Oh the Urbanity!

Last August I took my vows of poverty, chastity and obedience.  Thanks to that final one, my superiors sent me to New York City to finish up my undergrad and hopefully do a masters.  New York was the one place I asked not to be sent.  That's probably why they sent me there.

In the novitiate, my director asked me to contemplate my images of God.  I was unsure how to tackle this question, having never given it consideration.  Isn't God just kind of...there?  Existing?  A few images came to me as I prayed, one for each member of the Trinity.  Christ is the faces of the poor, the oppressed, the downtrodden.  He is them in their moments of weakness and crucifixion.  Christ is also the poor in their joy, their love, their Resurrection.  Check out this cross from the Creighton Retreat House in Griswold, IA for a good visualization.

The Holy Spirit maintained a bit of that floaty feeling, being very hard to pinpoint.  It's kind of as described in Acts of the Apostles--a rushing wind bearing flame.  The Holy Spirit always seems more of an action than image for me--inspiring, rushing, guiding, creating.  And the Father?  God the Father appears to me as landscape.  Great open expanses, mountains, plains, forests and rivers inspire my image of God the Father.  He is the pure image of wild, untamed and grace-filled beauty.

I discovered on my 8-day retreat that this image has been causing me a bit of trouble this past year.  There is no wild in New York City.  The John Muir in me screams for boundless wilderness that refuses to be tamed, just as God's love behaves.  It refuses containment.  Ironically, I contained my image of God in a rather boundless feature.  My claustrophobia in New York this past year came from missing part of the Trinity.  It was not just the density of people and buildings in New York, but the lack of wild and untamed God-love that I missed.  That God-love certainly lives in New York City, though.  I need help in transforming my image.  I do not turn away or get rid of those old graces and images; but I must also not cling to them.  As Jesus tells Mary Mag, "Let go dude--I've gotta ascend to heaven!"  (Author's interpretation)

Of all the things St. Ignatius wrote, one of my favorites is the Suscipe, also called the Take Lord (Loyola Press has an excellent reflection on how radical the prayer is).  In it, Ignatius offers up everything.  Not only his material goods, but his heart, memory, his entire being.  All he asks is God's love.  In NYC, God is asking me to offer up my image of God and be open to seeing God's love in new and different ways.  I have to adventure into the unknown.  I have absolutely no idea where I'm going.  My urban adventures are in underground subway trains rather than hitchhiking and driving.  But I have good company and the consolation that when trundling into the unknown, I've typically ended up in pretty good places.

I leave you with an older poem (June 2011) and this music video.  Next time: Leaving No Trace


They jut out from the ground and puncture
the sky.  Or perhaps, the ground I imagine
should be there suddenly disappears,
leaving behind alien land.  A mountain
goat doe huddles on a ledge with her young
as a bison bull grazes on the plain below.
The sun burns the edge of a plateau as unimagined colors envelope the rest of
the sky.  A back-lit hawk sits on an unfelt
breeze, watching for any movement of a meal.

 The soil here is too thin, too poor in nutrition 

to support anything that doesn't

belong there.  When it rains, the land is

unsure what to do.  Anything flat explodes

with a dark, lush green.  Any rising erodes

away, leaving a constantly transitioning land.

It is a land to be lost in, for the colors

blend, the markers forbid themselves to

be remembered.

But this is where God lives, breathing, begging
to be found.  This is where the Holy Spirit whispers to me to open my heart and I release it like the flash flood that races through the buttes.
This is where Christ cries out from the
history of the land and those who should live here who shed lives here.  This is where God inflicts my imagination with beauty so fierce, I can never discover it completely