a look back:

The weekly blogging has been a pleasant experience for me. Father Dziak's  questions were not what I expected and required a lot of thought and reflection.

Before studying the exercises in the class, I would view them as praying every day and reading the Bible. I did not see it as a time of extreme reflection and penance. Father Ted said in class that the questions I answered in the blogs  come from the exercises. These questions gave me a preview of how difficult, spiritually, the exercises really are. 

By answering these questions, I have improved my way on critical thinking and discernment. I understand what Ignatius was trying to accomplish in his religious journey and how he has changed the world with his religious goals. 

Ignatius’ main goal was to help save souls. If we look at what he has done, Ignatius has given the Society a lot to accomplish his goal. He gave us the Spiritual Exercises which helps people in discernment and their relationship with God. Ignatius also gave us schools. Jesuit education wants to shape its students; making men and women for others. 

The blog where we had to picture ourselves forty years from now was definitely the  hardest. I am a person that doesn’t really focus on the far future (I usually have short term goals and not a big one). Looking forty years into my life was not easy as it required a lot of though.

The blog I enjoyed the most was the creative blog. I learned in Father Ted’s response on this blog about the “Jesus is my Homeboy” company . I was surprised at the fact that it was ran by a Jesuit. 

Finally, I can say that I enjoyed the blogs. They helped me in my spiritual life, discernment, and about the life of Ignatius. Great addition to go with the course.

April 23, 2052 Journal,

I remembered my time at Loyola University New Orleans and the classes I took. Out of all the classes I took, I can relate to Ignatius Loyola because of the situation I am in. I seem to be in conflict with what the rest of my life is going to be. I am living with a family in New Orleans, since I fell in love with the city when I was in college. I got offered a new job in Arizona selling medical equipment. This job offers more money, but I have a family to consider in this decision as well. The class on Ignatius’ life taught me about discernment and the importance of making a sound decision. I’ve talked to my wife and children about the move and they approve of me taking this new job as long as my wife can find one too.

My wife is a five star chef and needless to say, she keeps my belly happy. It is hard to find a restaurant that will suit her style of cooking, so we might have to open one in Arizona resulting in closing the restaurant we have in New Orleans.

With the rules of discernment that I learned I hope to make the correct decision. So far, I have my goal set in mind which is to start my own brand of top notch medical equipment, and the more I do in the filed, the more I can begin to develop my own machines. I have talked to my parents about this and they encourage me as well to move to Arizona. I also talked to my brother, but he is crazy and suggested I take him with me.

I have yet to make my decision, but the earlier I make it, the better. I have two months to answer. My wife and I have also been discerning as to opening a restaurant in Arizona or not. I fear that we might take too long to get things in order and I’ll end up declining the job. I am indifferent though, I love New Orleans and my family.

I can say that a Jesuit education has made me aware of other
things besides schoolwork. Being in a Jesuit institution, I can say that I have
grown spiritually and socially.
I have grown spiritually in the sense that Jesuit education
focusses on teaching the word of God and what it means to follow him. For
example, in the Ignatius Loyola class, we learned what the spiritual exercises
are and what their purpose is. Father Dziak explained that with the spiritual
exercises we can learn about ourselves while getting to know Jesus and learning
to live the lifestyle he lived. What I am trying to say is that other religious
institutions do not show their students how to pray, while in this class, we
touched on the spiritual exercises, which is a very powerful experience to go
through.
A Jesuit education does not just improve someone’s life
spiritually, but also socially in the sense that it teaches its pupils to deal
with people through service. Service is an important concept in Jesuit
education because Ignatius showed love through his actions and did everything
for the greater glory of God, which is how we, as Jesuit pupils, should perform
service too. Service helps us socially because we are dealing with people
constantly. We deal with people in schools, hospitals, or in a bigger scale,
with the community.
I am thankful for being blessed with a Jesuit education. It
has taught me mostly how to live my life by giving me certain values. It has
also shown me how to make decisions using Ignatius’ rules of discernment. The
rules of discernment help me mostly in making an objective decision over a
subjective decision.

