A couple of days ago on Twitter, Brian Cox asked the Twitter historians, “Did Galileo know that he would annoy the Church when he published The Starry Messenger?” The very simple answer to this question is, no but a lengthy discussion of the situation developed on Twitter. It was suggested that somebody should produce a short temperate answer to the question as a reference source and after some hesitation I have acquiesced. This will be a relative short presentation of the various stages of this historical process with a minimum of explanation and justification, as Joe Friday used to say, “the facts ma’am, just the facts!” This is of course my interpretation but it is based on a fairly good knowledge of the most recent principal secondary literature on the subject and it is one that I think would find fairly general agreement amongst those who have seriously studied the subject.
‘Review for Religious’, which ceased publication in January 2012, was (amongst other things) an important forum for articles and other materials exploring a renewal in the practice and understanding of the Spiritual Exercises and of spiritual direction. The good news is that the full archive of contents is available online for free. Despite the journal’s name the archive is worth browsing by anyone interested in Ignatian spirituality.
The bad news is that the archive is quite hard to use! Each issue (70 years’ worth) is available as a pdf but to tell what is in each issue you have to download and search an Excel spreadsheet. It works but it is cumbersome. For example, searching the Excel article index locates the seminal article by George Aschenbrenner, SJ on the Consciousness Examen (that’s Volume 31, issue 1, 1972, page 14 if you are interested).
I recently read an interesting article (Intelligent Design: Humans, Cockroaches, and the Laws of Physics) from 1997 by Victor J. Stenger in which he combats the kind of fine-tuning arguments that are often evinced as ‘proof’ that our universe is carefully set up for the emergence of complex life forms like ourselves. What caught my eye me was his approach to the laws of physics:
‘However, the laws of physics, at least in their formal expressions, are no less human inventions than the laws by which we govern ourselves. They represent our imperfect attempts at economical and useful descriptions of the observations we make with our senses and instruments. This is not to say we subjectively determine how the universe behaves, or that it has no orderly behavior. Few scientists deny that an objective, ordered reality exists that is independent of human life and experience. We simply have to recognize that the concept of “natural law” carries with it certain metaphysical baggage that is tied to our traditional, pre-scientific modes of thought. We are going a step beyond logic to conclude that the existence in the universe of order, which we conventionally label as the laws of nature, implies a cosmic lawgiver.’
The status of laws of nature is an interesting topic in the philosophy of science and opinions are split along two axes. The first concerns whether laws of nature are prescriptive or descriptive, i.e., whether they govern or control the behaviour of their subjects or whether they describe it. Take, for example, the law of gravity: is the law of gravitation an elegant shorthand description of the way bodies behave or is it what makes bodies do what they do? There are two extreme ways of putting this dilemma: gravity is out there in the world or gravity is in scientist’s heads (and books). The mediaevals (who thought a lot about such matters in advance of what we would recognise as real science) talked about relations (pattern, order, structure, etc.) as being either de re or de dictu–a matter of reality or a matter of our speaking and naming reality.
The second parting of the ways over the status of natural law comes when we consider whether they are, so to speak, natural or artificial. How much does is the law of gravity simply ‘read off’ the face of nature and how much is it a projection of human ingenuity and creativity? How you answer says a lot about how you view language, imagination, and the relationship between human beings and the world.
In principle these two dichotomies are independent but in practice many scientists opt for a basically Humean combination: laws that are natural and descriptive. It’s a conjunction that supports a mechanistic worldview and scientific objectivity.
I’m inclined to want to dodge both dichotomies. C. S. Peirce’s semiotic conception of laws or ‘generals’ as cosmic habits is very interesting in this regard. It lets law be a kind of real relation (pattern, form, or structure) having its own proper existence in the cosmos without getting entirely Platonic about them. Peirce believed the relationship between human minds and physical events can only be understood when we understand the operation of signs. Semiotics offers an account of creation and creativity that may be able to avoid the split between the natural and the artificial. In such a scheme the laws of physics would be imaginatively constructed (created) forms which catch the form of reality (creation).
