Jesuit with strong Kiwi ties reflects on suffering and love

Fr Justin Glyn SJ, who emigrated from South Africa with his family to New Zealand in 1998, and who was ordained as a priest in the Society of Jesus in Auckland in 2016, spoke with Meredith Lake on the Soul Search programme.

The interview was recorded while Pope Francis was in hospital, and the discussion ranged broadly over topics of suffering and spirituality, especially Ignatian spirituality, and discernment.

Fr Glyn said that Job in the Old Testament asked the fundamental question: “Why do I suffer?”

“The question is far more – what does God do about suffering?

“I think the answer is that God becomes part of that and draws that into God’s self. God joins our human story and God’s self, who is without limits, becomes one who is limited for us . . . and to then give us the potential of being something else beyond the human.”

Fr Glyn, who has been legally blind since birth, continued: “I think that one can go through quite a lot if one loves and is loved.

“The Good News of Christianity is that God first loved us. So, we go into this suffering not unarmed and unprotected. But we go into it cocooned in the love of God, and often that love of God is made manifest in the love of others.”

Fr Glyn said that St Ignatius of Loyola, one of the co-founders of the Jesuits, “talks about the love of God spreading out through others as drops from a fountain or beams from the sun”.

“The love of God is reflected and refracted through the love of individuals, which then displays that,” Fr Glyn explained.

“That is actually what goes to, not so much to the mitigation of suffering, because the pain will still be there, but it allows for the suffering to become something else if one is open to it.

“And that doesn’t necessarily make it easier, that is not a chocolate box answer that says you will not feel pain anymore.

“But it does allow for something more like true resilience.”

Discussing the question of limitation and humanity’s attempt to transcend limits by innovation and technological advancement, Fr Glyn said that this is not true transcendence.

“We are not God as individuals,” he said. He had earlier remarked that “the ultimate human temptation is to believe that we are not [limited], that we can be like God. That is part of the Genesis myth, of course”.

“What we are, are limited people who have the potential to work together and to display the image of God, not just as isolated units, but actually as people who are invested in each other, who care for each other genuinely, rather than just seeing each other as stumbling blocks to our own advancement.”

Fr Glyn noted that one of the key gifts of Ignatian spirituality for today’s troubled world would be “to be aware of how loved one is by God, but also then to be aware of how does one match that to one’s life and look at the practical consequences for how we do things”.

“Ignatian spirituality is a spirituality that looks to practical decision-making. It is not a flight from the world. The world is a big and scary place, and the question then is – how does one act in that big and scary place with integrity?”

FULL STORY

Pope Francis and the transformation of suffering – ABC listen (ABC Radio National/Soul Search)

An Interview with Father Justin Glyn, SJ (Profiles in Catholicism)