The image of the prodigal son was chosen because during Week 1 we are supposed to see God as a loving God who despite of all our sinners he still loves us. Although our sins separate us from God, it is the reality that we are all sinners and need God's greater mercy and forgiveness.

The picture saying "Jesus is my Homeboy" was chosen to describe Week 2 because this is the time when we recognize Jesus the man as a friend. We get to know who Jesus was and how he lived his life. Through scripture, reflection, and prayer we get to know very intimately who Jesus was and what were his values. By the time we are done with week 2, Jesus is our homeboy.

In week 3 we get to reflect on the death of Jesus, God's only son. In addition to the death of Jesus, we get to understand the ultimate expression of God's love. God sacrificed his only son to save us from sin and he did this out of love.

The Jesus of Divine Mercy was chosen because in week 4 we reflect on that fact that God beat death. We rejoice with Jesus resurrected and we become empowered by his spirit.

Heroes

When I think as of to who is my hero, the first person that comes to my mind is my father. I never looked at my father as a best friend, I always viewed him as a wise person who I should go to when I need guidance and advise wether it is what to do with my life or just to talk to about life. I respect my father mostly because he is a self-less hard worker who thinks about his family first. When he got my mother pregnant, he decided to work to make sure he gives his children a good education/life. This is all he wanted. He spend numerous days, weekends, and months showing us how to become hard workers like he is, and to have values.

He showed us what hard work is. He came from a family of farmers, and since he was young he would work in the farm. This is how he showed us what hard work was and how to be responsible. He decided to build a corral in our backyard where we had chickens, cock fighters, rabbits, ducks, and even a cow. After me and my brother built it with my father, he said that the corral was our responsibility now. We had to come back from school and feed all the animals, keep the corral clean and neat, and keep an eye on the new baby chickens (putting them in a special cage with a light bulb).

By doing this, my father allowed me to see what hard work really is and gave me a basis of what responsibility is. I didn’t really want to go down to the corral every day, but I had to. He made sure I did. And if I didn’t he would make me go down there at night. This has to be one of the most memorable things that I could take a lot from when I was little and I have my dad to thank for that. He is my example of what kind of father I want to be to my kids when that day comes.

"We should not fix our desires on health or sickness, wealth or poverty, success or failure, a long life or a short one."

Ignatius makes strong emphasis on discernment. That we should make our decisions after setting our goals, a long period of reflection, gathering information, and, finally, going through with the decision. In this quote we see that in order to be happy, our decisions should not be based on health or sickness, wealth of poverty, success or failure, a long life or a short life, we should make our decisions based on our own happiness. That's where discernment comes in.

Ignatius describes discernment as the way of figuring out which direction God is leading you. Ignatius believed God had a strong influence in the decisions we make.

When making our decisions we should look at the gifts God has given us; gifts included in our DNA, culture, family and environment. It is based on these gifts that we can tell more or less where God wants us to go. Although some people might look at their gifts and go a way God doesn’t want them to, those people made their decisions to fit their superficial needs and wants. Life is a mystery, God won’t tell us exactly where he wants us, and this is why discernment is so important. Ignatius teaches us that when making the decisions, it should be head over heart, or the objective over the subjective. Decisions should never be made in the heat of the moment because this leads us to making poor decisions. Every decision should require time and the steps given by Ignatius when it comes to discernment.

When I take a look at what gifts God has given me the first thing that comes to mind is my determination. It took me a while to figure out I had such a strong determination, but I recently discovered that I can do anything I want as long as I decide it is something I really want to do. I found out I had determination during the summer when I started looking up information on bodybuilding. I spent hours on the computer and message board learning as to what were the better exercises, supplements, etc. I learned what it was to actually be responsible during the summer working from 8:00am to 5:00pm. I would come home exhausted but find energy to go to train, as if it was something I really enjoyed. When I came back to Loyola I figured that If I enjoyed what I was doing, why not apply it to every day life? I like to study and I like being a hard worker. It was this school year that I decided I was going to be a better student than what I was last year. I have become more involved in school and work. These are my only two priorities at the moment.
Being determined is not the key to reach all my goals, a combination of responsibility is also needed. I mix these two traits in school to do better. After classes I attempt to finish all my work for the next week. By doing this, I don’t allow myself to be bombarded with work I have to hand in last minute. Also, I try to strive for greatness in the sense that I like doing things right. I don’t like to hand in a paper that I know I pulled out of my sleeve.
When I am at work I tend to try to outperform, not with the purpose of putting the people working with me down, but rather with the purpose of taking pride in what I do and giving it my all. I tend to bother the assistant director on game days as to what he needs help with and hop on it as soon as I can. I figure that hard work is noticeable by the superiors and can lead to respect even if I am just another work study student.
As long as I am doing things that I enjoy I will keep doing them with determination and responsibility.

