A facility for finding God in all things has long been a way to define the essence of Jesuit spirituality. This discovery of the divine presence is not limited to the wonders of creation but includes the whole world of human life and activity. Jesuits have themselves been involved in almost all human enterprises and have desired to share with students and others with whom they have worked this ability to combine the life of the spirit with the life of this world. The Jesuit experience has been called a world-affirming spirituality or simply worldly spirituality, but others hostile to the teachings of the Jesuits have called it Christian atheism or pantheism.

As I said, the finding of God in all things is not just the discovery of God in the beauty of nature, although St. Ignatius himself was much given to going to rooftops in Rome and praising God as he gazed upon the starry heaven. Some would see the beginnings of the Jesuit involvement in astronomical work from this, and it is certainly much in the Jesuit style not just to gaze upon nature but to penetrate ever more deeply into the mysteries of the cosmos, to attempt to understand as fully as possible, and thus to praise God even more for the amazing structure of the universe. There are many craters on the moon with Jesuit names due to the early involvement of Jesuits in astronomy. Today, Jesuit astronomers with observatories near Rome and Tucson, Arizona, are still a significant presence in the world of astronomical science.

However, it is not just in understanding the world that God is found, as important as that is for a Jesuit approach to God. It is in changing the world that God is found as well. It is in the discovery of what we are to do with our lives and how we are to make very practical decisions on how best to promote the greater glory of God, that Jesuit spirituality has over the years offered the most to Jesuits and to those others associated with them. St. Irenaeus had said early in Christian history that the glory of God is humanity fully alive and, although I do not know of St. Ignatius quoting this directly, it certainly fits in well with his thought and the Jesuit tradition. If the glory of God can be seen in the evolving universe with its amazing diversity, richness and creativity, the glory of God is even more wonderfully manifested in fully alive men and women, that is, in human lives marked by the divine presence shown forth in well-done deeds.

St. Ignatius led many people through the Spiritual Exercises that had shaped his own life and led to his dedication to the greater glory of God, thus assisting them in letting God enter more fully into their lives. Many of these were people of influence, as we would say, making serious decisions about what to do with their lives. And many then, and over the years since, were led to serve God in the midst of world and not to enter a monastery or convent, or even the Jesuits. For example, a young member of the nobility in the past, or a university student or professional person today, might make the Ignatian retreat or Spiritual Exercises and be led to find God in marriage or in the service of others in a so-called secular occupation. However, it seems to me, that in this view of God's presence, which St. Ignatius offers and which Jesuits have developed and shared over the years, there is really nothing that can be seen to be totally secular. The totality of life and work can and should be filled with the presence of God in whom and through whom and for whom all exists.

For example, commerce and all the world of business enterprise has at its heart the provision of “goods and services,” even when profit seems to be the main object. Is it a distortion of the marketplace to see in the word "goods” the root meaning of God's gifts in creation when he saw that all was good? And "services" is of course the same word as "ministries," so that it may not sound too strange if we see lay ministries beyond the sanctuary in teaching, medicine, TV and film production, engineering, and, yes, even in merchandising, banking and law! That little aside on secularity needs to be complemented by the reflection that there are still vocations that can be called lay and religious. However, the distinction should not be so great that the lawyer, house painter or dancer cannot see that they are called in their occupations to know God becoming more present in the world through them.

I like to think that Jesuits and other religious community members who work in what are usually considered lay or secular occupations have a challenge to serve as guides for others in those works on how to find God there. Or, better, to bring God's presence more strongly into the world through this activity and so contribute to the coming of the reign of God! Of course, even though I have focused here mainly on what we might call "professional work," thinking of the sorts of things most of our own university alumni do, all human effort is a share in God's creative and redeeming presence and no work exists that cannot and should not be part of the building up of God's kingdom.

