The people of Israel are suffering, yet they are not afraid to ask God why. They ask: God, have you cast us off? Are we loathsome to you? The people acknowledge the sins of their fathers and the sins that themselves have committed. They ask God to remember the covenant that he made with them, to forgive them in honor of his own name.
We live in a society where so many people are not willing to acknowledge the wrongs that they have done. It is so much easier to blame the system, to blame someone else, to sue someone, to not take responsibility. The people were confronting God in the midst of suffering from a great draught. Do we cry out to God in the same way when are suffering or going through obstacles?
Ignatius of Loyola, whose feast day we celebrate today, confronted God in this same spirit of honesty. He was a wounded soldier recuperating in bed the wounds he sustained in battle. After reading books on the lives of the saints and the life of Christ, he got the call from the Lord to serve him. After a conversion of heart and time spent in the wilderness and as a hermit and spent time on a spiritual quest before entering seminary at the University of Paris to become a priest. He felt the call to start a new order of priests, the Jesuits, which is the largest religious order of priests in the world today. In the document Ignatius wrote in founding the Jesuits, he stated that members of the order should “…desire to serve as a soldier of God beneath the banner of the cross in our Society, which we desire to be designated by the name of Jesus, and to serve the Lord alone and the Church his Spouse, under the Roman pontiff, the vicar of Christ on earth.” Leaving behind the life of a solider was not easy for Ignatius – it meant confronting his demons and his shortcomings. Yet, Ignatius stands as a witness today of someone who was able to approach God with great honesty and candor. May we all have the courage to do the same.
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