(I wrote this a few years back for the Loyola Hall website. It’s a way of praying and an attitude towards experience.)
from the film Shakespeare in Love
If you want God to speak to you you need to give God a vocabulary.
Scripture is, of course, a privileged source of ‘words’ that God might address to you — hence the number of different ways of praying that put the Bible centre stage — but worship too is a place God can speak, as are the sacraments, spiritual reading, nature, art etc. We could extend the list indefinitely.
Indeed it was the genius of Ignatius Loyola to engage deeply with the truth that God can speak to us in countless ways — God is to be found ‘in all things’. The Spiritual Exercises — his training course in listening to God — takes that seriously, inviting the person praying to listen to God in the whole range of their experience.
What is it about experience that lets it become God’s vocabulary? It is experience’s capacity to move us, to touch us in heart and mind, to stir up desires and responses in us. In this sense all experience can be ‘artistic’ or have the quality of a story, able to draw us in, able to carry rich meanings.
Ignatius brings imagination to bear on all experience — life, scripture, play, work. Perhaps that’s why an Ignatian approach to prayer can find rich raw material in TV, film, song, drama and story — art high and low.
So how do you pray with, say, a film? Well, I have rarely found that setting out deliberately to do so bears much fruit. Instead I find that such prayer is a matter of waiting and noticing and being ready to respond. It is about noticing when you are moved and being ready to respond to the God who might be crafting some new vocabulary for you.
Let me give two examples which might shed some light.
A few years back, in the grip of chronic illness, I was a in a sullen place in prayer. Not able to get beyond a sense that either God was responsible or I was — and either possibility seemed to shut off communication. At some point outside of formal prayer I was half aware of a tune in my head. I couldn’t identify it and after irritating me for a while it went away. But then it returned and I began to wonder if it wasn’t from an LP (remember those?) I had once owned by Billy Joel. Some searching of iTunes later I found the song — ‘Innocent Man’ — and felt something move.
I then spent days, in and out of prayer, listening and letting the song — words, music, tone — become part of God’s vocabulary. Not just hearing a message and applying it to myself, but sitting with it and with God and letting both speak. Through it, God convinced me that both of us were innocent, neither bore a blame. But more; it brought me to experience Jesus afresh in a vulnerable light. My accusation of guilt seemed to hurt him and my desire to care for him took my prayer in a creative direction.
This kind of prayer doesn’t have to be focused around an issue. The film ‘Once’ is one I find myself returning to still, partly unaware of what God is saying to me through it.
It’s a gentle and moving film with some great songs at its heart and it draws me back periodically to linger with it again. And when I do God is very much around. The sense is of God by my side (to my left and slightly behind me, if you ask) just as caught up as I am, sharing the moment. Sometimes it feels like his hand is on my shoulder. Whatever is being spoken is being spoken slowly over years.
So how about a method? Sorry! But here are some hints to adapt for yourself.
1) Be ready to be moved when you listen or view. And be ready to wonder if God might not be waiting to be found in what moves you.
2) When your attention has been caught — gently or forcefully — by a film or a song or a work of art be prepared to linger, to repeat, to give the moment time to develop. For example, play the song again. Do you get the same reaction or something else? What is it your are feeling? Maybe you know and maybe you don’t. Can you stay with the movement for a while contemplatively, i.e., just noticing it and not trying to work anything out or get a result?
3) Who is the God who seems to be present as you stay with the song or scene? How is this God looking at you; present to you; speaking to you? Is God watching with you or is God somehow ‘in’ the scene that has moved you?
4) Notice what you find yourself desiring in all this. Let yourself feel the desire. If it feels right let yourself express the desire to God. But notice also what God seems to be desiring. Let yourself take that desire to heart.
5) Stay with the thing that moves you until it loses it flavour. Keep coming back to it as long as you feel drawn back. I am embarrassed to say how many time I have seen the film ‘Shakespeare in Love’ because of a scene near the close where the heroine says to young Will ‘write me well’.
6) The first rule of any kind of prayer is to go where God is and do what helps God be present and communicative. That applies equally here: find the flow and follow it.
