WE REPEAT THE PHRASE so often we no longer hear it: finding God in all things. It looks beautiful printed on coffee mugs, framed in retreat center lobbies, hashtagged under Instagram photos of mountain vistas. It has become a tranquilizer: a retreat talk closer, a soft landing whenever life gets difficult. But go back to where Ignatius of Loyola actually found this God, and the tranquilizer reading falls apart. The premise was built to indict, never meant to soothe.
Ignatius did not find God at the height of triumph. He found God on his back, leg shattered, his ambition in ruins, with nothing left to do but lie there and reckon with what remained. That is the birthplace of Ignatian discernment: a body broken by crisis with nowhere left to perform. If we strip that origin out of the phrase, we are not practicing Ignatian spirituality. We are borrowing its vocabulary to bless our own comfort.
To take "finding God in all things" seriously is to reckon with the core scandal of the Christian story: the Incarnation. The premise is not that God stayed at a safe, antiseptic distance, radiating peaceful energy from the heavens. The premise is that God took on flesh, entered occupied territory, lived among the marginalized, and was executed as a political dissident. If the divine chose to live in the dirt and the political friction of first-century Palestine, then the divine is not allergic to our modern mess.
So say it plainly: if your God only shows up when things are beautiful, when the event goes well, when the community feels warm, when the retreat delivers its scheduled spiritual high, what you have is not an Ignatian spirituality. It is a curated one, a boutique God who happens to share your exact class interests and conflict-avoidance strategies. God is present in the silent retreat, yes, but also, agonizingly, in the overcrowded, underfunded hospital. In the golden hour light, sure, but also on the picket line, with workers who have nothing left to bargain with but their refusal to move. The peace vigil counts. The war zone it was held for counts more. God is in the eviction. The strike. The flooded barangay, the refugee camp, the courtroom where the verdict is already decided by who can afford to wait it out. If God is not there for you, you have not encountered what Ignatius was describing. You have found a fraction of it and mistaken the fraction for the whole.
Why do we shrink the scope of where God can be found? Because sunsets demand nothing of us. You can watch a sunset, feel a fleeting sense of gratitude, and go back to your life entirely unchanged. A mountain vista does not ask you to redistribute your wealth. A quiet cup of morning coffee does not challenge your complicity in unjust labor practices.
But finding God in the face of an underpaid worker, a displaced tenant, a systemic victim, requires something terrifying: a response. If God is truly present in the friction and fractures of our society, neutrality is no longer an option. To acknowledge the divine in the marginalized is to hear a demand for justice. It forces us to take a side. When we tell ourselves that politics, economics, and systemic injustice are "too negative" for our spiritual lives, we are not protecting our peace. We are abandoning God in the places where God most reliably chooses to dwell.
This is also why a single day of outreach, or a few days of immersion followed by a full return to comfort, does not count as discernment. It is a spectacle. You show up, take the photo, go back to the dorm, and the experience seals itself shut behind you: untouched, unintegrated, safely contained to a weekend. That is tourism wearing the language of vocation. However, discernment does not close. It is recursive: you return to the same question again and again, asking what in your actual life, your time, your money, your loyalties, has to change because of what you saw. Ignatius never canonized comfort. Nowhere in the Spiritual Exercises does it say one exposure is enough, that you are permitted to file the experience away and resume your prior life unbothered.
Ignatius was not a man who hid from the grit of the world. He spent his life wandering the political and religious crossfires of sixteenth-century Europe and nursing the sick in squalid hospitals, hands deep in the dirty, complicated reality of human suffering. He knew that spiritual vision does not look away from the world's wounds. It looks directly into them.
This is not a call to abandon outreach or immersion. It is a refusal to let those one-off gestures stand in as proof of a spirituality that was supposed to cost something ongoing. We should refuse to let a checkbox activity, completed once a year, do the work a sustained conversion was supposed to do. If we are serious about this, the question cannot stop at the immersion site. It has to follow us home. What commitment survives past the week? What decision, about time, about money, about which side of a structure you actually stand on, changes because of what you claimed to have found?
We are long overdue for a spiritual undomesticating. It is time to stop looking for God solely in the places where we go to escape the world, and start looking in the places where the world is fighting for its life: in the collective struggle for human dignity, not only in moments of personal clarity. Finding God in all things is not a soothing mantra for the privileged. It is a dangerous, radical directive. It means walking into the fires of human conflict and staring straight at the brokenness, the resistance, the relentless demand for justice, then still having the courage to say: Surely, the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it.
