The Call to Discernment in Troubled Times E-Book

Dean Brackley

• Herausgeber: WS
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2004

Seitenzahl: 538

Beschreibung

A new kind of spiritual classic and a powerful reintroduction to Christianity, this hopeful book by esteemed pastor and teacher Fr. Dean Brackley integrates a realistic analysis of today's social crisis with the deep personal spirituality of St. Ignatius Loyola.

Leseprobe

The Crossroad Publishing Company

www.crossroadpublishing.com

Copyright © 2004 by Dean Brackley

Cover design by George Foster

Cover art © 2004 The Spirit Source

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photo-copying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of The Crossroad Publishing Company. For permissions, email [email protected]

ISBN 978-0-8245-2268-1

Ebook ISBN 978-0-8245-0272-0

MOBI ISBN 978-0-8245-0275-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Brackley, Dean.

The call to discernment in troubled times : new perspectives on the transformative wisdom of Ignatius Loyola / Dean Brackley.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 0-8245-2268-0 (alk. paper)

1. Spiritual life – Catholic Church. 2. Ignatius, of Loyola, Saint, 1491-1556.

Exercitia spiritualia. I. Title.

BX2350.3.B73 2004

248.4'82–dc22

2004016204

Books published by The Crossroad Publishing Company may be purchased at special quantity discount rates for classes and institutional use. For information, please email [email protected].

To my parents, Nan and Dean, Sr., to whom I owe the most after God— with deep admiration, gratitude, and affection.

Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

The Copyeditor’s Conversion: A Foreword for Skeptics by Ellen Calmus

Acknowledgments

GETTING FREE

1. Spirituality for Solidarity

2. Free to Love

3. The Reality of Evil

4. Forgiveness

5. Reform of Life

6. Rules for Discernment

SOMETHING WORTH LIVING FOR

7. The Call

8. The Reign of God

9. Contemplation of Christ

10. The Two Standards

11. Downward Mobility

12. Humility and Solidarity

13. Expanding the Soul

DISCERNING AND DECIDING

14. Life in the Spirit

15. More Rules for Discernment

16. Three Ways to Make Decisions

17. The Way of Truth and Life

PASSION AND COMPASSION

18. The Grace of Compassion

19. The Solidarity of God

20. Blessed are the Persecuted

RESURRECTION

21. Resurrection and the Spirit

22. Consolation, Action, and Liberation

23. Learning to Love Like God

PRAYER

24. Introducing Prayer

25. School of Prayer

26. Worldly Prayer

The Penguin Is Real

Appendixes

Footnote

Abbreviations

Notes

Select Bibliography of Ignatian Resources in English

About the Author

About the Publisher

The Copyeditor’s Conversion: A Foreword for Skeptics

Ellen Calmus

In the course of copyediting the manuscript of this book, something extraordinary happened to me—despite the fact that I started the job without the least bit of interest in the subject matter, assuming that all books of theology were by definition dense, abstruse, and dusty. I had only the dimmest notion of who Ignatius of Loyola was, and I had never heard of his Spiritual Exercises, but I imagined they would be dense and dusty, too.

Still, having done plenty of copyediting in the course of many years as a starving writer, I figured I could do my usual job of tightening up the manuscript in terms of the issues that arise in just about anything written in my beloved and so frequently misused English language, regardless of subject matter. I warned the author that my reading would necessarily reflect the fact that I was not a “believer” (whatever that meant) in any traditional sense of the word: my education had been heavily weighted first in the sciences, particularly physics, and later in the arts, while my religious upbringing had been a hodgepodge sampling of churches in the areas where I’d grown up the child of atheist parents (they’d washed their hands of religious education but allowed me to go along with friends to an assortment of Protestant Bible schools in Florida, Jewish temple in New York, and an occasional Catholic Mass with an Italian-American neighbor in San Antonio). In my family, religion was appreciated mainly as a source of material for jokes and evidence of human gullibility. Although anything depending on a traditional Christian education would be sure to go right over my head, I thought I might be of some use as a test case for the author’s idea of making Ignatian thinking accessible to the postmodern, post-religious reader: in addition to the usual copyeditor’s role I would be a sort of skeptic acid test for the manuscript.

Why did I even take on the job if I had so little interest in the subject? To explain, I’ll have to tell you a little about the author, Dean Brackley, and how I came to meet him—and I’m afraid I’ll have to tell a bit of my own story, too. I was first introduced to Dean in San Salvador at the UCA, the University of Central America, during an all-night vigil held in memory of the six Jesuit professors assassinated there during the war. It was the sixth anniversary of their death, the first of these vigils I had been able to attend. I was terrified of going, not so much for fear that there would be some act of repression (I’d lived through many moments of that kind of fear during the war years, but those days seemed to be over). No, what scared me was a fear of the memories the event might revive.

I had hardly set foot on the UCA campus since I’d attended the six Jesuits’ funeral in 1989—a strange time that was, with war in the streets of San Salvador, sounds of explosions echoing off the volcano, helicopters flying overhead with machine guns protruding from their doors, the air in certain neighborhoods smelling of cadavers left in the heat during days of inconclusive combat. I’d been too stunned to be afraid. Memories of those weeks remained a kaleidoscope confusion of too-brightly-lit impressions, remembered details sharp as broken glass, strangely juxtaposed, hard to reconcile. One of the six, Ignacio Martín-Baró—“Nacho” to his friends—a dedicated, innovative social psychologist and vice rector of the UCA, had been my advisor and friend during the year I spent in El Salvador interviewing people for a book about the war, and I was devastated by his death, falling into a depression so deep it left me unable to write.

