Everyday Ignatian is a series written by guest contributors, chronicling their daily lives and experiences through the lens of Ignatian spirituality. This year, we’re excited to introduce a special theme for 2025: Virtues, or Gifts of the Spirit. Featuring writers Alli Bobzien, Catherine Sullivan and Jennifer Sawyer, along with select guest authors, Everyday Ignatian will highlight stories that explore the quarterly themes of prudence, patience, solidarity, and gratitude — and the impact they have on our lives today.
If you look at my text threads with a Jesuit friend, you’ll quickly observe that all our messages comprise numerous versions of the same exchange:
Fr. R: Hey, Gab! I want to invite you to a Christus Ministries [insert: mixer/retreat/faith sharing]. I think you’d find the content meaningful, and you’d be in community with other young adults who are also out of college.
Me: Hi there! Sorry it’s taken me so long to respond. Unfortunately, I’ve already got plans on [insert date here]. Hopefully I can join next time. Wishing you a wonderful event!
These messages stretch back about two years.
The repeated invitations baffled me at the time because the Jesuit in question, whom I met at Loyola Marymount University (LMU), knew the breadth and depth of my involvement there. At LMU, the place that embraced me as an 18-year-old first-year student, I am a double alum, staff member, cantor and student organization chaplain. It is the bridge between my adolescence and emerging adulthood, the source of my educational, spiritual, professional and social life. So I’ll sheepishly admit that my knee-jerk reaction to Fr. R’s ongoing outreach was, “Thanks, but I’m all set.”
Then 2025 began, bringing with it a deep mental health rut that caused me to question everything — relationships, career, faith. Each day was weighed down with a sense of restlessness at best and meaninglessness at worst. As my grasp on the present loosened, the future felt increasingly murky, like driving on a mountain road with zero visibility. I embarked on several weeks of therapy, slowly addressing those places in my life that were causing me anxiety. Still, my faith life was merely treading water, neatly compartmentalized within Sunday Mass.
During this time, I chaperoned an undergraduate retreat through LMU’s campus ministry. In the typical rhythm of such retreats, the students were given the option of receiving the sacrament of reconciliation from one of the Jesuits who had joined us for the day. After all the undergraduates had returned to the main cabin, I crept toward one of the makeshift “confessionals,” a picnic table under a drooping tree. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” I began. Through tears, I proceeded to tell the Jesuit in front of me how far I felt from God, yet how angry I was despite the distance. How futile the day-to-day often felt. How my clumsy attempts at prayer had nothing to show for them. He listened, then quietly assuaged my fears while challenging me to remember that ours is a God of closeness, who desires a relationship with each of us.
Then, after a pause, he asked, “Have you heard of Christus Ministries?”
No way. Et tu, Father?
“Yes,” I replied slowly. Then, to my own surprise, I added, “I’ve been thinking about going to their events. I think I need to be around peers and be more intentional about my faith life. I’ve let it go on autopilot.”
I felt the truth of the words as they left my mouth. At some point since graduating from college, my spiritual needs had changed. I needed more than what LMU could give me. I was growing up — and that meant outgrowing certain spaces while finding my place in others.
So, with no small amount of trepidation, I ventured out to a nearby parish where Christus Ministries hosts its weekly Word and Wisdom Wednesdays (WWW). Fr. R., who runs the program, was delighted; I was nervous. But I returned the next week. And the week after that. The consistency was a comfort: show up, mingle, listen to the Gospel reading for the coming Sunday, a nugget of wisdom from Fr. R., quiet reflection, then small group sharing. I started recognizing the regular attendees, learning faces and names and stories, and the more familiar I became with the group, the easier it became to show up, authentically myself, each week.
Several weeks into attending WWW on a weekly basis, I visited a coffee shop I’d never been to in a nearby neighborhood. When I turned to leave, drink in hand, a blonde girl standing in line did a double take at me. I smiled uncertainly — did she have me mistaken for someone else? But she beamed back. “Gab! Gab, right? From Wednesday nights?”
Momentarily dumbfounded, standing in this coffee shop I had never been in, I could only blink back at the girl for a beat or two. “Maddie!” I finally exclaimed. Outside the context of our Wednesday night gatherings, I almost failed to recognize her. We had been placed in the same small group a few times, where I learned that Maddie, a recent college graduate from the Midwest, was only in Los Angeles temporarily for an internship. I recalled meeting her at one of my first WWWs, slightly awestruck by the initiative it took to seek out a faith community and make a home there, even if only for a couple of months. She gave me a hug, we chatted for a moment, and I left the cafe, reeling a little bit from our brief interaction but unsure why.
Driving off, the reason dawned on me: I had become part of something very tangible, something that existed outside the walls of a parish hall. I had not only been welcomed into Christus Ministries, but seen, known, called by name. In our Scripture reflections and small group sharing, so many of the worries I had been dragging around for months had been echoed back to me, affirmed and validated by peers experiencing the same growing pains. In doing so, in opening myself to the vulnerabilities of others and sharing my own, I had become part of a community. Maddie had done the same.
The third of the Society of Jesus’s four Universal Apostolic Preferences, Journeying with Youth, seeks to “accompany young people in the creation of a hope-filled future.” It acknowledges that the complexities of modern life and many sociopolitical factors make it difficult for young people to find “a road where they can build supportive personal and family relations based on solid spiritual and financial foundations.” In response, the Society of Jesus proposes walking alongside young people, “discerning these possibilities and finding God in the depths of reality.”
As a young person who has been on the receiving end of that accompaniment, I find that the vocation of walking alongside our young adults is straightforward — not easy, by any means, but simple. The realization of a hope-filled future begins with an invitation of relationship, an offer of companionship: “I am with you. You may not need it now, or perhaps you don’t realize you do, but I am with you.” In living in community with one another, we embody what I was told that day during the sacrament of reconciliation at that picnic table under the tree: “When we feel far from God, we’re the ones who have pulled away. God desires a relationship with us. Our God is a God of closeness.”
