Post from: All Things Seen and Unseen

Creation and Redemption

• Best Contemporary Theology Meme
• All Quiet on the Posting Front…
• Spiritual Direction: Finding a Way

The following talk was given to a weekend retreat group. I begin by referring to a session the previous evening where I’d shown a couple of clips from the film American Beauty in which the central character, at the point of death, reflects on his life and finds himself moved by gratitude and beauty. I asked the group to do their own reflection:

• What would you like to flash before your eyes in that last second, that ocean of time?
• What are you grateful for–really, spontaneously grateful for?
• Where is the beauty in your life and where is it leading you?

Called to Discipleship

I deliberately didn’t pretend last night that I knew what was meant by ‘Called to Discipleship’—it could mean all sorts of things—in general or specifically for this group or individually for me or for any one of you. I deliberately started of our working with the topic last night from what seems to me a particularly Ignatian angle. You start with experience, with life, with memory, with imagination and you let God show Godself there—in beauty, in gifts given, in attraction felt, in desires that grow and deepen.

In a section of the Spiritual Exercises that deals with making discipleship decisions one of the questions St. Ignatius asks—or one of the imaginative exercises he presents—is the one from last night: he says tersely, ‘consider, if you were at the point of death, what procedure and guide you will at that time wish you had used in this present decision’.

You’ll see I’ve already taken a position on our title: being called to discipleship is—at least in part—about making decisions. But before I go any further I want to get your sense of what might fit under our theme this weekend, both in general and for this group specifically.

So for a moment think or re-think about that:

• What does discipleship mean?
• What would it mean to be a disciple today?
• What about the calling part—what is it to be called?
• And what do these two terms leave out that also feels important?

We did some exchange of experiences and ideas at this point…

I hope we’ll get into most of your concerns and ideas in one way or another this weekend… For now I want to keep going with looking at how discipleship is handled in the Spiritual Exercises. I’ve already spoken about one of Ignatius’ major orientations: discipleship is about making a decision—or about continually making decisions. But what kind of decisions and how are we supposed to make them?

If we took his death-bed perspective—or did another thing he suggests and imagine ourselves before God on Judgement Day—if we took that vantage point on our decisions it could feel like we have a tough and threatening God looking over our shoulder ready to ruin us if we get it all wrong. But that isn’t how Ignatius wants us to go about it. The very first time he raises that question of choice he does so in the context of gratitude and of grace. What are you grateful for in your life? How do you feel you have been gifted—even among the pains and problems of life—how do you feel the thread of grace running though your days? It’s in that context—the context of redemption—that Ignatius asks us what kind of response we want to make: what will I do for Christ who has saved me and continues to save me?

Discipleship only makes sense out of an encounter with grace and an experience of real and spontaneous gratitude. And discipleship as a response of gratitude only makes sense if it is freely entered into.

So alongside decision we have to add gratitude and grace. Ignatius’ next word is probably attraction…
There’s an imaginative exercise he entitles the Call of the King—it all gets a bit Lord of the Rings here—the call of the king. He asks you to imagine a king—bring it forward 500 years and make it any kind of person who has a vision and a dream—imagine the kind of person who could inspire you to respond generously, even heroically. Imagine what kind of vision or dream would be worthy of you. What kind of project could catch your imagination? And more—what kind of person could catch your imagination and get you to reshape your life so you can help them do what they are burning to do? Ignatius wants you to do this imaginatively and not just abstractly: what would he or she look like, their manner, their clothing, their look? What would their friends be like? What, in fact, could so attract you about someone that you’d change your life for them?

Got any ideas? … Ignatius does a ‘bait and switch’ at this point and says ‘well how much more worthy and attractive is Jesus and his living out of God’s vision and dream’. Discipleship is about letting ourselves be attracted, letting ourselves desire and need to be disciples—not just in some abstract sense but disciples of this man with his crazy dream for this personal corner of the world. Attraction and desire awake in us a need, a need to be alongside this man—a desire and a need that go beyond the practical. Not just sharing the same project, or putting my money in the same pot, or casting my vote as he would vote, but taking up the same lifestyle: doing what he does, eating what he eats, sharing his hardships, enjoying his victories, mourning his setbacks. ‘What would it take to make you a hero?’ is the discipleship question. Who would it take?

