Michael Hansen SJ

I am a Jesuit based in Sydney presently director of the First Spiritual Exercises, a ministry of JISA. I have been working in the spirituality ministry for twenty five years and am the author of several spirituality books.

Like Iñigo Loyola, this ministry only truly developed after my life was totally disrupted by chronic illness and several years of being unable to work. I was physically and emotionally wounded by not being able to ground my identity in performance, or on ‘what I do’.

Year after year I kept saying, ‘when I am better I will do …’, until I realized I was wishing my whole life away. While making the thirty day Spiritual Exercises, my director suggested I try the ministry of the Exercises. In a flash, all those years I counted as nothing became pure gold in the one ministry that valued such interior journeys.

The difference between my old life and new was vividly revealed one night when I was praying in our chapel before Jesus nailed to his cross. Each day I kept asking for healing because I was full of pain, immobilized by chronic illness, powerless to shape my future, and feeling abandoned by my old dreams. I suddenly realized that the powerless Michael was standing before a powerless Jesus. In accepting  my vulnerability with the vulnerable Jesus, a new and deep intimacy began to grow between us.

Not being able to walk far during my convalescence, I started to look at the stars. Later I joined an Astronomy club and have since built many telescopes. When I look at the stars, I never feel small and insignificant, as many people say they do, rather I feel immensely precious and blessed that the lights of the universe are a part of me, that my Creator could love me so much in creation itself. And I feel expansive.

Now I dream of spreading the First Spiritual Exercises as widely as possible and this seems to be God’s dream for me. I no longer need to make myself the center of my life. Like the Australian bush after wildfire, I just need to grow in God’s seasons, letting fresh new shoots grow directly from the blackened trunk.