March 15, 2026 Essay: The Overflowing Cup

One of Saint Ignatius’s spiritual exercises imagines “three kinds of people” who are all burdened with the same problem. Each has a sum of money and wishes to be free “of the burden arising from the attachment to it.” Easy, you might say; give it away! But Ignatius wants us to see that the issue is attachment to money, not the money itself. So before working out what to do with it, which might be—who knows?—to give it away, keep it, or some other decision—they have to be free to do God’s will. And they can’t do that if they have already organized their lives and hearts to hold on to what they have.

This is about our freedom to be a disciple. The problem is not the things we possess, but the way they can possess us, robbing us of our freedom to live full lives of loving service. We want to be open, generous, free—and be ready to serve the Kingdom of God where we can. But in practice, a spirit in us stops us: a fear of losing what we have struggled to possess, a reluctance to admit we don’t have it all sewn up. Pope Francis called it “spirit of sufficiency.” It is the spirit of our age.

St John tells of a man blind from birth whose cure by Jesus destabilizes the community. There are three kinds of responses. The first is that of the doctors of the law, who try desperately to shut it down. They are threatened by the miracle—it is fruitful to ponder why—so try and force a different narrative. The second response, that of the man’s family and neighbors, is the saddest. They can see what has happened but can’t share in the joy of it. For fear of the Pharisees and the crowd, they won’t admit it publicly, so they deflect, keeping their heads down. The third response is the greatest, yet the loneliest: that of the now-seeing man himself, who knows something truly marvelous has happened to him, and struggles to understand it. He stands up to the jeering and bullying and boldly embraces the truth he comes to see: that God’s action has given him new life. For this he is cast out. But Jesus meets him there and makes him a disciple of the Kingdom.

In St Ignatius’s exercise the first and second persons want to follow God’s will, but they do nothing about it, and in practice bend God’s will to their own desire. This is the way of the world, the way of sufficiency. But in the third case, the person takes the key step: he makes himself insufficient. To be open to God’s will he gives up his attachment in his heart and so frees himself to follow Christ. Just as, in John’s Gospel, we learn no more about the next chapter in the seeing man’s life, so St Ignatius leaves it to us to take the story on from there—and make it our own story.

Here’s the spoiler. In both cases what lies ahead is openness to God’s action in our lives. And the sign of that action is what the psalmist calls the “overflowing cup.” Jesus’s presence is full of such signs: nets full of fish, multiplying loaves, dirty water becoming vintage wine. Why an overflow? Because it is the very life of God being poured out into us at such moments, as it will be, most fully and dramatically, in the Resurrection of Jesus.

“Such overflows of love happen, above all, at the crossroads of life, at moments of openness, fragility and humility,” Francis wrote in our book Let Us Dream, “when the ocean of His love bursts the dams of our self-sufficiency, and so allows for a new imagination of the possible.” Happy Laetare Sunday.

— Austen Ivereigh