Ignatius roots discipleship in relationship—and relationship that is mutual. Most people praying this exercise only experience an inkling of attraction in a dark and tangled mass of ifs and buts and doubtful maybes but insofar as they feel any desire they discover their vulnerability. I might desire to be with this man but he might not desire to have me with him. We have to be chosen, called. There’s an agonising echo of that schoolyard moment of picking teams— pick me, pick me, pick me, pick me, pick me. We need the call. Not just abstractly—we need to feel our desire met and kindled. Discipleship is only grown in the dance of mutual desire. God and I desiring together.

OK the list is growing: decision, gratitude, grace, attraction, desire, relationship and call.

Ignatius’ next move is to switch viewpoint—or viewpoints—he goes all split screen. He asks us to imagine three scenes. First of all imagine the Trinity in heaven having a conversation… Give it a try … What are they talking about? You have to follow their gaze to find out. They are looking at the face of this round world. So imagine scene two: the world. What do the Trinity see? They see people, they see people in all their diversity, their sorrows and joys. They see us loving and laughing; they see us hurting and hating. They see violence and they see tenderness; care and callousness. They see discrimination and oppression and misery. They see all we see when we open the newspaper or turn on the TV: AIDS and Iraq and climate change and polonium 210. What do you imagine they see, they hear, they feel? What moves the Trinity when they see this planet’s condition?

Back to scene 1. The Trinity is moved to come to our aid. ‘Let us work redemption’, is what Ignatius puts into God’s metaphorical mouth. Which brings us to scene 3: Mary in Nazareth and the mutual risky endeavour entered into by one person and their God. That’s discipleship for Ignatius—both what transpires between Mary and God—the ‘let it be to me as you say’—the asking and the answering—but also what happens ‘before’. The Trinity sees need and chooses to respond. Discipleship always arises from the choice to answer concrete need. Discipleship is always a response to reality, the way something will punch us in the guts with its injustice, its wrongness, its need that things be different. The gospels are always saying Jesus ‘took pity’ on someone or other. It’s a bad translation of a Greek word that also gets rendered as ‘felt anger’, ‘had compassion, etc. But it’s a word to do with spleen. It means feeling that churning in your guts at the wrongness of things that won’t let you rest until you do something even if it’s only weep or rage. The first disciple in the Spiritual Exercises is God, the Trinity. Or from another angle it is Jesus.

Jesus offers an easier way to study the discipleship of God—and to learn our own discipleship. Ignatius urges the person praying to ask, day after day, for a particular gift: to know Jesus better. To know him with the kind of knowledge that is very like falling in love. To know him better, to love him more, and out of all that to follow him. To know, to love, to follow. There’s discipleship.

How’s our list looking? Decision, gratitude, grace, attraction, desire, and call. But also: need and spleen. And, finally, the following, what used to be called the imitation of Christ. This imitation is more than mechanical reproduction, or following a set of maxims, or espousing certain values. It’s not quite ‘What Would Jesus Do?’ But it is about knowing Jesus. It is about knowing Jesus in a way that transforms us—that simultaneously makes us more like Jesus and more like ourselves. That’s discipleship: falling in love with God, with Jesus, so that we can respond to the planet’s need the way he did and does and would do through us.

Pedro Arrupe, the General Superior of the Jesuits before the present one, used to speak about us having a planet to heal. Grand, that! But it’s true. He had another favourite topic too: falling in love and the difference it makes to our lives. Both are about the call to discipleship.

Post from: All Things Seen and Unseen

Discipleship

• Too Attached to Words
• Sunday Week 2 Year B
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Post from: All Things Seen and Unseen

Eros, Attraction, Beauty, Desire

• Too Attached to Words
• Spiritual Direction: Finding a Way
• Friday Week 25 Year I

This is ordinary time… not ordinary as in plain, dull, ordinary but ordinary as in ordinal – my dictionary says ‘to do with the order things come in’ – these are days known only by their ordered succession, by their numbers—it’s the ninth week of ordinary time—they aren’t about anything obvious, they don’t have labels to identify them—it’s not part of Easter or Lent or any other season—and if they have a pattern it’s often a mechanical one put together by a someone back in headquarters to make sure we read a bit of everything eventually.

But we are creatures that love a pattern. Human beings can find patterns in the most chaotic mess. Computers may be able to crunch numbers with astonishing speed but try and get them to recognise a face or tell a story and they are a thousand times worse than any four-year old. We are pattern-making creatures from birth.

