The following is an adapted excerpt from Eric Clayton’s new book, “Finding Peace Here and Now: How Ignatian Spirituality Leads Us to Healing and Wholeness” (2025, Brazos Press) in which we’re invited to consider how the Easter story challenges us to find peace in community.
The resurrection is Jesus’s moment of return. During the fourth week of the Spiritual Exercises, St. Ignatius invites us to pray “for the grace to be glad and rejoice intensely because of the great joy and the glory of Christ our Lord.”[i] Fr. John English, SJ — in his classic “Spiritual Freedom: From an Experience of the Ignatian Exercises to the Art of Spiritual Guidance” — notes that this kind of joy “means escaping from our narrow selves to an unusual degree.”[ii] We accompany Christ in joy, contemplating Jesus’s joy, that of those he encounters, and the joy that is consequently awakened in us. It spills over from Christ to us, from us to others, and back again. This moment of return, this turning back toward community, is key — it ignites something within us. It connects us. Saint Paul says of the body of Christ, “If one part is honored, all the parts share its joy” (1 Cor. 12:26).
Does this joy feel sudden or abrupt? We just witnessed Jesus’s brutal execution, where violence was visited on his body and soul. We stood there; we watched. The disciples fled, fearful that the same violence would find and finish them. That same passage from Paul begins by reminding us that “if [one] part suffers, all the parts suffer with it” (1 Cor. 12:26). But now — joy! From passion to resurrection.
The transition can be jarring, yet Christ encourages us to embrace this joy, not to allow ourselves to become trapped in sorrow and sadness. To remind ourselves of our intrinsic identity as the beloved of God. “There are Christians whose lives seem like Lent without Easter,” our beloved Pope Francis wrote in his apostolic exhortation “Evangelii gaudium.” “I realize of course that joy is not expressed the same way at all times in life. . . . Joy adapts and changes, but it always endures, even as a flicker of light born of our personal certainty that, when everything is said and done, we are infinitely loved.”[iii] As we approach the resurrection, as we seek to embody its spiritual insights for peace, we must commit ourselves to that slow, steady work of joy, even in seeming darkness.
We know the story of the resurrection, more or less. Ignatius, as usual, invites us to sink into the story’s scenes. Ignatius asserts that the very first of Jesus’s apparitions after his return was to his mother, Mary.[iv] The second was to Mary Magdalene, and then he appeared to Mary the mother of James.[v] And so on: Jesus walks with his disciples on the road to Emmaus, and he shares breakfast with his friends after a night of fishing. He appears in the upper room, even though the doors are locked, and he returns again to put Thomas’s doubting mind at ease.
Ignatius names Jesus in this week the “Consoler” and says, “Consider the office of consoler that Christ our Lord exercises and compare it with the way in which friends are wont to console each other.”[vi] In each Gospel scene, Jesus enters deeply into the sorrow of his friends, of his community.
He returns to share in that hardship, to carry it, and ultimately, to show his friends that they can let it go, that they themselves can return to their lives in a new way.
Hope has spilled into joy. “The divinity, which seemed to hide itself during the passion, [is] now appearing and manifesting itself so miraculously in the most holy Resurrection.”[vii]
I wonder, did it have to be this way? Did Jesus really have to make the return journey himself? Did he have to personally visit each group of friends, spending time with each? Could we not imagine a scene parallel to Jesus’s baptism at the Jordan, all of his friends gathered in one place and the voice from heaven declaring, “He is risen! Fear not!” Same effect, right? In this scenario, the news of the resurrection still gets out, and the angels have a busy few days spreading the word — after all, isn’t that what they did at the Incarnation?
But that’s not the story we know; that’s not what happened. Jesus returns. He has to come back to his friends, his beloved community. He has to console. “This is a beautiful way of showing how Jesus goes about bringing joy, hope and confidence to people,” Fr. English writes. “All of the Resurrection appearances in the Bible have the Immanuel theme — the continuation of the Incarnation today. God continues with us and is present to us.”[viii]
God doesn’t gloss over the struggle, the fear, the hopelessness. God isn’t content to give a sign in the sky as he had done at previous times.
God wants to enter deeply into our own stories, to continue to walk with us from fear to hope, from uncertainty to courage, from violence to peace.
“In the Resurrection appearances we hear Christ’s command: ‘Do not be afraid; go and tell my [friends],’” English writes. “The message of the Resurrection is ‘go and spread the good news.’ In other words, move out of yourself; go and tell other people.”[ix] There is movement in the resurrection; it is not a state of paralysis, and it is certainly not a new status quo. It is a constant calling forth.
The resurrection is an invitation to seek out and eradicate fear — the fear that closes us in on ourselves, closes us off to other people and creation, to new ways of being and thinking. The resurrection changed the story; God lifted our horizons on what was even possible. But God didn’t just tell us the news; Jesus entered deeply into the story to walk with us into this new way of living.
What does it mean that we, who are made in the image and likeness of this same God who returns, are called to enter into the highs and lows of our community? How can this disposition be one of peace?
“Finding Peace Here and Now: How Ignatian Spirituality Leads Us to Healing and Wholeness” is now available from Brazos Press! Click here to learn more.
[i] Saint Ignatius, The Spiritual Exercises, trans. Louis J. Puhl, SJ (Loyola, 1951), 95.
[ii] John J. English, Spiritual Freedom: From an Experience of the Ignatian Exercises to the Art of Spiritual Guidance, 2nd ed. (Loyola House, 1974), 231.
[iii] Pope Francis, Evangelii gaudium (Vatican, 2013), par. 6, https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/apost_exhortations/documents/papa-francesco_esortazione-ap_20131124_evangelii-gaudium.html.
[iv] Ignatius, Spiritual Exercises, 132.
[v] Ignatius, Spiritual Exercises, 133.
[vi] Ignatius, Spiritual Exercises, 96.
[vii] Ignatius, Spiritual Exercises, 95.
[viii] English, Spiritual Freedom, 230.
[ix] English, Spiritual Freedom, 232.
