Readings
9
Living in the Gospel
So how did you get on this week?” Pat asked as she closed the folders on her desk and came to sit on one of the two armchairs in her small office.
“It was . . . different,” I replied. “Surprising. It didn’t go at all the way I expected.” I looked over Pat’s shoulder; outside the window a late spring snow was melting in the bright Colorado sun, icy water falling from budding branches into the warming soil.
She smiled but sat quietly, waiting for me to go on. Pat worked at a local Jesuit Retreat Center; over the years she had absorbed so much of the spirit and wisdom of the place that she now frequently directed people through the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises. I was one of a number of her directees. She was too shrewd to keep pushing the conversation; better to let the silence create space for thought and honesty.
I sipped from the mug of strong, black coffee cradled in my hands. “The reading from Matthew took an unexpected turn. I didn’t finish it.” Another brief silence. “This reading had touched me more deeply than I expected; I’m not reluctant to talk about it, but it’s tricky finding the words.”
Meditating on Matthew
Early in the morning, when I wasn’t likely to be interrupted, I had gone down to my makeshift chapel, knelt at my prayer desk and opened up the Bible to the day’s reading. Following the method of the Exercises, I began to picture the scene in my imagination. Jesus and his disciples were in some indefinite place in Galilee, probably traveling between towns. In my mind’s eye I began to see Palestine in the first century—or, at least, what I imagined Palestine might have been like; I have no way of knowing quite how accurate my mental picture truly was. I pictured a bright, spring day, wisps of cloud scudding across an azure sky. Dust from the road was caught up in the slight breeze, and the broad leaves of the palms by the roadside rustled slightly. Jesus and the disciples were talking.
When Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do the people say the Son of Man is?” And they said, “Some say John the Baptist, but others Elijah, and still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” (Mt 16:13-15)
I imagined myself as part of the group of disciples, and as Jesus asked that question—“Who do you say that I am?”—it seemed as though he directed it not to Peter but straight at me. And immediately I knew what I wanted to answer.
My answer was not Peter’s answer. I knew Peter’s response well; I had studied it, analyzed it, preached it more than once. It was a good, solid, theologically precise answer, a profound confession of faith in Jesus as Messiah and Son of God. Those few short words bore an unimaginable weight of significance, leaning back into the heart of Jewish tradition and yet expressing the most startling affirmation of Jesus’ divine nature. It was a great answer. But, I suddenly realized, it wouldn’t have been my answer.
As soon as I heard Christ ask me the question, a response welled up from somewhere deep inside. “But who do you say that I am?” he asked me. And I replied, “You are beautiful.”
It was such a deep, visceral response I couldn’t deny it. But I had no idea why I answered in that way, nor why that response had risen up with such speed and emotional force. I needed time to think this through. For the next few days I returned over and again to that prayer experience, trying to fathom what had happened. Now, trying to describe it to Pat, I felt no nearer to understanding.
After a few moments of silence, she quietly asked me, “Well, have you asked the Lord about this?”
I felt so stupid. You’d think it would be obvious: if you don’t understand what you’ve experienced with Christ in prayer, come back again and ask him. But it was taking time for such a simple idea to settle into my thick skull; I have a tendency to live in my head, and although I have enjoyed deep and wonderful experiences with God from time to time, I’ve always taken them away to some quiet place to work through in my own mind. During the Exercises I had begun to learn that Christ offers me his mysteries not as puzzles to solve but as enticements to come back for more.
So I took a moment to pray. Lord, why did I say that? I’ve studied so much theology, spent so many years teaching and preaching—why didn’t I have a more philosophical and thoughtful answer? “You are beautiful”—where did that come from?
And as I asked, I suddenly understood. Whether the Spirit spoke to me or simply nudged something within my heart, I’m not sure. There were no voices or visions. But immediately I knew why I had answered that way. For me, beauty is what gives the world meaning and value. I don’t have much ambition or desire for wealth, but I’m easily entranced by the beautiful. My wife is very relational, so when I want to offer her a compliment I know she’ll appreciate I tell her she’s the world’s most wonderful wife and mother. But when I want to say something that means a great deal to me, I tell her she’s beautiful. It’s my highest compliment: you embody all that makes life worth living.
“You are everything,” I said quietly. Pat looked at me quizzically. “You are everything,” I repeated. “That’s what I was saying. Take beauty out of my world and you’ve ripped the heart from it. And he is so beautiful. Without him, without his beauty, life would become tasteless and empty. He is beautiful, and so he is everything.”