I felt like a ghost the night I attended the vigil, a ghost among ghosts. I wandered silently among groups of people along that road winding up the hill past the UCA buildings to the library steps, shivering in the tropical night. A procession of people with candles walked past, the light warm on faces I didn’t recognize, standing in my own circle of darkness. I scanned the crowd, wondering if I would see people I’d known during those war years—so many who might possibly be there, or who might not have survived. Then I heard my name called. I looked around and saw a group of people from Nacho’s parish out in Jayaque. I was amazed that they remembered me from the time Nacho took me there so many years before. Morena (one of the most motherly women on the face of the earth, who had been Nacho’s assistant in the parish) and I threw our arms around each other and cried, and I realized I’d been needing to do that for years. As I dried my eyes, Morena told me: “You have to meet el Padre Dean!”—pointing to a tall, skinny foreigner in glasses standing nearby. She explained that this was the American priest who had taken the parish of Jayaque after Nacho died. While I had been thrilled to see Morena and the group from Jayaque, I frankly didn’t much care to meet some American priest who had come to take Nacho’s place in the parish—if he wasn’t even Salvadoran and had come only after Nacho was gone, then I figured he couldn’t have known my friend, so what possible use could there be in talking to him?—but Morena was not to be resisted. So we were introduced. Considering all the points against him, el Padre Dean Brackley seemed like a nice enough person. Not that I had much use for nice people in those dark times.

It wasn’t until I returned to El Salvador on the tenth anniversary of the assassination that I began to gain an appreciation of Dean’s depth of understanding. I stopped by his office in the theology department at the UCA to say hello and somehow felt the confianza to tell him that during this visit I—at last—intended to visit some of the difficult places for me in El Salvador, in hopes that this would help me resume work on my book. Dean amazed me by offering the kind of moral support one might expect from family or very old friends (if one happens to be particularly fortunate in the family and old friend department). His office became a regular stop for me during that visit: after a challenging interview or a visit to a memory-laden place I hadn’t seen since the war, Dean and I would go have lunch at a little Mexican restaurant uphill from the UCA, where I’d tell him where I’d been and what I’d heard, and cry into my enchiladas. It was with Dean’s support and encouragement that I was finally able to face that initial reencounter with the places there that had so deeply affected me and to talk about Ignacio Martín-Baró with someone who actually seemed to have a real sense of the great man I had known, which I believe Dean gathered from working with Nacho’s former colleagues, students, and parishioners.

Receiving his support as I faced what I needed to face there, benefiting from that accompaniment exactly when I most needed it as I took the first hesitant steps toward getting my book back on track, left me so deeply grateful to Dean Brackley that I couldn’t imagine how I could possibly repay such kindness. It was this gratitude that prompted me, when Dean told me he was writing a book himself, to offer to read the manuscript of the book you hold in your hands. A book about theology. As I said, I figured it would be dense and dusty going, but I was so thankful to begin to emerge from that cloud of paralyzing, blocking grief that I told Dean I would be more than glad to be a reader for his manuscript, secretly vowing that no matter how dense the theology might turn out to be, I’d do my best, in the course of my usual copyeditor’s labors, to dust it off.

My—what to call the impediment a nonbeliever works under while reading a book about religion?—my theological handicap made this daunting at the outset. Upon encountering the first reference to God I immediately wanted to red pencil in the margin: Define your terms! I knew this wasn’t supposed to be algebra, but all my education had been based on the idea that in order to talk about something we need to agree on what that something is. Yet here we seemed to be plunging from page one right into the ineffable. I decided to think of the word “God” in the text as a sort of unknown variable, the X whose value might emerge as I solved the rest of the equation. Does that sound ridiculous? It was how I went about suspending disbelief in order to try to follow a logic that seemed quite foreign to me. The mental leap involved reminded me of poetry, which helped me toward a sort of working definition: the force that through the green fuse drives the flower, brooding over the bent world with—ah!—bright wings. Not exactly Euclid, but it would do for the moment. It was a little unsettling to find myself setting off across such unplumbed waters, but Dean’s clear and sensible writing carried me forward, and I read on.

Within the first few paragraphs the current carried me directly into the ideas of Ignatius himself—which I was surprised to find immediately began to fascinate me. I was struck (thanks in part to Dean’s paraphrasing) by the modernity of the thinking of this sixteenth-century Spanish soldier-turned-religious. No dust! In fact, it seemed to me that Ignatius had been centuries ahead of our modern psychologists in his awareness of the difficulties we encounter in life due to the essential ways in which we fail to understand ourselves, making decisions that run counter to who we are and setting forth in the most self-sabotaging directions. I was impressed by the sheer intelligence behind the meditation exercises Ignatius designed to help us make the important decisions in life for which we are—by definition—unprepared. How can we possibly know, before we have committed ourselves to years of following a path which may or may not be right for us, what it will mean to marry a certain person, or choose a particular career? Well, it turns out that Ignatius of Loyola has some very specific methods to help us figure such things out. I found myself wishing someone had given me this book to read years ago.

As I sailed on into the text, I couldn’t help feeling the occasional moment of alarm brought on by the sustained suspension of my native skepticism, but I did my best to steady the keel by careful exercise of my craft, tucking in commas where they were needed, removing them where they were not, closing quotations, keeping the clauses in trim. Still, there were further shoals of vocabulary to run aground on. “Faith,” for example. The concept of faith, used in the religious sense, had always been one of the most problematic of terms for me. The idea of believing something just because you decide to believe it, or—worse—because you are told you ought to believe it, had seemed to me the very seed of authoritarianism, the first step toward giving up what I consider to be human beings’ greatest treasure: our ability to question, to think things through and make up our own minds based on the evidence presented to us. But in a sudden shift of perspective brought on, I believe, by Dean’s fresh discussion of religious ideas in a modern context, I began to wonder if this quaint-sounding concept of faith might not have a more interesting meaning altogether than the one I’d learned as a child, something akin to the notion, so dear to us postmoderns, of self-esteem, the belief in our ability to act effectively in the world, the sense of our worthiness to be loved which so many of us seem to be lacking. I found myself wanting to rethink a number of ideas I’d rejected years before as childish things to be cast off upon entering rational adulthood. These weren’t shoals at all, but the shores of entire new continents of concepts to be explored.

