ALLOWING THE CREATOR

To DEAL WITH THE CREATURE

An Approach to the Spiritual Exercises

of Ignatius of Loyola

William A. Barry, S.J.

Paulist Press
New York/ Mahwah, N.J.
Copyright ©1994 by the New England Province of the Society of Jesus

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in

any form or by any means, electronical or mechanical, including photocopy-
ing, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system without per-
mission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Barry, William A.
Allowing the creator to deal with the creature: an approach to the spiritual
exercises of Ignatius of Loyola I William A. Barry, S.J.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-8091-3465-9 (pbk.)
I. Ignatius, of Loyola, Saint, 1491-1556. Exercitia spiritualia. 2. Spiritual
exercises. I. Title.
BX2179.L8B36 1994
248.3-dc20 94-16220
CIP

Published by Paulist Press

997 Macarthur Boulevard
Mahwah, New Jersey 07430

Printed and bound in the

United States of America
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface ....................................................................................... 1

l. One Approach: "To Allow the Creator to Deal Immediately

with the Creature and the Creature with His Creator and
Lord" ..................................................................................... 5

2. "What Do You Want?" The Role of Desires in Prayer. .......21

3. Desire for God's Revelation ................................................ 32

4. The Principle and Foundation ............................................ .40

5. Transition Points in the Dynamic of the Exercises ............ .49

6. Ignatian Contemplation: The Use of Imagination in

Prayer ................................................................................... 63

7. The Discernment of Spirits .................................................. 72

8. The Changing Self-God Image of Ignatius of Loyola in

Relation to Discernment ...................................................... 87

9. Touchstone Experiences as Divining Rods in

Discernment. ........................................................................ 96

10. Toward Communal Discernment: Some Practical

Suggestions ....................................................................... 102

11. The Contemplation to Obtain Love ................................... 113

f-l'otes........................................................................................ 118

iii
 DEDICATION

IN GRATEFUL MEMORY OF
SISTER MARY AGNES REED, R.S.M.
WHO, AS SISTER MARY NATIVITY,
TAUGHT ME AT SACRED HEART GRAMMAR SCHOOL
WORCESTER, MASSACHUSETTS
AND WITH GREAT LOVE AND FIDELITY PRAYED FOR
AND CARED FOR ME
AND ALL THOSE WHOM SHE TAUGHT
UNTIL THE DAY OF HER DEATH
HOLY SATURDAY, APRIL 10, 1993

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Scripture taken from the New Revised Standard Version Bible,© 1989,
Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the
Churches of Christ in the United States of America.

Quotations from the Spiritual Exercises taken from George E. Ganss,

The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius. A Translation and
Commentary and used with the permission of the Institute of Jesuit
Sources, St. Louis, MO. Permission is gratefully acknowledged.

The original form of chapter 1 was an address to an International

Symposium on the Spiritual Exercises convened by the lnstitut
d'Etudes Theologiques in Brussels in 1991 and published in French in
La pratique des Exercices Spirituels d'lgnace de Loyola: Actes du
Symposium de Bruxelles du ]er au 6 avril 1991. The original form of
chapters 2, 3, 8 and 9 appeared in Review for Religious. A large sec-
tion of chapter 6 first appeared as a chapter of A Hunger for God pub-
lished by Sheed & Ward. Part of chapter 5 and the original form of
chapter 7 appeared in Human Development. The original form of chap-
ter 10 appeared in The Way Supplement. Permission to use these in
revised form is gratefully acknowledged. I am grateful to Ave Maria
for permission to reprint two sections of my Finding God in All
Things: A Companion to the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, 1991.
© 1993 by the New England Province of the Society of Jesus.
 Preface

After Vatican Council II many religious orders and congre-

gations began to reclaim their historical heritage, going back to
their founders or foundresses to catch the original charism that
kd to the foundation of their orders or congregations. It was no
different for the Society of Jesus. One discovery the Society
made was that the Spiritual Exercises of their founder, Ignatius
of Loyola, had originally been given to individuals, not groups.
Prior to 1965 the notion of individually directed Exercises was
almost unheard of, and had been unheard of, it seems, for more
than a century. In living memory Jesuits and others knew noth-
ing of a tradition of individually directed retreats. The Spiritual
Exercises were preached to large groups of people, and they had
an enormous impact in this form. So pervasive was this practice
fnat there were some Jesuits who felt that the introduction of the
individually directed retreat was an innovation, and perhaps an
unhealthy one at that, another instance of the triumph of psy-
chology in spiritual matters.
After 1965 Jesuits and others began to learn how to give
the Spiritual Exercises to individuals. Training courses and pro-
grams proliferated. People in large numbers flocked to retreat
houses to make individually directed retreats of varying lengths,
up to the traditional thirty days. At first these people were large-
ly men and women belonging to religious congregations and
diocesan priests, but gradually the word spread among the laity
and then to members of other Christian churches. Now there are
a number of retreat houses in the United States that almost
exclusively give directed retreats throughout the year. In addi-
tion, the rediscovery of the lgnatian heritage has led to the giv-
ing of the Spiritual Exercises to individuals and small groups
while the retreatants carry on their ordinary daily lives. On any
2 Allowing the Creator to Deal with the Creature
given day in the United States there are hundreds of people who
are making the Exercises by praying for an hour and a half a day
and seeing their director once a week while continuing to work a
regular job and carry out their other daily tasks.
As a result of this recovery of the tradition, the Spiritual
Exercises have taken on a new life in the church. Articles and
books have appeared at a steady rate, climaxing in 1991 during
the 500th anniversary of the birth of Ignatius. Since 1970 I have
been engaged in giving the Exercises, in training directors of the
Exercises and in writing on various aspects of Ignatian spiritual-
ity. During the lgnatian year I gave a series of lectures on the
Exercises at Boston College, and this series was made into a
book published in 1991 by Ave Maria Press, Finding God in All
Things: A Companion to the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius.
That book tries to make the Exercises accessible to people with
the hope that many more will want to try them out under direc-
tion. The present book has a different focus. I have reworked
material already published in journals and added new material,
all of which tries to show how I approach directing the
Exercises. My hope is that the book will be helpful to directors,
either to stimulate their own creative directing, or to be a foil
against which they can joust to deepen our understanding and
practice of using this tremendous tool given to the church by
that sixteenth century religious genius, Ignatius of Loyola. I
hope that the book may also be helpful to people who seek God,
who want to let the Creator deal immediately with them. All my
writing aims to be a help to people who hunger for God, to give
God a chance to satisfy that hunger.
I have dedicated the book to Sister Mary Agnes Reed,
R.S.M. who taught me in grade school and who always kept me
in her heart and thoughts throughout her life. She died on Holy
Saturday afternoon, 1993. As it turns out, I was putting the fin-
ishing touches on the first draft of this book as she lay dying and
then died. Let her stand for all those dedicated Sisters of Mercy
 Preface 3
who helped shape my early years both intellectually and reli-
giously. I am grateful to them all.
I want to take this opportunity to thank my father and sis-
ters who so faithfully read my stuff and encourage me. Once
again I am indebted to Marika Geoghegan, my good friend, who
read the manuscript and gave me strong encouragement. My
community of ten other Jesuits has been a great help to me since
I became provincial two years ago. Without them I would not be
able to do my job, nor would I have the time and energy to
write. Moreover, they encourage me in my writing. I am espe-
cially grateful to William C. Russell, S.J. and William G.
Devine, S.J. who read the first draft through very quickly and
thoroughly, gave me helpful suggestions for improving it and
expressed enthusiasm for the material. Finally, I take this oppor-
tunity to thank the past and present staff of the Center for
Religious Development in Cambridge, Massachusetts who
helped me to hone my approach to spiritual direction and to the
direction of the Exercises and who encouraged me to write in
those early days of learning how to direct the Exercises.

Laus Deo Semper!

 1

ONE APPROACH:
"To Allow the Creator to Deal Immediately
with the Creature and the Creature with
His Creator and Lord"

In the Fifteenth Introductory Explanation to the Spiritual

Exercises Ignatius urges the director to maintain an equilibrium
with regard to the choices the retreatant faces. At the end of the
paragraph he says: "Accordingly, the one giving the Exercises
ought not to lean or incline in either direction but rather, while
standing by like the pointer of a scale in equilibrium, to allow
the Creator to deal immediately with the creature and the crea-
ture with his Creator and Lord" (n. 15). In this first chapter I
want to outline how I approach directing the full Exercises,
what is commonly called the "thirty-day Ignatian retreat." In
other words, I want to present how I try "to allow the Creator to
deal immediately with the creature and the creature with his
Creator and Lord." To introduce my approach let me cite Gilles
Cusson.

We shall speak of the "integral" Exercises. This

expression does not necessarily refer to the matter of
time, that is, to the "thirty-day retreat." In fact, the
making of the Exercises does not derive its value
principally from the framework in which they are
given, nor from the precision of details and their tech-
nical apparatus. Their authenticity is measured,
instead, by the quality of the spiritual experience
5
6 Allowing the Creator to Deal with the Creature

which they foster, by their helping the retreatants to

prepare themselves for the salutary encounter with
God, in Christ.'

This strong statement echoes my own convictions that the

Spiritual Exercises are a method of encountering God's action
in our universe in an ordered progression, such that people who
have the prerequisites and desires can let God strip them of
their inordinate affections so that they can find God's will and
thus become more and more attuned to God's salvific intention
in creating this universe. Ignatius himself puts the purpose of
his "spiritual exercises" as "to overcome oneself, and to order
one's life, without reaching a decision through some disordered
affection" (n. 21). For Ignatius, union with God meant union
with a God who is always actively bringing about God's reign
in this universe. Union with God meant ordered desires and
action.2
In this chapter I will try to describe as succinctly as possi-
ble my own practice of giving the full Spiritual Exercises, a
practice which has evolved over a period of about twenty years
of directing individuals in retreats of varying lengths both in
the city and in country retreat houses. The clientele has also
varied from Jesuit novices and tertians to scholastics, sisters,
Catholic and non-Catholic lay people, ministers and priests. My
approach has been honed in peer group supervision with other
directors. My approach has also undoubtedly been affected by
my training as a clinical psychologist and my work as a training
supervisor of spiritual directors and, of course, by my upbring-
ing in the United States of America as the son of immigrant
Irish parents. It remains to be seen whether and how this
approach fits with the approaches of Jesuits and others from
widely different cultures. I present my own approach with the
hope that others will find it helpful, if only as a foil against
which to test their own approaches.
 One Approach 7
The Principle and Foundation
I assume that the Exercises will be profitable for people
according to the depth of their desires, a topic which we will
take up explicitly in chapter 2. Those who are ready for the full
Exercises must, I believe, have strong desires to develop and
deepen their relationship with God. Such desires, if they are real,
are based on strong, positive experiences of God, experiences
which I have come to call the affective Principle and
Foundation. It may help to understand my meaning if I first
describe people who do not have such positive experiences of
God. These are the fearful, scrupulous people whose image of
God seems to be one of a tyrant. The British psychoanalyst
Henry Guntrip notes:

It is a common experience in psychotherapy to find

patients who fear and hate God, a God who, in the
words of J. S. Mackenzie, "is always snooping
around after sinners," and who "becomes an outsize
of the threatening parent. ... The child grows up fear-
ing evil rather than loving good; afraid of vice rather
than in love with virtue." 3

Pierre Favre, one of the founding members of the Society

of Jesus, seems to have been in this condition when Ignatius first
met him in Paris. Only after four years was Pierre ready for the
full Exercises, after much patient spiritual direction by Ignatius.
What the Favres of this world need in order to desire closeness
to God and detachment from their inordinate desires is an expe-
rience of the enjoyment of God described by the psychiatrist J.
:[Link].

The enjoyment of God should be the supreme end of

spiritual technique; and it is in that enjoyment of God
that we feel not only saved in the Evangelical sense,
but safe: we are conscious of belonging to God, and
8 Allowing the Creator to Deal with the Creature

hence are never alone; and, to the degree we have

these two, hostile feelings disappear.... In that rela-
tionship Nature seems friendly and homely; even its
vast spaces instead of eliciting a sense of terror speak
of the infinite love; and the nearer beauty becomes
the garment with which the Almighty clothes
Himself. 4

Such experiences of the "enjoyment of God" elicit the

desire to get to know God and to let one's life be governed by
one's relationship with God.
Another way to describe this affective Principle and
Foundation would be to point to experiences of desiring "we
know not what," experiences of great well-being accompanied
by a yearning for Mystery itself. Sebastian Moore describes
such experiences and then explains them as experiences of being
desired into being by God, experiences of our creation which
immerse us in the great desire of the universe for the consum-
mation of God's own intention for the universe and for each one
of us.5 C. S. Lewis calls this desire "Joy," 6 an intense longing
which is distinguished from other longings by two things. "In
the first place, though the sense of want is acute and even
painful, yet the mere wanting is felt to be somehow a delight. ...
This hunger is better than any other fullness; this poverty better
than all other wealth." Secondly, we can be mistaken about the
object of the desire, as Lewis himself was for a good part of his
early life. Lewis concludes:

It appeared to me therefore that if a man diligently

followed this desire, pursuing the false objects until
their falsity appeared and then resolutely abandoning
them, he must come out at last into the clear knowl-
edge that the human soul was made to enjoy some
object that is never fully given - nay, cannot even
 One Approach 9
be imagined as given - in our present mode of sub-
jective and spatio-temporal experience.7

I believe that Ignatius spells out the implications of such an

experience in the First Principle and Foundation.8
When people have such an affective Principle and
Foundation, they desire to be united with God and to know
God's dreams for themselves and for the universe. Before I take
on someone for the full Exercises, I try to ascertain that he or
she has had sufficient positive experiences of God so that this
desire is present. In the first couple of days of the retreat I sug-
gest exercises that will bring back to memory these experiences
of being desired into existence and kept in existence by a loving
Creator who has a dream for the person. Psalms such as 8, 104,
or 139 are proposed for prayer. I often suggest a day of prayer in
which the person asks God to reveal her personal salvation his-
tory. After expressing the desire for such a personal revelation,
she recalls a person, a place or an incident of early childhood
a:nd then lets the memories rise almost like free association,
trusting that among the influences on her memories will be
God's Holy Spirit. In other periods of prayer on the same day
she can take up later periods of her life. The purpose is that she
ex:perience anew and in depth God's loving creation and provi-
dence for her and for the whole universe. The hope is that she
will come to the heartfelt knowledge that she has a part to play
in God's one action, which is this universe, and will desire to
know what that part is.
No matter how well one tries to screen people prior to
beginning the full Exercises, some people begin them without a
deep trust in God. In such cases this time on the affective
Principle and Foundation can take a number of days. One Jesuit
tertian spent about ten days struggling with whether he could
entrust his life to the God who had, seemingly, let him down
early in his life. It was time well spent; indeed, the lack of trust
might not have come to consciousness if he had not been mak-
10 Allowing the Creator to Deal with the Creature

ing the full Exercises with a director. Without this foundation,

however, it makes no sense to try to move the retreatant to the
next stage of the Exercises. The Exercises are an ordered pro-
gression in which one stage depends on the relatively "success-
ful" completion of the prior stage. The whole edifice depends on
the solidity of the foundation. 9 If the foundation is not firmly
established prior to the beginning of the full Exercises, then the
wise director has no alternative but to help the retreatant to
allow God to build it firmly.
I hope that it is already apparent that the kind of direction I
do and encourage in others requires the ability to listen to the
experience of the directee and to adapt one's approach accord-
ingly. The director, in other words, must have developed some
of the basic listening skills of the skilled counselor, such as the
ability to help the directee to be concrete and somewhat detailed
about experience, the ability to respond to the directee with
accurate empathy, the ability to ask questions for clarification in
a way that does not imply a negative judgment on the directee's
experience. 10 Very often directors need much help and supervi-
sion to overcome their tendency to want to give answers or to
help the person to discern before the actual experience of the
directee is sufficiently explored. Before discernment is possible
directees must become sufficiently aware of their experiences.
Directors who too quickly presume that they know what their
directees have experienced run the risk of not permitting "the
Creator to deal directly with the creature, and the creature
directly with his Creator and Lord" (n. 15) and thus of leading
them astray. Later in the chapter I will return to the topic of
supervision.