I hope that — despite my rambling — the next time you find yourself being moved by a film or song you might linger and let God have a say.
Microglia scan a healthy mouse retina. Image by Wai Wong/National Eye Institute
Two interestingposts at Phoenix Rising explore new research suggesting that ‘messed up microglia could be driving symptoms’.
Your dog can’t tell you when she’s feeling sick, but even so, you know. She moves slowly, she doesn’t eat, she sleeps a lot, she curls up in a corner by herself. “Sickness behavior” is shared by all mammals, and in humans it’s been shown to include fatigue, cognitive problems, body aches and pains and disturbed sleep. These symptoms might sound very familiar to patients with ME/CFS and fibromyalgia, and several researchers recently have suggested that many core symptoms of these illnesses are the result of sickness behaviour biology gone wrong.
It follows recent findings that braininflammation may be involved in ME.
All illness involves loss. At times I’ve read the story of the last fourteen years as a tale of loss after loss–of energy, of mobility, of friendships, of useful work, of reputation, of my own reliability–and when I read it that way it seems like I’m trapped in a collapsing bubble of capability and control. From being an agent I’m becoming ever more a patient–an impatient patient.
Grieving those losses is natural–there’s a whole literature to guide you through the stages of loss, to help you do your grieving–but nature isn’t always all it seems. Is it in our nature to hold our own lives as possession? Are we to be self-possessed? Isn’t that the sin of Adam–to want what is given as a gift to be owned by right, available of demand, the object of control and convenience? Isn’t it in the nature of nature to be recalcitrant as well as malleable; Other rather than Same?
What we hold we hold as gift–including ourselves, including our lives. St. Ignatius makes it his basic principle, his starting point, that our origin and end are both outside ourselves.
Human beings are created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord, and by this means to save their souls.
And the other things on the face of the earth are created for us and that they may help us in following the end for which we are created.
From this it follows that we are to use them as much as they help us on to our end, and ought to rid ourselves of them so far as they hinder us as to it.
For this it is necessary to make ourselves indifferent to all created things in all that is allowed to the choice of our free will and is not prohibited to it; so that, on our part, we want not health rather than sickness, riches rather than poverty, honour rather than dishonour, long rather than short life, and so in all the rest; desiring and choosing only what is most conducive for us to the end for which we are created.
‘We want not health rather than sickness’. That’s a bold manifesto to be placing at the door to the Spiritual Exercises–an expensive ticket for entry. In a wild and youthful spirit our idealism makes that prayer. I remember, many years ago, quaking at the prospect but finding it incredibly attractive–to be that indifferent, that free, that unafraid, that available to whatever destiny awaited me.
And there’s the paradox for me. It is a liberating vision to be unbound from fear of death or illness or poverty or dishonour. So free! Yet when illness makes an appearance it comes as a binding, a limiting, a loss. It comes un-heroically, sadly, in complication. How can you receive it with open arms as a lover’s gift?
Ignatius’ vision isn’t fatalistic. Finding God in all things isn’t an underwriting of reality as it comes to us. Often it is a naming of evil, a refusal of acquiescence, a passion to make things otherwise. How do you find God in illness–by fighting or surrendering?
At a practical level I grapple with that question under the rubric of ‘living’? Do I put my life on hold until the imaginary moment I become well again or do I live as well as I can here and now with my losses all around me?
(I wrote this a few years back for the Loyola Hall website. It’s a way of praying I still use myself from time to time.)
This is a kind of prayer you do with your eyes open and a pen and paper in front of you. It’s well suited as a short exercise of 10 or 15 minutes and is particularly good at getting something stirring when otherwise you are feeling stuck or dull.
Since it takes only a little while (and you can keep your eyes open) I recommend giving it a try for real now rather than just reading about it. Don’t read all the way ahead but follow each instruction as it comes.
In preparation, find a nice sheet of paper — A4 or letter-sized is fine for now but feel free to experiment later — also maybe something to lean it on and a pen or pencil you can jot with. I prefer to have the paper arranged ‘landscape’ rather than ‘portrait’ but that’s up to you.