As the combination of Ignatius’s acuity and Dean’s wide-ranging discussion of Ignatius’s meaning and how his ideas might be used to address the particular needs and problems of today’s more interconnected society drew me further into the text, I continued to read in the close-up, magnifying-glass-in-hand way of copyeditors. What happened next—the extraordinary thing I’ve mentioned—is difficult to describe. In fact, I think it may be impossible to describe exactly what happened, but I can try to describe how it happened.

Back home in Mexico, I’d been working on and off on Dean’s manuscript for several months while recovering from a painful divorce. I saw Christmas approaching that year with a degree of dread: under the circumstances, I just wanted to be alone. Festivities were out of the question, so I decided I’d make use of the down time to get as much of that stack of chapters copyedited as I could. I made some soup and set up my computer on a dining room table empty of everything but a potted fern. Dean had questioned my decision to do this, saying I should only devote my holidays to the copyediting if I really wanted to. “I really want to,” I said. To the few friends who asked about my plans, I answered with a laugh that I intended to spend Christmas with St. Ignatius, which they seemed to find amusingly original.

The streets emptied as masses of Mexico City’s residents left town to be with family in the countryside or on the beaches. My apartment building was nearly deserted, and the whole city grew very quiet. On December 23 I sat down in front of my computer and started work on the chapter entitled “Humility and Solidarity.” I worked away, barely stopping to heat the occasional bowl of soup, which I ate sitting in front of my computer as I continued to study the text. The next day, Christmas Eve, I found myself, almost without knowing how I’d gotten there, deep in the next chapter, “Expanding the Soul.” At that point, I didn’t feel like stopping even for soup. I was so absorbed in the text that the dining room table was starting to seem like the most appealing place in the city. Pausing for a moment, I noticed how beautifully a shaft of late-afternoon sunlight was illuminating the fern and my little laptop. Bach’s Mass in B Minor was playing on the stereo, the closest thing to Christmas music I had on hand. Did I work straight through the night? I think I must have rested at some point, though by this time I was so wrapped up in the work—one chapter melting into the next—that sleeping began to seem of as little interest to me as eating. Without my quite knowing how it happened, Christmas Eve turned into Christmas morning.

Now, there is a sort of trick I play on myself when I am copyediting. I imagine I am the author myself, or, perhaps more accurately, that I am inhabiting the author’s mind. I find this useful, since it helps me sense where the text is heading, and it is easier in this way for me to figure out when the author has something in mind which hasn’t quite made it onto the page. It may sound like an odd way to copyedit, but it works for me. However, I had never copyedited a text by an author with a mind like Dean Brackley’s—let alone like Ignatius of Loyola’s. The experience of imagining myself inside these two exceptional minds began to have a curious effect: I would discover myself sitting still in front of my computer, staring off into space, thoughts soaring. What I think was happening was that, without any intention of doing so, I was just naturally falling into the kind of meditation that Ignatius—and Dean—were recommending in these chapters. It felt as if, even while my rational mind continued to function, some deeper intelligence in there was beginning to awaken and engage.

This was when it happened—though I hardly know what to call it. If I were writing in an ordinary, nontheological context, I wouldn’t hesitate to call it a miracle (we use the word so loosely these days as an all-purpose superlative for anything at all), but here the word seems in danger of being so literally appropriate that it seems almost presumptuous to write it. Maybe I’ll put aside trying to name it and just try to describe what it felt like. Though that isn’t easy, either, and I’m not sure how possible it is to communicate with any clarity about this kind of thing.

I’ll try. It was as if the two meanings of the word “light” were suddenly the same, the world both brilliantly illuminated and, as if by entirely logical correlation in a non-Euclidian geometry of some highly advanced physics, all heaviness had been converted into buoyancy. The sun beamed in like a celestial knowing wink, and the light became a happiness I hadn’t experienced since before Nacho died. Twelve years of depression evaporated, just lifted from my shoulders. The happiness wasn’t at all a champagne-high sort of giddiness, no bubbly golden-hued confusion. It was more like a wonderful clarity, a transparence. Thinking back to that moment, what it most reminds me of is the time when, as a very lucky teenager who got to hear a truly brilliant physicist explain the proof of Einstein’s theory of special relativity, after following the physicist through realms of calculus that stretched the limits of my abilities, I suddenly, struck breathless with awe and delight, got special relativity.

What to do with this sudden grace? I looked out the window: it was still Christmas; I was still alone. What I did—with even greater pleasure than before—was simply to carry on with the copyediting, wondering as I did how long that marvelous feeling could possibly last. A short time later, having been silent for days, the phone rang. Somehow, though it was a long-distance extravagance and he had never called me before, I wasn’t surprised to hear Dean’s voice on the line (the way I was feeling, it wouldn’t have entirely surprised me if it had been Ignatius himself calling). Now I suppose that Dean must have been feeling some compassion for me, especially knowing how depressed I’d been and considering that I was spending Christmas alone doing nothing but copyediting his manuscript, and I think the call was simply an act of kindness on his part. But at that splendid moment, it seemed entirely of a piece with the sudden shift in the universe I had experienced an hour or so before. Dean sounded surprised to find me in such good spirits, but it was beyond me to explain what had happened. I told him I was very well, enjoying the work a lot, and we wished each other Merry Christmas.

Would I have been surprised to know that exactly one year later Dean would be baptizing me? Though I think nothing could have astonished me after what happened that morning, certainly the thought never crossed my mind. But that is in fact what happened, after a year of asking questions and talking theology with Dean and a number of other patient religious friends, at a Mexico City church called La Resurrección, in a simple Mass containing a baptismal ceremony so moving it left me feeling legally adopted into that parish of good souls, who continue to treat me with the kindest affection. Whenever I go to Mass at La Resurrección it seems to me that what the liberation theologians say about Christ being present in the poor is visibly, palpably true. The true miracle is that the happiness of that glowing Christmas morning is still with me, showing no signs of abating, even though with the September attacks and the war that followed—not to mention illness, family griefs, deaths of friends, money troubles—it’s taken a few blows along the way.