As we step away from the life of Ignatius, what view, personality characteristic, or aspect of his life did you identify with the most? Did you see any of yourself in him? Did you learn anything from him that you can apply to your own life?

Having learned Ignatius life, his mysticism is the first thing that comes up to my mind when i think of him. I identify myself with this characteristic because, like everyone else, I have goals we want to reach. Ignatius had the goal to help save souls and become the best saint and he followed his desire for these ambitions by doing the magis. I have a lot of goals, short term and long term. For short term I have to graduate and to get into graduate school. For long term I have to finish graduate school. But what am I going to do to get there? Like Ignatius, i have to be a mystic, in the sense that I see myself as capable of accomplishing my goals. This is easier said than done because I can have all the confidence in the world but I also need to work for my goal. It sounds corny , but by being a mystic I can believe in myself and do everything possible to work for my goal. This means doing the magis, never settling for the mundane. Being a mystic and doing the magis are not only for my benefit, but also for the community. With all the work I can do, It is only fair that I give back to the community in some way.

I have had these goals in mind since before I knew about Ignatius. But the story of Ignatius directed me to know exactly how to achieve my life goals. Ignatius’s life taught me that by having a goal and doing the magis I can achieve my goals. Being a mystic and doing the magis is not only for the sake of accomplishing life’s goals, but for the sake of becoming a person who works for that they want.

Man in the Red Bandana

The story of “The Man in the Red Bandana” is not what everyone’s first thought is when they think of the word hero. In a way, Wells can be compared to Ignatius, he wanted something, and seized it, he made a difference in people’s lives, and he is still remembered and honored by the people he has touched.

Wells, wanting to be a firefighter, enrolled as a cadet in the New York Fire Department. After graduating college, he got a desk job but it was not quite what he wanted to do. During the attack, Wells used his firefighter training to escort around twelve people to safety. He did not stop at the first few people, he kept trying to help as many as he could. He was fulfilling his dream. He can be compared to Ignatius in this way because Ignatius was a soldier at first. After Pamplona and being out of commission, he found out what he actually wanted to do, become the best saint there was. He established Los Compañeros de Jesus. Both Ignatius and Wells followed their dream.

The way Ignatius impacted peoples lives is different from the way Wells did it, but having an impact on someones life is a positive thing no matter how it is done. Ignatius showed people that God can be found in a ones experiences. On another note, Wells saved lives during a time of need. He did not give up. Those people have him to thank for being where they are today.

Today, 521 years since Ignatius was born, and 11 years since September 11, everyone remembers these two individuals who changed peoples lives for the best. We have Ignatius, Basque saint whose goal was to help save souls and we have Wells, lacrosse player, business men, and firefighter, a hero who gave his life to help others no matter the circumstances.

Response to the reading on Heroic Leadership

The first reading on this book taught me a good amount of who Jesuits are. Although it takes a business point of view on the matter, I see how it can relate to Jesuits. I learned that they were a group of ambitious people who had a goal and worked for it with haste, all in the name of God.

Like Ignatius, the author had an epiphany. The epiphany lead to him writing this book. The book would show people what it is to really be a leader by using the Jesuits as an example. He says Jesuits have revolutionary leadership principles and that these principles should not be limited to Jesuits, but applied to every-day life: “We can be leaders in everything we do” (5). An example of this said leadership applied by the Jesuits is that they were founded in 1540 by ten men, and within a decade they had more than thirty colleges established under their name.