Pat picked up the Bible from her desk and turned to the passage from Matthew. She ran a finger down the page, past Peter’s answer (“You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God!”) and on a few verses. Jesus told Peter that he, Jesus, must suffer and die at the hands of the priests and elders in Jerusalem. Peter was appalled: “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you!” The pain, the outrage in his voice is almost palpable.
Pat closed the Bible and looked me in the eyes. “Don’t you think that when Peter gave his brilliant theological response, he might simply have been saying, ‘You are everything’?” she asked. “Perhaps your answers weren’t so different after all.”
She was right. At that moment I realized I hadn’t studied the passage, analyzed the grammar, teased out the theological truths. I had lived the story. Through the Gospel words I had been brought into the presence of Christ. The living presence of God had broken through the lifeless page. Narrative had become conversation.
Ignatius of Loyola
This was precisely the kind of engagement with Scripture that Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Society of Jesus, sought to encourage when he composed his famous Spiritual Exercises in the early sixteenth century. Ignatius himself was drawn to the world of the Bible in a rather unique way. Born into a wealthy and noble Basque family, in his late teenage years he (like many young men of his rank in society) took up military service, fighting with distinction in a number of battles over the next two or three years. But during a siege of the Navarrese city of Pamplona he was struck in the legs by a cannonball; one leg was gruesomely wounded and the other badly broken. Carried back home to his family castle, he spent a number of painful months immobilized while his wounds slowly healed.
During his convalescence he read voraciously, and after a while stumbled across a book by Ludolph of Saxony called The Life of Christ. Ludolph had collected passages from some of the greatest Christian writers (such as Augustine of Hippo and Gregory the Great) to retell the gospel story of Christ’s life. He encouraged his readers to savor each of the stories in turn, taking time to imagine that they were present at each of the events described—to picture themselves at the stable in Bethlehem or watching the loaves and fishes being shared around the great crowd or standing at the foot of the cross. For months Ignatius immersed himself in the Gospel narratives and, as his body gradually recovered, so he found his soul gradually reformed and renewed by the experience of being so entirely steeped in Scripture.
After his recovery Ignatius was fired with a desire to help others discover the treasure of the Bible. This was the genesis of the Society of Jesus, the religious order known to most of us as the Jesuit fathers. Ignatius and his companions fanned out across Europe and beyond (some of the earliest missionaries to the recently discovered “New World” of the Americas were Jesuits) with one single burning passion: to help people know Christ through Scripture. The Spiritual Exercises became their handbook and guide (and still is to this day). The short book, a manual for spiritual directors, describes a structured program for slowly and prayerfully reading the Gospels and finding ways of encountering the living Christ through his living Word.
The basic method of the Exercises is very simple. Ignatius would encourage people to begin by paying attention to every detail of a Gospel story: the setting, the people involved, gestures and words, the time of day or year. He would teach them to use their imagination to recreate the scene in their minds, making it as present to the senses as possible—if you were there, what would you see? What might you hear? What fragrances drift through the air? Is it warm or cold, wet or dry? Who is gathered around you? What are they doing? Where is Jesus in this story, what is he doing, and how are others reacting? We might imagine a director preparing to shoot a scene for a movie. In his mind he has to consider every detail. How will this scene look and feel? What movements are required? What dialogue will take place? The director has to become supremely attentive to detail—and so must we, Ignatius might add.
Then, following the teaching he had received from Ludolph’s book, he would encourage people to insert themselves into the scene. Don’t just watch; participate. Can you imagine yourself as a disciple or a person in the crowd? As a leper or blind man, a sinful woman or righteous Pharisee? What is it then like, experiencing these unfolding events? If, in your imagination, you are no longer a passive observer but an involved actor in the scene, how does it affect your perception of the story? In particular, Ignatius counseled his directees to pay close attention to their emotions: what do you feel? Our emotional responses often give us important clues about the way the story is directly touching us—where we struggle with or rejoice in the gospel message. They may shape the way we want to respond to what Jesus is doing, even taking the story off in unexpected directions. We might be praying through the story of Jesus meeting a paralyzed man beside the pool in Jerusalem (Jn 5:1-9). Jesus approaches the man and asks him, “Do you want to be made well?” The man, of course, responds affirmatively. But we may be surprised, imagining ourselves in his place, to find that we are resisting Jesus, holding him at arm’s length, uncertain whether we want his healing in our lives. We have allowed the story to unearth something deep within, something which can now become the focus of our prayer.
