IT IS HELPFUL TO UNDERSTAND THE DYNAMIC of your God-given Name of Grace in terms of its three interconnected elements: Identity —> Vocation —> Mission.[1] The starting point is identity and its connection with story. Each of us constructs and lives a narrative. The rough and perpetually changing draft of the autobiography you carry in your mind shapes your life. This narrative is you, your identity. Like most people you tell stories about yourself. The ‘self’ is a storyteller. In telling these stories to others you may, for most purposes, be said to be performing straightforward narrative actions. In saying that you also tell them to yourself, however, you are enclosing one story within another. This is the story that there is a self to tell something to, a someone else serving as audience who is yourself or your self.
The Ignatian Camino is a time to stop telling yourself your own story. Since the day you were born, your mother, father, maybe the teachers at school, your friends, everybody, without your even asking, have told you who you are and what you should be. They will tell you your story. Before long, you begin to believe these stories. Unknowingly you say, “This is my story. This is who I am.” The Ignatian Camino is a time to stop telling yourself your own story and to go through this process of Identity —> Vocation —> Mission to find your real story. The reason why you stop telling yourself your story is because you want God to tell you your story. This requires silence, openness and listening on your part.
Your true story. Only God knows your true story. Do not let other people tell you the story of who you are and what your identity is. God knows your identity. God gave it to you. Listen, and God will tell you your story. If there is something in your life that bothers you, tell God about it. Whatever you do, keep it relational with God. No matter what the issue, and how much it may be getting to you, don’t focus on that. Focus instead on your relationship with God, and bring your concern into that relationship.
You get your identity in the presence of the Word of God, by listening to the Word of God. It is true your mother and father told you about God and that is part of the “word”, and you went to school and the teachers told you, or you had religious education classes, or a picture book that tried to tell you your story. Those early experiences come into it. Then one day you say, “This is who I really am before God. I believe now, not because my mother does, or my father, or my family, but I believe. You don’t have to tell me.”
The Ignatian Camino is a time when you try to understand your story from God’s perspective. It is as if God enters into your life and says, “Listen”. This is not a whispering in the ear. It is a realization coming from your presence to the Word of God. It is a realization of God’s breaking into your life This is Name of Grace, a calling. Identity —> Vocation —> Mission. God wants you to go on mission, to help Him build the Kingdom.
Identity. The process begins with identity: Who am I as a person? What identity has God given me? Then comes vocation, a calling. When you speak of “vocation”, you are not necessarily talking about a religious vocation. God calls everyone to holiness. God says, “You, come. Come here.” In Scripture when God calls, He often symbolises that call by changing the person’s name: Abram becomes Abraham; Saul becomes Paul; Simon Bar-Jona becomes Cephas, the Rock. There is a change in name. God calls you by your name. He says in Isaiah 43, “I have called you by your name, you are mine.” Your response is, “Here I am. Send me.”
Vocation. To follow that call you may have to walk “through towns and villages” (Luke 13:22). You are going around that circle: Identity —> Vocation —> Mission. Vocation also has about it the notion of “with others”. In communion with whom? Who are going to be my companions, my friends, my colleagues? Vocation always has the notion of contextualizing how one’s life is going to be lived out, with what people, where, and with what concerns. That is part of vocation. You follow that vocation, and the vocation becomes mission. Your walking “through towns and villages” to follow a calling or vocation is the mission.
Mission. The notion of mission can profit from some explicit reflection. In the church of the Gesu of the Society of Jesus in Rome is a marvellous picture of St. Francis Xavier kneeling at the feet of St. Ignatius. Ignatius is pointing off to the far reaches of the Indies and saying, “Go and set everything on fire.” Ite incendite et flammate omnia. Notice it is in the plural. Ignatius is saying it to Francis and to the Holy Spirit. That makes great art: Go and set everything on fire! It is great art, but poor theology.
Mission is never “Go”; mission is always “Come”. God never says to anyone, “I am here. You, go there.” God says, “I am here. Come here.” Those persons who live under obedience or who are the superiors of those who live under obedience should take note of the theology of mission.
Obedience. For true obedience there has to be a dialogue so that the one who gives the mission is content and the one who is missioned is content that he is going where he can find God and is called by God. One does not go where one cannot find God. Someone who is going to the inner city to bring God to the inner city had better not go. If they do not know that God has been there in the inner city for a hundred years before they ever thought of it, they should not go. If they are going to meet God there, that is fine. The same is true for someone going to the foreign missions. If someone is going to the foreign missions to bring God to some God-forsaken place, he had better not go. There is no God-forsaken place! God has been there thousands of years before anyone ever got the idea of going there “on mission”.
The discerning dialogue between a superior and a person-to-be-sent has to uncover the presence of God there; and both have to have possession of that grace, that ability to find that God is there already.
In the process of Identity —> Vocation —> Mission, often one of those aspects of your life with God will shine very brightly and throw light on the other two. Sometimes one or the other or two of them will be dim. I may not really know what my vocation is, nor do I know what my mission is, but my identity is shining very brightly and casting light on vocation and mission. Sometimes the mission will be very bright and the identity will have grown dim and vocation may have grown dim also. Mission will cast light on identity and vocation. You will go around that cycle many times in your life: Identity —> Vocation —> Mission —> Identity —> Vocation —> Mission —> Identity —> Vocation —> Mission —> Identity —> Vocation —> Mission.
