“What are you looking for?” That is the first question that Jesus asked Andrew and an unnamed person who the tradition believes is John in today’s scripture. Ignatian spirituality begins with a gracious, all-loving and merciful God meeting us wherever we are in life, asking us that all important question: “What do you desire?” For those of us who have fallen in love with Jesus, endlessly fascinated by his person and his story, we are like these two disciples who heard about Jesus and began to follow him. Jesus looks at us in the same way and asks us the same “million dollar question”: what do you desire?

Do our deepest desires include what I call the Godspell graces: “to see him more clearly, love him more dearly and follow him more nearly, day by day” …as that great song from the 1970s put it so well?

—Fr. Brian Paulson, S.J. serves as Provincial of the Chicago-Detroit Province of the Society of Jesus.