After a leg injury while walking the Ignatian Camino, Brendan McManus, SJ, struggled to be grateful and find God in the experience. He writes:
Ignatius managed to turn his leg injury and convalescence into a new way of relating to God. His frustrating immobility became the moment where he realised that God was speaking to him. Not being able to be the dashing soldier helped him to wake up to the reality that God was speaking to him within his life experience. Could I turn this incapacitating injury into something more positive, more of God, and could I find gratitude?
Slowly my leg healed, and I began to appreciate what others were doing for me in the house, helping me to get through the day. Then I was able to give a course on prayer in the local parish through a local man who kindly drove me there once a week. I knew something of what it means to abandon yourself to God, to place yourself in God’s hands, as I was unable to do much else. Paradoxically, the experience of convalescence teaches a lot of truths about how much we are dependent on others, how fragile we really are, how the world gets on without us (we’re not that indispensable), and how God needs us to listen and learn.
Read the full story, “Limping in the Footsteps of Ignatius Loyola,” at the Irish Jesuit province blog. Elements of the story feature in Fr. Brendan’s book, The Way to Manresa: Discoveries Along the Ignatian Camino.
