Peace Beyond Understanding: Hidden in the ordinary woman crossing a street

What is the peace of Christ like? How do you experience it? How is it not the peace that the world gives? Mark E. Thibodeaux, SJ

It is an ordinary Thursday afternoon. The routine is this. Leave the office, drive to the bank, make a deposit then pick up my daughter Leela at the dance studio. Two blocks away from my downtown office I move my foot to break and stop my car, allowing a woman to cross the Paseo de Peralta.

Watching her step off the high curb onto the crosswalk, suddenly time catches my breath and ebbs to super slow motion. Air stills to silent as my now tearing eyes track the turtlesque progress of the woman crossing the street. She is neither young nor old, familiar nor unfamiliar. With eyes that see as I have never before seen, I recognize this everyday woman as stand in for all women, all men, all of humanity, and me. There is no distance between her and me for I am watching her even as I am walking as her and experience an invisible web of glowing connection with every being and all creation. All of humankind is present and absolutely akin in this radiant, slow motion, beyond peaceful, perennial moment. This is both the most ordinary and most extraordinary waking (dare I say fully awake?) moment I have known. It plumbs me to my core and stretches me to incorporate all of creation in a peace that is beyond understanding..

Several years later when I describe this experience to my Jesuit Spiritual Director he invites me to review the “Rules For Discernment Of Spirits,” as described in The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola. Puhl, S.J, louis J. Trans. (Chicago, Loyola Press) 1951, p147

“God alone can give consolation to the soul without any previous cause. It belongs solely to the Creator to come into a soul, to leave it, to act upon it, to draw it wholly to the love of His Divine Majesty. I said without previous cause, that is, without any preceding perception or knowledge of any subject by which a soul might be led to such a consolation through its own acts of intellect and will.”

As I was not praying, meditating, studying, taking drugs nor in any way acting to provoke the experience of being One in and of, with and through the woman crossing the street, from the point of view of Ignatian Spirituality, this is an experience of consolation without previous cause. I am merely driving my car when the eyes of my heart are opened to see beyond the illusion of separation to experience the mysterious kinship and irrefutable affinity of all humankind in a state of peace beyond understanding.

This peace remains with me as sure and present as my fingers pressing the keyboard. This peace is my standard, I turn my face and seal my faith in it.

Debra Asis
All words are generated by grace and the grit of this real human being.

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Mark E. Thibodeaux, SJ’s above questions are found in today’s selection in An Ignatian Book of Days by Jim Manney, a series of daily reflections from the Spiritual Wisdom of St. Ignatius of Loyola. Throughout the book we hear the voices of St. Ignatius as well as many great thinkers and writers, long gone and present day, each uniquely revealing the way of finding God in all things.And that is my intention; to find God/Divine Presence/Ultimate Reality in whatever presents itself to me each day in 2024.

Each day I read, reflect and write on the selection, hoping to articulate the ways in which I come to know God/Divine Presence/Ultimate Reality via personal experience, impelled by the leading of my inner life.

INVITATION

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All words are generated by grace and the grit of a real human being,
Debra Asis