“You know, this prayer thing has me stumped. I really do want to pray. But when I sit down, my mind seems to go blank. I talk to God, but God never seems to talk back. After doing this for a while, I get discouraged and quit. But pretty soon, the nagging is back: “You should be praying.” So I make a resolution, start again, and pretty soon, I stop. What I really like to do is walk in the wild, so on Sunday afternoon, I give myself a treat and go out to the headlands and hike. Sometimes there I really feel like I am praying. But it doesn’t seem to carry over to Monday through Saturday. Anyhow, when my friend told me about the Spiritual Exercises, my heart jumped a little. So here I am.”
–A Contemporary Woman
(The Spiritual Exercise Reclaimed, p 113)
“A practice of daily reflection such as that proposed in the reclaimed examination of consciousness both depends on and fosters the skills of noticing, naming and acting on one’s awareness of God’s presence in daily life.”
(The Spiritual Exercise Reclaimed, p 116)
In my view, these ideas embodied today feel most resonate through Mary Oliver’s poetry. As she wrote in the poem, The Moths:
If you notice anything,
it leads you to notice
more
and more.
Is Mary Oliver an example of “A Contemporary Woman,” the mysteriously attributed author of the quote at the beginning of the reading? Is the Contemporary Woman bound to find spirituality outside of the institutions that have shut women out, or can women actually reclaim spiritual practices that were created intentionally without them in mind? How can something be reclaimed if it was never claimed by them originally?
Considering the way poets such as Mary Oliver embody Ignatian spirituality today, is this the arena in which women can truly live out such spirituality, outside of the patriarchal confines of religious/Catholic institutions? Or can women truly claim space within a tradition that has never really allowed for their full flourishing?
I appreciate the pushes for feminist reinterpretations of religious texts, but I wonder how much an interpretation counts when it is still not the dominant way of understanding and seeing a text. With this in mind, how can someone like Pope Francis, a spiritual visionary who is still confined to the traditional gender roles of the Catholic church, help shift culture toward a place that allows women’s spiritual gifts to be appreciated and used in broader applications within the church?
Katie Gordon 