Saint Ignatius of Loyola’s The Spiritual Exercises culminates with a final spiritual practice known as the “Contemplation to Attain Love.” While imagining ourselves standing before God, we are meant to recall with gratitude all the blessings God has given us: everything on which our mortal and eternal lives depend. The next step is to consider what we “in all reason and justice” ought to give God in return (no. 234, p. 94). We cannot in good conscience hold anything back. It is in this context that Ignatius introduces the famous prayer which, in Latin, is known as the Suscipe (“Take”):
“Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and all my will—all that I have and possess. You, Lord, have given all that to me. I now give it back to you, O Lord. All of it is yours. Dispose of it according to your will. Give me love of yourself along with your grace, for that is enough for me” (no. 234, p. 95).
The first word of this prayer, “take,” is startling. Is it not more natural to want God to give us things than to take them from us? To be sure, the prayer does ask God to bestow “love of yourself along with your grace,” but its principal aim is to have us release everything we have, even ourselves, into God’s merciful hands.
The acquisitive mentality that seeks only to grasp, cling, and hoard lies at the root of many of this world’s problems. Ignatius rightly understands it to be incompatible with love—and, for that matter, justice. If God has given us everything for God’s own purposes, and as part of a relationship of mutual generosity, it is unjust for us to guard these things jealously, as if we were in charge of them or had rights to use them however we pleased. The just course of action is to surrender everything to God and to let God’s love determine the rest. We will never reach the spiritual or social heights God intends for us unless we get over our tendency to take, take, take.
From a certain angle, what is called “anti-Black racism” is nothing other than a particular habit of taking. It began with the theft of persons, along with their labor and liberty, but this was not all. Slavery stole memories too. A generation after the Middle Passage and its suppression of traditional languages and lifeways, who among the enslaved could recall their African homelands? Although understanding and will are so essential to our shared humanity that they could never have been entirely removed, they were relentlessly attacked. Education was denied and punished. Daily cruelties tested people’s will to go on. After emancipation, freed persons and their descendants were left without land or property. Segregation blocked access to education, jobs, and other opportunities for advancement, and the few who did prosper could expect a fierce backlash.
This history of largescale, multigenerational theft explains persistent economic inequalities and a range of adverse social effects. In 2021, average Black householders in the U.S. had less than one tenth the wealth of their white counterparts and roughly a quarter had more debt than assets, leaving them precarious, if not outright impoverished.
Black persons never told their captors or overseers, “take, lord, and receive all my liberty, etc.,” and yet it was taken. There was no consent. This theft is a grave social sin at the bedrock of modern American life.
Many victims of this racially targeted robbery are deceased and yet—we can hope—now live eternally in God. The same goes for many of the perpetrators. Their misdeeds, however, cast a long shadow that we cannot seem to outrun. What are we to do now? How can we repair the harm they caused? Although some scholars have made powerful arguments in this regard, it is difficult to work out mathematically, legally, and ethically who owes what to whom and how any transfer of resources should be practically achieved. Nevertheless, the fact that the status quo is a product of massive injustice is undeniable.
Jesuits were complicit in this racial thievery, but they were hardly unique. The work of repair that Ignatian spirituality compels us to pursue cannot stop with efforts to make amends to descendants of Jesuit slaveholding, vital as those efforts are. The blood of millions of enslaved and oppressed persons cries out to God from the ground, and all of these cries must be heard.
What would happen, I wonder, if every Christian whose life has been made more materially comfortable because of this history of unrepentant theft chose to pray the Suscipe in earnest? If they uttered and meditated on these challenging words every day, while reflecting on the world around them, would their hearts change? How would God’s merciful love guide them to dispose of their resources, their liberty, their understanding, and their will? It might seem naïve to imagine such a scenario, but I would simply note that we as a church have not even bothered to try it, or anything like it, and I cannot help dreaming about what might unfold if we did—that is, if we finally took the spiritual and moral demands of Christian faith seriously in this manner.
To be clear, being Black does not exempt one from this difficult prayer. Avarice is toxic wherever it grows, and all humans, especially in this age of material excess and envy, could benefit from a spiritual discipline of letting go. Ignatius is wise to encourage a practice of complete gratitude and total surrender as a path toward genuine happiness and wholeness. I, therefore, also find myself wondering what might happen if those of us in the Black community freely chose to offer up everything—all that we have and are—to a divine love much greater than ourselves.