The particular spirituality of St. Ignatius does not find God in all things simply by plunging into activity with enthusiasm and with whatever good intentions. There is a stepping back to situate ourselves in the history of God's dealings with us in Christ, in the invitation to become Christ's disciples and to welcome the Holy Spirit into our hearts and lives. To be able to love the world and find God in it, we must be quite aware of sin in our lives, our weaknesses, the need for redemption, and the power of Christ's Spirit at work in the world, even when unrecognized as such. But the God we desire to love with all our hearts, all our minds, all our souls and all our strength is not far away, much less to be found only in church, but deep in the center of all creation and in us and all our fellow human pilgrims on this earth and in all aspects of our lives.

This worldly mysticism of St. Ignatius, as it may be called, is not at all different from the basic Christian teaching that Christ brings God into our midst and the gift of the Spirit brings God into our deepest selves. God is very much in the world and in particular in all human beings. And our love of God must be manifested in our love of one another so that we love not only in word but also in deed. We Jesuits believe that our worldly spirituality, at its best, has touched many who have passed through our schools or who have made the Spiritual Exercises or have had Jesuit friends or known a Jesuit working in their own so-called secular world. We Jesuits may be less present in the future to "lay occupations," and perhaps a valuable witness will thus be lost because lay persons cannot as easily publicly declare themselves both as committed disciples of Jesus Christ and as astrophysicists, artists, or cardiac surgeons, as Jesuits in these fields are able to do.

I recall the almost inevitable witnessing that took place in my life during seven years as a part-time employee at Jet Propulsion Lab. There were indeed a good number of Catholics about the lab, as I discovered, but I was the "conspicuous Catholic" even when I didn't wear my Roman collar, because all I came in contact with knew I was "the Jesuit." I was at that time attracted by a phrase of Cardinal Suhard, archbishop of Paris. He referred to priests in our contemporary society as having a "ministry of confusion," namely to be signs of belief in the midst of unbelief. Certainly, all of us, lay and religious alike, have a call to be signs of contradiction by our total dedication to building up the human world in all its dimensions as our way of loving God and one another.

Let me draw these rambling thoughts to a close with examples of several Jesuits of our time who integrate in a wonderful manner their life in the world and their life with God. They are examples not only for Jesuits but for those as well who partake of the Jesuit spirit and whom I would like to call "lay Jesuits," while being aware that not a few believe all Jesuits are lay folk, if not atheists! First, I turn to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the anthropologist, poet and mystic who has been criticized over the years by many for what they believe is either fuzzy thinking or outright heresy, but in whom not a few still find one of the best examples of finding God in all things. With a thorough-going devotion to an evolving universe full of the divine presence, Father Teilhard de Chardin was a dedicated priest who rarely if ever had a congregation, but who touched many through his writings and has challenged other Christians to accept the findings of science with enthusiasm and integrate them into their faith to the enrichment of both. Truly his is a worldly spirituality and quite in the tradition of St. Ignatius. Perhaps it is his optimism about human progress that has made him less appreciated these days, but I believe he is well worth reexamining!

From a totally different direction, we might consider Fernando Cardenal, the key Jesuit in the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua. Father Cardenal very early on became involved with the Sandinista youth movement and, after the victory, was a government minister in charge first of the literacy program. It is obviously most Jesuitical to find God in a Marxist-inspired revolution and to be able to say, "I saw that the FSLN was the Good Samaritan rescuing wounded Nicaragua. I couldn't refuse them without offending God." Of course, not all Jesuits would agree with me that Cardenal is a good example of our spirituality, but I am deeply impressed with what I have read of his thoughts. Some time ago, he was dismissed from the Jesuits because of he chose to remain in the government after the revolution, against the order of the Vatican. However, he continued to live a Jesuit life within a community of Jesuits with whom he shared his home and, I believe, has given one dramatic model of living the spirit of St. Ignatius in the ambiguous world of politics. Not too long ago, he was received once again into the Jesuits.

