As a priest, his life moves in the very opposite direction of ‘sovereign self’. In the very moment of receiving himself he can only let go, let himself be given. Given in all those small and unnoticed ways; in the ordinariness of sacraments which he celebrates for God’s people, in the prayers he says, sometimes badly and distractedly; in all the lives he touches, sometimes absentmindedly, sometimes with love and insight and care; and in those hidden moments when someone opens their life to him in its pain and despair, its guilt and its shame, when somehow he finds a word or maybe no word, but his presence is an unacknowledged healing. So, in all this daily rhythm of receiving and being given he allows himself to be shaped by the ebb and flow of grace, alive in the rhythm of the Spirit breathing in him. He allows himself to be lost in the life of the Church. He gives himself to the unsung gestures of love and he recognises that on some days, just on some days, he might understand a little of their beauty and their mystery.
Occasionally, if he’s attentive and faithful to the rhythms of this sacrament that has become his life, he might begin to glimpse a form, another life that moves within his own without which he would have no life. He might recognise the One in whose life his own lies immersed and hidden. And when he comes each day to say those simple words, not his own words but the words he has been given, he knows he is in the school of love. ‘Take and receive…’ Not just words but an act; an act which he knows he can never fathom or exhaust. Here, pronounced and performed, he is born to himself and to Christ and to his people. He will know the Life he carries; the joy, even in sacrifice and surrender, of being poured out and given away. In these words which he is given to speak, his life has become a Eucharist; a ‘yes’ which he says yet knows is always beyond him, ‘Take and receive.’ Here, in this act, all the hidden surrenders gather into Love, into Christ, and he knows whose identity he carries. He knows himself in living this life beyond his own.
Take Lord, and receive
All my liberty, my memory, my understanding,
and my entire will,
all I have and possess. You have given all to me.
To you, Lord, I return it.
All is yours, dispose of it wholly according
to your will.
Give me your love and your grace, for this is
sufficient for me.
(St Ignatius of Loyola, Spiritual Exercises 234)
Fr James Hanvey SJ Superior of the Jesuit Community at Farm Street, London.
Taken from Priesthood: A life open to Christ compiled by Canon Daniel P. Cronin, St Paul Publications 2009, ISBN 978-0854397624, pp. 144-146.
Source: Thinking Faith