The "First Week"

Retreatants who have a profound experience of the affec-
tive Principle and Foundation recognize that God is creating this
universe so that all men and women might live in harmony with
 One Approach 11
th~ Trinity and in community with one another. They also realize
that each person has a role to play in God's loving intention for
this universe. Such retreatants will want to live out God's plan,
but they also know that the world and they themselves are not in
harmony with God's plan. Such felt knowledge leads into the
First Week of the Spiritual Exercises where the desire is to know
how both the world and oneself have fallen short of what God
iqtends. At the same time these retreatants want to know that
God has not given up on them or on the world. One can put the
d~sire this way: "I want God to reveal to me how God sees me
and my world?"
The novelist Brian Moore has captured well this desire at
the end of his novel Blackrobe. The novel is set in Canada at the
time of the French conquest of the native Americans, and
poignantly describes the clash of alien cultures as the French
J~suit priests try to convert the Iroquois and Hurons. The protag-
ohist Pere Laforgue has witnessed this tragic clash, has himself
been tortured by the Iroquois, and has at times doubted the exis-
tence of God. At the end of the novel he is baptizing people of
the Huron tribe knowing that their baptism will mean the end of
their civilization. The novel thus depicts both personal and cul-
tural brokenness and sinfulness. It ends with these words: "And
a prayer came to him, a true prayer at last. 'Spare them. Spare
them, 0 Lord. Do you love us?' 'Yes."' That prayer of Pere
Laforgue expresses the desire of the retreatant who enters the
dynamic of the First Week of the Spiritual Exercises.
1 In the course of the First Week I try to help retreatants to
lpok not only at their own sinfulness and sinful tendencies but
also at the history of sin in the world. The first meditation on
Triple Sin can be given as in the book of the Exercises, but
retreatants can also meditate on the condition of the world at
present and then reflect on the historical conditions that have
contributed to the present conditions. The headlines of the day's
newspapers often can supply the opening for such reflection.
The seemingly intractable evils of our day portrayed in the
12 Allowing the Creator to Deal with the Creature
newspapers bring home the power of evil and of the Evil One
and show how far from the intention of God our world has
strayed. I also suggest that retreatants ask God to reveal their
own complicity in this history of sin and evil in the world in a
period of prayer that complements the earlier period when they
asked God to reveal their salvation history.
During this First Week I also propose scripture texts that
help them to face God and Jesus as the sinners they are.
Examples are the woman caught in adultery (Jn 8: 1-11), Isaiah
43: 1-7 (given the context that the Israelites are in exile because
of their sins), the washing of the feet (Jn 13: 1-11), and Peter's
triple profession of love (Jn 21: 15-19). During this time I sug-
gest that they end their prayer periods by looking at Jesus on the
cross and speaking directly to him. It is quite difficult for many
people who are aware of their sinfulness to look directly into the
eyes of Jesus on the cross, but when they do, they come to a
deep realization of his love and forgiveness. During this time
also they pray the "triple colloquy" suggested by Ignatius, first
asking Mary to intercede with Jesus, then asking Jesus to inter-
cede with his Father, and finally begging the Father for that deep
knowledge of their own sins and sinful tendencies and also of
the disorder of the world in which they live and move and have
their being (n. 63). This triple intercession indicates the depth of
the desire for freedom from all sins and sinful tendencies and all
inordinate attachments.
In directing this week of the Exercises I have assumed that
only God can reveal our sins and sinful tendencies to us. Sin is
precisely a blind spot which keeps us from knowing ourselves
as we really are. So we beg God for God's view of ourselves
and our world so that we can repent and try to live out God's
dream for us and our world in cooperation with God's grace.
Actually, in each of the weeks of the Exercises the id quod volo,
the desire, is for a personal revelation of God, as we shall see in
more detail in chapter 3. I shall allude to the object of this desire
in each of the weeks.
 One Approach 13
During this week retreatants who have for long harbored
the deep-seated fear that some secret sins or sinful tendencies, or
sbmething of which they are ashamed, could not bear the light of
day, somehow would not be forgiven by God, can find them-
selves
I
freed from an overwhelming burden. Let one example
suffice for many. Suppose someone has for years feared that he
is a homosexual. With his rational mind he can tell himself that
God loves him no matter what his erotic attractions may be, but
he cannot admit to God exactly what these attractions are
because he fears that God will repudiate him. As long as these
fears keep him from being open with God, his prayer experi-
dnces will be somewhat superficial. God will seem distant. The
qirector will notice that his description of prayer seems dry and
intellectual. There will not be much movement, the kind of
rilovement Ignatius expects during the Exercises. The alert
qirector can help the directee by questioning him about his
desires and about how he feels about the way the prayer periods
Jre going. If they have established a good working relationship,
tp.e director can point out that his prayer seems dry and overly
rational. By judicious questioning and gentle confrontation the
director can help the directee to recognize that something is
keeping him from closeness to God. In the course of further
prayer he may realize what that something is. During this week
he has a chance to pour out to God and to Jesus not only his
fears but also the content of his fantasies and to discover that
I

~od still looks on him with love and care. This experience can
disabuse him of the illusion that God's love is conditional, and
can lead to the freedom from self-absorption that makes
entrance into the Second Week of the Spiritual Exercises possi-
ble and desirable.
I also hope that retreatants will, during this Week, realize
that God also loves this sinful world with all its sinful and cor-
tupting social structures. In other words, during this period in
~e Exercises retreatants can cqme to the deep realization that
pod wants the world itself to be!more of a place where men and
14 Allowing the Creator to Deal with the Creature

women can live out God's dream for them, and that God has not
given up on the world, in spite of all the horrors perpetrated in
it, in spite of the injustice and poverty, the murders and torture
so easily verified by a casual reading of the newspaper head-
lines. During this Week of the Exercises retreatants· can come to
recognize God's revulsion at the social injustice in the world
while, at the same time, experiencing God's tremendous love for
our world and for our feeble efforts to live out God's dream.

The "Second Week"

I look upon the kingdom meditation as an exercise which
evokes the deep-seated desire in us for the fulfillment of God's
dream for the world and for someone to whom we can give our
whole selves in order to fulfill that dream. The parable of the
earthly king is of a piece with the myths of the hero and heroine
which have been a part of world literature since its inception.
The prophecies of the Jewish scriptures which evoke our hopes
in Advent are of this type. The early Christians read these
prophecies and then pointed to Jesus as the fulfillment and more
than fulfillment of them. In a sense the way a person reacts to
these myths indicates whether they have the desire of the
Second Week. Let me give an example using Luke 4: 16-21. In
this pericope Jesus reads from the prophet Isaiah in the syna-
gogue and then says: "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in
your hearing." If a retreatant hears the words of Isaiah and
focuses on herself as one of those in need of healing or freedom,
rather than on the figure of Jesus who has a mission, then per-
haps she still is in the dynamic of the First Week; the focus is
still on her need for healing and forgiveness. But if she thrills to
the program of the prophet ~nd wants to be with Jesus on his
mission, then she has the desire of the Second Week, which is
that Jesus reveal himself to her in order that she may love him
more and follow him more closely. In chapter 5 we shall look
more closely at the transition points to the four Weeks.
 One Approach 15
During the Second Week I begin with the first day pro-
posed by Ignatius. The contemplation of the incarnation with its
reference to the Trinity looking down upon the world, brings
back to mind both the Principle and Foundation and the First
\yeek, and the contemplation of the nativity with the suggestions
for the colloquy looks forward to the passion and cross. After
this first day I usually suggest a day spent on the first ten chap-
ters of Mark's gospel. People rarely read a whole gospel in one
Sftting, and Mark's first ten chapters can be read reflectively in
less than one prayer period. During the other prayer periods of
the day the retreatants go back to those aspects of Jesus' life and
ministry and personality that struck them most forcefully. Then,
in the next day or two, I suggest a closer look at scenes from the
first three chapters culminating in the call of the Twelve. "He
vrent up the mountain and called to him those whom he wanted,
and they came to him. And he appointed twelve, whom he also
named apostles, to be with him, and to be sent out to proclaim
the message, and to have authority to cast out demons"
(3:13-15).
I For most retreatants these days lead to the point of whether
they want to ask to be chosen to be companions of Jesus as the
Twelve were chosen. They are then ready to take a day in which
they meditate on the value systems of Satan and of Jesus,
Ignatius' Fourth Day. Stripped of the medieval imagery, the
meditation on the Two Standards strikes a responsive chord in
people. Movies such as Woody Allen's "Crimes and Mis-
demeanors" depict the progression of temptation. In that movie,
for example, an honored doctor comes to the point of hiring a hit
man to kill his mistress because she threatens to spill the beans
tp his wife. Reputation and mopey are on the line; hence, he
takes into his own hands the role of God and pays the hit man to
kill. Herod's banquet in Mark 6 also depicts the same progres-
~ion. Because he will lose face among his guests, Herod finally
cJoes something he does not want to do, namely, kill John the
Baptist. Here again Ignatius sug~ests a triple colloquy, praying
16 Allowing the Creator to Deal with the Creature

first to Mary, then to Jesus and finally to the Father (n. 147).
This triple prayer underlines the reality that these two value sys-
tems square off in battle within the individual heart. If I am to
live by the values of Jesus, I absolutely need the grace of God, I
need to be put under the value system of Jesus by the Father.
The meditation on the Three Classes of Persons finishes this
Fourth Day.
For the rest of the Second Week I usually suggest the sec-
tion of Mark's gospel from 8:22 to the end of chapter 10. This
section can be looked at as an inclusio, since it begins and ends
with a cure of a blind man. Moreover, Bartimaeus, after his
cure, "followed" Jesus "on the way," the way that leads to
Calvary. In this section Jesus predicts his passion three times,
and three times the disciples are blind. Jesus also speaks of the
costs of discipleship. During these days retreatants continue to
ask to know Jesus in order to love him more and to follow him
more closely, continue to pray the triple colloquy of the medita-
tion on the Two Standards.
The issue before retreatants is how Jesus wants them to
live out their lives as disciples. I take the "election" as an issue
of God's election of the retreatant, not, in the first instance, of
the election or choice by the retreatant. This stance is also sup-
ported by these words of Leo Bakker:

... the exercitant does not stand before a whole row of

objects of election among which he must choose
those which agree more with God's will; rather,
according to Ignatius, the exercitant who wants
"more" actually finds himself facing only one alter-
native: a life in which he only desires to take on the
likeness of his earthly Lord, or a life in which he may
actually take on this likeness. Election- the grace of
the Second Week- is, therefore, nothing else than
the inner knowledge of the Lord in order to love him
more and to follow him more closely.11
 One Approach 17

In other words, retreatants face the question: does God

want me to live out my life as a disciple of the poor Jesus? If the
ankwer is yes, the concrete details -of how to live out this choice
I
can only be worked out in the time after the conclusion of the
I

Exercises.
'
Of course, at this time of election the retreatant may con-
ch11dethat God's election or call to follow Christ's poor includes
a concrete way of living, e.g., as a religious or as a lay mission-
ary. But the concrete details may not work out. At Manresa,
Ignatius himself came to the conclusion that God wanted him to
w9rk apostolicly in poverty. He also wrongly concluded that
Jerusalem was to be the venue of his apostolate. Life after
M~nresa eventually taught him tht; concrete way in which God's
el¢ction of Ignatius would enflesh itself. Another example is
provided by a young man who, dµring the Exercises, came to a
prbfound knowledge and love of the poor Jesus and a conviction
th~t Jesus was calling him to apostolic work. He also concluded
th~t Jesus was calling him to enter the Jesuits. But the Jesuits,
for some reason, did not accept him, and he had to look further
tojsee how to concretize his election. Directors need to be aware
of the difference between the election to discipleship and the
cqncrete details of a life of such discipleship which can only be
1
w [Link] in a world where many factors come into play.

