In his Spiritual Exercises, St Ignatius starts the second week with a meditation on the “Incarnation”. He has the person making the retreat join God in looking down on the “surface and circuit of the globe”, seeing people engaged in all sorts of everyday activities. He asks us to imagine people of different races and with different customs of dress. However, the first activity he asks the one making the retreat to focus on is to imagine people “some at peace and some at war”.
It would seem that for St Ignatius, this would be God's primary concern.
Over the years, through the pages of Jesuits and Friends, we have been able to focus on the lives of people from many territories in their prosperous times and in their hard times. You have been very supportive of the people of Zimbabwe, as they have struggled through untold hardships, and, at last, we can see the glimmerings of hope for these people. You have supported the Jesuits in Guyana as they have accompanied the Amerindian peoples for the last 100 years, tending to their spiritual needs and helping them develop their lives, but in harmony with the rainforest in which they live. You have been there for the people of South Africa in the darkest days of Apartheid and you now walk with them as they make bold strides on the way to becoming a democracy. In this issue we have a first hand perspective on the struggle of the Tamils of Sri Lanka to resist total annihilation. The pages of the magazine afford us the chance to see the world as God sees it and thus to begin to love it as God loves it.
Obviously, for St Ignatius, his immediate focusing in on peace and war stems from his own, albeit rather unsuccessful, military career. At Pamplona he was injured in the first battle he ever took part in. However, after his conversion, Ignatius sees warfare in a new light. Man's inhumanity to man, manifest through oppression and the use of violence, becomes a metaphor for the greater battle that is being waged for peace and justice. When our heart goes out to a people who are being oppressed, and when we see the plight of these fellow human beings but through the eyes of God, we cannot fail to be but moved in the same way that the three divine Persons were moved. The second Person of the Trinity decides that he must become a human being to bring the story of salvation to all.
Sadly, our world is still full of conflict, injustice and oppression. We should derive consolation from the fact that God is still looking down on our actual world, which he wants us to see through his eyes. Even today he is still being moved to become involved in the lives of those caught up in the drama of violence that unfolds, but he needs our feet to accompany these people, our voice to speak up for them and our generosity to come to their assistance. As you read the articles in this current issue, let your heart be ready to be moved.
Fr Tim Curtis SJ
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