There was, I admit, one faith-shaking moment when I wondered what on earth a feminist like me was doing contemplating joining an institution as male-dominated and plagued with error and contradiction as the Catholic Church. When I told my theologian friends, they acted quickly, arranging interviews with Catholic feminists and nuns of impressive intellect and spiritual strength. I reflected (as I continued my copyediting) that even our sixteenth-century Catholic Ignatius comes across as having had something close to a feminist sensibility himself. A political analogy occurred to me: I certainly wouldn’t expect immigrant friends deciding to become U.S. citizens to endorse the foreign policy of whatever administration was in power at the moment, but would rejoice in their bringing a questioning mind into our evolving democracy. Wasn’t it equally reasonable for me to join the Church while maintaining my conviction that male domination is archaic and un-Christian, wrong for a thousand reasons, and must go? Who knew: maybe I’d put my own two cents’ worth toward helping that evolution along.

On the other hand, I knew I could never join the Catholic or any other church if this would require distancing myself from other churches and religions important to me: the Judaism of my New York cousins and friends with whom I have shared Seders, the Christian Science of my beloved Aunt Anne and cousins in Maine, the Presbyterian Churches that have made me feel at home in Princeton and other American cities. Dean told me that many Catholics have close ties to other religions, mentioning one of his Jesuit brothers whose religious practice includes celebrating Sabbath in the Jewish tradition, and assured me that the Catholic Church would not exclude me for my associations with other religions: another obstacle melted away. And though I’d previously understood the word “conversion” to mean the renouncing of a supposedly inferior religion in favor of a supposedly superior one—a concept I’d found too patronizing to take seriously—I came to understand the concept of conversion in the sense of a spiritual transformation. Not patronizing at all, but deeply interesting.

All the while, that sustaining moment of Christmas joy carried me through these and other grave doubts and kept me in what may possibly have been an almost annoying state of good cheer during exhausting months of working with Catholic Relief Services’ 2001 earthquake relief effort in El Salvador. Best of all, though, the sturdy happiness that evolved during the year of successive epiphanies which followed that moment of Christmas light has given me the courage to face the pain of the past, overcome my writer’s block—and I am writing again.

I can’t promise that if you read this book you will have the kind of transforming experience I did. But I think there is a good chance that, if you read it with some attentiveness and reflect on the ideas presented here, doors may well be opened. Consider the fact that I started reading the book with no interest at all in its contents: having picked up this book on your own, you are already five steps ahead of where I was when I began reading. You may be way ahead of me in being able to talk about spiritual things, as well, since I confess that the word “God” still makes me uneasy; my variable X continues undefined for me, at least in words. However, it is clear to me that the formulas presented here can work—albeit, as they say, in mysterious ways. If you happen to be, as I was, a skeptic without any adult experience in Christian spirituality, I encourage you to suspend disbelief for the time it takes to read this book and give these exercises a try: I think you will find this to be a particularly accessible approach to understanding what that experience is about. What Ignatius of Loyola set out to do four centuries ago, and what Dean Brackley has set out to make accessible to people of our time, is a sort of spiritual methodology which helps us to prepare the ground in order to become as well-equipped as possible to make the decisions which will lead us toward living better and more fulfilled lives. Whether or not reading this book brings you to your own transforming spiritual experience, these exercises are designed to help you gain deeper insights into yourself, your talents, your yearnings, and your relationship to the rest of the world—no small accomplishment in this fragmented day and age of ours.

Malinalco, Mexico

April 2004

Acknowledgments

In writing this book, I have drawn a great deal on others’ experience and testimony. This humbling process has helped me appreciate better how all that we have are gifts received.

Many others have helped make the book possible. I want to thank my colleagues at the Universidad Centroamericana (UCA) in San Salvador who freed me from other tasks, as well as the many friends who shared their knowledge, hospitality and resources at the Woodstock Theological Center in Washington, D.C.; the Jesuit Center for Spirituality in Wernersville, Pennsylvania; Ciszek Hall at Fordham University in the Bronx; Schell House and John Carroll University in Cleveland; and St. Alphonsus House and Loyola Center at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.

I am especially grateful to Gwendolin Herder and Roy Carlisle of Crossroad for their patient collaboration and assistance. I also wish to thank Tom Clarke, S.J., Elinor Shea, O.S.U., Miriam Cleary, O.S.U., Sagrario Núñez, A.C.J., Mary Campbell, Jack Barron, S.J., Gene Palumbo, Dan Hartnett, S.J., Arthur Lyons, Vincent O’Keefe, S.J., Jon Sobrino, S.J., Peter Gyves, N.S.J., José Antonio Pacheco, S.J., David López, Martha Zechmeister, Xavier Alegre, S.J., Robin Waterman, Jean Stokan and Trena Yonkers Talz for their helpful suggestions, and Zulma Alvarado for her secretarial assistance.

I owe an unpayable debt to Ellen Calmus, whose talent and generosity have immensely improved the book in style and content.

DB

San Salvador

April 2004

GETTING FREE

These turbulent times disclose our need for a discipline of the spirit. To respond to our world we must get free to love. That involves personal transformation, which includes coming to terms with evil in the world and in ourselves, accepting forgiveness and changing.

1Spirituality for Solidarity

We live in troubling times. While people can connect as never before, the world seems more fragmented. We are awash in information, yet it is hard to get a sense of the whole. As communities and families crumble, we feel more alone. The voracious monsters of greed, unchecked market forces, and violence prowl the planet, leaving a trail of misery and exclusion in their wake. AIDS spreads and environmental crisis deepens. All this leaves many people dispirited and apprehensive.