When I was a student we had a chaplain who everyday at mass could take the two readings and the psalm and the saint of the day if there was one and weave them together into a quick little pattern, all neatly linked in three minutes flat. The problem was that we all tended to stop and admire his skill and ingenuity rather than listen to what he said. We liked the pattern-maker more than the pattern.

Our ordinary time seems to demand we make it less ordinary. We want to tell a story that gives it significance, finds a meaning, and even points a way forward. We want a pattern in our lives too: we want to see their significance, know their meaning, and make the choices that keep the story alive.

We like our stories to have beginning, middle and end. I always like it when the books I read have chapter titles and not just numbers. I like it even better when they have a little quotation to get me thinking about what it all means.

A little while ago I was given the DVDs of a science fiction show I’d wanted to see but missed called “Firefly” – think Cowboys and Indians in spaceships – and it’s a lot of fun, and very well written, with 8 or 9 well-drawn characters that over the short series grow and take shape and show their stories and change each other in all sorts of ways and hint at secrets and stories yet to be told. Because it was a series that was cancelled part way through. A story with no ending. With loose ends. A dozen stories still waiting to be told. And my intense curiosity about each character and what they still had left to tell, and about the group, the whole, and their collective story which seemed to be going … somewhere, having some significance. I hate not knowing what happens to Inara. I really want to know who Shepherd Book really is and where Simon and his sister are headed. And I never will. Unless I make it up myself. And that doesn’t really work. Because half the pleasure is not in making up, but in appreciating the reality of the characters and the sense that behind them there is an author with a hope.

Mary Doria Russell, writer and novelist, says from her point of view it’s not just about making up either. She says her characters just won’t do some things she asks them to do. The writing won’t work. Her people have an integrity. She had one character, Emilio (a Jesuit by the way), she needed to get back to a certain place. She tried a dozen different ways to write him there but he simply wouldn’t cooperate – everything became false when she did – she lost the plot, as we say. In the end she realised he would never go there of his own free-will and she had to have him kidnapped and taken there by force. Of which she still feels ashamed.

Another of her characters came to her one day in her writing and told her he was gay, something she says she’d never thought about and didn’t really come into the story at all. But her character seemed to want her to know it.

Stories are powerful. Human beings are in need of stories, our own stories, and we have to tell them on the hoof, in the middle of things. With our own integrity as characters. Partly looking back and telling our story to ourselves in a way that makes sense and partly looking forward and writing who we will be, feeling out a future that feels right.

We speak from time to time about finding God’s will, doing God’s will. There’s a low motive attached to that sometimes—we don’t want to get on God’s wrong side—but sometimes there’s something more beautiful going on too. There’s the sense we have—the conviction, the hope—that whatever the shape our lives have taken so far, somehow God stands behind them as the author of a story. Not that God gets to write and drag us along like puppets but that there’s a meaning and a shape and a pattern that God is authoring from moment to moment. And we, we want to be authored. We don’t want to bind ourselves to an unchanging divine blueprint but we do want to co-operate with the story. We want to know the plot and lend ourselves to it. We want to tell the story of our lives the way the author would. Maybe we even want to surprise God by telling him something he’d never expected and nudge the story in a particular way. Either way, we are here, in the middle of things, with our stories unfolding and the endings still unwritten. How will it all turn out? God knows, we say. But God has our freedom and stubbornness to write with too. So maybe God writes our lives with the same hope and expectation we live them.

Post from: All Things Seen and Unseen

‘Firefly’ and Finding God’s Will

• Tuesday Week 2 of Advent
• Sunday Week 4 of Lent Year A
• Imaginative Contemplation

It is a reflection on how we, as spiritual directors, navigate: what we look for, what we pay attention to, what we receive and what we reject. And on what lies at the heart of the art of spiritual direction.

I was sitting with my spiritual director a while back, bemoaning the recent drabness of my spiritual landscape, when she asked a question that split me in two: ‘If God were here now, what would you say?’

Two spontaneous responses rose to the surface more or less together. One was ‘Pull your socks up!’–a slightly irritated demand to God to tidy up my life and fix some of the health problems that have been besetting me. The second was ‘Hey, buddy!’ Now, I’ve called God many things in my life, including friend and lover, but this was the first time I’d used buddy, and I felt rather embarrassed by it.

I narrate this because it illustrates a question that is both practical and theological: to which of two spontaneous movements should a spiritual director give more attention? Which thread should they follow?

