The Arrupe Prayer
It’s not really a prayer and Arrupe didn’t write it, but it’s splendid anyway
Last week I wrote about a popular prayer that was mistakenly attributed to Saint Ignatius. Here’s another famous “prayer,” this one long mis-attributed to Pedro Arrupe, Ignatius’s fellow Basque and superior general of the Jesuits from 1965-1983.
Nothing is more practical than finding God, than falling in Love in a quite absolute, final way. What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will affect everything. It will decide what will get you out of bed in the morning, what you do with your evenings, how you spend your weekends, what you read, whom you know, what breaks your heart, and what amazes you with joy and gratitude. Fall in Love, stay in love, and it will decide everything.
People love this reflection on love. You’ll find it in quote collections, prayer books, on T-shirts, inspirational prints on Etsy. In the Ignatian-Jesuit world it’s revered. This has a lot to do with its connection to Pedro Arrupe, the most beloved Jesuit of modern times. More on that in a minute.
No wonder it’s popular. The quote has the magic of great poetry. It expresses something felt and sensed but seldom put into words: Everything in your life is the way it is because of love. You read it and think, “yes, of course, that’s right but I never thought of it that way.” Love is very practical. I live where I live, do what I do, enjoy the things I like, have the friends I have because I fell in love with a woman many years ago and made a life with her. My choices, my values, my sense of what’s important are shaped by the love of God. I believe that Love is at the center of all things. That sounds abstract, but it’s not. It’s real. It’s my life. It’s what gets me out of bed in the morning.
When you don’t feel immersed in Love, when you have trouble getting out of bed in the morning as we often do, the Arrupe quote can take on the character of a prayer. This is what I want, Lord. I want your love to shape the way I live and how I think and act. I want to fall in love with you. It will change everything.
This is a thoroughly Ignatian idea. The Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner once startled a group of academic colleagues by blurting out, “You’re really dealing with Jesus only when you throw your arms around him.” Rahner was a formidable intellectual, perhaps the greatest theologian of the twentieth century, but he prized loving Jesus above all else. If there is an Ignatian “program” for renewal, this is it: Everything starts with awakening our awareness of God’s love. That’s what matters most.
Ignatius’s core conviction was that God can be known personally, friend to friend, person to person. Ignatian prayer is about experiencing God personally, imaginatively, in the heart. It’s about finding God in everyday experience, in work, in the inner movements of your spirit. It’s about throwing your arms around Jesus instead of wrapping your mind around him. The Arrupe quote triggers these ideas. It’s inspiring and engaging, but also deep. The love quote is deservedly loved.
The irony is that it’s famous by an accident. It first emerged in the 1990s as something written or said by Pedro Arrupe. Jesuits who knew Arrupe said that it certainly sounded like something he would say, but no source was ever found in his speeches and writings. The source turned up in an unexpected place—the archives of the Maryland Province of the Jesuits, in the manuscript of a talk given in 1981 by Joseph Whelan, SJ, former provincial of the province. Sometime later a Jesuit saw the quote on a bulletin board in a women’s religious community, with credit mistakenly given to Arrupe. The Jesuit posted the quote on his university’s website and it quickly went viral. Would this have happened if Whelan had been listed as the author? That’s doubtful. The quote became famous because Arrupe supposedly said it.
Fame is fickle. We know this wonderful thought about love because someone made a mistake copying an inspirational quote for a community bulletin board. There’s another lesson in this odd story. People are saying and writing wonderful things all the time. A few are remembered and cherished; most are not. I know; I worked in religious publishing for many years. So pay attention to the talks you hear. Read books carefully. You might find a quote that will change everything.
Thank you, Jim, for the invitation to come at what I’m reading with the expectation that I’ll likely encounter grace. I suspect such a pre-disposition may improve my choices of what I choose to read.