Tfe "Third" and "Fourth Weeks"

The Third Week is ushered in by the arousal of the desire
in the retreatant to have Jesus reveal what his passion and death
were like. In the First Week the retreatant looked at Jesus on the
cmss, but the desire then was to know that Jesus still looked on
' I
her, the sinner, with love. The focus was more on her own needs.
Now the focus is on Jesus and what he is suffering. The desire is
ftjr compassion for Jesus. Retreatlmts who have this desire may
be surprised, however, at how difficult it is to stay with Jesus in
c6ntemplation of the passion. But it could hardly be otherwise.
18 Allowing the Creator to Deal with the Creature

All of us shy away from pain, suffering and death. If we find it

very difficult to face our own suffering and eventual death, we
often find it even more difficult to face the suffering and death
of those we love. We do not easily ask our loved ones to tell us
what they are suffering, and we put off mentioning to them the
reality of their imminent death as long as possible. When
retreatants enter the Third Week, these dynamics operate even
though the desire to share Christ's sufferings is very strong.
Directors need to recognize how deep the resistance is and to
help their directees face it without getting discouraged. Nowhere
else in the Exercises is it so clear that consolation does not nec-
essarily mean feeling happy and content. I have known people
who have suffered deeply during this week as they felt not only
what Jesus himself suffered, but also what he still suffers in all
the sufferings of the people of our world. Yet painful though it
was, they knew that they wanted to stay close to Jesus and found
themselves desolate when they pulled away from contemplation
of his sufferings.
The Fourth Week arrives with the desire to have Jesus
reveal the joy of his resurrected life. Here, too, it may not be
easy for the retreatant to stay with the contemplation of the risen
Jesus. I believe that one source of resistance here is the hidden
hope that with the resurrection the cross and death of Jesus will
be seen as only a bad dream. But the risen Jesus carries the
marks of his passion on him. The past is not undone. The wis-
dom of Jesus is hard to accept, namely, that he could only be the
risen One he now is through the actual life he led and the death
he suffered. "Oh, how foolish you are, and how slow of heart to
believe all that the prophets have declared! Was it not necessary
that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into
his glory?" (Lk 24: 25-26). The only way to have the joy of the
resurrection is to accept it as a grace on God's terms. Another
source of resistance, I believe, is a deep-seated reluctance to sur-
render ourselves totally to God, to accept the fragility and frailty
of all our best efforts and our lives and to leave resurrection and
 One Approach 19

the success of the kingdom to the Father. It is very hard for us to

believe in practice that the only way to save our life is to lose it,
th't the only way to enjoy life is not to cling to it with might and
main. Again, retreatants need to be reminded that they desire a
gr~ce, not something in their power to bring about.
' Often enough in a thirty-day retreat there is not much time
left to spend on the Contemplation to Obtain Love about which
wJ will have more to say in chapter 11. I usually point it out and
sukgest that retreatants might well want to continue with this
contemplation after the retreat is over. I explain that it is a con-
templation, not a meditation. We are here asking for an intimate
knowledge of God's great gifts. In Manresa Ignatius had a num-
ber of mystical experiences which he describes in his
A~tobiography. These seem to have been the experiential sub-
stratum for the Contemplation. Ignatius hopes that the exercitant
will experience God's creative touch, God's desire and efforts to
share with us as much of himself as he can. In effect, Ignatius
hopes that the exercitant will experience the whole world and
e~ery moment in it as sacred, as "charged with the grandeur of
God." 12
I Ignatius himself seems to have realized that directors need-
ed to be reminded to let the Creator deal directly with the crea-
tute. Both in my own practice and in supervising others I have
cqme to realize that reminders are often not enough. Directors
tob easily want to help with counsel or theology or directions,
especially when their directees are;experiencing difficulty. In the
actual direction session they reveal that their faith in the reality
of God's direct dealings with their directees is rather weak.
Moreover, in the intensity of the one-to-one direction personality
p4tterns in themselves and in their directees are activated.
Transference and countertransference reactions often occur.
'Qlese can be expected to be rather strong in a thirty-day retreat
when the director and directee meet every day and deal with
vJry intimate experiences. As a result groups of directors with
whom I have worked have trie~ to engage in some kind of
20 Allowing the Creator to Deal with the Creature
supervision. Most often the directors gather regularly for peer
supervision in a group. The focus of such supervision is not on
the absent party (the retreatant) but on the experience of the
director. The director presents her experience of directing some-
one, revealing her own reactions and thoughts and feelings. The
peer group helps her to examine her experience and to under-
stand why she is reacting as she does. Directors are encouraged
to present experiences which trouble or concern or surprise
them. In this way they can learn something about themselves as
directors and also can see in the concrete where they need to ask
God's help to become better directors.13

Conclusion
In this chapter I have tried to show how I approach the
direction of the Spiritual Exercises. Ignatius discovered in his
own experience that God and he could deal directly with one
another and that these dealings had an ordered progression.
Perhaps because of my training as a psychologist I tend to see
this ordered progression in terms of an ever-deepening relation-
ship analogous to the development of an intimate human rela-
tionship. Any developing intimate relationship between two
humans begins with an initial attraction (the affective Principle
and Foundation). As the relationship develops, it will gradually
erode the egocentric concerns of each of the parties and shift
each to concern and care for the other instead of the self (First
Week). Moreover, such a developing relationship, if it continues
to develop authentically, will lead the two persons to larger con-
cerns than just themselves (Second Week). Finally, any intimate
relationship must come to grips with suffering and death (Third
Week) in order to enjoy fully life itself (Fourth Week). The
human analogy, however, pales before the reality of what hap-
pens when the Creator deals directly with the creature and the
creature with his or her Creator.
 2

"WHAT DO YOU WANT?"

THE ROLE OF DESIRES IN PRAYER

"I know; you're going to ask what I want." "As I was dri-
ving up to the retreat house, I thought of your perennial ques-
tion: "What do you want?' and here's what I came up with." I
have often noticed that people who see me for some time for
spiritual direction or directed retreats say things like this. It even
betomes something of a bit of humorous byplay, as though they
w~nt to beat me to the punch. Clearly, one of my favorite ques-
tiqns for directees is the one Jesus put to the two disciples who
began to follow him, "What are you looking for?" (Jn 1: 38). If
directees pick up on this predilection and start asking themselves
the question, then, I believe, a good deal of my work as spiritual
director is done. If we know what we want in prayer, we are
going to find our way. After a practical belief that God wants an
intimate relationship with each one of us and that God is directly
enpountered in our experience, notµing is more important for the
de~elopment of our relationship with God, for our prayer, in
other words, than knowledge of what we want and of what God
w~nts. In this chapter I want to discuss the role of desires in
prayer.
Anyone familiar with the Spiritual Exercises knows that
among the preludes to every meditation or contemplation is "to
ask God our Lord for what I want and desire." In the various
stages or weeks of the Exercises Ignatius states what the desire
is in each case. For example, in the First Week I "ask for grow-
ing and intense sorrow and tears for my sins," and in the Second
Wfek I "ask for an interior knowle~ge of Our Lord, who became
21
22 Allowing the Creator to Deal with the Creature

human for me, that I may love him more intensely and follow
him more closely." In chapter 3 I will try to show that each of
the desires of the Exercises is a desire for some particular reve-
lation by the Lord.
On the face of it it looks as though Ignatius is saying:
"Here is what you should desire at each stage of the Spiritual
Exercises." One conclusion might be to take a person through
the four Weeks and just put before him or her what Ignatius
gives as the desire. In fact, this has been the procedure in
preached retreats, including the preached thirty-day retreats we
older Jesuits and other religious made in novitiate and tertian-
ship. But what happened if, as a matter of fact, I did not really
desire to know Jesus more intimately when the Second Week
was presented to me? Suppose, for example, I was still too
afraid of what he thinks of me. In most instances, I would guess,
we just presumed that we had the desire if it was Second Week
time. But I would contend that without the real desire we never
got very intimate with Jesus. Indeed, I believe that "what we
really desire" is diagnostic of the stage of the Exercises we are
actually in. To demonstrate this thesis we need to look at the
role of desires in any relationship.
If you get a call from someone asking for a meeting, your
first question, at least to yourself, is, "What does she or he
want?" is it not? In fact, many meetings between people come
off badly because the individuals involved have mistaken ideas
of what each wants. For example, I want to become your friend,
and you believe that I want help with homework; you want to
help me, but are not even thinking of a deeper friendship. At the
end of the meeting both of us are going to be pretty frustrated
unless we talk about our different desires and come to some
understanding. Often enough relationships become frustrating
because of ambivalent or incompatible desires in one or both
parties. For example, I want to get closer to you, but I am also
afraid of you. Or I want a friendship with you (a happily married
woman), but I also want to have an affair. Every intended
 "What Do You Want?" 23
enfounter with another person is accompanied by a desire or
desires. We are not always aware of our desires, but they are
present, and they condition our behavior in the encounter.
Now suppose that I want to befriend you, and you do not
want my friendship. Will my efforts at befriending you get me or
you anywhere? Only to frustration and resentment, probably.
Bqt suppose that I persist in trying to do nice things for you.
What will happen? You will probably get more and more irritat-
ed and thus less and less likely to become my friend. And like
many a "do-gooder" whose good deeds are rejected, I may even-
tually wash my hands of you and call you an ingrate who
def erves his fate. Friendship is only possible when the desires
an~ mutual, when you freely desire my friendship and I freely
de~ire yours. Friendship cannot be coerced.
"But," someone may object, "we often do things that we
do not want to do. Because of my friendship for you, for exam-
ple, I will go to a movie I don't like." But what do you want? If
it is because of friendship with me that you go to the movie,
your deepest desire is to please me or to be with me, is it not?
1

The friendship is more important than the movie. I believe that

the centrality of desire for the developing of a relationship can-
not be denied.
I Now let us look at the importance of desires for the rela-
tionship with the Lord. In the first chapter of John's gospel the
two disciples of John are intrigued by this Jesus whom John has
just pointed out as the lamb of God. So they start following
Jesus. When Jesus asks them what they are looking for, they say,
"Rabbi, where are you staying?" They do not yet have strong
desires, it seems; curiosity seems to be the desire. Jesus does not
1

disdain this desire. "Come and see." Unless we have some

attraction toward God, some curiosity or hope or desire, we will
ndt take the time to begin our side of the relationship. If I
beHeve in my heart and feelings that God is an ogre, ready to
pounce on any infraction, then I may try to placate God, but I
will never want to get close. And God, as it were, does hand-
24 Allowing the Creator to Deal with the Creature
stands to convince us that God really is benign, that God is, as
Jesus asserted, Abba (dear Dad, or, since God has no gender,
dear Mom). The profligate wonders of nature, our own creation
and life, the words of Old and New Testaments, Jesus himself,
loving, caring people in our lives - these are all signs of God's
desire that we find God attractive and let God come close. But
God cannot, or will not, force us into closeness. We must have
some desire to get to know God better. Sebastian Moore affirms
that God's creative touch which desires us into being arouses in
us a desire for "I know not what," i.e., a desire for the Mystery
we call God. 14 This experience (understood as the experience of
one's creation and continued creation) can be seen as the affec-
tive principle and foundation for the development of one's rela-
tionship with God. The desire for "I know not what" is what
makes our hearts restless until they rest in God.
Many people need help to recognize that they have such a
desire. Because of life's hurts they may not recognize any other
desire but to be left alone, or not to be hurt any more. Telling
such people that God is love has little or no effect. They may
need help to let God know that they are afraid and desire to be
less afraid. Indeed, they may need help to voice some of their
anger at life's hurts which seem to them to have come from the
Author of life. The fact that they have not completely turned
away from religion indicates that they may still want something
from God, even if only an acknowledgement that God knows
what happened to them in life. Like Job some may cry out:
"know then that God has put me in the wrong, and closed his net
around me. Even when I cry out, "Violence!' I am not answered;
I call aloud, but there is no justice" (Job 19: 6-7). Only after Job
has poured out his sorrows, it seems, can he say: "For I know
that my Redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon
the earth" (25). In other words, it may take a great deal of pas-
toral care and patient spiritual direction for some people to come
to the point where they can trust life and the Author of life
 "What Do You Want?" 25
en~ugh to let into their consciousness the desire for "I know not
what."
I Job's "friends" tried to derail him from expressing his
de~ires to God. In his misery he wants God to speak to him. Job
will not lie and say, as his "friends" insinuate, that he deserves
hif calamities because of his sinst He will not accept the "just
Wfrld hypothesis" proposed by his!"friends," according to which
a person's sufferings must be deserved. No, he knows that he
ddes not deserve the awful fate that has befallen him, and he
desires to speak directly to God and to hear God's answer. Often
en~ugh we Christians are like the "friends" of Job. To a mother
who has just lost her only child! we might say, "God knows
bd~t," and thus make it difficult for her to voice her outrage at
God and her need for God's own answer to this awful loss.
Sometimes we feel that we have to defend God against the anger
ditected at God by suffering people. Yet the anger may be the
m~st authentic way for a person to relate to God and to express a
de!sireto know God's response.
I Finally, in chapters 38 through 41 God does answer Job out
of the whirlwind. The response may not sound very comforting
or apologetic to us, but apparently Job was satisfied, for he said:
"I. had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye
se~s you; therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and
ashes" (42: 5-6). Moreover, then God speaks to Job's "friends,"
"My wrath is kindled against you and against your two friends;
for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job
h~s" (7). Whatever else God's speech from the whirlwind
m~ans, it certainly does not mean that Job has lost God's friend-
sh~pby voicing so strongly his desire to have God answer him.
Another biblical instance of an attempt to derail a desire
directed toward God comes in the first chapter of the first book
o~ Samuel. Hannah, one of the two wives of Elkanah, is barren
a1'd miserable. She wants a son. rer husband, Elkanah, seeing
hdr weeping and fasting, says to her, "Hannah, why do you
weep? Why do you not eat? Why is your heart sad? Am I not
26 Allowing the Creator to Deal with the Creature