Got all you need? To begin, turn your inner senses toward God and ask briefly, in whatever way feels helpful, that this exercise will help you be aware of God’s presence.
The first step is to look at your blank piece of paper and right in the centre of it write the word ‘GOD’ clearly and legibly. Another time you could choose any other word that happens to feel like a good starting point given what’s going on in your life but ‘GOD’ is a good start for now. When you have written your word … read on.
Now take a long look at the whole piece of paper with the single word in the middle – just look at it unhurriedly, undemandingly, openly, contemplatively — and wait for another word to come to you. Don’t strain or filter or analyse or worry — just look and wait for a word — it might take seconds or minutes. Do that now then come back to these instructions.
When a word does turn up write it on the paper wherever feels right. It might be next to ‘GOD’ or above or below, close or distant…
Done? Now take another contemplative look at your sheet of paper which now has two words on it. Just look and wait for a third word to come along — not trying to make connections, not trying not to, not trying at all. Do that now…
When your third word arrives put it down on paper too, wherever it seems to want to go.
Done? You get the pattern: look, wait, write; look, wait, write… Keep doing that until 10 minutes have passed, or the page feels complete, or you feel ready to move on. By then you might have collected a handful of words or dozens — it’s up to you. Come back to these instructions when you reach that point…
OK. Now take one last look at your paper laid out with a pattern of words — another low-key, contemplative look. Then ask yourself this question: ‘If God were saying something to me through this sheet of paper what might it be?’ Ask yourself that question and wait contemplatively for an answer. When it comes, write it down on your paper too in the form of a simple sentence addressed to you by God — nothing third-person or abstract…
Now notice your feelings at seeing (and hearing) these words spoken to you. Notice how you might respond, what you might say back to God, what you feel moved to do… If it feels right make that response, or say what you want to say, or do what you want to do.
At this point you might consider the exercise finished … or it might become the starting place for further prayer — either right away or at some later time; maybe continuing the dialogue, maybe sitting in silence with the God who has addressed you.
I hope you tried this simple way of praying with pen and paper and found it useful.
‘Buyer beware!’ I’ve been editing the pages to do with the plugins I wrote for WordPress some time ago, making it clear they are officially unsupported (having spent years unofficially unsupported!). That’s what I’ve been saying on each page: Caveat Emptor. Though no one is actually buying them people are still downloading and using my plugins and I feel bad not being able to offer support, or bring them into line with new WordPress conventions and capabilities, or develop them further.
But the plugins still work if you don’t push them too hard — kind of like me!
My, this place has accumulated some dust and detritus while I’ve been on hiatus!
I’ve recently moved my real world location which involved a lot of dusting and discovering (and terror and tantrums) and I am slowly settling into my new digs. All this prompted me to do some virtual spring cleaning here too — cleaning out the clutter of spam comments, removing some nasty links that got injected in 2013 due to a plugin vulnerability, and thinking about how to use this site now.
the view from my room at Campion Hall
During the years off my health has continued to decline slowly as ME wore me down bit by bit. It still is in some ways but in others I have a little more energy. I stopped blogging here in 2008 because I couldn’t keep up with the support requests arising from my WordPress plugins and it felt embarrassing to post other stuff and ignore that. At some points I couldn’t do much of anything at all. The plugins still get a lot of traffic but they haven’t been and won’t be updated so I will be making that clear on the relevant pages. They still function in most cases — including here on this site.
What else? Well I’ve not been preaching or presiding at Mass in the intervening years so the fruit of that, the bulk of the old content here, won’t be getting new material but I have thought about bringing some of the archived homilies back into the limelight. I have also written some bits and pieces for The Way and Thinking Faith which I might comment on and link to here. I’ve also been reading and thinking about health and sickness and God too and i still want to explore that area a little. Will it happen here? Perhaps.
I’ve also (just about) maintained the website at the now defunct Loyola Hall Spirituality Centre (my home for the last 14 years!) and I might give an afterlife to some of the more useful material that was housed there. All possibilities.