But there are signs of hope. One is a growing interest in spirituality. As the desert of materialism expands, people are seeking fresh water. By “spirituality” I mean a discipline of the spirit (which we are), a way of life. For believers, spirituality is a way of life “in the Spirit,” capital S, a way of living-in-the-world in relation to God. For Christians, it is a way of following Christ.

The disorientation that so many experience today hit home for me, personally, in college. The trouble began as I reflected on how all the geniuses that we were reading disagreed among themselves. To me, each one’s vision of life seemed as valid, or invalid, as the others’. This provoked a deep crisis. I had been brought up a Catholic, was instructed in the faith, and had wonderful role models. Now it seemed that Christian doctrine hovered over an abyss. Looking back, I can see that I was short on experience, especially the kind that helps us make sense of life and its conundrums. I had little acquaintance with the suffering of the poor.

Fortunately, my upbringing provided resources for this crisis, which lasted four years. I clung to basic morality and a sense of vocation (I was a Jesuit in training at the time). I sought guidance and made use of tools I’d recently acquired, like St. Ignatius of Loyola’s “Rules for Discernment.” Though I had doubts about God, Ignatius seemed to me to make good practical sense. His Rules got me through workdays of depression and anxiety and offered promise that I could ride out the storm. They helped me notice that when I drew near to suffering I experienced a sense of solidity and some relief. Letting the drama of life and death break through my defenses—the drama of down-and-out adults and youth at risk in Lower Manhattan where I lived and worked—helped me gather together my scattered self. It did me good to get close to these people.

Since then, that kind of experience has continued to nourish me. The crucified people of today lead us to the center of things. Eventually they helped me rediscover Christianity. Through those difficult years and ever since, the Ignatian path, Ignatian spirituality, has been crucial for finding my way.

I discovered I had company. Plenty of others were walking a path like mine, especially members of my own middle-class “tribe.” For many, engaging the victims of history became a turning point in their journey, leaving them “ruined for life,” as the Jesuit volunteers say (ruined, that is, for the conventional life they once aspired to). The victims help us find a deeper purpose in life. They help us discover our vocation to solidarity.

In these times of transition, the world cries out for that. One “order” is coming apart, and its successor is not yet in sight. I’m not sure what the best political strategy is for making the world a more liveable place. I do know that the world needs a critical mass of people who will respond to suffering, who are ready for long-term commitment, and who will make wise choices along the way. Without such “new human beings,” I doubt that any amount of money, sophisticated strategies, or even structural change will make our world much more human.

IGNATIUS: TENDING THE FLAME

Sustaining a life of generous service requires a spirituality. Which is where Ignatius comes in. A genius of the spiritual life, he lived in Europe at the dawn of the modern age, and he addressed a growing need for personalized spirituality. During the Middle Ages, that was deemed proper mostly for church professionals—monks, nuns, and the clergy. Religious commoners had to be content with the minimum of sacraments and popular devotions, including public practices like processions. With hindsight, we can appreciate how the crumbling of the Middle Ages brought to light the need for a personalized spirituality for lay people. By Ignatius’s time, the official and collective devotions were proving less helpful for sustaining serious Christian commitment. The Renaissance, the rediscovery of the Bible, the invention of the printing press, the birth of modern science, the discovery of “new worlds”—all this undermined exclusive reliance on ancient authority and venerable custom. Commerce facilitated travel; people could see that their traditions were local, not universal. The situation raised questions similar to those we ask in our own wildly pluralistic times: How do we ground our convictions and sustain commitment, and how do we do this together?

In the cities of a Renaissance Europe in the throes of the Reformation, reasonable people increasingly disagreed on life’s basic questions. In an environment of critical questioning and viable alternatives, there could be no substitute for personal conviction founded not on faith alone, but also on experience and reason.

Ignatius responded to his changing times with uncommon originality. As a Basque soldier, Iñigo (as he had been christened) pursued the pleasures and prestige of courtly life until he was thirty. But in 1521, while convalescing at Loyola from a battle injury at Pamplona, he underwent a profound experience that he later interpreted as God’s direct action on him. He experienced within himself the birth of a great love and a powerful desire to spend his life in God’s service. He later spoke of being “on fire with God.”

Departing Loyola in 1522, he took up residence in a cave at Manresa, near Barcelona, where he spent several months in intense prayer and reflection. Having resolved to imitate the exploits of the saints, he practiced harsh penances and took other rash actions with little regard for circumstance or consequences. He later concluded that in this period his passion to serve was contaminated with egoism and lacking in “discretion.” At Manresa he fell into such deep desolation that he thought of suicide. He begged God to show him the way forward. Soon after, he says, he was learning to let God lead him and to order his tangled loves.

With this progress came powerful illuminations about life, the world, and God. He understood people better, perceived his surroundings more clearly, and developed a better grasp of how the world worked. In time, he would speak of finding God easily and communicating “familiarly” with God.

Endowed with exceptional insight and a habit of reflection, Iñigo soon discovered that his gifts benefited others. He could help them understand their experience, above all how God was working in their lives. His passion became, and always remained, to help people steward the flame of love that God had lit within them, the better to serve the world around them. That flame spread through the many deep friendships he formed. The spirituality we associate with him is all about tending that flame in us, as it is purified, flourishes, or even flags, and stirring the fire in others.

Iñigo was a layman with no thought of becoming a priest, still less of starting a religious order. His desire to help people led him to shape his new insights into a series of meditations, or “spiritual exercises,” which he administered to others. For those who were properly disposed, his retreat lasted about thirty days, grouped into four uneven “weeks,” each devoted to a different theme. For about ten years after Manresa, he refined his retreat notes, fashioning them into a manual, Spiritual Exercises, for others to use in guiding “exercitants.” (I will refer to the retreat itself as the Spiritual Exercises and to the manual as Spiritual Exercises, in italics. These days those who make a retreat are commonly called “retreatants.”)

