Satisfaction

Journal Entry November 4^th 2006

“Satisfaction. It feels wonderful. It feels like you’ve accomplished something – you’ve worked towards a goal and achieved it and can now revel in the success. So then lack of satisfaction = failure? Who doesn’t want the selfish satisfaction of being a skilled, revered, renowned teacher, mentor and coach?… I admit it. I have an unhealthy desire to be perfect and among countless others, the main problems with that are two-fold: #1 I foolishly think this is something that I do on my own…as in God gave me all of these gifts and it’s my job to perfectly return them to Him. #2 He doesn’t expect perfection from me. Yes, He has given me these gifts, but somehow I am oblivious to the fact that He doesn’t just drop the package, ring the doorbell and run…It is through Him that they come to fruition…Somehow I have this twisted notion that passion = perfection and that I’m not living passionately if I’m not perfect and if I’m not perfect I’m not succeeding and if I’m not succeeding then I am failing….

“The goal is to realize deeply the faith vision of all reality as the dynamic movement of God’s creative love toward the fulfillment of His external purpose (Eph 1-10). Through this realization, I am graced with a profound sense of the reality and majesty of God and of His personal love for me in creating me. I recognize His personal call to me to open myself to Him to perceive His unending fidelity to me. Consequently, I seek total spiritual freedom expressed by Ignatius in the words ‘make ourselves indifferent in order to surrender all of my desires to His concrete call to me, known or yet to be discovered, so that in all ways I shall always praise, reverence and serve God our Lord.’ Thus, all of my desires and choices and uses of creatures will become ordered to my own profound ruling desire – to move more and more to God as I discover every new call to me…[23 First Principle and Foundation – Spiritual Exercises]

And I suppose I’ve never thought of it like that – being indifferent so as to live with passion. It sounds ridiculous but it’s so true – emptying yourself of your own desires and wants – being completely indifferent to the world in the sense that you are free to let God decide and direct you where he chooses instead of me taking the liberty of doing it myself. It’s a fantastic concept and I guess that’s why they paid Loyola the big bucks!

The fact of the matter is that there is no ME in this, and it’s a truly humbling epiphany – that there is absolutely no I in this endeavor and I need to be indifferent to whatever part of ME demands attention. It’s not about what I desire or what I aspire to be. In all honesty, there is nothing skilled, revered or renowed about what I do everyday, and when all is said and done, I will become nothing more than an idea or maybe not even that….

but I’ll exist in each one of them. I trust that just as every impression of them has now become a part of me, each one ever so slightly changing the way I view the world, so too have I been absorbed into part of their being. I have to be content knowing that my effect is small, not trivial, just small. Whenever they hear the word passion, they may never associate it with me. I will never physically see the lightbulb go off. But in some miniscule way, they might view the world a little differently having known the definition of that word…

It’s something that requires an extraordinary amount of patience and trust because it’s a matter of giving without expecting anything. I won’t see the results. I won’t thrive off of the results. All I receive is the satisfaction of knowing there are results somewhere at the end of the process. Perhaps the most amazing part about all of this is that this is not just about teaching…of course it’s more directly applicable because I get to see and interact with the same 175 people everyday, but doesn’t this hold true with every single person with whom our paths have crossed??

Hasn’t every person that I have ever come into contact with left some mark on me that has affected the person that I am? It seems absurd but it only further proves my point that while I don’t consciously think about it, they are there in some form absorbed into the essence of who I am. Most of the time I don’t realize it or care to notice….but it’s there. I myself, am simply a composite accumulation of the number of people who have touched me and the final result is the way I put all of them together and present myself to the world.

Honestly, it’s terrifying when I really think about it. How many people in this world have I touched directly or indirectly? Whether it’s the person I didn’t wave to on my morning run and never thought twice about, or the person I stay up and talk with until the first glows of sunrise grace the horizon. The numbers are upwards of thousands……….and how many of those are mindless interactions? Indifferent interactions? If I would have known at that time I was altering someone’s life, I think…I know my behavior would have been drastically different…..

But see that’s the best part – I can’t just walk around with this chip on my shoulders thinking I have this special power to touch the lives indelibly of every person I come into contact with – talk about absurd – the truth in that only leads to arrogance. But the fact that we truly do belong to each other paradoxically cannot be something that you consciously think about not just because it’s overwhelming but because it negates the beauty of it. This idea, this concept needs to be ingrained into my very being….not infused artificially but absorbed into my spirit and my flesh.”