Ignatius believed that all human beings have experiences of God’s creative and sustaining love. If we pay attention to these experiences, we will find that during them we desire God with all our heart and, at the same time, feel an enormous sense of well-being. Caught up in this experience, we feel that everything and everyone pales in comparison. We want this Mystery more than we want anything or anyone else. We become—for the moment, at least—free of inordinate attachments to people and things, or “indifferent,” as Ignatius says; we would not want to choose anything that would take us away from the object of this desire for “we know not what,” the Mystery we call God. A long life, health, riches—these all pale in comparison to the mystery we desire.

- Excerpted from A Friendship Like No Other by William A. Barry