The issue often surfaces for directors once they have mastered the art of attentive listening. So much arises in a spiritual direction session and offers itself for exploration. The knack that we all struggle to acquire is that of winnowing the wheat from the chaff. How do we, during a session, encourage and develop those strands of a directee’s experience that are leading somewhere good, and how do we let go of those that aren’t? In this case, which way to go: socks or buddy? Do we have a rule of thumb? And do we have a rationale for our instruction and practice?

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Post from: All Things Seen and Unseen

Spiritual Direction: Finding a Way

• All Quiet on the Posting Front…
• Sunday Week 16 Year B
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A step or two in front of the place where I am to contemplate or meditate, I will stand for the length of an Our Father, raising my mind above and considering how God our Lord is looking at me, etc., and make an act of reverence or humility.… un paso o dos antes del lugar donde tengo de contemplar o meditar, me pondré en pie, por espacio de un Pater noster, alzado el entendimiento arriba, considerando cómo Dios nuestro Señor me mira, etc., y hacer una reverencia o humiliación. (Exx 75)

THIS IS ONE OF THE IGNATIAN ‘ADDITIONS’ or ‘Additional Directions’—general guidelines ‘for making the Exercises better and finding more readily what one desires’ (Exx 73.1). Ignatius has just been mentioning the remote preparation for a day of prayer—what to do on falling asleep and what to do on rising. He will go on to talk about posture, about the review of prayer, and about the maintenance of a suitable mood in the retreat situation. Here, however, he is discussing what will help someone make each exercise better, what will help them find more readily what they desire. What Ignatius says here is intended for every prayer or spiritual exercise we make.

This may seem surprising. Especially outside retreat, relatively few of us observe this directive. I want nevertheless to argue that this third Addition not only helps us make the Exercises better, but also gives us a perspective which is absolutely vital for a correct appreciation of Ignatian spirituality. Ignatius is putting his finger here on a neuralgic issue which pains every aspect of our prayer, of our lives, and of the way we speak to one another about God. Ignatius both identifies the issue, and offers an antidote.

Mind-Blindness and Autism

As is well known, children up to the age of four cannot handle the idea that other people have other minds with independent contents. A three-year-old believes that everyone knows what they know and sees what they see. The psychologists call it mind-blindness. Somewhere between the ages of three and four, children shed their mind-blindness, and begin to work out that other people have their own sets of desires and knowledge and expectations. They develop what the literature calls a ‘theory of mind’.

But some children never develop an adequate theory of mind and stay more or less mind-blind all their lives. We call this condition autism. Autistic children are able to deal with other people on one level, but they never make the leap into other people’s heads to see things their way. They never understand that someone else is a person like themselves, with independent knowledge, intentions and feelings. Thus they become frustrated at the unpredictability of their environment, and seek to impose some shape by ritual and repetition. They are prone to stubbornness, and to tantrums when things are changed out of their usual pattern.

Autism is a good image for how most of us are in prayer. We tend to be mind-blind about God. We think that God knows simply what we know, sees simply what we see; and consequently we rarely stop to ask God what God actually sees or knows or feels. We find it hard to let God enter our prayer as a real living person; instead, we misuse the name ‘God’ to denote a projection of what we think and feel. At the very least this image sums up how I personally am in prayer. I am spiritually autistic—mind-blind about God. You might not be. You might be very different from me. But let me go on to speak of my own experience and you can judge for yourselves.

Like an autistic child, I go about my prayer in a whole set of ways that try to minimise the chaos of my inner life by finding rituals and rules to tame my inner experience. I focus on my own needs and intentions, my own desires and insights, my own consolations and desolations. Most of my prayer consists of me thinking, or me feeling, me speaking, or me being silent. Some of the time I may pay lip service to my notional commitment to the belief that God enters my prayer as a person. I certainly spend quite a lot of inner time addressing something I call God. But in fact, this internal rehearsal of my experience tends to swing between two modes of speech: either I talk to myself or I talk to my idea of God. Of course it is not all talking—I operate in quieter ways too, through a kind of interior looking, or just sitting. And sometimes I read or paint or write. But these activities only extend and modulate the pattern; they do not fundamentally change it. Not that this ‘prayer’ is dull; it can be lovely, or horrible, depending upon my mood or upon what is going on in the rest of my life. But what it remains, fundamentally, is mine—my thoughts, my feelings, my words, my silence.

