Handling Setbacks

Editor’s note: In Heroic Leadership, Chris Lowney explores four foundational pillars of leadership exemplified by the Jesuits: self-awareness, ingenuity, love, and heroism. We’ve invited dotMagis bloggers to reflect on each pillar. Handling setbacks is an aspect of ingenuity. Explore these ideas further with the exercises in The Heroic Leadership Workbook.

“Now I begin!”

So wrote Venerable Bruno Lanteri about the soul who remembers the goodness of God, recalling the words of Psalm 76 in the Vulgate (Latin) Bible:

Will God forget to shew mercy? or will he in his anger shut up his mercies?
And I said, Now have I begun: this is the change of the right hand of the most High.
I remembered the works of the Lord: for I will be mindful of thy wonders from the beginning.
And I will meditate on all thy works: and will be employed in thy inventions. (Emphasis added.)

Venerable Bruno was the founder of the Oblates of the Virgin Mary and a devotee of St. Ignatius of Loyola during the period of Jesuit suppression in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Those words, “now I begin”—nunc coepi—captured for him the spirit of the repentant soul looking toward the abundant mercy of God.

Every person who takes spiritual life seriously knows that it will involve setbacks. Venerable Bruno, responding to the pessimism of 18th century Jansenism, emphasized the abundance of divine mercy: “If I should fall a thousand times a day, a thousand times a day I will begin again…”

His is a spirituality of the now of God’s mercy, the now of God’s invitation to a change of heart, the now of God’s work in creating in me a clean heart. Am I experiencing a setback? Now is God’s new invitation to healing. Have I strayed from God? Now is the time when he, the father of the prodigal son, is watching the horizon for my return. Have I found myself in distress and wondering whether God cares? Now is the time when he has left the 99 sheep behind in order to search for me, his lost sheep.

Am I unable to handle my setbacks? Now is the time to rely on God, whose yoke is easy and whose burden is light.