more to you than ten sons?" (1 Sam 1: 8). In other words,

Elkanah wants Hannah to forget her desire and be satisfied with
what she has. In the story we do not hear Hannah's reply, but her
actions tell us that she was not fobbed off by Elkanah's
entreaties. She went to the temple. "She was deeply distressed
and prayed to the Lord, and wept bitterly" (10). Indeed, when
accused of being drunk by Eli, the priest, she says, "No, my
Lord, I am a woman deeply troubled ... I have been pouring out
my soul before the Lord" (15). Hannah knows what she wants
and is not afraid to tell God over and over what it is.
Often we tell ourselves or are told to quell our desires, to
look at all the good we already have. We can be made to feel
guilty and ungrateful for desiring what we want. But if we do
suppress our desires without being satisfied that God has heard
us, then, in effect, we pull back from honesty with God. The
result for our relationship with God often is polite distance or
cool civility. Perhaps God cannot or will not grant what we
want, but for the sake of the continued development of the rela-
tionship we need to keep letting God know our real desires until
we are satisfied or have heard or felt some response. In 2
Corinthians Paul says, "a thorn was given me in the flesh, a
messenger of Satan to torment me .... Three times I appealed to
the Lord about this, that it would leave me, but he said to me,
"My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in
weakness'" (2 Cor 12: 7-9). Paul could now stop making
known his desire because now he knew God's answer. "So I will
boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that the
power of Christ may dwell in me. Therefore, I am content with
weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities for
the sake of Christ; for whenever I am weak, then I am strong"
(9-10).
Convictions such as Paul's come not from theological or
spiritual nostrums, but from the experience of growing trans-
parency between a Paul and the Lord. Too often we use the
hard-won wisdom of a Paul to shortcircuit a similar transparen-
 "What Do You Want?" 27
cy in our own relationship with the Lord. A woman may, for
example, be experiencing the "dark night of the soul" and not
like it at all. Her desire may be for it to be removed. She may be
helped by the knowledge that others have experienced the same
thing before her and been the better for it, but such knowledge
do~s not have to satisfy her desire to be rid of the "dark night."
A ihort circuit in the relationship might occur if she is told by
he{ spiritual director or tells herself to squelch her desire
"because the experience is good for you." What she needs to
ex~erience is God's response, not a theorem of spiritual theolo-
gy. She needs to know (really, not notionally) that God does
want this darkness for the good of their relationship. Such real
knowledge comes only through mutual transparency.
Most of the healing miracles of the New Testament depend
on ithe desire of the recipient for healing. The example of the
blind beggar Bartimaeus (Mk 10: 46-52) stands out, but is not
unJsual. "When he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began
to ~hout and to say, 'Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!'
MJny sternly ordered him to be quiet, but he cried out even
more loudly, 'Son of David, have mercy on me!"' Obviously
Bartimaeus will not be hindered from expressing his desire by
any number of voices trying to quiet him.
These "voices" can come from within us as well as from
without, by the way. "Jesus won't have time for the likes of me;
oth~r people have more important problems; things aren't so
ba4." These interior voices may be expressing our ambivalence
abqut being healed. Just as Bartimaeus had made a way of life
out!of his blindness, so too we may have made our own physical
or psychological or spiritual limitations a way of life and be
afraid of what a future without them might be. One person on a
retreat thought that he desired healing from a kind of darkness
that seemed to rule his life. But then he heard the Lord ask, "Do
you want me to heal you of this?" and he had to admit that he
was not sure. Interestingly, he felt that God approved the hon-
estr of his response. The inner voices may also arise from our
28 Allowing the Creator to Deal with the Creature
fear of expressing strong desires for healing only to have them
dashed. "Suppose I really want to be healed and I hear the
answer Paul got? What a disappointment!" 15 Desires are com-
plex and often contradictory. However, once we have allowed
the ambivalence and complexity of our desires to surface we
have something else to ask the Lord about.
In the Bartimaeus story Jesus calls him over and asks,
"What do you want me to do for you?" Bartimaeus is quite clear
and unambivalent, "My teacher, let me see again." "Go," says
Jesus, "your faith has made you well." I have highlighted Jesus'
words. Without the faith of Bartimaeus, apparently, this miracle
could not have occurred. The miracle requires a partnership
between Jesus' healing power and desire to heal and
Bartimaeus' faith and desire to be healed. Indeed, Bartimaeus'
faith is his desire in action.
An example may help to illustrate this point. Once I was
filled with anger and self-pity about the turn a friendship had
taken and thought that I was praying for healing. I was contem-
plating the story of the two blind men in Matthew 9: 27-30.
When Jesus asked them, "Do you believe that I am able to do
this?" I knew immediately that I was not ready to give up my
self-pity and anger. If I did desire healing, it was with the same
"but not yet" desire with which Augustine at one time desired
chastity. I did not have the "faith" found in the two blind men
and in Bartimaeus, a faith that showed itself in unambivalent
desire. Another example that shows how desire is faith in action
is provided by the father of the boy with the evil spirit reported
in Mark 9: 14-29. Instead of asking directly for a healing the
father said to Jesus, "but if you are able to do anything, have
pity on us and help us." Because he did not believe in Jesus'
power to heal, he could not desire the healing directly. "If you
are able! - All things can be done for the one who believes."
To which the father replied, "I believe; help my unbelief." In
effect th~ man is saying, "Help me to desire healing."
This last example brings us close to the nub of why desires
 "What Do You Want?" 29
are the raw material out of which relationships are made. In
order for the healing to occur there must be a meshing of
de$ires. Bartimaeus' desire for healing meets Jesus' desire to
heal; without both desires there is no relationship, at least no
mtltual relationship. This point is beautifully illustrated in the
story of the leper. "A leper came to him begging him, and kneel-
ing he said, 'If you choose, you can make me clean.' Moved
with pity, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, and said
to him, 'I do choose. Be made clean!' Immediately the leprosy
left him, and he was made clean" (Mk 1: 40-42). Clearly desire
meets desire. The kind of relationship Jesus desires is a mutual
onp, where desire meets desire.
I The need for a partnership of desires becomes even clearer
wqen we look at friendship. In John 15: 15 Jesus says, "I have
called you friends." He then goes on to indicate what that means
as far as he is concerned: "because I have made known to you
everything that I heard from my Father." From his side the
desire has been to be fully transparent, to communicate to them
all that he is. His desire meets their desire to know him as fully
1

as i possible. Of course, full mutuality of friendship means that

they desire to be fully transparent before him and that he desires
totknow them fully. Take away one side of these desires, and
th re no longer is a mutual relationship.
On the apostles' part (and on ours) the mere desire for
mutual transparency does not carry it off. "Between the cup and
the lip .... " Our desires are ambivalent and complex; we are also
fearful, and our fears get in the way of what we most deeply
want. We need help and healing to grow toward mutual trans-
parency with the Lord. But that help is available if we want it. If
we notice, for example, that we want to know Jesus better, but
are afraid of the consequences, we can ask Jesus for help to
overcome our fears. But again we notice that desire is the key to
de\'eloping the relationship.
The retreatant mentioned earlier who told God that he was
not sure that he wanted healing of the darkness that ruled his life
30 Allowing the Creator to Deal with the Creature

provides another example of the reciprocity of relationships.

Later in the same day he became more sure that he wanted heal-
ing and asked the Lord to heal him. The Lord's response was
perplexing; "I can't," he seemed to say. The retreatant was
enraged at such a response when his own reluctance had been
overcome, and he let God know in no uncertain terms. Yet still
later in the day, out of the blue, as it were, he heard the Lord say,
"But we can." He knew immediately that the Lord meant that he
could live more out of joy than sadness if he kept desiring the
Lord's helpful presence rather than withdrawing into himself.
"We can" meant partnership.
At the beginning of this chapter I stated that the real
desires a person has are diagnostic of where the person is in
terms of the four Weeks of the Exercises. Let me now return to
that point. If retreatants do not have a real trust in God's loving
care and providence, they will not desire that God reveal to
them their sinfulness. Without an experienced-based belief in
God's goodness and love, without, in other words, what I have
called earlier an affective Principle and Foundation, people are
too frightened of God to be able to say and mean the last words
of Psalm 139: "Search me, 0 God, and know my heart; test me
and know my thoughts. See if there is any wicked way in me,
and lead me in the way everlasting" (23-24). If there is no such
real desire, then the first Weekof the Exercises is not on. And, it
seems, at this point God's desire is not so much to reveal sinful-
ness as to convince the person that God is "Abba." Similarly, if
a retreatant voices the desire to know Jesus in order to love him
more and to follow him more closely, yet in his prayer continu-
ally identifies with those who need healing, perhaps his real
desire is to be healed. The desire to know Jesus of the Second
Week shows itself in an interest in Jesus himself, his values, his
emotions, his dreams, his apostolate. If the retreatant is not real-
ly interested in these matters, but continually focuses on his own
needs and weaknesses, then the Second Week is not really in
progress. Jesus, himself, may at this time desire more to heal
 "What Do You Want?" 31
than to call to companionship. The difference between the first
and third week also comes down to a difference in desire. In the
first week I desire to know that Jesus forgives me (and us), that
he died for my (and our) sins; the focus is on desiring to have a
deep experience of how much Jesus loved us even though he
kn~w how sinful we were. The desire of the Third Week is more
. to I share the passion with Jesus insofar as this is possible. The
fofus is on what Jesus felt and suffered, and the desire is that he
reyeal that to me. Retreat directors, I believe, do their most
important work when they help their directees to discover what
they do in reality want. And so every retreat could begin with a
contemplation of Jesus as he turns and says, "What are you
looking for? What do you want?" As retreatants hear these
w~rds •and let them penetrate their hearts, they will come to
knpw better what they desire; in other words, they will know
better who they are at this time in their relationship with the
Lqrd.
I

I
 3

DESIRE FOR GOD'S REVELATION

In this chapter I want to demonstrate that the desires of

people who make the Spiritual Exercises are for God's personal
revelation to them. People sometimes come to retreat with rather
vaguely thought-out hopes and desires: "I want to get back to
prayer;" "I need to recharge the spiritual batteries;" "I want to
pray about a decision I have to make;" "I just want to be alone
with God for a while." When directors probe a bit into these
desires, they regularly find that retreatants want to experience
the closeness and care of God, but hold little hope that God will
actually be a felt presence. In other words, some retreatants
expect too little of God, have an image of God as being more
niggardly with favors than God has revealed of Godself. This
image of God may stem from a sense that God cannot be both-
ered with the "likes of me." It may stem from a sense that God
is a distant and almighty figure. With such an image, whatever
the source, retreatants will not have those great desires that
Ignatius hopes for in the exercitant. They will not be able to
enter upon the exercises "with great spirit and generosity toward
their Creator and Lord" as the Fifth Introductory Explanation
puts it (n. 5). Such retreatants need a different picture of God.
However, a new view of God is not attained from theological
lectures or homiletic exhortations as much as from a different
experience of God. Thus, a retreatant with such an image of God
is helped if she is guided to ask God for what she wants and
needs, namely, an experience of God that will enable her to
expect great things of God.
An example may help. A forty-year-old priest began a thir-
32
 Desire for God's Revelation 33
I
ty-day retreat with a good deal of apprehension. He wanted to
rekjndle his devotion. But the prospect of praying four to five
ho~rs a day for thirty days was not a little daunting. The idea
th~t God would speak intimately to him seemed foreign to him.
Hei expected to "grunt his way through life" with God at a dis-
tance. At the same time part of him wanted intimacy with God.
In the first few days he was surprised that the contemplation of
natural beauty came easy to him and that the days did not drag.
But he still could not believe that God would speak intimately
with him. He did ask God to help him to believe this. About the
foJrth day he was "surprised by joy," as it were. He had had an
up~and-down day of prayer. When he woke up in the morning,
hel got into a conversation with God and felt that God was say-
ing: "You are precious in my eyes." In the following few days he
seesawed between believing in the experience and the possibili-
ties it evoked and still doubting its validity. Finally about the
eighth day the reality of the experience, and of other like experi-
ences, sank in. Here was an experience of God he had secretly
hoped for, but also did not expect. From then on he had great
hdpes and a great desire for God, only occasionally dampened
b~ a return of his old image of self-in-relation-to-God. His
iniage of God- and correlatively of himself- was changed by
thfs prolonged experience.
A retreatant may be a "house divided" as she begins the
reµ-eat. She may desire closeness to God, but she may also be
afraid of God. She may fear that God will be terribly demand-
ing. She may fear that God will come close as a condemning
judge who frowns on her actions. A retreatant like this needs
hJlp to put her ambivalent self before God. What she wants and
n~eds is an experience of God that will overcome her fears. She
might be encouraged to begin her periods of prayer by asking
Gbd to reveal Godself in a way that will not frighten her away.
Then she can do something that will give God a chance to
respond to her desire. She may take a walk in a park or along the
34 Allowing the Creator to Deal with the Creature

shore; she may quietly read Psalm 139. She wants a revelation
of God that will help her to overcome her ambivalence.
Retreatants may also be helped to know God better by
knowing how God has been present in their lives up to the pre-
sent, as we mentioned in chapter 1. Retreatants desire that God
reveal to them their salvation history, namely, their history with
God. The retreatant asks God to reveal in detail how God has
been present throughout the retreatant's life. Then he or she
recalls some place or person or incident from childhood and
allows the memories to come freely. The idea is to try not to
control the thoughts and images and memories, but to trust the
process and the Spirit who dwells in our hearts to bring to mind
what God wants to reveal at the present time. Some retreatants
fruitfully spend many days in such prayer and come to a new
and different image of themselves in relation to God, i.e., to a
new revelation of God in relation to themselves.
Naturally enough, not every thought, memory, or image is
equally important or a revelation of who God has been for the
person. But it is extraordinary how fruitful such prayer time is.
It often allows the retreatant to "own" here and now reactions,
attitudes, and feelings locked in the past. For instance, a
retreatant may cry for the first time for his father who died years
before and realize that one of the blocks to intimacy with God
was his inability to acknowledge his feelings of loss and anger.
Most people finish a day or two of such prayer able to say,
sometimes for the first time with conviction, the words of Psalm
139: "For it is you who formed my inward parts; you knit me
together in my mother's womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully
and wonderfully made" (13-14).
Once again we recognize that the desire of the retreatant is
for a personal revelation of God, a revelation which will also
disclose to the retreatant who he or she is before God. When
such desires are answered, then the retreatant "knows" (in the
Johannine sense which combines faith, knowledge and love)
that God is his or her God and that he or she is God's son or
 Desire for God's Revelation 35
dapghter. The retreatant can affirm with inner conviction the
Pdnciple and Foundation of Ignatius.
I