The author says that now-days leadership is a superficial thing, whereas the Jesuits would use a more deep leadership style that could be defined as the four pillars of success: self-awareness, ingenuity, love, and heroism. These four pillars basically mean that a leader must: understand his/her strengths and weaknesses, adapt to the world, engage others in a positive attitude, and motivate others and themselves through ambitions.

In this chapter the reader finds out that you do not need to follow all these steps on how to become a leader to be one. People are leaders every day, in small or bigger things. The most important thing to take from this chapter is that you cannot talk about being a leader to be one, you have to live leadership.

Ignatius was a mystic, and strongly believed in the spirit world, in the presence of the devil (the ‘evil one’ as he calls it.) What is your view? Do you believe in an evil spirit?

Thinking of an evil spirit that temps us is something that I don’t really believe in. I believe there is a devil and a hell, but I refuse the idea of an evil spirit that temps us., and that he lives in the fiery pits of hell. God gave us free will to do what we want. In addition to this, he gave us the Ten Commandments as a guide on how to live to achieve the kingdom of God.

But in a more philosophical view, I don’t believe in evil, just absence of good. This means that the people that are considered “bad” are not, they just lack good in their actions. This applies to the evil spirit, or hell. It is just absence of God. So, my idea of hell is a place where there is absence of God, our soul will not reach the kingdom of God and lose touch with God.

Fiery pits of hell and endless suffering are things us humans use to describe hell because we don’t know how it’s like. The same applies to heaven when we describe it as a peaceful place in the clouds. Heaven and Hell are not places; they are ideas that we use to picture what it would be like to live in endless happiness or suffering. Everyone has a different idea.

Is there an event that changed your faith and way you look at the world?

The summer of 2004 my parents decided to send me to a Christian camp in Canada, Ontario Pioneer Camp. This trip was going to be my first time traveling somewhere other than the United States alone for an extended period of time. My dad went to this camp when he was young and thought my brother and I would like it just as he did. My dad wanted us to have a good spiritual personality and the opportunity to experience life in another country. As years passed, my brother and I kept going to this camp. I saw it more as a retreat rather than a summer camp. OPC was Protestant, making it different for me since I have been raised Catholic. I looked passed this and went with an open mind. I saw that they all had a different way of viewing God and the Bible. There was Worship and Bible Study every day and in addition to this, Chapel on Sundays. At first it was a lot to do with God for it being a camp, but after all the Bible studies, not having any of the distractions I have back home (electronics especially), and being in the woods for a month and a half experiencing God’s creation made me feel like I developed a good relationship with God.

When I was old enough to become a counselor there, I didn’t think twice about going through with it. This was a lot better than being a camper because I had to apply everything I learned in the previous years. I began to see OPC as me giving something to a community. Giving them my time, and energy to be there, in a different Country, because I loved it. I have to thank OPC because it showed me how important giving to the community really is.

Why am I enrolled in the Ignatius Loyola Class?

I studied in a Catholic school with Piarist priests in Ponce, Puerto Rico and I thought this was the only way priests could be involved in a school setting. Piarists have Saint Joseph Calasanz like Jesuits have Saint Ignatius of Loyola. It was for my sophomore year of high school that I moved to San Juan and changed from a school with Piarists priests to a school with Jesuit priests, the school was San Ignacio de Loyola (Saint Ignatius of Loyola). I noticed quite a difference after being in this new school in terms of the philosophy of the teachers and what it was to be a good person in this world. They kept mentioning these traits a person had to have over and over and they got engraved in my mind, be a man of faith, to be intellectually competent, to be able to discern, and to be a man of service. I found out how to apply these traits in my years in this school, but unlike my classmates, it took me a little longer to understand these traits.

I first went to Colegio San Ignacio de Loyola my sophomore year of high school. The school starts from seventh grade to senior year. My friends that have been in the school since seventh grade have had classes teaching them who is Ignatius, who are the Jesuits, and what do they stand for. It makes me feel like I really missed out because I graduated from this Jesuit school and I don’t have much knowledge of who Ignatius was or what he did. I am enrolled in this class because I feel that it is my responsibility to know who Ignatius was. I’m sure that how Piarists priests taught us how to live our life and be good people to society, Jesuits can do the same and I can grow in my faith and become a better person that can offer something to the world.