Reflecting and Responding
Ignatius of Loyola
Guided by the Mysteries of Christ
The following are some rules for perceiving and understanding the different movements that are produced in the soul—the good that should be accepted; the bad that should be rejected. . . . This takes place in those who earnestly strive to purify themselves from their sins and who advance from good to better in the service of God our Lord.
THE SPIRITUAL EXERCISES
ENTERING THE MIX AT THE END OF THE fifteenth century and growing into full maturity in the sixteenth, Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556) represents one of the greatest conversion and growth stories in Christian history. His transforming experience occurred in 1521, when he was wounded in battle and suffered severe injuries to both legs. His own autobiography records that until this time he had been fully given to the vanities of the world and especially to acts of heroism in war. But the brutal wounds in 1521 meant a subsequent rehabilitation requiring months of rest. From this experience of suffering came a remarkable reflection on his life with God. These reflections triggered a moral and spiritual transformation that changed his life and forever changed the world.
While recovering in his native Spain, Ignatius was given a variety of books, including The Life of Christ by Ludolph of Saxony, Golden Legends by Jacobus de Voragine, a book on the life of St. Francis and a copy of Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ. These books stimulated a spiritual awakening that inspired Ignatius to think long and hard about the ultimate destiny of his own life and that of every human being. He wondered to himself, Why not become like St. Francis and imitate Christ? While traveling on a pilgrimage through Manresa, a small town near the Benedictine monastery of Montserrat, Ignatius experienced a deep conviction that our true destiny as individuals is to return to God in order to find the peace and contentment we so desperately seek.
This insight completely changed Ignatius. He came to see that our life with God could fundamentally reshape us. He also recognized that we could be given to spiritual excesses that would distort us. Out of these observations and experiences Ignatius gathered ten men in 1534 and formed the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) in order to send disciples throughout the world to provide an educated “middle way” to God. His best work, The Spiritual Exercises, outlines the disciplines we must undergo if we are to become like Christ and accomplish his vision for our life in the world.
In his writings, Ignatius reflects on the tremendous difference between what Christ expects of him and how he actually responds in his effort to imitate Christ. Troubled by this gulf, he begins to review the life and teachings of Jesus as recorded in the Gospels. During one of his extended meditations on Jesus, Ignatius recognizes how his moods shift and his thoughts change. Intrigued, he begins to examine how best to understand these discrete experiences in the larger scheme of life with God. It is in the midst of these reflections that Ignatius realizes that our experiences of God must have reasonable explanations. In other words, we need to know what they mean if they are to have enduring power in shaping the destiny of our life.
The Goal of The Spiritual Exercises
This conviction resulted in a body of writings and correspondence that fills twelve volumes. The Spiritual Exercises forms the centerpiece of this work, and its enduring influence has been the remarkable impact individuals undergo when they work their way through the thirty-day Ignatian retreat, a series of disciplined practices meant to form our character into the very expression of the character of Christ. Of the writing of this landmark work, Ignatius recalls, “The Spiritual Exercises are all the best that I have been able to think out, experience and understand in this life, both for helping somebody to make the most of themselves as well as being a profit to others.”
The Spiritual Exercises comes from Ignatius’s own experience of learning to understand life with God. This understanding is guided by his desire to find the middle way between the excess of religious enthusiasm and the sterility of philosophical reflection. The exercises require a disciplined imagination and a specific pattern of guided reflection and are to be completed in thirty days. None of the weeks is perfunctory. Each requires discernment so that we know we have learned what the specific “experience” is meant to teach us before we move on. As we attend to the person and work of Jesus Christ, God’s work unfolds in our life dramatically. The Exercises captured a psychological truth long before it was scientifically proven: namely, that it takes roughly thirty days to change virtually any behavior-based habit.
It is important to note that Ignatius never intended for these exercises to replace regular participation in the church or to jettison our understanding and appreciation of orthodox theology. Additionally, Ignatius emphasizes that the evidence for our movement into a deeper reflection on the mysteries of Christ is manifested by our movement outward into a deeper life of service.
Week one: Moral reform. Ignatius begins week one by laying out the process of moral reform. The purpose of moral reform is to channel our desires and harness our passions in a way that allows us to attend to the mysteries of the life of Christ. Since we are created to praise God, we need to understand how this can occur.
In this context Ignatius explains the difference between venial and mortal sins. Venial sins pertain to one’s thought life. Mortal sins are the sins we commit with our body and are more pernicious because they are based on deadly thoughts giving rise to sinful actions. Three stages of reflection guide us in understanding the way God breaks the grip of this sin in order to redirect our life to him.