And that’s precisely where Ignatius would have guided people next: into prayer. Each of the Exercises concludes with what Ignatius called a “colloquy,” a spiritual conversation. But Ignatius taught people to allow the meditation and conversation to blend together in the context of the imaginative engagement with the Gospel story. To continue the example, we might have pictured ourselves as the lame man lying beside the pool, asked by Jesus if we truly want to be healed. We want to explore our reaction to that invitation more fully with Christ. Ignatius urges us not to break the meditation, to step out of the scene in order to pray. We have pictured ourselves in the presence of Christ: from within that scene, speak with Christ. As you lay beside the Jerusalem pool, talk with Jesus “exactly as one friend speaks to another,” as Ignatius expressed it. Allow the conversation to develop as a natural extension of the meditation. And then listen. Be ready to hear Christ’s response.
It’s precisely at this point that some of us experience an important difficulty: if I’m imagining this scene, and imagining speaking to Christ, am I not simply imagining his response? In other words, I could “hear” Jesus speaking to me, but wouldn’t I just be making it up? Isn’t this simply self-delusion, pretending that I can put words into Jesus’ mouth?
There are those who hold that God speaks to us today in no other way than through the written words of Scripture, and such people will never be able to understand this practice as anything other than a delusional game. But many of us believe that God continues to speak to his people directly and personally—in a way consistent with Scripture certainly, but not only through the book itself. We may have experienced this in a variety of ways: a vague sense that God is “nudging” us to do or say something; a feeling that God is speaking to us through the words of some poem, book, song or conversation; a clearer perception that God is present in some place; even (from time to time) the unmistakable experience of “hearing” the voice of God—although for most of us that last phenomenon is rare indeed. We are, in principle at least, open to the idea that Christ might speak to us. But we want to be able to distinguish clearly between the genuine voice of God and “just imagining.” Doesn’t an Ignatian colloquy lead us exactly where we don’t want to be—into the heart of our imagination?
The simple answer is yes. But before we dismiss Ignatius out of hand, we might want to stop and explore whether that really is such a problem.
Spiritual Vision
In Western culture most people have come to see the imagination as frivolous, playful and essentially disconnected from the real world. In ancient times people greatly respected (even feared) their dreams, seeking to listen to the voice of their imagination by night; we dismiss our dreams as the product of stress, stimulation or overindulgence in cheese. Daydreaming and fantasizing are equated with wasting time and laziness. When others’ ideas seem disconnected from worldly reality we say, with an ironic tone, that they have a “vivid imagination.” The implication is clear: the imagination may be creative and entertaining, but it cannot be trusted. It is a purely internal playground where we can indulge our fantasies without consequence; to take it too seriously would be foolish and risky.
In previous generations, however, Christians took a much more positive view of the imagination: it was seen as the soul’s equivalent of the body’s physical senses. The imagination had a number of functions: it was the place where the information gathered by our five senses could be integrated and processed; the place where we could freely experiment with the store of ideas, concepts and memories held in our minds—and also as the primary gateway of spiritual experience. Traditionally Christians have assumed that we become open to spiritual reality primarily through the imagination, which is capable of receiving experiences that are incomprehensible to our physical senses.
Think of Ezekiel’s vision beside the river Chebar. In the midst of a great storm cloud he saw multifaced living creatures, their four wings outspread, surrounding a burning fire around which sparks and lightning flashed. Beside the creatures were wheels within wheels, their rims circled with eyes; the wheels turned to and fro, rising and falling with the winged creatures. Over the heads of the creatures Ezekiel saw a crystal dome, over which was a sapphire throne on which was seated some kind of human figure who seemed wrapped in fire.
How did Ezekiel see this? It seems fairly clear that this was a visionary experience, not something he saw with his physical eyes. Traditionally Christians would have interpreted this as God revealing himself to Ezekiel through the imagination. We might be tempted to ask, “So, Ezekiel was just imagining this?” But the question would have made little sense to our ancestors in the faith. Just imagining? Do you just see this book? Can you just smell your coffee, or just hear the traffic? Your perception of those things through your senses does nothing to undermine their reality. Why do we assume that our imagination is so closed to God and to the spiritual world that it can “only imagine” and never experience for itself? Ezekiel didn’t just imagine the vision of God: he saw it! The fact that he saw it in his imagination made it no less real.
