Welcome, Everyone, to Mwangaza Jesuit Spirituality Centre where our work has been to direct the Spiritual Exercises since 1979. Our main ministry is guiding individually directed retreats. Last year, we directed 80 Thirty-day retreats and 1,000 Eight-day retreats. We gather for this Symposium as Jesuits, members of Christian Life Community, members of various Ignatian congregations, and as laity and religious living Ignatian spirituality. Mwangaza is our home for the next three days as we explore how the Spiritual Exercises form us and those we serve as we endeavor to seek and find God in all things in the service of the Reign of God.
Mwangaza means “Shining Light” in Swahili. It is a title of Christ, who is the Shining Light that informs our worldview, appropriated through the Spiritual Exercises. Jesus Mwangaza is the Light Shining on our reality as we recognize Jesus’ redeeming love by which he sets us free from all that binds us so that we can see and respond in growing freedom to the question, “What ought I to do for Christ?” He informs our reality as we seek to know him with our hearts in order to love him and follow him as he shows us the Way to respond in utilizing our unique talents and gifts. He inspires us to follow his way by placing ourselves under his standard and by choosing the values of spiritual poverty, diminishments, and humility. The highest value in following in Jesus’ way is desiring and embracing the freedom of the suffering which will come from standing where Jesus stands, with the poor, the marginalized and the disenfranchised. Next, Jesus shines our way forward by confirming us in our commitment by being strengthened through journeying with him in his Passion and by recognizing that the victory of his resurrection ensures the ultimate value of all our struggle and even our apparent defeats.
Finally, there is the “Contemplation to Attain the Love of God”. “To attain the love of God” can mean many things, but I become more certain that, at its heart, it means to grow in loving like God loves, like Jesus loves; and this agape love is self-giving, even self-sacrificing, love that we grow in embracing as we live the Spiritual Exercises through Ignatian spirituality.
Last week, a visitor to Africa, herself influenced by Ignatian spirituality, said to me, “I am visiting here because Africa is the future.” I am confident that the tools of the Exercise and Ignatian spirituality can reveal how we are the future and how we can commit to realizing Africa’s role in realizing the future. We are certainly at the margins in terms of economic power and other kinds of worldly power. But through exercising the key African value of hospitality and working to affirm that everyone is welcome and everyone has the potential to make a distinctive contribution, are we not uniquely poised to implement the power of love in our openness to God working through us? As lay theologian, Rosemary Haughton has said, “The only power that God exercises in our world of today is the power of love.” Through the combination of our poverty and our valuing community do we not find the space to let God work the power of love through us here in Africa?
Reflecting on a lifetime of living the Exercises and sharing Ignatian spirituality, I find it easy to assert that our key charism and gift to the Church and world is the discernment of spirits. The Exercises is school of discernment. We learn to listen to our hearts and discover what leads us to God and what leads us away from God, to embrace the former and become free of the latter. We are about freedom from inordinate attachments so that we can see clearly the way the Spirit is leading and commit ourselves to following this way.
Our charism of discernment is for the Church. We will need to play a critical role in helping our Church become a synodal church, a church that listens and that listens to everyone. In this way, we will serve as prophets who witness to and help realize what God is working.
I pledge the resources of Mwangaza in support of our Symposium. In welcoming us all, I close in affirming that our task is not only daunting but also so exciting. We are here to share what we are living and to progress in utilizing the Exercises more aptly to support the people we help form and serve here in Africa and to follow Jesus, Mwangaza, the Shining Light, in establishing the Reign of God more firmly in our midst.
By Terry Charlton, S.J.
Director of Mwangaza Jesuit Spirituality Center