The Spiritual Exercises crystallizes most of Ignatius’s key insights—but not all. He went on to study for several years and to gather the group of close friends who became the first Jesuits. Meanwhile, his vision evolved. This is evident from his voluminous correspondence (over seven thousand letters and instructions have come down to us!), the so-called Autobiography, fragments of his Spiritual Diary, the Constitutions he wrote for the new Society of Jesus during his last years, and from testimonies of others about him. For Ignatius in his mature later years, to live meant to seek and find God everywhere, in order to collaborate with God in service to others.

Ignatius’s outlook was revolutionary. While he was a child of his times, he also transcended them. He even transcends our own. According to the great theologian Karl Rahner, Ignatius’s originality will be understood only in the future. His spirituality “is not typical of our time; it is not characteristic of the modern era which is nearing its end. It is, rather, a sign of the approaching future.”1 Today’s booming interest in Ignatius seems to confirm Rahner’s prophecy. Ignatian spirituality is now promoted and practiced beyond the Catholic Church where it was born, among members of other Christian churches and among non-Christians, as well. Its contemporary vigor is evident in the welcome it has received from many feminists.2

READING THESE PAGES

Although Ignatius’s vision evolved, it remained grounded in his experience at Manresa and the insights set forth in his retreat manual. The Spiritual Exercises always remained his preferred instrument for introducing people to a life of deeper faith, hope, and love. When he discovered someone who was open to generous commitment, he would invite that person to make the Exercises.

Here I follow his lead. Like the Exercises, this book offers readers an opportunity to reflect on their experience in an ordered way and to grow in commitment. Like Ignatius’s retreat, it (re)introduces them to Christianity, as an experience more than a set of doctrines. For that purpose, I can hardly improve on his basic pedagogy. As I said above, the full Exercises lasted about a month, divided into four uneven “weeks.” I use the same schema for the scaffolding of this book. At the same time, I incorporate Ignatius’s more mature insights, which “flow back” over the themes of the Exercises, so that all the essential elements of his spirituality are included.

This book is more than an introduction, however. It seeks to adapt the Ignatian vision to our times, as many have already done, but with special attention to our global social crisis. Obviously, there is a need to re-present Ignatius’s wisdom in contemporary language, including more adequate theological language. But we must also explore its social implications—a point of particular emphasis in this book. In the Spiritual Exercises, attention centers on the individual and God’s action in the life of the individual, which is only fitting in a retreat where people take stock of their lives. But the Exercises are not all of Ignatian spirituality. Moreover, we can be certain that, were he alive today, Ignatius would develop the social significance of his insights. We are more aware today of the social and institutional dimensions of our lives. Christians are more aware of the social implications of their vocation and of the mission of the church. We are all more conscious of the scope of misery in the world, of the institutional mechanisms of injustice, and of the global dimension of our moral drama. Responding to massive injustice according to each one’s calling is the price of being human, and Christian, today. Those looking for a privatized spirituality to shelter them from a violent world have come to the wrong place.

I explain my interpretation of the social significance of some key Ignatian themes in two appendices at the end of this book—one on the exercise of “The Call” (or “The Kingdom”), the other on the “Two Standards” meditation. Readers with less interest in these more scholarly arguments can skip the appendices without losing the main lines of thought.

The First Week of the Exercises (corresponding to Part 1 of this book) deals with sin and forgiveness; the Second, with following Christ and making major life choices (Parts 2 and 3); the Third Week considers the passion and death of Christ (Part 4); and the Fourth Week, the risen Christ (Part 5). Although prayer is discussed throughout the book, its final three chapters treat prayer systematically (Part 6). They do not depend on earlier chapters and can be read at any time.

As the progression of “weeks” suggests, Ignatius recognized a typical pattern in God’s dealings with us, that is, a typical pattern in our growth in freedom and love. Not that people pass lockstep through stages, never to return to them. Rather, as in a symphony of four movements, the themes of the four weeks recur in different ways throughout the life of the maturing person.

At the same time, Ignatius stressed that each individual is unique and that God deals freely with each one. He always tailored his counsel to each one’s needs, sternly warning others against steering everybody along the same road. In these matters, one size does not fit all.

Nor is every truth always timely. We need different types of nourishment at different points of our journey. Some people may not be ready for certain vital truths, and dwelling on them could do them harm (cf. John 16:12–13). Others may have no need to rehearse the basics, but should instead “leave the elementary doctrine of Christ and go on to maturity” (Heb. 6:1).

Readers should therefore read this book with the prime Ignatian virtue of discretion. They should take from it what illuminates their experience, what heals, and what challenges them to step forward onto new terrain. Ignatius advises us to dwell on and savor just such things. And better still than reading this book would be to make the Exercises, for which no book can really substitute.

These pages speak the language of faith. However, others besides convinced Christians have derived great profit from Ignatius (as I did myself during years of agnostic doubt). I have tried to make this book “searcher-friendly” and to speak of Transcendence without mystification, decoding theological language as much as possible. That is one reason I introduce prayer only gradually. Most often, I take human experience, rather than revelation, as the starting point for each theme. At the same time, our lives are too rich for precise scientific explanation, ordinary common-sense discourse, or both, to encompass. If the holy Mystery called God pervades our lives, as I believe it does, then we need religious symbols to point to reality as it actually is. Without that language, we sell our experience short. I invite readers, as Ignatius invited those he counseled, to give a fair hearing to language that might at first put them off [22].*

CONCLUSION

With major institutions in crisis, we find it hard to say where the world is headed. Some believe this affords groups of deeply committed people a better chance to shape the future than they would have under more stable, less fluid conditions: an encouraging way to think about this state of uncertainty. In any event, we urgently need a critical mass of such people to make this century the century of solidarity and turn the swelling tide of misery, violence, and environmental crisis.

The good news (gospel) assures us that it makes sense to struggle against the odds and to celebrate along the way. I do believe, as the song says, that we shall overcome some day. I hope these reflections will stoke the inner flame of generous readers and provide them with resources to help bring that day closer.