In the same way it is possible for Christ to speak to us in our imagination—the real and actual living Christ truly and directly speaking, not just in some fantasy. In fact, Ignatius is teaching us an incredibly powerful way of opening ourselves to God’s presence through Scripture. When we engage so intentionally with the Bible in our imagination, we open ourselves more fully (not less) to the spiritual reality of God’s presence. It becomes easier for God to speak into our minds, hearts and lives, not harder. Those who have practiced the kind of biblical meditation Ignatius taught know the truth of this for themselves. It is possible for us to deceive ourselves, to play pretend, to put words into Christ’s mouth. But, on the whole, we know when we are doing it. When I have a conversation with a friend, I can without difficulty discern the difference between what he is actually saying and what, in my mind, I wish he were saying. It is no harder to discern the difference between my fantasies about what Christ might say to me and the reality of Christ speaking. The psalmist wrote:
The voice of the Lord is powerful;
the voice of the Lord is full of majesty. . . .
The voice of the Lord flashes forth flames of fire.
The voice of the Lord shakes the wilderness. (Ps 29:4, 7-8)
Those with experience know that the voice of God has an unmistakable and undeniable quality. If God speaks, you will know.
Exploring the Exercises
Learning to read Scripture like this takes practice and time. Ignatius created a month-long retreat during which he would counsel people to meditate and pray for a number of hours every day; many Jesuit retreat centers still offer these thirty-day retreats, and if you are one of the few people who is able to take four weeks out of a busy schedule you might want to consider attending such a retreat—it will change your life forever. But Ignatius recognized that most people would never be in a position to devote such an extended time to the exercises, so he developed an alternative approach which encouraged people to meditate and pray for around an hour a day over the course of many months; this has become known as the “exercises in daily life.”
Again, many Jesuit centers offer directors who would be willing to guide you through these exercises; I can testify from my own experience to their life-transforming effect. But it is quite possible for you to begin praying Scripture in this imaginative and meditative way right now, wherever you find yourself, even if you have no guide or spiritual director to walk the journey with you. You have Scripture, and you have Christ. That is all you need.
If you want to explore this biblical prayer more fully, I would advise setting aside a reasonable period of time on a regular basis—at least half an hour every day would be best. But do be flexible and allow yourself grace; some people’s circumstances will not allow even this (a single working mother in a noisy apartment building might be grateful to carve out fifteen minutes two or three times a week). Find what time you can, and offer it expectantly to God.
Settle yourself somewhere quiet where you are unlikely to be disturbed. Turn to a passage of Scripture on which to meditate. The seven passages listed at the end of this chapter, drawn from the heart of Jesus’ life and ministry, might be an excellent place to start. After you become more familiar with this approach to reading and praying, you may want to branch out into more challenging areas of the Gospels, such as the passion narratives (the final chapters of each Gospel that tell the stories leading up to the crucifixion).
Follow the steps outlined below as you pray the passage:
It is entirely possible to practice this meditative reading with any passage of Scripture, of course, whether it be Romans, Leviticus, Revelation or Isaiah. Personally, I have found the Song of Songs (which we read and prayed through earlier) to be a particularly rich text for such imaginative prayer. But it is much easier to begin with the Gospels before launching out into the rest of the Bible; it is easier to engage in the colloquy with Christ when we already have a clear sense of his presence in the narrative. As you become more adept at praying the Gospels, you will begin to understand how other biblical passages might be similarly prayed. Over time, you will learn the art of being ever more attentive to God in Scripture.
Readings
Using the Ignatian approach to praying with the Gospels described in this chapter, this week we are going to meditate on seven stories from the biblical accounts of the life of Jesus. It may be that you find one or more of these readings particularly fruitful—somehow, the story speaks powerfully into your life, stirs up unexpected emotions or responses, or brings you deeply into the presence of Christ. If so, stay with it, if necessary for the whole week. There are no rewards or prizes for completing all the passages; you can always come back to those you miss at a later date.
Ignatius encouraged making “repetitions” of our readings in this way. We are not seeking merely to consume the book, working our way through as many pages as we can in the shortest possible time. We are seeking God. So when Scripture brings us into an encounter with God, we would be wise to stay there. After all, wouldn’t it be better to invest an entire year in reading a single verse well than in reading the whole Bible badly?
Day 1
John 2:1-11
(the wedding at Cana)
Day 2
Matthew 8:23-27
(Jesus calms the storm)
Day 3
Matthew 15:21-28
(the Syrophoenician woman)
Day 4
Mark 10:46-52
(blind Bartimaeus)
Day 5
Matthew 19:16-30
(the rich young man)
Day 6
Matthew 14:13-21
(the feeding of the five thousand)
Day 7
Matthew 17:1-9
(the transfiguration of Jesus)