Distant from the worlds of anthropology and of revolution, theologian Father Karl Rahner, who died in l984, nevertheless has had a profound impact on our understanding of the human condition and has himself been enough of a revolutionary to arouse suspicion on the part of some in the Church. It is difficult to focus on one particular aspect of his reflections on the Church and on human society, but for me, his struggles to understand how God reaches those outside of Christianity and, indeed, outside of religious belief are especially Jesuit. Of course, to be faithful to his faith, Rahner had to affirm that there is a privileged encounter with God in Jesus Christ and the Church. He points out that his views on what he called, perhaps not totally felicitously, "anonymous Christianity," are the same as the explicit and unembarrassed teaching of the Second Vatican Council. Rahner states this teaching as that "there are human beings who are not Christians, sociologically, sacramentally and confessionally, and still they are justified and ordered by God's grace toward eternally life and the immediate presence of God. This is true for members of any religion whatsoever, and for atheists who follow their conscience - that is what the Council says." Father Rahner said he could not perceive himself as "someone saved and redeemed by God if, from the very outset, [he] didn't care whether God finds, saves, and brings all others to eternal life." Not that he believes in universal salvation, for we can indeed reject the invitation of God, but Rahner is very much a part of the contemporary Catholic respect for God's workings in mysterious ways in the hearts of all people, inviting them into friendship with himself, without any explicit reference to Christianity. This is a very deep finding of God in all things to find his presence not only in the great world religions and their adherents but even in professed atheists, especially in the hearts of those Marxists with whom Rahner had frequent dialogue.

Finally, I'll reach back into the end of the last century to the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, who, if he wasn't condemned like my last two examples, did experience some lack of appreciation by Jesuits because of his calling as a poet. He has, to my mind, a grand vision of the good in all things, in nature and in his fellow human beings. Not unlike the astronomers who know God better through research, Hopkins dug into the details of all things, exploring the "inscape" as he called it and discovered “the dearest freshness” deep within a world "charged with the grandeur of God:"

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and share's man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs –
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and ah! bright wings.

Each of us is challenged, then, to discover God everywhere. Even to discover good everywhere is often challenge enough, but the good we glimpse is sign and sacrament of the Good we do not see. Is it really so simple then to find God in all things, to see the good and the beautiful and the true everywhere and, for our part, to live in all we do with goodness and beauty and truth? Yes, simple to conceive and yet most difficult to live, and for the living of it we as Christians find the possibility through the one who is "the way, the truth and the life," the Jesus who is at the heart of Ignatius Loyola, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Fernando Cardenal, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and many less well-known people who have partaken of the Jesuit spirit.

This spirit, of course, is not anything else but the spirit of the Gospel of Jesus made present to the world in which we live. The God whom we glimpse in all things shines forth in richest brilliance in this Jesus "through whom all things came into being" and in whom "everything continues in being." To conclude let me cite one of many of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's pensées in Hymn of the Universe:

Lift up your head, Jerusalem, and see the immense multitude of those who build and those who seek; see all those who toil in laboratories, in studios, in factories, in the deserts and in the vast crucible of human society. For all the ferment produced by their labours, in art, in science, in thought, all is for you. Therefore open wide your arms, open wide your heart, and like Christ your Lord welcome the wave-flow, the flood, of the sap of humanity. Take it to yourself, for without its baptism you will wither away for lack of longing as a flower withers for lack of water; and preserve it and care for it, since without your sun it will go stupidly to waste in sterile shoots. What has become of the temptations aroused by a world too vast in its horizons, too seductive in its beauty? They no longer exist. The earth mother can indeed take me now into the immensity of her arms. She can enlarge me with her life, or take me back into her primordial dust. She can adorn herself for me with every allurement, every horror, and every mystery. She can intoxicate me with the scent of her tangibility and her unity. She can throw me to my knees in expectancy of what is maturing in her womb. But all her enchantments can no longer harm me, since she has become for me, more than herself and beyond herself, the body of him who is and who is to come. The divine milieu.