The Revelation of Sinfulness

Once retreatants have had a rather deep experience of
God's personal love and concern for them and have acknowl-
edged the centrality of God in their lives and hearts, they often
begin to think of examining their consciences. They become
aware of how they have fallen short of God's hopes for them and
fof the relation with them. The director needs to help them to
re~ognize their desires and to discern where they come from.
l We have become so used to seeing the examination of con-
science as a thorough self-scrutiny that we can forget the theo-
'
logical truism that only God can reveal sin to us. The sinner,
precisely as sinner, is blind to his or her state. The conviction of
sinfulness is a gift of God, an act of God's love. Thus, when the
desire to examine sinfulness arises, it is important for the direc-
tor to take time with the retreatant to clarify where the desire
cqmes from. Examination of sins can become an exercise in
self-absorption. It may even be a way of resisting the light of
Gpd's love and God's view of one's sinfulness. The clearest
[Link] of such resistance is the self-scrutiny of the scrupulous
person. What such self-scrutiny effectively blocks out (albeit
without conscious awareness of such intent) is God's revelation
of God as lover and of the scrupulous person's real sinfulness,
namely the unwillingness or inability to accept that love.
Concern for "my sins" may effectively keep the light of God's
scrutiny from illuminating the need for conversion.
If retreatants have come to a deep trust of God's love and
concern, they may spontaneously ask God to reveal any way-
ward ways, or they may be encouraged to do so by the director.
I '
They make their own the words of Psalm 139 already quoted:
"Search me, 0 God, and know my heart; test me and know my
thoughts. See if there is any wicked way in me, and lead me in
36 Allowing the Creator to Deal with the Creature

the way everlasting" (23-24). God is being asked to reveal

God's ways, to root out all that hinders intimacy and disciple-
ship. When the prayer begins this way, the retreatant often is
surprised to find that "sins" expected to be on the docket are not
even brought to mind. But something else is revealed and
becomes the focal point for conversion; for example, an attitude
of self-righteousness or an unwillingness to receive. God has
been allowed to reveal God's own view of the relationship, and
that view turns out to be different than expected. Retreatants
often discover that their sinfulness is not so much in their acts of
commission or omission as in their unwillingness to be open and
honest with God about these acts. They find out that God wants
intimacy with them, warts and all, and that they have been pre-
venting that intimacy by being unwilling or unable to speak the
whole truth to God. Their sin, in other words, consists, at least
partly, in not believing that God would forgive them, that God
does indeed love sinners. They also find out that their unwilling-
ness to be open with God stems from their reluctance to look
honestly at their lives in God's presence. The revelation of sin-
fulness reveals who we are, but it also reveals who God is and
wants to be for us.
Even when retreatants have experienced the forgiving love
of God, they may have difficulty facing in its stark reality the
fact that Jesus died for them. That he died for all human beings
is accepted and affirmed, but the sticking point comes when one
faces the very personal experience that "he died for me in the
full knowledge of who I am." Retreatants want to believe this
truth, but they can also be afraid, sometimes even terrified, of
approaching in imagination Jesus crucified and looking him in
the eyes. Whatever the source of these fears-whether they arise
from the reluctance to accept such love, from the apprehension
that Jesus will not be looking at me with love or from the fear of
the demands such love will make-the fears are real enough,
and the prayer can be very difficult. The director does best not
to argue with retreatants, but to help them to ask Jesus to reveal
 Desire for God's Revelation 37
himself in such a way that they can accept such love. They are
en~ouraged to share with him their fears and to approach him as
I
be~t
I
they can. It may take days, but they should not be moved
on, because this point is crucial for their subsequent relationship
to I God and to Jesus. If this stumbling block is removed by the
grace of God, then they will experience at a profound level the
free and freeing love of God for them precisely as who they are.
They will know that they are loved sinners, and they will also
know that God really is a lover of sinners.

I
The Desire to Know Jesus
The desire of the Second Week, "to ask for an interior
kqowledge of Our Lord, who became human for me, that I may
love him more intensely and follow him more closely," is obvi-
ously a desire for revelation. One can only know Jesus intimate-
ly ' if he reveals himself. One asks for this grace and then con-
templates the gospel stories, not in order to understand the
gqspels better, but because the gospels are privileged writings to
contemplate in order to give the living Lord Jesus a chance to
re~eal himself. I want Jesus to reveal to me his values, his loves
add hates, his dreams and hopes, and especially his hopes for
0¥ relationship and for my life. As Jesus takes on more and
more reality for retreatants, they may find him more challenging
and daunting than they had expected. He may show himself as
having desires for them which they resist. He may desire that
th~y give up everything and follow him in apostolic discipleship.
They may recognize that they can freely respond "yes" or "no"
aJd that they will not jeopardize his love for them by saying
"no." They, too, develop new or different desires toward him;
they may desire to be chosen for apostolic discipleship realizing
th~t Jesus is free to choose them dr not. The experience of many
retreatants in this Week, in other words, is that they are develop-
ing an adult relationship to the living Lord Jesus.
A desire for a more intimate revelation of Jesus is the way
38 Allowing the Creator to Deal with the Creature

many retreatants express the grace of the Third Week. They

have come to a personal knowledge and a deep love of Jesus,
and now they ask that he share with them his suffering self, that
he let them into that suffering and death that made him who he
now is. It is important for directors to point out that they are
asking for a grace, something that is not in their own power to
attain. Many think that they can easily enter the contemplation
of the passion and death of Jesus, only to find that their prayer is
dry and difficult. One cannot enter into another's sufferings
unless the other reveals himself. So retreatants need to ask Jesus
to reveal himself so that they can be sorrowful and compassion-
ate with him. When he begins to reveal himself, they may well
find that they have asked for more than they expected, and they
resist strongly letting this revelation penetrate to their hearts.
The Third Week very often is a struggle.
The desire that Jesus reveal his triumph, his joy, the expe-
rience of having come through to resurrection so that one can
rejoice and exult with him is the grace of the Fourth Week. Here
again the director stresses that a grace or a revelation is being
asked for. The Fourth Week experience is not automatic, the cli-
max that can be experienced just by contemplating the resurrec-
tion narratives. Jesus must reveal himself. Moreover, the
retreatant may well resist this self-revelation of Jesus just as he
has resisted earlier self-revelations. Resurrection, for example,
does not mean sweet revenge on one's enemies. The triumph
may not be as one had expected. Once again we find that the
desire for revelation is an ambivalent one because God and
God's Son are surprising mystery.

Conclusion
When directors and retreatants look at the graces asked for
in retreat as a request for revelation, perspectives change. For
one thing, people realize more clearly that prayer is a matter of
relationship. Intimacy is the basic issue, not resolutions "to be
 :

I Desire for God's Revelation 39

better" or answers to problems. Many of life's problems and
1

challenges have no answers; one can only live with and through
thbm. Problems and challenges, however, can be faced and lived
thtough with more peace and resilience if people know that they
art not alone. A man's wife will not return from the dead, but
the pain is more bearable when he has poured out his sorrow, his
an!ger,his despair to God and has experienced God's intimate
prfsence to him. Secondly, retreatants recognize more clearly
that willpower alone cannot achieve "success" in prayer. It is
much clearer that what one desires is a gift which only the Other
I

car supply.
Freedom i~ at the_h~art of the process. No one can coerc_e
personal revelation or mtimacy. God cannot be forced, but nei-
thfr can the retreatant. There are some graces that God has
fr1ely decided to give everyone, if they will accept them. God
wants to save and liberate all of us; God loves us all to the point
ofjletting Jesus die for us, and God wants us to accept that love.
B~t the call to apostolic discipleship has not been promised to
anr7one who asks for it. It may also be that there are certain
de1sires we have, such as to be let into the suffering heart of
Jerus, that are not granted or only granted after a long time of
waiting. On the other hand, we need to recognize much more
I
cl¢arly that freedom also means that we are free before God.
Directors should not try to coerce retreatants to ask for what
thty do not (yet) want or are too ambivalent to desire honestly.
G<;>d does not seem to want dumb submission. God wants spon-
taneous love.
I The relationship to God and to Jesus tends to take on a
more
I
adult flavor when people begin to look on prayer in this
inferpersonal way. They realize that they are not asking for
gr~ces,_much as a child asks for can?y, b~t for intimacy. W?ile
thfy wisely approach such an entetpnse with fear and trembhng,
they nonetheless can do so as adults who know that intimacy
re9uires maturity on their part.
 4

THE PRINCIPLE AND FOUNDATION

Many of us have been accustomed to view the Principle

and Foundation as a rather dry theological statement of the reali-
ty of the human situation. We often fail to recognize that this set
of truths is based not so much on deductions from theological
premises as on reflection on lived experience in the light of the-
ology. In his monograph in Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits 16
Joseph Tetlow shows convincingly that Ignatius' text is based on
experience, the experience of our continuing creation. He main-
tains that this experience is "that we are being created momently
by our God and Lord in all concrete particulars and that we are
listening to God's summons into life when we let ourselves hear
our most authentic desires, which rise out of God's passionate,
creative love for us." 17 Since Ignatius' text and Tetlow's interpre-
tation express a universal, everyone must be able to have an
experience that draws him/her to the knowledge, love and service
of God. Can we point to an experience that seems universal and
which thus could ground these statements?18
In Let This Mind Be In You, Sebastian Moore suggests that
we all have experiences of desiring "I know not what," experi-
ences which are also accompanied by a feeling of great well-
being. These experiences, he says, are experiences of being
touched by the creative desire of God who desires us into being
and continues us in being. "God could," he says, "be defined-
or rather pointed to-by this experience, as that which ... causes
in us that desire for we know not what which is the foundational
religious experience." 19 He refers to the autobiography of C. S.
Lewis where Lewis describes such an experience:
40
 The Principle and Foundation 41
As I stood before a flowering currant bush on a sum-
mer day there suddenly arose in me without warning,
and as if from a depth not of years but of centuries,
the memory of that earlier morning at the Old House
when my brother had brought his toy garden into the
nursery. It is difficult to find words strong enough for
the sensation which came over me; Milton's "enor-
mous bliss" of Eden ... comes somewhere near it. It
was a sensation, of course, of desire; but desire for
what? not, certainly, for a biscuit tin filled with moss,
nor even (though that came into it) for my own
past ... and before I knew what I desired, the desire
itself was gone, the whole glimpse withdrawn, the
world turned commonplace again, or only stirred by a
longing for the longing that had just ceased. It had
taken only a moment of time; and in a certain sense
everything else that had ever happened to me was
insignificant in comparison.20
I
Oply later in life did Lewis discover that what he desired was
thf Mystery we call God.
, In Sacred Journey Frederick Buechner provides a wonder-
fu,lexample from his own life, an example which also illustrates
how multidimensional such experiences are. After his father's
tr•gic suicide his mother took him and his brother to Bermuda.
N~ar the end of his stay he was sitting on a wall watching ferries
cQme and go with a girl who was also thirteen. Quite innocently,
I
he says,
I

I our bare knees happened to iouch for a moment, and

in that moment I was filled ;with such a sweet panic
and anguish for I had no id~a what that I knew my
life could never be complete;until I found it. .. .It was
the upward-reaching and fothomlessly hungering,
heart-breaking love for the beauty of the world at its
!
42 Allowing the Creator to Deal with the Creature

most beautiful, and, beyond that, for that beauty east

of the sun and west of the moon which is past the
reach of all but our most desperate desiring and is
finally the beauty of Beauty itself, of Being itself and
what lies at the heart of Being.21

Buechner himself acknowledges that there are many ways

of explaining this experience. However, he goes on to say that

looking back at those distant years I choose not to

deny, either, the compelling sense of an unseen giver
and a series of hidden gifts as not only another part of
their reality, but the deepest part of all.22

The novel Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant provides an

example of an ordinary person. Pearl Tull is an old, blind, dying
woman who was abandoned by her husband and brought up
three children alone. She lives with one of her sons, Ezra, and
his task each day is to read to her some of her diary from child-
hood. Most of the entries are pretty banal, and Pearl quickly has
him move on. Then comes the final scene before her death. Ezra
riffles through some entries and begins to read:

"Early this morning," he read to his mother, "I went

out behind the house to weed. Was kneeling in the dirt
by the stable with my pinafore a mess and perspiration
rolling down my back, wiped my face on my sleeve,
reached for the trowel, and all at once thought, Why I
believe that at just this moment I am absolutely
happy."
His mother stopped rocking and grew still.
"The Bedloe girl's piano scales were floating out
her window," he read, "and a bottle fly was buzzing in
the grass, and I saw that I was kneeling on such a
beautiful green little planet. I don't care what else
 The Principle and Foundation 43
might come about, I have had this moment. It belongs
to me."
That was the end of the entry. He fell silent.
"Thank you, Ezra," his mother said. "There's no
need to read any more."23

Obviously Pearl wanted to remember that foundational experi-

ence once more before she died; perhaps, too, she wanted Ezra
to know that she had had that experience.
Not everyone who has such experiences interprets them as
experiences of God as Frederick Buechner did. C. S. Lewis, for
example, did not do so until much later in life. But a believer
can do so and can also draw out their implications. Notice that
the experiences speak of desire, desire for "I know not what." In
another book Lewis describes the Joy he experienced as "an
intense longing" which, though intense and even painful, is
wmehow a delight, indeed a greater delight than the fulfillment
of any another desire. 24 Moreover the experience includes a
sense of great well-being. While in the experience we do not
worry about ourselves, our worth, our goodness. We seem to
take for granted our being in the world. Moore interprets the
experience, quite rightly, as an experience of being desired into
existence by God. Hence, we are desirable.
However, let us not miss the most significant aspect of
these experiences. The experiences happen in the present, not at
the moment of creation in the past. Our image of the creation of
the universe refers to something that happened in the distant past,
at the moment of the big bang. When we imagine God creating
us, we tend to think of our creation as happening when we were
conceived or born. But the experiences we have been discussing
are described as happening to people already alive. If these are
experiences of the creative touch of God, then we are talking of
an action of God that is going on continually, not of an action
that happened in some distant point in time. When we have such
experiences, we are experiencing the present action of God.
44 Allowing the Creator to Deal with the Creature