We now turn to the “Foundation,” a kind of overture of first principles, which Ignatius invited people to ponder at the beginning of his retreat.

2Free to Love

For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another. For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

(Gal. 5:13–14)

The Beatles were right: all you need is love. But real love does not come cheap. Dorothy Day used to quote Dostoyevsky, saying, “Love in practice is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.”1 What love requires is not always obvious. Above all, love demands sacrifice, and we are slow to sign up for that. And even when we do, the path of love is full of traps and blind alleys that steer us off track or turn us around. Our frailty and our fears block our way to serious commitment. To respond with love to a world which seems to have gone wrong in fundamental ways, a broken world, we must get free to love—we need to find a way to love better and over the long haul.

THE FOUNDATION

Popular wisdom and songs are full of advice about how to live and to love, but how far does that advice lead us? This book offers a way based on the spiritual wisdom of Ignatius of Loyola, the sixteenth-century founder of the Jesuits.

A set of basic propositions called “The Foundation” stands at the beginning of Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises. The Foundation speaks to the heart of life’s drama. It is about getting free to love. With the addition of a clarifying amendment at the beginning, it reads as follows:

Human beings are created to love God with their whole heart and soul, essentially by loving and serving their neighbors. In this way they participate in God’s plan to bring all creation to completion and so arrive at their own ultimate fulfillment (eternal life).

The other things on the face of the earth are created for human beings, and to help them to pursue the end for which they are created.

From this it follows that we ought to use these things to the extent that they help us toward that end, and free ourselves from them to the extent that they hinder us from it.

For this reason it is necessary to make ourselves indifferent to all created things, in regard to everything which is left to our free will and is not forbidden, in such a way that, for our part, we not seek health rather than sickness, riches rather than poverty, honor rather than dishonor, a long life rather than a short one, and so on in all other matters, wanting and choosing only that which leads more to the end for which we are created [23].2

The original text begins: “Human beings are created to praise, reverence and serve God our Lord, and by this means to save their souls,” but I have translated “save their souls” as “attain their ultimate fulfillment.” I have specified what Ignatius left implicit: that we praise and serve God essentially by loving our neighbor.

The Foundation outlines a vision of life and the most basic criteria for making choices. It says that we live well and attain our ultimate purpose by loving just one thing, or rather some One, and that this requires interior freedom—freedom to choose, habitually, the most loving thing. According to the Foundation, serving God is what makes us happy. If that is true, then the sensible way to deal with “all other things on the face of the earth” is to embrace them to the extent that they contribute to that goal and shun them when they do not. We should be ready for riches or poverty, honor or dishonor, health or sickness, a long life or a short life, depending on whether they serve this goal. It makes no sense to have nonnegotiables in life: for example, to pursue economic security or social prestige no matter what, or to determine to do nothing, ever, that might endanger our health. Rather, says Ignatius, we should be “indifferent” to such alternatives. “Indifferent” is probably not the best choice of words. As the Ignatian scholar George Ganss says, “indifference” here means:

undetermined to one thing or option rather than another; impartial; unbiased; with decision suspended until the reasons for a wise choice are learned; still undecided. In no way does it mean unconcerned or unimportant. It implies interior freedom from disordered inclinations.3

“Indifference” means inner freedom. It is the capacity to sense and then embrace what is best, even when that goes against our inclinations. Indifference is neither stoic impassiveness nor the extinction of desire that some currents of Eastern religions advocate. It means being so passionately and single-mindedly committed, so completely in love, that we are willing to sacrifice anything, including our lives, for the ultimate goal. It means magnanimous generosity, abandonment into God’s hands, availability. It is not so much detachment from things as “detachability.”4 It means being like a good shortstop, ready to move in any direction at the crack of the bat.

Of course, we are not indifferent to murder or adultery. Nor are we indifferent to our spouse, family, church, or anything else that serves the ultimate goal here and now. Once we determine that X is more conducive to that goal than the alternatives, we pursue X passionately. Our one great love works itself out as passionate loves of people, projects, and all creation.5 But we need a radical interior freedom in order to “want and choose” what is more conducive to this goal. And, in the course of following our particular commitments, we must be free to move on when the supreme goal requires it.

“Indifference” means living “without being determined by any disordered inclination” [21]. Inclinations are likes and dislikes, “habits of the heart,” that direct the will toward food, possessions, sexual gratification, or sleep; or toward beauty, order, or knowledge. They can be ordered or disordered. Disorder can take crude forms of compulsion or more refined, socially constructed forms, like legalism, racism, elitism, or conformity to convention.6 Paul speaks of slavery to “the flesh” (by which he means human nature on all its levels) and even to “the law,” which comes from God.

Inner freedom is not the total absence of disordered desire. Otherwise, no one would qualify. Rather, it means being able to overcome contrary desire, especially disordered desire, when we have to. That requires ordering our desires, or rather allowing God to order them [16; cf. 1], like a magnet pulling iron filings into line, and to enlist them in single-minded service. That is what happens when we fall in love: the one we love engages our feelings and aligns them toward a single reference. This liberates us for spontaneous and creative action. Tracing the biblical roots of the Foundation can help us understand all of this better.

COVENANT, FEAR, AND FAITH

Assyria will not save us;

   We will not ride upon horses;

We will say no more, “Our god,”

   to the work of our hands.

In you the orphan finds mercy.   

