Surrounded by Love: The Self We Bring Before God
- Kimi Nettuno
- Jan 21
- 6 min read
Updated: Feb 2
Throughout this month, we have lingered with a deceptively simple question: Who am I?
We have explored who we learned to be, who we believe ourselves to be, and who we are becoming. We have named survival patterns, listened to the body, allowed Scripture to speak our name, and noticed how our image of God shapes our image of self. Now, at the close of January, we pause not to resolve the question, but to hold it more honestly because Ignatius of Loyola understood something essential:
We cannot separate who we think we are from who we believe God to be.
These two images are always in conversation.
Images of Self and Images of God
In The Spiritual Exercises Reclaimed, Ignatian scholar Elizabeth Liebert, SNJM, reflects on how the First Week of the Spiritual Exercises is not primarily about sin, but about awakening to love. She writes that Ignatius' Spiritual Exercises invite us to recognize “a love that forgives sin and welcomes the sinner,” a love that surrounds us before we ever attempt to change ourselves (Surrounded by Love, Elizabeth Liebert).
Liebert is particularly attentive to how images of self and images of God develop together. When the self is experienced as flawed, burdensome, or unworthy, God is often perceived as distant, disappointed, or demanding. When the self is seen primarily through the lens of failure or inadequacy, God can feel unsafe.
This is not a failure of faith. It is a human response shaped by experience.
Ignatius knew this intimately. His early spiritual life was marked by severity toward himself and a rigid image of God. Over time, through prayer and honest self-awareness, his experience of God softened. As his image of God changed, so did his relationship with himself.
This is the work of discernment.
Compassionate Honesty Comes First
Liebert emphasizes that Ignatius does not ask us to judge ourselves harshly, but to look at ourselves truthfully and compassionately. This is especially important for those whose lives have required adaptation, resilience, or self-protection. What you discovered about yourself this month is not something to fix or erase. It is something to understand.
Before we can ask, Who is God? We must first acknowledge, Who do I think I am? And we must do so surrounded by love.
Standing Beside You: A Personal Witness
Throughout this month, I have intentionally made space for your answers. I wanted you to linger with your own questions, your own discoveries, your own naming of who you believe yourself to be. Before we turn together toward the question Who is God?, I want to step out from behind the page for a moment and stand beside you.
Not as someone who has arrived. But as someone who is still becoming.
For many years, my image of God was shaped by the abuse I experienced as a child. God was not gentle. God was not safe. God was mean, demanding, and punishing. If there was a God at all, He looked very much like my stepfather… a tyrant whose love was conditional and whose presence required vigilance and survival.
At the same time, my image of myself mirrored that belief. I believed I was broken. My body felt like a dangerous place, something I could not trust or enter into. Growing up quickly was not a choice; it was a necessity. Tenderness and softness belonged to children, and I had no space for either. Looking back now, I can see that these images were not failures of faith. They were surviving. They were the ways I made sense of a world that required control to endure.
As my spiritual life matured, those images did not disappear quickly or neatly. They moved, slowly and often painfully, through years of confusion. And I have come to believe this confusion is not a mistake. It is part of the journey. Just as Jesus’ life moved through passion and abandonment before resurrection, so too our images of God and self must sometimes pass through loss before they are renewed. We do not simply discard the images that once kept us safe. We walk with them into uncertainty. That walk is often brutal. It involves a kind of death… a relinquishing of control, certainty, and familiar ways of understanding.
For me, Spiritual Direction became the place where that transformation could begin. Through Ignatian Spirituality, I was gently invited to notice the Holy Spirit in the small places of my day. Over time, that invitation expanded. I began to allow the Spirit into the darker places as well. And there, I encountered Jesus not as distant or demanding, but as fully present… crying, screaming, hoping with me. Everything I felt, Jesus felt too.
In one moment of imaginative prayer, I was invited to walk with my long-deceased stepfather. What surprised me was not anger, but love. A love that held both of us. A love that desired the same thing for him as for me… to be surrounded by love. In that prayer, I saw him in heaven. And for the first time, I desired that for him.
What I learned is this: the place where our images feel most distorted is often the very place God longs to redeem. You are allowed to feel whatever you feel about yourself. You are allowed to notice how those feelings shape the way you imagine God.
Without guilt.
Without judgment.
Because it is there, precisely there, that God desires to meet you… not to erase your experience, but to surround it with love.
You Are Already Surrounded by Love
One of Liebert’s most powerful insights is that the First Week of the Exercises is grounded not in fear, but in belonging. The exercitant is invited to experience themselves as held within God’s mercy before any moral inventory is made (Surrounded by Love, Elizabeth Liebert). This means something crucial:
No matter what surfaced for you this month, no matter what names you gave to your patterns, wounds, or defenses, no matter what resistance or grief emerged, you were never outside of love. Not then.
Not now.
God’s love does not wait for clarity; it accompanies confusion.
An Embodied Pause
Before moving forward, take a moment.
Place both feet softly on the ground. Allow your breath to deepen naturally.
Silently say on the inhale: “I am here.”
Then gently add on the exhale: “And I am surrounded by love.”
A Final Journaling Invitation for January
Set a timer for five minutes and write with one or two of these prompts:
How do I most often describe myself, internally?
What image of God seems to accompany that description?
What would it be like to believe that I am surrounded by love, even here?
Write with compassion; Saint Ignatius would insist on nothing less.
Crossing the Bridge
As January closes, we do not arrive at answers. We arrive at readiness.
In February, we will begin to turn more intentionally toward the question:
Who is God?
Not in abstraction, but in relationship. We will do so knowing this: the way we perceive God will continue to shape the way we live, love, and offer ourselves to the world. For now, rest here.
You are already held.
You are already seen.
You are already surrounded by love.
From the garden within me to the garden within you,
Kimi
A Note of Gratitude & Sources for Further Prayer
The wisdom, prayer, and scholarship of the following voices have shaped the reflections offered throughout this month. I am profoundly grateful for the ways their work has accompanied and transformed my own spiritual journey.
William A. Barry, S.J. The Changing Self–God Image of Ignatius of Loyola. Review for Religious, 1991.A foundational reflection on how our images of self and God develop together through lived experience and prayer.
Michael Casey, OCSO. Fully Human, Fully Divine: An Interactive Christology. Liguori Publications, 2004.A deeply incarnational exploration of Christian maturity as becoming fully human in God.
Elizabeth Liebert, SNJM. Surrounded by Love: Images of Self and God in the Spiritual Exercises. In The Spiritual Exercises Reclaimed. A profound Ignatian invitation to recognize that we are held in love before any movement toward change or conversion.
Gabor Maté, M.D. Selected teachings and reflections on trauma, attachment, and the development of the self. These insights have helped frame survival patterns not as failures, but as intelligent responses formed in relationship.
These voices remind us that discernment, healing, and self-knowledge are always communal journeys.
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