faith is one of continued wrestling, where our faith butts up against the troubles of our experience and the sovereign God who controls all things.  But the work of Christ, True Israel, assures us that we never wrestle alone or in vain.  We may get injured in the ring, but our wounds – like Jacob’s thrown hip – will never become fatal to faith’s final security.  God won’t allow it.  . . . . We can  trust the character of God – the one who loves us so much that he came and wrestled on our behalf – and be confident that his judgments are always right, his nature always good, and his saving promises always sure” (Mark S. Gignilliat in Christianity Today, December, 2015).

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Finding God  in all things.  Ignatian spirituality is summed up in this phrase.  It invites a person to search for and find God in every circumstance of life, not just in explicitly religious situations or activities such as prayer in the church or in private.  It implies that God is present everywhere and, though invisible, can be ‘found’ in any and all of the creatures which God has made.  They reveal at least a little of what their Maker is like – often by arousing wonder in those who are able to look with the ‘eyes of faith'” (George Traub SJ, in Do You Speak Ignatian).

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“We are all pilgrims. I don’t think anybody would be surprised to find, deep within, a lonely traveler who at some point has lost the way, instead meeting with confusion, disappointment, and disenchantment.  For me this common life experience shows us all to be pilgrims seeking guidance and direction  back to where God wants us to be.

Pilgrims are not self-guided, wandering about without destination.  They know their steps trace the many others from a long time ago on the same journey.  Fed and led by the wisdom of their predecessors, pilgrims direct themselves toward these well-chosen places, embedded in history, which call one to an inner transformation.

This is where we find the key to a pilgrimage: pilgrims explore not only outwardly, but more especially inwardly.  Pilgrims know that the true course for any traveler is the interior one.  It is in the silence, in the interior moments, in the prayer, in the meditation, where pilgrims look inward to discover little by little their own path” (by an anonymous pilgrim from Manresa Matters. a newsletter from the Manresa Jesuit Retreat House).

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“The most significant religious events recounted in the Bible do not occur in ‘temples made with hands.’ The most important religion in that book is unorganized and is sometimes profoundly disruptive of organization. From Abraham to Jesus, the most important people are not priests but shepherds, soldiers, property owners, workers, housewives, queens and kings, manservants and maidservants, fishermen, prisoners, whores, even bureaucrats. The great visionary encounters did not take place in temples but in sheep pastures, in the desert, in the wilderness, on mountains, on the shores of rivers and the sea, in the middle of the sea, in prisons . . . . Religion, according to this view, is less to be celebrated in rituals than practiced in the world” (by Wendell Berry in The Art of the Commonplace).