As my two years as a novice in the Society of Jesus onclude, I am filled with gratitude for this time of blessing, a time in which the Society has continually called me beyond myself into a deeper relationship
with Christ and the people He has called me to serve – relationships that have in turn deepened my desire to be a Jesuit.

The start of both novitiate years is given to prayer, study, and ministry. In the first year we also learn about living in community and working with a spiritual director. The latter parts of each year are reserved for a variety of experiences generally referred to as experiments.

One of our first experiments is the long retreat, a time of
deep prayer in which the Jesuit novice, with the aid of his spiritual director and The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, contemplates Jesus’ life and mission.We engage our imaginations to walk with Christ from His birth through His passion, death, and resurrection, all the while meditating on how Christ calls each of us to take up His mission.

I had prayed for a long time prior to entering the Society over the meaningfulness of life.Was my life a given or was it a gift? Put another way, had I been thrown into existence without design or placed meaningfully with care by a loving God?

During the Exercises I prayed over a recurring scene in which I imagined myself encountering our Holy Mother on an olive farm doing such things as talking with children, working the trees, or cooking in the farmhouse. I asked her if she would ask Jesus if I could be a companion in mission.
She said I should ask him personally and sent me to a barn where Jesus was working an olive press. (Two or three months later I learned for the first time that the word Gethsemane means olive press.) When I asked Jesus the same question, He told me to ask God the Father, whom I
found in a dark room lined with aisles that extended beyond
my vision.

After some discussion about joining Jesus in mission, God the Father asked me to follow Him into the darkness. Along the way I noticed the aisles were lined with jars of olive oil, each labeled with a different name. God stopped, grabbed one of the jars, and handed it to me.My name was on the jar, and I learned the oil would be shared later at a
great banquet.

Reflecting on this scene allowed me to begin to sense the magnitude of God’s all-embracing love. Things about my past I had found difficult to understand were sanctified by knowing God had been there with me and loving me. And my desire to be with Jesus in mission was sanctified by knowing that God loved me still. This understanding continues
to deepen my desire to give my life to the God who loves me boundlessly.