Name of Grace. You learn and gain insight as you go through this cycle many times. You begin to know and become aware of your Name of Grace. What is your Name of Grace? Each person has a very specific, unique and individual Name of Grace. God has related with no one ever before, nor will God ever again relate with anyone in precisely the same way that God relates with you. You have your very personal, individual, unique relationship with God. God calls you by your name. “I have called you by your name” (Isaiah 43:1). That name is not just Tom or Jim or Peter or Michael. That name is an ontological calling: being called into existence, into relationship with God.
Examples of Name of Grace. There are many interesting, but very different examples of “Names of Grace” in history. St. Francis of Assisi, for instance, Il Poverello, “God’s Little Poor Man”, had a very specific Name of Grace. That is what Francis was to reflect to the world: that aspect of God that could somehow be symbolised by Francis being Il Poverello, God’s Little Poor Man. St. Therese of Lisieux, the Little Way, is another very discernible Name of Grace. The “Little Way” was St. Therese’s way, her “Name of Grace”, her identity and vocation and mission.
A very interesting Name of Grace was that of St. Robert Cardinal Bellarmine, a priest of the Society of Jesus. He was not just a very brilliant man, but also a true genius. The Pope wanted him to become a cardinal. The Society of Jesus said, “No, we would rather not.” The Pope said, “Yes,” and the Society said, “No, we would rather not.” Finally, the Pope put his foot down and said, “The Church of God has not his like in learning. He will be a cardinal.” And so it came to pass. He became a cardinal. As cardinal this very brilliant man, a man of genius, had a palace. He had a coach and four horses to take him around Rome. He ate good meals. He had butlers and housemaids and cooks; and he had quite an extensive personal library, which was quite unusual for that time. Books were enormously expensive; most of them were still scribed. He moved in a certain echelon of society because he was a cardinal.
Things that were fitting for St. Robert Cardinal Bellarmine would not at all be fitting for Il Poverello, God’s Little Poor Man. Robert and Francis knew that. Certain things did not fit their Name of Grace. Francis slept on a mat. Robert Bellarmine slept in a palace in a nice bed. Francis ate what he could beg. Robert Cardinal Bellarmine had good meals prepared for him. If they were alive today, Robert Cardinal Bellarmine would probably have at least a top of the range Ford; and Francis, God’s Little Poor Man, would possibly have a push bike with no gears.
It was not just in material things that their lives were very different. Bellarmine was a truly learned man of genius; it is possible that Francis of Assisi could not read or write. He was certainly not a learned man. Certain things were fitting to their Name of Grace: the way they prayed, the way they thought, the way they talked and so on. They came to know their Name of Grace. Francis could tell immediately that the coach and four horses did not fit his Name of Grace. Bellarmine could say, “Yes, I have to have my library. That fits my Name of Grace.” Both were great saints; yet both were very different. Different though their lives were, they were both great saints because they were faithful to their Name of Grace. During this camino my hope is that you will come to come to know your God-given Name of Grace.
Discernment. Apostolic spirituality is a spirituality of choice at the level of faith, a spirituality of decision-making. To make good decisions you have the process of discernment. Discernment is an experiential knowledge of self in which the object of choice is congruent with your fundamental religious orientation.
Let me unpack that phrase. It is an experiential knowledge of self. It is not head knowledge, a conceptual knowledge, but it is an experience, as the Scripture means knowledge when it says, “a man KNEW his wife.” He had a deep experience of his wife. An experiential knowledge of self may be comparable to what a woman goes through when she is going to a dinner-dance. She opens her closet, looks the dresses over, and says, “It is that one.” She knows. That is what fits. That is experiential knowledge. There are many objects of choice. Will I study for a Masters degree in Counselling? Will I become fluent in Spanish? Will I accept a position in Fiji? Will I train as a spiritual director? Whatever the choice to be made is, it must be congruent with your fundamental religious orientation.
Your fundamental religious orientation is your Name of Grace. A good decision fits with your Name of Grace. It is “experiential knowledge of self in which the object of choice is congruent with your fundamental religious orientation.” The decision and how you understand yourself before God fit. They come together. You are comfortable. Your head, heart and faith are saying the same thing. It is energising.
If you come to know and have insight into your Name of Grace, you will find that you use it to make good decisions. You can say, “This decision fits with my Name of Grace.” It fits with your fundamental religious orientation, your unique individuality before God. Discernment of that truest and deepest self is the authentic, the most profound and radical meaning of the “Election” which is the goal of the Exercises. The authentic meaning of the Election in the process and dynamics of the Ignatian Exercises is a becoming aware in growing inner freedom of God’s personal design or plan for me so that I can accept it profoundly in my life to live it out faithfully and generously. You may never get to the point where you can say your Name of Grace in twenty-five words or less, but you may get a sense of it and a sense of how to make decisions: discernment is experiential knowledge of self in which the object of choice is congruent with your fundamental religious orientation. Hopefully during this Ignatian Camino your Name of Grace will be raised to consciousness, and you will be better able to see how God is calling, identifying and missioning you.
[1] George Schemel and Judith Roemer. Beyond Individuation to Discipleship: A directory for those who give the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius, University of Scranton: Private Printing.
Walking with Inigo — The Ignatian Camino 