June 2, 2003 

"The Call of the King, Part I"

Ignatius calls this transition week, "The Call of the King."  God gives all of us an invitation-everyone.  Many, many are called.  It's up to us if we want to accept His invitation.  Often people think a call just has to do with religious or marriage vocations.  Not at all.  God is calling us all the time.  He's calling us to launch out into the deep.  He's calling us to go deeper into relationship with Himself.  He's calling us to be more generous, more grateful, more humble.  He's always calling us to be somewhere other that where we are at right now because He wants us to grow.  He always wants us to move beyond where we are right now. 
 
Remember when He called Peter out of the boat?  That was a big leap of faith for Peter.  We can just see Jesus constantly moving back as Peter is moving forward, like "Come on, you can take another step, another step."  Peter was walking fine until He realized, "Look at me!"  He took His eyes off Jesus, and he went down, but Jesus was right there.  Jesus caught him.  Peter made it.  We'll have times when we go down, too, but God is always moving and drawing and calling us beyond wherever we are at right now because He loves us.  That's why He's calling us out of the different levels of our sins.  So Ignatius wants us to focus and listen to the call of the King.
 
Ignatius says that in this retreat we have dealt with the stripping process quite a bit.  We've come into a spiritual poverty and emptiness.  God has been removing this prop and this excuse and rationalization, even the different desires that we thought were Godly and holy.  And so we're coming into a posture of standing naked before God, which is beautiful.  That's the posture of a child.  Little children run around naked, and they're not self-conscious.  We're coming into a part now where we're not going to be self-conscious anymore but are going to make the transition and become more God-conscious.  We want to focus on the King. 
 
We've gone through a stripping process where we see what has got to go, and we know we have the power to let it go.  We don't have the power to fill ourselves with the gifts and graces of God, but we have the power to let go in order to make room for Him to fill me.  We do have that power.  Since we've been stripped of the old self, the false self, Ignatius says it's time now to put on the Lord Jesus Christ.  St. Paul said, "Put on the Lord Jesus Christ" (see Rom 13:14).  In other words as St. Paul said, "Yet I live, no longer I, but Christ lives in me" (Gal 2:20).  The apostles went through this whole process.  They began to see.  We'll start to see this growth in their lives, too.  So the grace of the week that we will be praying for is to put on the Lord Jesus Christ.  The whole focus is going to be more on Jesus. ("The Call of the King" will be continued next week.)

Excerpt from Mother Nadine's "Heart-to-heart Listening: The Call of the King," 2000.