The Ignatian Workout: Foundation (Day One)

Principle One: We are created to praise, reverence, and serve God, and by these means to achieve our eternal well-being.
Living the practice of the foundation is about challenging the false notions about what is good and bad in life.
"Jesus said, 'You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect." (Matthew 5:48).
Our perfection lies precisely in our ability to mirror the kind of love that God has for us...Our perfection is simply our desire to respond to this already accomplished fact of God's love, to make our lives great because we are capable of it.
To praise, reverence and serve God means to work with God at each moment, constructing our lives in such a way that all our choices, all our desires, all our hopes are oriented toward the love of God.
Our happiness depends upon loving God with all our heart, soul and strength. Take time to consider how you do this...


There's a swim meet tonight. It's been two weeks since the last swim meet, when I nearly drowned in a wellspring of agitation.

The backstory: Since February, I've brought Isabel and Lily to twice-weekly, semi-private swim lessons to get them ready for swim team. I'd noticed that Isabel had started putting on weight. Not too much, but enough to show that she hasn't inherited my skinny girl metabolism. I know that Isabel (and possibly Lily) will probably face a day, and after that a lifetime, when their bodies will become a source of burden. The focus on weight loss is so rampant, so ever-present around us, and my girls are just a few years away from noticing.

There are ways to deal with this, but the one I prefer is avoiding the weight issue naturally. Just don't put the weight on to begin with. And so the swim lessons. I thought I'd get Isabel into a highly aerobic sport, one where she'd burn calories without even realizing it. If she liked swimming, I'd sign her up for one of the year-round swim teams that are so plentiful in this area.

Then came May, and the neighborhood's summer swim team began. Despite those three months of twice weekly lessons, Isabel and Lily lagged behind their teammates at practice. Both were relegated to the last lane (where the weakest swimmers go). The coaches, laconic teenagers, had little incentive to help struggling swimmers get better. On the day before the first meet, when they had the kids race one another and timed it, Isabel came in dead last.

She dreaded the meet, and so did I. I called the assistant coach, and asked if Isabel could be in just two races, her two strongest strokes. But when the heat list arrived, Isabel was in three races, one of them a relay--which means three other kids (and these are not nice kids) would be depending on her to do well in order to get their ribbon.

The meet was like a dark night of the soul. Hot, crowded, very loud. Whistles and horns and screams. Kids pushed through the crowd with "EAT MY BUBBLES" scrawled in Sharpie across their backs. Isabel was sick with stress and worry, and my heart fluttered in vicarious anxiety. I approached the coach, an unsmiling college girl, and asked if Isabel really had to swim the relay. She brushed me off--"She can do it," she said--and I glared at her, turned away angrily. And then...the four-hour ordeal stretched out before us like an eternity.

Kids swarmed the snack bar, buying Pushup Pops and Airheads and M&Ms and Kit Kats and Ring Pops. There's a tacit acknowledgement from the parents that the candy gorging is part of the swim meet experience. Isabel and Lily's experience, too. I objected, but not out loud. How could I?

Lee arrived late, then didn't want to stay. I fumed at the injustice of that; he fumed at my inability to understand that he'd just worked a full day and commuted home and therefore wasn't up for this brutal exercise.

In the end, the coach was right. Isabel swam all three races adequately. She didn't come close to winning, but her relay team was the B team, so they wouldn't have won anyway. At nine p.m., we dragged ourselves home, with Isabel insisting that she would never swim in another meet again.

At practice yesterday, I sat a few tables over from Paul, the stay-at-home dad to Min and Saree, who are teammates and neighborhood kids. A year ago I'd tried unsuccessfully to plant a friendship there, inviting them for playdates. They are beautiful girls, but cold and unsmiling, even at their young ages. Saree's sport is gymnastics. At the ripe old age of going-on-seven, she executes perfect cartwheels on the grassy entrance to the pool.

The first week of swim team practice, Saree took a liking to Lily. They made a tent together, rolled in the grass. The second week, Saree dropped her for another girl. Every morning since then, Lily watches them make tents across the pool, and then she makes her own tents by herself, next to me.

I overheard a snippet of Paul in a conversation with a friend. "You can't teach competitiveness," he was saying. "They have to have it in them."

I blanched. I began to talk to him in my mind. "You CAN teach compassion and kindness, though," I thought. "And which is more important, really?" He angered me, this man who put his high-achieving, unsmiling girls on the school bus with my sweet, guileless ones.

Our happiness depends upon loving God with all our heart, soul and strength.  It's a matter of mirroring back God's love for us. We are CAPABLE OF MAKING OUR LIVES GREAT, by responding to the already established fact of God's love for us. 

Tonight, another meet. Standing poolside amidst the chaos, hugging Isabel close, I will not feel the love of God. I'll feel short of breath. I'll feel angry, disappointed. I'll fret over my inability to keep the candy count down to two per kid.

Challenging the false notions about what is good and bad in life: The false--not to mention ridiculous--notions at tonight's swim meet? Swimming isn't about health; it's about squashing your opponent. Candy, gobs of it, is quite all right. (So what if Georgia is #2 in the nation for obese children? It's a swim meet!) The louder, the better, always. The later, the better, too. You're weird if you're not enjoying it.

Is a swim meet an opportunity to love God with all our heart, soul and strength? Here's my prayer: Lord, show me tonight how to love you, how to feel your love and mirror it back, in the midst of the hell-writ-small that is tonight's swim meet. I will be looking for you in the chaos.

Now as for Paul, and his girls. Lord, please help me to identify why they bother me. They are not slaying children in Darfur or raping women in the Sudan! This is small, and yet I live out my life in small spaces like my neighborhood, and even the small stuff counts.

If I am focused on your love, on mirroring back your love, then a taskmaster dad and his snooty offspring shouldn't make a difference to me. I am already quite friendly to him and his girls. I can work on meaning it. I will not be happy, and I will not make my life great, by recoiling at the people around me. I can see them in perspective. They are indifferent to me and my girls, but why would it matter when God is deeply interested in us? I will construct my life in such a way that all my choices, all my desires, all my hopes are oriented toward loving him back.