How are we to understand such an assertion? The late

Scottish philosopher John Macmurray developed a philosophy
of the person based on the primacy of action over thought. 25
Action includes thought, since any action is intended. When I
act, I know what I intend to do. Events are different from
actions in that events are not intended; they happen. Actions
include events. Let me give an example of an action as
Macmurray understands the term. This book is one action of
mine since it is governed by one intention. I want to present my
approach to the Exercises in such a way that it will have an
influence on you, the readers. This one action includes many
other actions, e.g., the many actions of rewriting it, and many
events, e.g., the typing skills that occur without my intention.
My one action, since my intention is to have an influence on
you, also depends on my audience and their willingness to pay
attention to the book. Thus the printed book in your hands and
before your eyes is my one action. In reading and reflecting on
this book you are also encountering me. In an analogous way we
can understand the universe as one action of God. Hence, God is
always active, always doing his thing, as it were. Thus, at every
moment of existence of the universe God is creating this world
and everything in it, and we are encountering God whether we
are aware of it or not.
If the universe is one action of God, then God has one
intention in creating it. What does God intend with this one
action which is the universe? We only know the intentions of
persons (and only persons can perform actions) if they reveal
them to us. If you do not reveal to me the intention of your
action in my regard, I may infer that you intended to help me,
but I may be wrong. You may have just acted inadvertently. I
can only know your intention if you reveal it to me truthfully. If
this is true of human beings, how much more true is it of God!
Has God revealed to us his intention in creating the universe?
Christians believe that God has done so in the person of Jesus
the Christ.
 The Principle and Foundation 45
The kingdom of God which Jesus preached can be seen as
the intention of God in creating the universe. God, it seems, cre-
ates this universe to invite all persons to enter the community
life of the Trinity. Moreover, this intention has implications for
our present age; the kingdom of God is both of this world and
not of this world. God wants all persons to live as sisters and
brothers of Jesus and in harmony with the whole created uni-
verse. Hence, God has a stake in how each of us lives our lives.
Tetlow, in his monograph, speaks not so much of the kingdom of
God as of "God's project" which seems to come down to the
same thing. God's project

suggests ... a finite reality that exists in God but that is

not God. A project is a concrete event, an ongoing
activity that requires improvisation and adjustment. ..
To God's project, all things great and small are
required to make a contribution out of the self, and
indeed will make a contribution whether by choice or
not, whether embracing God's hopes or attempting to
frustrate them.26

Thus, when we have foundational experiences such as I

described earlier, we are experiencing the creative action of
God, which is always at work to bring us and all persons under
the reign or kingdom of God, into the community life of the
Trinity. We may not draw out all the implications of such experi-
ences but, nonetheless, I believe, we can do so. In fact, Ignatius
has drawn out these implications from his own experiences and
distilled them, albeit in a language colored by his own age and
theology, in the Principle and Foundation. This is the point of
Tetlow's monograph. When we experience the desire for "I
know not what," we are experiencing God's one creative action
which calls each one of us and the whole universe into being
with the intention of drawing all persons into the one community
which is the Trinity. No wonder C. S. Lewis could say that he
46 Allowing the Creator to Deal with the Creature

was "surprised by Joy," by a desire that "had taken only a

moment of time" but which made "everything else that had ever
happened to me .. .insignificant in comparison."
When I have the experience of desiring "I know not what,"
I am experiencing God creating me now in all the particulars of
my present existence. While in thrall to that experience I do not
worry about my past failures and sins or about what the future
might hold. I feel at one with the universe and as whole as I
could possibly be. Moreover the desire I experience is the deep-
est desire within me. That desire is in tune with God's one inten-
tion in creating the universe, and that desire can become the rul-
ing passion of my life, if I let it. When we experience this
desire, it is God's Holy Spirit drawing us into the community
which is the Trinity. While we are in the power of this desire,
everything else becomes relative before the absolute Mystery
we desire. Moreover, insofar as this desire reigns in our hearts,
we desire to live out our lives in harmony with this desire and
want to do whatever will more readily bring us to the object of
our desire. Hence, we want to live in harmony with God's cre-
ative purpose in creating us, to choose what will be more in tune
with our desire for union with God. Ignatius spells out the impli-
cations of the foundational experience of God's creative touch in
the Principle and Foundation.
Because God is God and because our only ultimate happi-
ness lies in living in harmony with God's intention for the uni-
verse and for each one of us, Ignatius calls upon us to be "indif-
ferent" to all created things. In his recent translation Ganss notes
that the term is a key technical term in Ignatian spirituality.
However, "(i)n no way does it mean unconcerned or unimpor-
tant. It implies interior freedom from disordered inclinations." 27
In the monograph already cited Tetlow translates "indifferent"
by "at balance." The term "at balance" comes much closer to
Ignatius' intent. In the throes of the desire for "I know not what"
we do not want anything else to get in the way of the fulfillment
of that deepest desire. Thus, before every choice we want to be
 The Principle and Foundation 47
at balance in order to discern or discover what will more surely
bring us what we most deeply desire.
Roger Haight in his enlightening book Dynamics of
Theology makes the point that "(t)he symbol of the kingdom of
God can mediate the experience that as personal and as creator
God has a will and intention for creation and that, as a creature,
the self participates in that intention."28 Later he notes the trans-
forming power of this symbol.

The special note of the kingdom of God is that the

one encountered, God, is encountered as having a
divine intention for the world and human history. The
symbol thus appeals more directly to human will and
influences more pointedly human action. An appreci-
ation of its transcendent meaning fairly demands a
conversion to a desire to be in conformity with God's
will. The symbol thus transforms natural ethics into
an expression of God's will. It transforms a person's
responses to the world into simultaneous responses to
God. It transforms goals and ideals into the goals and
ideals of God. It can thus have an impact on the trans-
formation of the world. The kingdom of God is of
this world and transcendently more than that.29

The experience that underlies the words of the Principle

and Foundation leads the person who takes it seriously to want
to make the full Spiritual Exercises in order to be able to be
freed from anything that will hinder the freedom to choose what
is more in tune with what God wants and to be able to discern
better what that is.

Conclusion
In this chapter we have been reflecting on the Principle and
Foundation and on the experiences upon which it is based.
48 Allowing the Creator to Deal with the Creature
Ignatius' text is not derived from theological premises although
theological premises and principles are at work in the elabora-
tion of the written exercise. The experience that underlies it
seems to be an experience of God creating this universe and
everything in it with the intention of drawing all persons into the
community life of the Trinity and into harmonious relations with
one another and with the whole universe. Because God is the
One Creator, this experience is available to all people according
to their capacity. However, even those who have vivid and even
awesome experiences of this creative touch of God may not, and
often do not want to, pay enough attention to the experiences
and to draw out their implications for their lives. For those who
do pay attention and who want to draw out the implications of
their experience of the Mystery who calls everything and "me"
into being for a purpose, Ignatius offers the Spiritual Exercises
as a powerful means "to overcome oneself, and to order one's
life, without reaching a decision through some disordered affec-
tion" (21). Because such people experience in an overpowering
way what God intends with the universe, with every person and
with "me," they recognize the deep disorder of our world and of
human beings and of "myself," and they beg God to convert
them and all human beings. Moreover, in our day, because we
are so aware of the interdependence of everything in the uni-
verse, the experience of God's creative action brings us to rec-
ognize how contrary to God's intention are the institutions and
social structures that influence all our lives, and we beg God to
give us the courage and the willingness to do our part to change
these unjust institutions and structures. I believe that the Thirty-
Second General Congregation of the Society of Jesus was
moved by the spirituality of the Principle and Foundation (and
of the Contemplation to Attain Love) to the insight that in our
modem world work for justice is constitutive of every apostolate
that deserves the name Christian.
 5

TRANSITION POINTS IN THE DYNAMIC

OF THE EXERCISES

In this chapter I want to look at the transition points in the

dynamic of the Spiritual Exercises. That is, I want to indicate the
kinds of experiences I look for in a retreatant that demonstrate a
readiness to begin a particular set of exercises, called "Weeks."
The Spiritual Exercises are not a drill that one goes through
without any regard to what one is experiencing. The director's
main task, after listening, is to help the directee to know what he
or she authentically desires. These desires can be seen as touch-
stones for the readiness to move to a new stage of the Exercises.

The Principle and Foundation

As we noted in the last chapter, the Principle and
Foundation is the fruit of Ignatius' experience as well as of his
later study of theology. Ignatius, after much spiritual agony,
came to experience God as the deepest desire of his heart; he
n~alizedthat he was created for God and that nothing else would
satisfy him. Moreover, through his experiences at Manresa, he
came to have a felt knowledge of God's architectonic purpose
for the creation of the universe. In the Principle and Foundation
he tried to distill the fruit of those experiences in the light of his
later theological studies. •
li1 effect, Ignatius came to believe, through mystical expe-
rience, that the perfect community which is the Trinity, motivat-
e:d purely by love, creates a universe where persons created in
the image of God are continually being drawn by the cords of
49
50 Allowing the Creator to Deal with the Creature

divine love into the community life of the Trinity. In the depths
of our hearts we are being drawn by a desire for union with God
and thus with all other persons. Ignatius came to believe that the
Trinity wants each of us to live our lives in order to be part of
the dream of God, the kingdom of heaven. We cannot, therefore,
ultimately be happy and at peace in this life unless our lives are
in tune with God's dream for the universe and for each one of
us. If we have this experience of God as the Creator who loves
us into existence for community with God, then we will have a
positive spiritual identity; we will know that we are beloved of
God, the apple of God's eye. I have called this experience the
affective Principle and Foundation needed to make the Spiritual
Exercises. With this experience relatively firmly established in
our hearts we will, at least inchoatively, realize that we should
not let anything get in the way of attaining the end God has in
mind for us. We will want to beg· God to remove from us all
inordinate attachments (which Gerald May 30 calls addictions);
hence we will be ready to begin the Spiritual Exercises.
I suspect that many of us know from our own and others'
experience that it is often difficult to let this experience of God's
creative love and dream for us take root in our hearts. A poor
self-image can get in the way, as can an image of God as one
who, as I mentioned above, is "always snooping around after
sinners." 31 Scrupulous people, for example, have the devil's own
time coming to believe that God loves them "warts and all." It
took four years of careful spiritual direction by Ignatius before
Pierre Favre, who later became one of the best directors of the
Exercises, was ready to make the Spiritual Exercises. Ignatius
himself was so plagued by scruples that, he tells us, he came
close to suicide.32 Only after a long time of siege by such scru-
ples did he come to the belief that God was not a tyrant. We will
only ask God to purify us of our inordinate attachments and to
reveal to us our sins and sinful tendencies when we believe in
our bones that God is on our side, that God has our good at
heart.
 Transition Points in the Dynamic of the Exercises 51
If what I have just noted has any validity, then we need to
be patient with ourselves and with those to whom we minister,
willing to take the time and to use our ingenuity to help our-
selves and others to have, and to have confidence in, such expe-
riences of a loving creative God who invites us into community
with the Trinity. These experiences are the firm foundation upon
which a developing relationship with God is built.
Before this foundation is firmly built people live in an illu-
sory world. They believe that God needs to be placated, and yet
is in a real sense implacable. They try, as Paul did, to fulfill the
letter of every law in order to deserve, if not the love of God, at
least God's grudging acceptance. The illusion comes down to
the belief that "I am rotten to the core and unlovable." Many
pwple live in this illusory world. Those who minister in the
church need to develop the spiritual techniques or pastoral prac-
tices that will help people to overcome this illusion and to come
to a basic trust in God. Only with such a grasp of reality will
they (and we) be able to enter the "First Week" of the Exercises
which requires the authentic desire of directees to have God
re:veal to them how they and our world have fallen short of
God's dream for them and for the world.

The "First Week"

When people are becoming relatively firmly grounded in
the experience of God as a loving Creator, as the Abba of Jesus,
they often experience a sort of honeymoon period in prayer.
They relish spending time relating to God; prayer seems easy
and delightful. But the honeymoon period cannot last forever.
We all know that we have fallen short of the glory of God. We
become aware of our resistances to further closeness to God. We
want God to remove from us everything that hinders further
closeness to God, but at the same time we are afraid of what
such a removal will entail. We come to recognize that the world
is not at all the garden of Eden God intended. God has begun to
52 Allowing the Creator to Deal with the Creature

reveal to us our own and our society's sins and sinful tenden-
cies. We are entering the dynamic of the First Week of the
Spiritual Exercises where our desire is that God reveal to us our
own and our world's sinfulness, forgive us and enable us to live
more and more in the freedom of the children of God.
As we have seen earlier, the movements of the Spiritual
Exercises are driven by desires, the id quod volo, of the second
or third prelude Ignatius puts before every meditation or con-
templation. These desires cannot be forced; they must be
authentic desires of our hearts. If we. do not have the desire
Ignatius expects to drive the dynamic of the First Week, for
example, the only thing we can do is to ask God to give us the
desire. One of the key questions we can put to ourselves for our
own prayer and to those we direct is: "What do I really want
right now from God or in my relationship with God?" Honesty
about our real desires is crucial for growth in our relationship
with God, and indeed, in any relationship. In giving the
Exercises to groups of people we need to keep in mind that the
people in the group will vary widely in their desires. As we give
"points" for prayer, it would be good to remind our listeners to
move with their own authentic desires.
In the First Week of the Exercises, then, my desire is that
God reveal how far I have fallen short of God's dream for me
and how my inordinate attachments (addictions) keep me from
living out God's dream. But I also want to know that God still
loves me, warts and all; I want to know that I am a loved sinner.
Only such knowledge will give me the grace and the impetus to
try to overcome my sinful tendencies. Moreover, I want God to
reveal to me how far my society, my culture, my church, my
world have fallen short of God's dream without losing God's
loving care.
The fact that we need reassurance about God's love of us
sinners indicates that at this stage of our spiritual journey we
also labor under an illusion. It is difficult for us to believe in our
bones that God loves sinners. Yet Jesus died for us sinners. This
 Transition Points in the Dynamic of the Exercises 53
illusion, like the one which says "I am rotten to the core and
totally unlovable," also dies hard. Yet only with its death and
burial can we be free. While we live with this illusion, we con-
tinually try to prove that we are lovable; we continually try to
save ourselves. Only if we can let Jesus wash our feet when he
and we know our sinfulness, only if we can look into the eyes of
Jesus dying on the cross for our sins and there see love, are we
living in the real world which is still, in spite of all its crooked-
ness, a world where God continues to draw us into community
with the Trinity, where Jesus gave up his life precisely for us
sinners.
When we are freed from this illusion, then we know in the
depth of our hearts: "For God so loved the world that he gave
his only son, so that everyone who believes in him may not per-
ish but have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into
the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world
might be saved through him" (Jn 3: 16-17). With this deep
heartfelt knowledge we can speak to Jesus on the cross as a
friend speaks to a friend. Then we will be able to ask ourselves
without being driven by unhealthy guilt feelings, but by genuine
love and shame: "What have I done for Christ? What am I doing
for Christ? What ought I to do for Christ?" Now I am, perhaps,
ready to allow the desire to know, love and follow Christ rise in
my heart.

