How are we to interpret the alternately serendipitous and disappointing, surprising and unpredictable, programs of our lives? What is going on when dying or monetary catastrophe drive us to rethink what we would like from life, when academics or mentors discover and nurture expertise we didn’t know we had, after we succeed past our wildest imaginings, when managers steer our careers in fortuitous instructions, after we aren’t supplied the job we wished so badly, when mates level out alternatives that we didn’t know existed, or after we persist in pursuing a private ardour in opposition to all odds of success, solely to search out that success and achievement ultimately come? Do such instances merely vindicate human ingenuity, resilience, fortitude, and creativeness? Or is God, too, at work in some ineffable means, as Hopkins says, “play[ing] in ten thousand locations / Pretty in limbs, and beautiful in eyes not his”?
Nicely, why not each? That’s how I learn Ignatius, the previous army commander and take-charge, type-A character who nonetheless attuned himself to learn God’s will within the delicate promptings of consolations and desolations. Or, as expressed in an incredible mantra of Jesuit spirituality, “Discover God in all issues.”
—Excerpted from Heroic Dwelling by Chris Lowney
