Noticing - Chris Gleeson SJ

Notice

Thank you for noticing this new notice. Your noticing it has been noted and will be reported to the authorities.

Knowing my proclivity for using PowerPoint presentations, one of our parishioners at St Ignatius' Toowong last year sent me a photo of that sign she had seen in a New Farm park in Brisbane.

In recent days I have been reading a delightful book by American Jesuit, James Martin, which goes under the lofty and (almost) pretentious tFitle: The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything: A Spirituality for Real Life. As with all Martin's books, it is written with a simplicity and lightness of touch that illumines even the most complex issues.

I was particularly taken by his idea that finding and being found by God in all things, the core of Ignatian spirituality, is really about noticing. 'For Ignatius and his friends, finding God meant noticing where God was already active in their lives ... God is always inviting us to encounter the transcendent in the everyday. The key is noticing.' Noticing helps us realise that our life is already suffused with the presence of God.

When you think about it, so much of our faith is about noticing, about seeing, in Daniel O'Leary's words, 'God's signature on everything around us.' It is about striving 'to see God's face behind every face, to discover the lover-God who comes to us disguised as our lives'. After all, the Book of Proverbs was absolutely right when it declared that a community will perish where the people have no vision. 'Happy are your eyes because they see, your ears because they hear' (Matthew 13:16).

That well-heralded foreigner, the Good Samaritan, had the ability to see a traveller in dire straits and come to his aid—something that the so-called respectable people, the priest and the teacher, failed or chose not to notice. British Jesuit Gerry Hughes, when writing about the parable of Dives and Lazarus in Luke 16, points out that 'Dives simply does not notice Lazarus, and that is the most disturbing element of the parable' (Oh God, Why).

Over thirty years ago the European Jesuit trainees, we call them scholastics, wrote to Father General Pedro Arrupe inviting him to participate in their annual conference. Not really understanding that the General needed more than two weeks notice to be able to attend an engagement, they were disappointed that he could not join them. However, typical of the man, he wrote a beautiful letter expressing his hopes for them in the future.

One of his prayers for them was that they would learn to see the world with the eyes of Christ, not with rose-coloured glasses, but with eyes that see Jesus present in all people. Can we see Christ in others as we are enjoined to do in Matthew 25? No, not of our own accord, Dutch author Henri Nouwen has written, but it is the Christ present in us that enables us to see Christ in other people. A nice twist.

Last year I had the good fortune to review a very interesting little book by Terrance Klein titled Vanity Faith: Searching for Spirituality among the Stars. Very simply, he seeks rather delightfully to show that the stage and screen have much to offer Christian spirituality. 'Everything you need to know about grace you can learn from watching Audrey Hepburn movies, and you can learn a lot about the soul by simply paying attention to your own desires. Falling in love? The stars wrote the script.'

I mention it here because it resonates well with the idea that faith is a way of seeing the world, that grace, once conceived as a type of sacramental injection, is really a moment of recognition, of noticing God's presence around us.

Klein contends that grace is always a kind of knowing, even the amazing kind; it is knowing your place in the world 'the way Audrey does as Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's. It's finding your spot in a nest of relationships. It's the feeling of belonging that love brings.' Even Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady has his moment of grace, finding his spot in the world with the well-known lyrics: 'I've grown accustomed to her face.'

In other words, we need to jettison the old idea of grace as an object and think of it as 'an event. It's that moment when we recognise the presence of God in our lives, when finally, and all too briefly, we realise that God has always been there working on our behalf.' Louis Armstrong's enduring song 'What a Wonderful World' celebrates the many gifts of God's grace to us.

In his chapter on love, Terrance Klein moves from the great love story in Rogers and Hammerstein's Sound of Music to the gospels which 'are all about recognising love and then risking everything to attain it'. It was St Augustine who first likened the Trinity to love, which is always tripartite, 'involving a Lover, a Beloved, and the Love they share.' There is no love without that trinity.

As we prepare for the Feast of St Ignatius on 31 July, we might reflect on our noticing skills and pray that we can, through utilising more effectively his Examen prayer, develop our capacity to notice where God already exists in our life, 'where our yesterdays were beautiful. Indeed, we might try James Martin's advice of doing the Examen with God, so that our prayer is 'more of a conversation than a task to be completed'.

Tony de Mello, Jesuit retreat-giver and story teller extraordinaire, liked to relate the story of 'the little fish'.

'Excuse me', said an ocean fish. 'You are older than I, so can you tell me where to find this thing they call the ocean?'

'The ocean', said the older fish, 'is the thing you are in now.'

'Oh, this? But this is water. What I'm seeking is the ocean', said the disappointed fish as he swam away to search elsewhere.

'Stop searching, little fish', says De Mello. 'There isn't anything to look for. All you have to do is look.' We might add - all you have to do is notice.