Thus when my spiritual director asks me how God has responded to my inner talk, I tend not to know. I have not let God interrupt me. I don’t just mean that I talk and talk and never listen—‘Listen, Lord, your servant is speaking’. But even when I am trying to listen, even when I am sincerely asking for an answer to some deep question, I tend in fact to ask, and then go straight on to mulling over several possible answers that God might have given already, rather than asking God and waiting for an answer.

I am, by nature, mind-blind where God is concerned. I do not really expect God to have a point of view about my inner experience—or about my outer experience for that matter. On the odd occasion when I get beyond this blindness, I still approach God’s point of view abstractly. I wonder what kind of thing God ought to see or feel or believe, rather than trying to discover what God is actually seeing, feeling and believing. I am concerned with what God would say rather than with what God does say. And even when I expect more, even when my heart has been opened to the possibility that God might appear in my prayer as a real person with real feelings, desires and needs—even then, all the rituals of my inner autism are so strong that following through is a struggle.

I have not always been aware of this disability in myself. I am not reconciled to it. If you had asked me fifteen years ago whether I thought God was present and active in my prayer, I am sure that I would have given a resoundingly affirmative answer. Back then, I did not think that I was spiritually mind-blind but, looking back from where I stand now, I reckon I was.

At that time, I had had some training in spiritual direction, and I had even done some training of others. One of the standard textbooks that I read, and that I got others to read, was The Practice of Spiritual Direction by William Barry and William Connolly.(New York: Seabury, 1983). Now I read it, and I see that the book is occupied on every page with how to foster just the non-autistic experience of God that I am talking about. Back then, I would have told you that I believed it and practised what they were saying; but, truth to tell, if that actually was the case, it was more by accident than design. As a director I rarely asked the kinds of questions that got people in touch with the real living God of their experience; instead I was satisfied with getting them to reflect on their own experience. If it ever contained the real, surprising God this was a happy accident. My spiritual mind-blindness runs deep. And what is worse, I am always thinking that I have got over it.

The Prison of Modernity

Why am I like this? Perhaps the answers are personal: I happen to be a sad soul who is developmentally challenged in this area. But I doubt it. Let me be bold and venture the opinion that everyone I have seen for spiritual direction or guided retreat suffers from mind-blindness to some degree. Spiritual autism is a pathology of our times. We do not allow God to be a living presence—a real subject—in our lives, because we have been trained by our culture to believe that God cannot, or at least does not, behave in that way.

A phrase such as ‘our culture’ is, of course, a little imperialistic. I mean the modern culture of the educated Western world. People who write about such things—we might call them cultural analysts—use the word modern in a very specific way. They do not mean up-to-date or recent. Rather, they are referring to a cultural trend that has been going on for centuries in the West, probably beginning around 500 years ago. According to this reckoning, Ignatius himself lived at the dawn of modernity, and he is its archetypal saint.

This version of modernity has a number of characteristic outlooks that we tend to take for granted, or at least that we find ourselves having to fight against. Let me mention four of them, four cultural attitudes which predispose us to mind-blindness about God. Two of them concern the nature of the human person; two affect our outlook on God. Together, I believe, they set us up to be spiritually mind-blind.

Individualism

First, we tend to see ourselves as individuals and to behave as individualists. When the medievals wanted to ground their knowledge they looked to other people. They looked to tradition. They looked to authorities. But subsequent philosophy has looked in a different place. It has turned to the individual, to the subject. What can I know? What can I be certain of? How can I overcome illusion? How can I be free from other people’s false ideas? These are the issues that fascinate us still. How can I be free? How can I make up my own mind? What does my own experience say about this or that? Who am I in myself?

Instead of valuing where we come from, we are concerned with who we can make ourselves into. Instead of valuing our parents’ patterns of life, we want to express our own uniqueness. Instead of valuing quiet suffering, we want to get therapy that will make us better. On the whole, we are subjective, expressive, therapeutic individualists. No wonder my prayer is all about me, me, me.