The "Second Week"

The desire of the Second Week of the Exercises is
expressed in the third prelude Ignatius suggests for each contem-
plation. "Here it will be to ask for an interior knowledge of Our
Lord, who became human for me, that I may love him more
intensely and follow him more closely" (n. 104). A fundamental
shift in orientation has occurred in those who have this desire.
Prior to this shift the focus has been on ourselves and our needs.
We have wanted to know in a heartfelt way that God is where
54 Allowing the Creator to Deal with the Creature
we are, with us in our brokenness, our sinfulness, our desperate
need. With this shift in desire we now want to be where Jesus is;
we want to know him and his values and his mission and we
want to be part of that mission.33 The difference might be illus-
trated by two different images of ourselves in relation to Jesus.
In the First Week we are like the blind man Bartimaeus who
wants Jesus to give him succor, to heal his blindness. In the
Second Week we are like Bartimaeus who, now seeing, follows
Jesus "on the way" (Mk 10: 52).
Ignatius did not believe that many people were ready for
this kind of shift of perspective. Hence he was slow, it seems, to
give the full Exercises. There are many who, because of the
physical or psychological traumas suffered in life, find it almost
impossible to focus for long on anything but their own need for
healing. I realize that I am reading into the text, but I have used
the man from whom the legion of demons was driven out as an
example. After the legion was driven out, "the man who had
been possessed by demons begged him that he might be with
him. But Jesus refused, and said to him, 'Go home to your
friends, and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and
what mercy he has shown you'" (Mk 5: 18-19). Perhaps, we
could say, he was too scarred by what he has suffered to be able
to make the radical shift that discipleship with Jesus entails. At
any rate, we might keep in mind the possibility that we our-
selves or those to whom we minister can only be hurt by being
pushed into a desire to follow Jesus which is beyond our capaci-
ties.
Those who desire to know Jesus in order to love him more
and to follow him more closely will also encounter resistances
to the call of Jesus. They will be as blind as the disciples who,
after each of the three predictions of the passion, show how
completely they have missed the reality of the call. After all,
those who follow Jesus too closely may, and indeed will, suffer
the same fate as he suffered or at least something similar. Here
the source of the resistance is much more realistic. The disci-
 TransitionPoints in the Dynamicof the Exercises 55
pies, when they finally became like Christ, did suffer persecu-
tion and martyrdom. Throughout the ages those who have
become, through close personal relationship, like Christ have
suffered as he suffered. Yet even here an illusion lies behind the
resistance. The illusion is that we can control our lives and our
fate. If we surrender ourselves to the following of Christ, we
fear that we will lose control of our lives and our fate. Yet this
fear keeps us from what we most desire at this stage of the spiri-
tual journey, namely closeness to Jesus. Throughout the gospels
Jesus contrasts faith and fear, and continually points out how
useless fear is. In the final analysis Jesus' call to discipleship
faces anyone who hears the call with these words of Jesus:

If any want to become my followers, let them deny

themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For
those who want to save their life will lose it, and
those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake
of the gospel will save it. For what will it profit them
to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed,
what can they give in return for their life? (Mk 8:
34-37)

Ignatius, of course, was astute enough a spiritual guide to

know that we cannot follow Jesus in this way without the grace
of God. In the meditation on the Two Standards he indicates
quite clearly that the two standards or value systems run right
through each human heart. Hence, he proposes the triple collo-
quy in which we ask Mary, then Jesus, then the Father to put us
under the standard of Christ. We are addicted to possessions, to
our reputations, to our honor, and so we cannot, by ourselves,
embrace the values of Christ. Yet these values are the real values
that bring true happiness and peace in this life and in the next. In
this sense Christianity is what John Macmurray in Persons in
Relation calls "real religion" in this remarkable statement which
I so much enjoy citing:
56 Allowing the Creator to Deal with the Creature

The maxim of illusory religion runs: "Fear not; trust

in God and He will see that none of the things you
fear will happen to you"; that of real religion, on the
contrary, is "Fear not; the things that you are afraid of
are quite likely to happen to you, but they are nothing
to be afraid of." 34

Ignatius suggests that those who want to be intimate fol-

lowers of Jesus must beg over and over again to be freed from
their fears and illusory values in order to embrace the values of
Jesus.

The "Third Week"

The desire of the Second Week of the Exercises is "for an
interior knowledge of Our Lord, who became human for me,
that I may love him more intensely and follow him more close-
ly." We want to know his values, his loves, his hates, his
dreams, his hopes. We want to know his heart so that we might
be so much in love with him that nothing, not even our fear of
suffering and of death, will get in the way of following him. As
we are given the grace of this Week, we find ourselves more and
more focused on Jesus, less and less on ourselves. Such a focus
is not an achievement of our own will, but a gift of God for
which we must continually beg. Indeed, the focus is not a once-
and-for-all-time gift for most of us; our self-centeredness dies
hard and may only be finally overcome with the grave. I wonder
whether the experience of how difficult it was for self-centered-
ness to be overcome led to the theological postulation of the
existence of purgatory.
Nonetheless, those who do have the desire of the Second
Week are gradually freed of enough of their self-centeredness
that they can ask for the graces of the "Two Standards" and of
the "Three Degrees of Humility." Jesus does become the love of
their lives, their closest friend, their dearest companion. As they
 Transition Points in the Dynamic of the Exercises 51
come to the end of this stage of their spiritual journey, they-
like Bartimaeus after he receives his sight-want to follow Jesus
along the way (Mk 10: 52), and the way is the "way of the
cross." They are ready to begin the Third Week.
The desire of this Week, as Ignatius articulates it, is: "to
ask for sorrow, regret, and confusion, because the Lord is going
to His Passion for my sins" (n. 193). Once again it is important
to note that Ignatius is talking of a "desire" and that desires are
not under our control. To desire to have compassion for Jesus, to
suffer with Jesus, is a gift of the love for Jesus that has grown in
our hearts throughout the Second Week. Moreover, the presence
of the desire does not preclude conflicting desires. Think of how
difficult it is for very close friends or loved ones to share pain,
suffering and dying. I may want to suffer with my closest friend;
but I also fear the consequences of that desire. To share his or
her suffering cuts me to the quick. If he or she dies, I lose "half
my soul," as Augustine described a dear one; no one easily
accepts such a loss. Moreover, my friend may not want to
increase my pain by sharing what is really going on in him or
her. Those who have worked with the terminally ill note that
often both the dying person and her loved ones are terribly lone-
ly precisely because of the mutual fears of "hurting one anoth-
er," of "making it worse" for one another by sharing their real
feelings.
In the case of Jesus we presume that he wants to share his
suffering with those who desire to suffer with him; we presume
that he wants to give as much of himself to us as we want and
can take. (Cf. the Contemplation to Obtain Love, First Point, n.
234.) The ambivalence lies in us. Moreover, we cannot presume
that even a relatively deep experience of the Second Week of the
Exercises will lead, during this retreat, to a deep desire to suffer
with, to have compassion for Jesus. What we can hope for is that
during our continuing relationship with Jesus this desire will
grow in us as a gift of his love for us. A very deep experience of
58 Allowing the Creator to Deal with the Creature

the Third Week may only come many years after one has fin-
ished the full Spiritual Exercises.
Social psychologists speak of the ''just world hypothesis"35
which unconsciously guides much of our thoughts, feelings and
behavior. According to this hypothesis suffering is deserved.
Thus, if we hear that someone has cancer of the lungs, we pre-
sume that he has been a heavy smoker. If a mud slide wipes out
a whole town, we wonder why the p~ople built their town in that
place. If a woman is raped, there is a tendency for people to pre-
sume that she went to the wrong part of town or made a poor
choice of companion or got what she was asking for. We want to
find a reason for a calamity. To understand this dynamic reflect
on your own reactions when you have heard some piece of bad
news regarding yourself. Behind the almost instinctive "Why
me?" lies the ''just world hypothesis," and the only answer that
makes sense is that I must have done something wrong. If
calamities are not somehow deserved, then we are all at risk at
any moment, and that is a frightening prospect. This "just world
hypothesis" makes it difficult for anyone of us to enter deeply
into the suffering of another, no matter how close. In the case of
Jesus the "just world hypothesis" is totally exploded. Here the
absolutely innocent one suffers horribly-another reason why it
is difficult for us to desire wholeheartedly to suffer with, to have
compassion for Jesus.
Some of the more bizarre theological theories to explain
the suffering of Jesus might well stem from the unconscious
sway of the "just world hypothesis." For instance, the theory
that Jesus had to suffer so horribly in order to satisfy God's
anger at the sins of humans. Or that only the suffering of a
human being who was God could make up for the infinite indig-
nity suffered by God through sin. These theories, it seems to me,
are concocted to explain why Jesus, the innocent one, had to
suffer so horribly, thus safeguarding the "just world hypothesis."
Yet anyone not beguiled by the hypothesis might ask how such
 Transition Points in the Dynamic of the Exercises 59
theories square with Jesus' revelation of God as his "Abba,"
"Daddy," (or "Mommy") and as overflowing love.
Thus, we must expect that no matter how strong our desire
to suffer with Jesus is there will be internal resistances to that
desire. Death threatens us with annihilation, with the loss of all
the relationships that make us who we are. In his Pulitzer Prize-
winning book, The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker demonstrated
quite well how pervasive in our culture the fear of death is, and
how desperately we strive to deny its possibility.36 All the psy-
chological defenses we put up to deny the reality of death will
raise their heads as we approach the Third Week of the Spiritual
Exercises.
Because of these resistances Ignatius has us beg for what
we desire over and over again. He knows firsthand that one
experience of compassion for Jesus will not suffice to overcome
the resistances. But in spite of the strength of the resistance
God's grace is not defeated.

People do receive this gift of sorrow and compassion

for Jesus, and they know that their sorrow is different
from the sorrow they experienced in the First Week
of the Exercises when they contemplated Jesus on the
-cross. Then they were sorry for their sins and mar-
veled that in spite of the sins which had put Jesus on
the cross he still looked on them with love. Now they
are not focused on themselves much at all, but on
Jesus and what he has gone through and is going
through. One woman came in during a retreat with
tears streaming down her face and said, "He's dead;
I'm glad that his agony is over." And people who
receive this grace of compassion for Jesus find that
the compassion spills over to compassion for all the
suffering people of this world. Indeed, they sense that
Jesus is still suffering in all the people who suffer,
especially in those who are oppressed and ground
60 Allowing the Creator to Deal with the Creature

down as he was. I think that such compassion for a

suffering world means taking on the heart of Christ
and the compassion of God. God, I believe, is reveal-
ing his own reactions to the horrors human beings
perpetrate on one another and on God's beloved
Jesus. The mystical body of Christ is experienced in
a mysterious way when God gives us this gift of
compassion for Jesus' suffering and the suffering of
untold others. 37

It may be that the deepest motivation for work for justice

in our world arises from the compassion of the Third Week.

The "Fourth Week"

Ignatius expects that in those who have experienced com-
passion for Jesus in some depth God will elicit a desire "for the
grace to be glad and to rejoice intensely because of the great
glory and joy of Christ our Lord" (n. 221). This shift in desire
ushers in the Fourth Week of the Exercises. Notice that the
retreatant asks for a grace, something not in one's own power to
achieve. Secondly, notice that we ask to rejoice for Jesus' sake.
The fact that we ask for a grace in this Week indicates that
the experience of joy in the resurrection of Jesus does not come
automatically. And indeed, we do experience resistance to this
grace, which seems strange indeed. However, to experience this
intense joy we have to be able to notice the wounds in Jesus'
hands and feet. The resurrection is not a return to the status quo
ante, not an undoing of the horrors of the crucifixion. To experi-
ence the joy of Jesus we must be able to accept the mysterious
"necessity" of such a horror. "Was it not necessary that the
Messiah should suffer these things and then enter his glory?"
(Lk 24:26). The only way that Jesus could be the glorified Jesus
he now is (rather than some other Jesus without the marks of
 Transition Points in the Dynamic of the Exercises 61
these particular wounds) was the way of the cross. This is the
wisdom of Jesus.
It is very hard for us to come to this wisdom. In fact, on
our own we cannot come to it. We need the grace of God.
Hence, we must beg God to be able to rejoice with Jesus. To
rejoice with him we must accept his cruel death. It was not a bad
dream, just as the pains and sufferings and losses we suffer and
will suffer in life are not bad dreams. I believe that we also can-
not fully rejoice in the life of our loved ones who have died and
experience their risen life until we can accept their suffering and
death. Not only does the fear of death keep us from fully enjoy-
ing this life, it also keeps us from rejoicing with the risen Jesus
and with our loved ones who have joined him. I want to repeat
once again Macmurray's maxim of real religion. "Fear not; the
things that you are afraid of are quite likely to happen to you,
but they are nothing to be afraid of."38 The resurrection of Jesus
shows real religion at its best. The passion and death really did
happen, but, Jesus says, they are nothing to be afraid of. When
we receive the grace of rejoicing with Jesus in his glory, then we
want to shout Alleluia over and over again.39

Conclusion
In this chapter I have tried to show some of the experiences
and desires of retreatants that indicate where in the dynamic pro-
gression of the Spiritual Exercises they are. Obviously progress
in the spiritual life is not a matter of smooth progress from one
plateau to another. The experience of being a loved sinner is not
a once-for-all achievement which never needs to be repeated.
The development of any relationship, and especially of the rela-
tionship with the Lord, is fraught with many peaks and valleys,
with periods of strong development in intimacy and periods of
regression to early stages of the relationship. Even a very deep
experience of the full Spiritual Exercises, even one which culmi-
nates in a mystical experience of the Contemplation to Obtain
62 Allowing the Creator to Deal with the Creature

Love, does not preclude later regressions to early stages in the

relationship with the Lord. However, once one has experienced
the heights of the relationship, one knows how much God wants
to give of Self and thus whets the appetite to desire to return to
that depth of relationship.
 6

IGNATIAN CONTEMPLATION: THE USE

OF IMAGINATION IN PRAYER

What was the original genial insight of Ignatius of Loyola?