First, we must reflect on our sin, acknowledging its severity and power to disrupt our life with God. Second, we must recognize how the sin of Adam and Eve is the pattern for all of us as devious thoughts lead to wayward actions. Finally, we must reflect on the sins of others, not to judge or despise them but to recognize how human sin can ruin God’s destiny for our life.
Week two: Our life with God. After outlining spiritual and moral “purgation,” Ignatius opens week two by focusing on the role of the imagination in “illuminating” our life with God. Throughout the history of the church, the imagination has played a key role in directing or diverting us from life with God. Imagination is the power we have to generate possible explanations for why we experience life the way we do. The imagination creates understanding. It clarifies meaning. It permits our conceptions and our perceptions to connect with one another. Without imagination, we would never be able to know, understand or even conceptualize our experience of the world. Imagination, then, operates to synthesize the specific experiences of our life into a meaningful whole.
Ignatius sees the imagination as creating contact with the living reality of Jesus Christ. This dramatic recovery of the life of Christ is meant to lead us into a full identification with the Savior. Beginning with the nativity, Ignatius identifies key events from the life of Christ and helps us to identify with these experiences. After reflecting on Christ’s birth, we continue by contemplating his presentation in the temple, the parallels between his life with the life of Moses, his flight to Egypt, his obedience to his parents, his baptism, the Sermon on the Mount, the calling of his disciples, his public ministry and his humiliation as he was preparing for his passion.
In each case, these reflections are meant to produce in us a capacity for unbroken contemplation of God. In concluding the disciplines of week two, Ignatius introduces the idea of three classes of people: those who are free of worldly attachments but only at the end of life; those who are free of attachments spiritually, but still own them; and those who are fully devoted followers of Jesus Christ, living and responding to life exactly as he did.
Through this ascending scale, Ignatius outlines the way he envisions our spiritual growth occurring: we grow to the extent that we are free from our attachments to this world. Positive engagement is not only possible but quite necessary. We cannot be like Christ unless we are free from the physical possessions of this life while enjoying the spiritual vitality of identifying with his life.
Week three: Identifying with Christ. Week three is devoted to imaginative reflection on the passion of Jesus. Like week two, week three uses real stories from the Gospels to draw us into full identity and union with the life and sufferings of Jesus. But for Ignatius, the goal of the spiritual life is not only “union” with Christ but also full devotion to his life and ministry. In this way he differs dramatically from Dionysius and others who emphasize that the goal of life is perfect union with God and complete contentment and rest in him. For Ignatius, contemplation is not an end in itself but a means of preparation for expressing as best we can the active love of God in the world.
Week four: Full identity with Christ and service to the world. Week four completes the exercises and opens with Christ’s appearance to Mary. Here, Ignatius takes us through a wonderfully imaginative tour of the tomb and Christ’s conversation with her. The point of week four is to celebrate our full identity with Christ and to re-engage by celebrating our role and responsibilities within the created order. In this final week, Ignatius insists that no meaningful life with God can occur apart from our active life in the world.
These four weeks complete the threefold way. Week one guides us through “purgation.” Week two brings “illumination.” Weeks three and four bring us into “union” with God for greater service in the world. In this way we are able to see and know the ways of God and his will for our life. This is to be converted into a living embodiment of Jesus Christ as a result of our imitation of him.
Throughout his writings, Ignatius emphasizes two seven-step approaches that are integral to the right use of the exercises. One is for evaluating all truth claims in which we use our mind to discern the truth of God. The other is for understanding how we can make a greater contribution to the common good in which we see the motives that lead us to display a heart for the world.
Seven Steps to Truth
The seven steps for evaluating all truth claims include:
Seven Contributions to the Common Good
The seven steps for determining what is true are followed by seven steps for making a greater contribution to the common good.
Ultimately, Ignatius lays the groundwork for those who seek a deeper life with God while pursuing a broader impact on society. Despite being a contemporary of Luther and Calvin and actively resisting the Protestant Reformation, he provided many of the very same tools for Catholics that Luther and Calvin provided for Protestants. Both sides demonstrate a desire for a closer walk with God by engaging in a life of prayer and active service. Ignatius’s highly structured retreat method (including meditation, contemplation, application of the senses and examination of conscience) reflects his belief that we can have a direct experience of God that not only changes us but also helps us contribute something worthy to society.