Doubt

If I ever start to take seriously the idea that God might appear in my prayer with thoughts and feelings of God’s own, a second modern outlook rushes in with objections. We have been brought up to doubt, to be sceptical. Modernity has been obsessed with the question of method. How do I become sure about what I believe? And it has tended to lean on the side of doubt. We wonder how we can be sure of anything. We do not want to be tricked by our own quirks. How do I know that this is God, and not just wishful thinking? How do I know that the words I hear are words from God, and not projections of my inner needs? After Freud and Marx, we know better than ever the many ways in which we can be mistaken, often unconsciously. So is it not better to believe as little as possible? Should I not stick with my own experience and keep God out of it? It is difficult enough to make claims about my own experience; what kind of crank starts to make claims about what God might be saying to them? No wonder I do not make great claims about my prayer; no wonder I keep it simple. I stay the level of reflection on my own experience, and avoid the risk of making a fool of myself by believing that God might speak.

Divine Action

Philosophy has spent 500 years struggling with the problem of knowledge, theology has spent that time worrying about divine action. What place does God have in the world? What can God, in concrete physical terms, actually do? Do we believe in miracles? Is the world not, rather, a disenchanted mechanism?

The caricature of the medieval world portrays it as rife with superstition, with angels and demons around every corner. The coming of modernity has banished angels and demons to chocolate boxes and television screens. Perhaps this is a relief. But what has been lost is a sense that God can be a part of everyday human experience. Science has pushed God to the edges of our culture. Newton thought that his clockwork solar system ran pretty smoothly on its own, with God providing the occasional necessary top-up. Then Laplace did the maths, and found that the planets got on very well all alone, thank you. When asked about God, his reaction was politely dismissive: ‘Sir, I have no need of that hypothesis’. Over the past 500 years we have tended to find, over and again, that we have no need of God. God has been pushed into the distance. And the idea of God has been watered down, tamed. The interfering tyrant with a finger in every pie has become a remote and impersonal first cause. Not the kind of God whom I expect to express opinions in my prayer.

God as Person

Which brings us to the question of whether God is a person. This is not really a modern problem: it is much older. On retreat people often ask, ‘why do I need to tell God that—God knows everything already?’ If God is unchanging, all-knowing, and uniformly benevolent, how can I expect God to have moods, feelings, desires, needs even, which God expresses in my prayer? Why communicate with such a God? What effect could I possibly expect to have upon this God? God might be watching me, but what sense does it make to consider how God is looking at me?

Ignatius and Modernity’s Pitfalls

Ignatius and his Spiritual Exercises date from the beginning of the cultural trend that we call modernity. Ignatius has one foot firmly planted in the medieval world, with the other standing in the modern era. Ignatius’ genius, I believe, is to offer an outlook, a spirituality, which is at home in modernity and yet avoids its pitfalls. The third Addition sums up his outlook. Here Ignatius is giving not only an orientation for any kind of prayer or spiritual exercise, but also a pointer to how we should shape our whole way of life. We are to begin by spending a moment considering how God is looking at us, and we are to respond with an act of reverence. Very simply, Ignatius is inviting us constantly to include God in our theory of mind, constantly to let God be really real.

We do not begin our prayer alone as individuals; we begin with someone else looking at us. We will rapidly move on to the ‘id quod volo’, the grace that I desire. But first we experience, for a moment, that we are desired, that we begin outside ourselves, that who we are is not self-generated. We are not self-made men and women. We receive ourselves, in the eyes of another. In this way, Ignatius defuses our individualism.

He subverts our doubt, too. We start our epistemology with doubt; Ignatius begins his with trust—not trust as the opposite of doubt, but trust that subverts doubt. We doubt our senses. We doubt the facts. We doubt ourselves. But Ignatius does not want us to start our prayer in the realm of facts and data and things; he points us towards the realm of relationship. Relationship, to be real, always begins in trust, and breathes trust as its atmosphere. We are right to doubt things, but right to trust persons.

All relationships demand a basic trust. Trust can be tempered by experience; in some cases it must be toned down, or even withdrawn. But unless we can trust at least some of the time, we remain alone and isolated. As is well known, Ignatius is no advocate of credulity. Not all our experience is experience of God. We are moved by many spirits, good and bad, and Ignatius provides the guidelines for telling them apart in his methods of discernment. But discernment only operates in an atmosphere of prior trust—only when we admit an experience and let it develop do we have the grounds for discernment. You cannot discern from a distance. You have to get involved, to take the risk; only on that basis can you assess the feedback and make the adjustment. Discernment implies relationship.

