Inner Compass

 

As the election approaches and we sink deeper and deeper into the twin pandemics of racism and coronovirus, I am aware of losing focus, not to mention hope. I am seeking Wisdom.

I have returned or am trying to revitalize my practice of Ignatian Spiritual Exercises, and finding the mere pause and turn toward this rule of life adjustment worth its weight in gold.

The idea of an inner compass which we try to not only access but use as a guide, calls to mind a frenzy of ideas: direction, time, the holiness within, the holiness without, searching, finding, the center, the Center, paradox, lost, wilderness, found, grace...just to name a few!

I am thinking that as the poet says “old maps no longer work” and our own “inner compass” offers a guide to creating a new map, one without cardinal or ordinal notation. 

Margaret Silf tells a story in her book on these exercises entitled Inner Compass of a man named Wainwright whose instruction in a mountain hiking guide was “turn left at the third hawthorne tree”! Now before going to the immediate concern that I would never know a hawthorne tree, I found myself instead smiling and hopeful. Imagination was stirred. 

Imagine if we all learned from our inner compass how to give directions, spiritual journey directions, differently and creatively. It seems that is what is happening with church these days and gathering and feeding and praying...differently.

Imagine writing a pilgrimage guide which contained the following instruction: persist up the hill toward the cross in the middle of three and wait. You have arrived and will be joined by a multitude of others. 

The cross is our landmark; my eyes are lifted toward it.