The Enduring Question
How do we find what we are meant to do? This is the infamous and expansive search – the quest for our unique calling. What on earth am I here for? What am I supposed to DO with my life? Karen Yates
When Bill Haley tries to answer the enduring question, he quotes this remark by Jesuit Pedro Arrupe who spontaneously answered a group facing the same question:
Nothing is more practical than finding God, that is, than falling in love in a quite absolute, final way. What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will affect everything. It will decide what will get you out of bed in the morning, what you will do with your evenings, how you will spend your weekends, what you read, who you know, what breaks your heart, and what amazes you with joy and gratitude. Fall in love, stay in love and it will decide everything.
Ruminate on this. Think of all you’ve done; all you’ve been doing; and consider what it means to fall in love with God in an absolute and final way; how this love would seize your imagination and affect everything it integrates.
It resonates with Augustine who said the question What do you love? is the most important of all. Our loves reveal or betray what we are about; “it goes to the heart of who we are,” Garber states. Our loves are a clue to our purpose.
When I as young in my faith, I had many detractors who cautioned, warned, even argued that I was taking this love all “too seriously.” In fact, I was just beginning to understand the secret of this short life; and it was bewildering to me why others weren’t falling over themselves into the love for which we are made.
It is an exuberant foolish healing love; and if you will be so foolish too, then happily fall in love with the Lover of our souls – love with the One who made us for Himself.
The life story, the witness of heroic leadership and the sheer goodness of Pedro Arrupe give evidence of a man who found God in this broken world, a man who found God in others and a man who learned, above all, to trust love. This simple truth dominates Arrupe’s later writings, including his last major essay on Ignatian spirituality, “Rooted and Grounded in Love” (1981).
Curriculum of the Spiritual Life 