In the third Addition, Ignatius invites us into a complex, relational reality. If God is looking at us, God is in relationship with us. As we try to understand this relationship, we can focus either on God or on ourselves. We can consider what it is like to be looked at. How am I feeling? We can also consider the God who is looking, and what that God is like. How is God feeling? As we move between these two ways of responding to Ignatius’ invitation, they begin to fuse, to enrich each other, to be woven into something intricate and beautiful. I am looking at God looking at me looking at God. When I look at the God who looks at me, it is not a matter simply of seeing the other as one object among many, but of looking, gazing, contemplating. We see each other. The look transforms—it is encounter.

This encounter is a touchstone. Modernity doubts that God can act, and doubts that God is a person. Ignatius is asking whether we can move beyond our doubt. Can we discover a God who can act and who is a person? When I pause and consider and look at God looking at me, who do I find looking back? That is a question for experience, not for theory.

Some translations of the third Addition read ‘consider that God is looking at me …’. This reading is linguistically possible, but it misses the real point. The brute fact in itself might be enough to dispel the problem of individualism and the problem of doubt, but we need something more. We need to see how God is looking at us. Not in general, not in principle, not in the abstract—but here and now and specifically. Is our God is a living person with thoughts and feelings of God’s own, and not just an extension of our own thinking and feeling?

Once people have discovered the living God, they often discover too that their experience in prayer is not totally malleable. It has a stubborn shape. The God of their prayer is not totally projected. Prayer starts to get surprising. The bush burns, but it is not consumed. You ask a question, and get an answer that shocks you. You search in one place, but God is in another. You are feeling one thing, but God feels another.

When prayer becomes an encounter with the living God, it becomes unpredictable. You thought you were doing something relatively safe—praying—and instead you find yourself face to face with someone real. Fierce or fond, bright or dark (who knows?), but it is someone other and someone real—not yourself. Ignatius wants every spiritual exercise to be an encounter with the living God, another knot in the web of relationship woven in the gaze that passes between you and God.

Today God is smiling. Tomorrow God is sad. The day after God might be sleeping, or dancing, or weeping, or angry. I cannot know how God is looking at me without looking at God. I cannot make up the answer, or guess it, or remember how it was. The only way to do what Ignatius asks is to turn the inner gaze on God and see, here and now, how God is actually looking back … at me.

It is in this way that Ignatius wants each one of us to step into prayer every time. All Ignatian prayer begins with the encounter with the living God. Only thus can the identification of personal desires be more than selfishness or individualistic therapy. Thus it is that Ignatian colloquy can become real conversation, ‘friend to friend’, rather than a hesitant monologue. Only through this encounter do all the annotations, procedures and processes make sense. This central conviction also governs Ignatius’ laconic dictum: ‘acts of the will require more reverence than acts of the intellect’ (Exx 3.3). Because of this encounter, Ignatius can expect the Spiritual Exercises to be a rollercoaster ride of alternating spiritual motions. This encounter also tells us why generosity is the prime prerequisite for making the Exercises well.

The whole First Week can be seen as a simple development of this attitude to prayer. Can I discover myself in the eyes of God? Can I come to see myself the way God sees me—honestly and benevolently? Me, with all the fragments, all the shame and all the glory, caught in a gaze of love, and invited into companionship with Jesus?

This article has been couched in the language of vision throughout—looking, gazing, seeing, contemplating. But you could substitute any of the other senses. Many of us know God imaginatively through sound: we hear God speak. Others sense God by touch; they could not tell you how God looks at them for all the tea in China, but they know the weight of God’s hand on their shoulder. It is the communication that matters—how it happens is secondary. Ignatius does not simply say, ‘considering how God our Lord is looking at me’; he adds what is a favourite word of his, ‘etc.’ Some translations take the ‘et cetera’ to refer to further thoughts we might have. But a richer interpretation sees it as referring to further activities in which God may be engaging. God is not only looking at us but interacting with us in a wide range of ways: enlightening us, communicating Godself to us, embracing us.Willem A. M. Peters, The Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius: Exposition and Interpretation (Jersey City: Program to Adapt the Spiritual Exercises, 1968), 22-24.

Thus the third Addition offers more than an introductory gambit in the game of prayer. Ignatius’ God is an active God, a God not content to be a distant observer, a God intimately engaged with every person who prays. This God is miles away from the cultural caricature I presented earlier. This God can be encountered, known. This God feels, acts, interacts. This God has personality.

Robert R. Marsh SJ, The Way, 43/4 (October 2004), 19-28

Post from: All Things Seen and Unseen

Looking at God Looking at You: Ignatius’ Third Addition

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