(Hos. 14:3)

The central story of the Hebrew Bible is the Exodus. Yahweh, the god of Israel, freed the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt and led them to the land of promise. Once out in the desert, Yahweh made a covenant with Israel and promised them security and well-being (shalom). That is what gods were supposed to do for communities at risk from war, disease, wild animals, and crop failure. In turn, Israel promised to look to Yahweh alone. This covenant of exclusive adherence was revolutionary. Ancient Near Eastern peoples usually worshiped several gods simultaneously, looking to one for copious rainfall, another for the fertility of the flock, still another for national security. Yahweh rejected this divine division of labor, assuming exclusive responsibility for Israel’s well-being and making an unheard-of demand: “You shall have no other gods besides me” (Exod. 20:3). The Great Commandment of the Book of Deuteronomy, the Shema, restates this: “Hear, O Israel: Yahweh is our God, Yahweh alone. You shall love Yahweh your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and with all your might” (Deut. 6:4–5). You shall not give Yahweh 80 percent of your heart and the remaining 20 percent to some other god, for “Yahweh is a jealous god” (Deut. 6:15). Israel must live entirely by “hearing” Yahweh’s word and following his instruction (torah). This exclusive “love” is love and trust all in one—the fundamental religious attitude we call faith.7

With this, humanity takes a decisive step forward. Serving many gods pulls a people, or an individual, in more than one direction, like someone trying to manage two spouses. To serve Yahweh alone means having an undivided heart. A single super-loyalty puts all others in perspective. That means not being tyrannized by anything in heaven or on earth. It means freedom. This is the taproot of the Ignatian Foundation.

The Bible, Ignatius, and traditional spiritual theology all target “disordered inclinations” as key obstacles to freedom. The Bible stresses the objects of these inclinations, which it calls idols. Israel was to embrace the God of life and reject the idols of death (cf. Deut. 30:15–20). Idol-language discloses the public dimension of our internal disorders.

Here the Bible takes aim at one disordered inclination: fear. Insecurity stirs our fear—of hardship, rejection, and death. Fear “disorders” our desires; we grasp for idols which promise security, but fail to deliver it. Idols enslave their devotees and demand human sacrifice.

Today we have different insecurities, and different idols. Although we can control our surroundings better than our ancestors, we are still afraid. We cling to the means of control—money, power, status, and weaponry. “Indifference” is the freedom to let those things go. As the song says, “Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose.”

I live in El Salvador, where I have been amazed at people who seem to have lost all fear, including mothers and spouses of those “disappeared” and massacred during the civil war of the 1980s. In a tense situation during the war, one woman told me, “Mire, when you’ve hunted for your children among piles of corpses, you are no longer afraid. They can’t do anything to you anymore.”

Although fear is natural and beneficial in the presence of danger, it can dominate us. It need not, however. When terror invaded Jesus in the garden, he overcame it, by placing his destiny in his Father’s hands: “Let your will, not mine, be done.” He repeatedly called his disciples to radical trust: “Why are you fearful, you of little faith?” “Do not be afraid!” Pointing to the birds and the lilies, he told them not to worry about food or clothing. His message was that God knows and cares for you. Seek first God’s Reign and its justice, and all your personal needs will be met (cf. Matt. 6:25–33). The Letter to the Hebrews says Jesus cut the root of fear. He set “free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death” (2:15).

“Indifference” to food, shelter, clothing—and death—might sound foolish, or even dangerous. Yet even those things we most need, and to which we have a right, can dominate us. And none of these things, nor all good things together, can make us happy by themselves.8 They can relieve suffering and give pleasure. Going without them brings pain, even death. But all the satisfaction that things can give us does not add up to happiness; and all the pain of loss does not add up to unhappiness.

Happiness goes deeper than pleasure; misery goes deeper than pain. When peace and happiness are present, they flow deep within us like a river, even when we lack things that are good, even when we lack things that are essential (cf. John 7:37–39). That living water does not depend decisively on what we have or where we are. Paul wrote to the Romans:

Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? … No, … For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, … nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Rom. 8:35–39)

Thus Paul could write, “In any and all circumstances I have learned the secret of being well-fed and of going hungry, of having plenty and of being in need” (Phil. 4:11–13).

The river of living water is not our private property but a river shared and “channeled” by friends who nourish a common vision and praxis. (This is what church is supposed to be and do.) In this sense, friends (and spouses) do “make us happy.” But if one or another dies, despite our loss and grief, our happiness should remain. Its ultimate source lies elsewhere. Landscapes, a party, or a community victory can swell our joy, but they do not create it.

WITH ALL YOUR HEART AND SOUL AND STRENGTH

Radical trust and total commitment can seem like a lot to ask for. In the final analysis we will only find out whether the Great Commandment and the Foundation make sense if we take up their challenge. But perhaps it will help if we briefly address some of the obstacles that often block this path. These issues all deserve more extensive treatment and we will return to some of them later. The first difficulty is often faith itself.

• Faith includes both trust and belief: for example, the belief that God exists and acts on our behalf. Faith is not an irrational leap in the dark. While it leaps beyond the evidence at hand, faith leaps from the solid platform of experience and in the direction in which the evidence points. We exercise faith like this in the bus driver, the dentist, our friend or spouse. We trust them, based on our experience or on others’ testimony, and we risk the leap because it is more reasonable to trust than not to. When Jesus chided his disciples for their lack of faith, it was not because he wanted them to act irrationally, but because “having eyes they did not see and having ears they did not listen.” Their senses were dulled, their capacity to experience deadened. They failed to penetrate reality (cf. Mark 8:18) and to perceive the Reign of God in their midst. Authentic testimonies of faith are based on experience. They shine like a beacon not on some imaginary world but deep into the heart of reality, which we experience all too superficially. The difference between religious faith and everyday faith (in the dentist, for example) lies in the type of evidence and the type of subsequent verification which, in the case of religious faith, almost always leave room for doubt. But doubt also stalks our faith that someone loves us. In neither case does doubt invalidate faith, or necessarily weaken it.

• But how is total commitment to God compatible with freedom and human fulfillment? The God of the Bible is not another “entity” in the universe. This God acts like no other agent, desiring only our freedom and full humanity and to bring all creation to fulfillment, and working only for that. God is Love, says John’s famous letter, a God with whom we can fall in love. Otherwise, total commitment would make no sense.