Although all four of the individuals we have considered in this chapter lived during the premodern era (before the seventeenth century and the scientific method), their insights span into our postmodern era because of their unique understanding of our life with God. Eventually, the Western church would settle into the patterns of separation we know today as Roman Catholic, Protestant and Anglican. In the sixteenth century, however, it was unclear what would happen politically, and eventually these fissures led to the Thirty Years’ War.
Today we face a new opportunity. For the most part Christians no longer feel threatened by resources coming from other expressions of Christianity. As a result, all four of these individuals are experiencing a renaissance today that likely will provide guidance deep into the twenty-first century.
REFLECTING AND RESPONDING
The four-part structure of the Ignatian spiritual retreat is quite ingenious. The first week centers on our need—indeed our sin—in the light of God’s overcoming love. The second week centers on the life of Christ, the third week on the death of Christ and the fourth week on the resurrection of Christ.
Whatever details of The Spiritual Exercises you may disagree with, I want to commend this four-part rhythm to you. Oh, how we need a deeper musing on our perennial knack for disobedience and God’s unbounded habit of mercy. Oh, how we need a richer contemplation on that Life that is life indeed and that shows us the way so we may follow in his steps. Oh, how we need a fuller meditation on that death that sets us free. And, oh, how we need a more profound experience of that resurrection that empowers us to obey Christ in all things.
I hope you noticed how highly Christocentric this structure is. This is no accident. Ignatius wanted to anchor the Christian life in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, especially as it is expressed in the four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. This was done in order to give a solid foundation for the spiritual life. In addition it provided guardrails for the excesses of both the religious mystical experiences that abounded at the time and the philosophical speculations of the day. This is the central “middle way” to which Gayle Beebe refers. Center your efforts on the Jesus revealed in the Gospels and everything else will find its proper place. This is the Ignatian vision.
Ignatius believed church reform was to be based on individual reform. Hence his Spiritual Exercises are intently personal. The individual does not just read this book but enters into a retreat experience designed to reform the inner spiritual space. I know people who in the third week of an Ignatian retreat have entered genuine death to self only to emerge in week four into personal existential resurrection. Their heart is changed. Their affections are changed. Their values are changed. All for the better.
Now, a word about the dynamic use of the sanctified imagination that is so central to Ignatius and the retreat experience he designed. In placing such a strong emphasis on the imagination, Ignatius was helping ordinary people enter into the life of Jesus in a vivid, emotive, affective way. To “see” Jesus standing by the sea of Galilee, to “hear” the waves splashing against the side of the boat, to “touch” the hem of his garment, to “smell” the sea air, to “taste” the bread and the wine—all are dramatic visual aids that draw us into the story until the story becomes genuinely autobiographic of us. We stand before Jesus as he asks us, “Who do you say that I am?” With the woman at the well we ask, “Where do I get this living water?” We, with Nicodemus, puzzle over spiritual realities, asking, “How can these things be?” We tremble at the issues of life and death, exclaiming, “I believe, help my unbelief!” We humbly sit with the other disciples allowing Jesus to wash our feet. And we join Thomas in confessing, “My Lord and my God!” This is how the imagination can be sanctified and used for the purposes of God.
I wonder if you found it as interesting as I did that Ignatius laid out seven approaches for making a greater contribution to the common good. This is, of course, a natural outflow of his conviction that the evidence of the effectiveness of the thirty-day retreat is a movement outward into a deeper life of service to others. I especially like his fourth point: be likeable. How simple and how very important. Grumpy, sarcastic, opinionated people make life difficult for everyone around them. Conversely, when the goodness of God flows from us naturally and easily, it brings life to all. In so doing we contribute to the common good. May it be so for us all.
Dear Lord, we too want to imitate Jesus as was true for Francis and Bonaventure and Thomas and Ignatius. But imitation is a tricky thing. It easily becomes so superficial, so outward. It is easy to see this in the “disciples” of our contemporary celebrity figures. They mimic their idols in the silliest ways. It would be comical if it weren’t so tragic.
But then, we quickly fall into the same trap. We so want to be like Jesus and so desperately try to follow the way of Jesus that, more often than not, we end up in some silly, superficial mimicry that has nothing to do with righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.
What we long for, Lord, is a richer, deeper, fuller imitation of the heart of Jesus. Give us, we pray, the compassion of Jesus. Grant us today an increase of the spirit of mercy and joy and peace. Most of all, may our lives become more and more characterized by divine, agapé love.
Translating these graces into our world of laundry and computers and deadlines is the real key. For that we will need your boundless wisdom. Lord, help us always to draw from the deep well of your wisdom. Amen.