I would say that it was the idea that God can be found in all
things, that every human experience has a religious dimension,
has religious meaning. The point is illustrated in the very first
chapter of the autobiography Ignatius dictated to Gorn;:alvesda
Camara. Ignatius, the fiery, brave, womanizing, ambitious
knight, is convalescing at the castle of Loyola from the shatter-
ing of his leg by a cannonball. He tells us that he was much
given to imagining himself as a knightly hero winning the favor
of a great lady. He would spend hours in such daydreams. Since,
however, he could not get the romantic novels he delighted in at
the Loyola castle, he began to read the only reading matter at
hand, a life of Christ and a book of lives of saints. What he read
also fed his imagination, and he began to engage in daydreams
of outdoing the saints in austerities in the following of Christ.
Again, these daydreams would last for hours. For a long time he
did not notice any difference in his reactions to these two sets of
daydreams. Yet there was a difference. During the knightly day-
dreams he felt exhilarated, but after them he felt "dry and unhap-
py." During the daydreams about imitating the saints, he also felt
exhilarated, but after these he "remained happy and joyful." He
then says:

He did not consider nor did he stop to examine this

difference until one day his eyes were partially
opened and he began to wonder at this difference and
63
64 Allowing the Creator to Deal with the Creature
to reflect upon it. From experience he knew that
some thoughts left him sad while others made him
happy, and little by little he came to perceive the dif-
ferent spirits that were moving him; one coming from
the devil, the other coming from God.40

I believe that this little story depicts the emergence of the

core of Ignatian spirituality, that God can be found in all things.
If God can be discovered in daydreams, then God can be found
anywhere. In this chapter I want to reflect on the way God used
the imagination of Ignatius to lead him to conversion and on
how the Ignatian Exercises suggest the use of imagination in
prayer.
Obviously Ignatius had a very strong imagination. He
loved to read the romantic novels of his time. They fired his
imagination to dream of doing great exploits for his king, his
country and his "grande dame." He is not alone in this liking for
romance, for heroic tales. Think of the popularity of the Western
novel and movie in the United States, which enkindled the
imaginations of countless people to imagine themselves as the
hero or heroine bringing peace and justice to a harsh land. Think
of the popularity of J. R. R. Tolkien's trilogy The Lord of the
Rings in which wizards, elves, dwarfs, human beings and hob-
bits (halflings) battle together to defeat the Dark Lord who
threatens doom to the world. I have read the trilogy five times,
and each time tears come to my eyes when Frodo and the other
hobbits are praised by the triumphant host for what they have
accomplished to help defeat the Dark Lord. Aragom, the King
in the trilogy, is almost the exact image of the king used by
Ignatius in his kingdom meditation in the Exercises for he, too,
shares all the toils and dangers of his men, leads them through
the valley of the dead, and gives his all to save the world from
the Dark Lord. Ignatius ate and drank such stories and they fired
his ambition and desire to do great things.
But God used this strong imagination to draw Ignatius to
 lgnatian Contemplation 65
another kind of ambition. The gospel stories and the lives of
saints are imaginative literature too. They can fire the imagina-
tion, and in Ignatius' case they did. You can imagine his dismay
when he discovered these were the only books available in
Loyola. Gradually, however, they caught his interest, piqued his
imagination, and the very same ambition which drove him to
want to do great knightly deeds now took over to let him imag-
ine himself doing the same heroic deeds that the saints did. And
in Christ he found a king better than all imagined earthly kings.
Finally, he noticed that the two sets of heroic imaginings had
different repercussions in his heart. Ignatius discovered that the
spirit of God was operative in both sets of imaginings, in the
worldly imaginings to help him to taste the ultimate vanity of
such exploits, and in the images of following Christ to help him
to taste the lasting joy of being with Christ. Actually, the way
Ignatius uses the parable of the king to help fire up the imagina-
tion of the retreatant for the person of Jesus seems to have been
the way the early Christians used the Suffering Servant stories of
Isaiah to catch the imagination of their hearers. One can imagine
them saying to one another: "Remember the story of the
Suffering Servant in Isaiah? Well, in Jesus that story has come
true, and in spades!"
Let me underline an important point here. Ignatius did not
become a totally different person with this first discernment and
his conversion. He was the same ambitious, driven man.41 From
his own experience Ignatius learned how God could use his
imaginative powers to teach him and draw him to a new way of
life. We have already seen how the insight he gained from his
daydreams during his convalescence was probably the kernel of
the kingdom meditation which he puts at the beginning of that
part of the Spiritual Exercises given over to contemplating the
public life of Jesus. It is aimed to fire the imagination with
desire to know Jesus better in order to love him more and follow
him more closely. But Ignatius also learned that God uses the
gospel stories to draw us imaginatively into their world in order
66 Allowing the Creator to Deal with the Creature
to reveal himself to us. So let us look at some of the suggestions
Ignatius makes in the Exercises.
Let me use the two contemplations of the incarnation and
the nativity. Here Ignatius spells out the suggestions that will
apply for all the contemplations to come. In the Second Prelude
of all the contemplations of the life of Christ, Ignatius suggests
"a composition, by imagining the place." In the contemplation
of the incarnation he says: "Here it will be to see the great extent
of the circuit of the world, with peoples so many and so diverse;
and then to see in particular the house and rooms of Our Lady,
in the city of Nazareth in the province of Galilee" (n. 103).
Immediately we see that Ignatius goes well beyond the gospel
text in his suggestions for the imagination.
In the text of the contemplation itself he fleshes out the
panoramic view of the world to have us picture the Trinity "gaz-
ing on the whole face and circuit of the earth" (n. 106). The
imaginative breadth is enormous, the whole sweep of the earth
under the gaze of God, and then it narrows to a tiny village in
the backwater province of Galilee and there to the home of a
young girl. The three points ask the retreatant to "see the various
persons, some here, some there," to "listen to what the persons
on the face of the earth are saying," "what the Divine Persons
are saying," "what the angel and Our Lady are saying," and then
to "consider what the people on the face of the earth are doing,"
"what the Divine Persons are doing," "what the angel and Our
Lady are doing." Nowhere in the gospels do we have any men-
tion of what is going on in the rest of the world at the time of the
annunciation, nor do we read of the counsels of the Holy Trinity.
Yet Ignatius imagines what is behind the text. The Trinity must
have taken counsel together, and for a reason. The reason, he
imagines, is what they see in the world, namely, that people are
going to hell and something needs to be done. Ignatius believes
that if we let our imaginations go in this way God will reveal to
us who Jesus is and what he stands for so that we will fall in
love with him and want to follow him.
 Jgnatian Contemplation 67
The Nativity contemplation repeats the suggestion about
the composition, imagining the place.

Here it will be to see in imagination the road from

Nazareth to Bethlehem. Consider its length and
breadth, whether it is level or winds through valleys
and hills. Similarly, look at the place or cave of the
Nativity: How big is it, or small? How low or high?
And how is it furnished? (n. 112)

Ignatius gives free rein to the retreatant's imagination.

Even though he had been to the Holy Land, he does not tell the
retreatant how the terrain looks in reality. Each retreatant is free
to imagine what the terrain and place might look like. In the
contemplation proper he again counsels looking at the persons,
listening to what they say, and considering what they are doing.
He also adds a new person to the scene, a "maidservant," and
suggests that "I will make myself a poor, little, and unworthy
slave, gazing at them, contemplating them, and serving them in
their needs, just as if I were there" (n. 114). Such suggestions
have freed retreatants to imagine themselves in the scene in
many ways. Women act as midwives; one pediatrician helped
Mary to deliver Jesus and then held him in his arms and handed
him to Mary. We can see that Ignatius expects that God willful-
fill the desire of the retreatant to get to know Jesus more inti-
mately through the use of his or her imagination.
This is probably as good a place as any to discuss at more
length the issue of imagination and fantasy in prayer. In the his-
tory of spirituality there have been two main ways of prayer.
One way stresses imageless, quiet prayer. In our day this way is
perhaps best exemplified by the use of centering prayer. One of
the best known teachers of this kind of prayer in the United
States is the Cistercian monk, Basil Pennington. 42 In Great
Britain and many other English-speaking countries the late
Benedictine, John Main, has had and continues to have a wide
68 Allowing the Creator to Deal with the Creature

influence.43 It is a very helpful way of giving ourselves a chance

to get in touch with the Mystery we call God at the center of our
being. The other way is exemplified by the Ignatian tradition
which advocates using all of our faculties in prayer: sensation,
imagination, mind, will. The stress on this way in this book
should not be taken to mean that this way is normative for
everyone. Both traditions have a venerable history, and I suspect
that most people can be helped to meet God by trying both
ways. It could be that some kinds of personalities prefer one
way to the other, but I am not prepared to try to distinguish per-
sonality types and their affinities for prayer forms. I would
encourage people to use whatever helps them to meet the living
God. Methods are only means to that desired end. When the end
is attained, i.e., when God is encountered, then the relationship
itself takes over.
But we need to say something about the use of imagination
as a method that many have found very helpful in meeting God.
We let the words of a gospel scene touch our imaginations in
much the same way that poetry or a novel might, asking the
Lord to reveal himself to us in the process. We can imagine our-
selves as actually a part of the scene, as Ignatius suggests.
At different times in our lives we will find ourselves iden-
tifying more with one character than another in a gospel scene.
When, for example, we feel lost and unsure of our path, we may
identify with Bartimaeus, the blind beggar of Mark 10, who
cries out, even against opposition, "Jesus, son of David, have
mercy on me!" The opposition may be within us, in the inner
voice that tries to tell us that prayer is futile. Then we, too, may
have to cry out all the more, and we, too, may hear deep within
us Jesus saying, "What do you want me to do for you?" And we
respond with our need to see, "My Teacher, let me see again; let
me see my way." And then we can pour out our heart's pain to
him.
At another time we may find ourselves surprised at our
reactions to a gospel scene. One man, for example, was reading
 lgnatian Contemplation 69
the section in Mark 3 where it says, "He went up the mountain
and called to him those whom he wanted; and they came to him.
And he appointed twelve, whom he also named apostles, to be
with him, and to be sent out to proclaim the message, and to
have authority to cast out demons" (Mk 3:13-15). He found
himself getting angry, and he did not understand why. He asked
the Lord to help him to understand what was happening.
Gradually it dawned on him that a Christian does not have much
choice of who his companions are going to be. He realized that
he was angry at a number of the people with whom his Christian
living had brought him together. The resentment had been build-
ing up unawares and affecting his happiness and his effective-
ness in work. The realization in itself freed him of some of his
anger, and he was also able to ask Jesus to help him to look at
his companions as also Jesus' companions.
Another example: People are often surprised at how diffi-
cult it is to let Jesus wash their feet as he washed the feet of his
disciples at the last supper (Jn 13). When they recoil, they now
understand Peter's reaction which before had seemed incompre-
hensible. As they ponder their reaction and ask the Lord's light
on it, they come to sense that their real sin is the unwillingness
to accept Jesus' forgiveness and to believe that they are loved
and, therefore, lovable.
People obviously differ in their imaginative abilities, or
perhaps better, in the kinds of imagination they have. Some
seem able to visualize in colorful detail the whole gospel scene,
almost as though their imaginations were creating a Technicolor
movie. Others have a vivid auditory imagination so that whole
conversations seem to go on in their heads and hearts. Others,
and here I count myself, do not seem to see or hear much at all,
but to feel the story and the characters in a way that is hard to
describe. This last group can be envious when they listen to the
more vivid descriptions of others and may even feel discouraged
at their "lack of imagination." Actually everyone has an imagi-
nation. If you wince when someone describes the impact of a
70 Allowing the Creator to Deal with the Creature

hammer hitting his thumb, you have an imagination; if you can

enjoy a good story, you have an imagination. Imaginations dif-
fer; we need to let God use the one we have and not bemoan the
one we do not have.
There are some people with vivid, creative imaginations
who have been able to let God use this gift as a way to develop
the relationship. One woman I know spent the good part of a
retreat on a vacation with Jesus during which time she was able
to pour out her heart to him and ask his advice about how to
handle some of the troubling issues of her life. Some of her
times of prayer were spent imaginatively outdoors, some before
a fireplace. Near the end of the retreat Jesus left and headed
back to the city, and she knew that this was his way of telling
her that he would be with her in her daily life. One man spent a
long time in prayer on a camping trip with Jesus. In the course
of the trip the basic issue of their relationship emerged, namely
the man's ability and willingness to trust Jesus enough to tell
him what was really on his mind. Some people create whole sto-
ries out of incidents in the gospels. One woman followed Jesus
on the way of the cross in vivid detail, even to the point of help-
ing him to his feet when he stumbled and staying close to him
when the guards became menacing and tried to drive her away.
Nothing could keep her from going with Jesus.
When we use our imaginations in prayer in any of these
ways, we are aware that much of what happens is our own prod-
uct, based on our own past experience. How can we be sure that
the whole thing is not just a fanciful daydream that we piously
call prayer? My first answer is a trust in tradition. God has, it
seems, used the imagination of saints like Ignatius of Loyola,
Francis Xavier, Margaret Mary Alacoque to draw them into a
very deep intimate friendship with him. Then I would point to a
need for discernment, but a discernment that does not take as a
starting point suspicion of our human nature, but trust that God
has made us good. It is a profound insight of Ignatius to note in
the beginning of his rules for discernment that God's presence to
 lgnatian Contemplation 71
those who are searching for him is signaled by positive emo-
tions: gentleness, peacefulness, quiet confidence (nn. 315-316).
If our use of the imagination leads to such feelings as well as to
an increased faith and hope and love, and a desire to know God
and Jesus more, then we can have confidence that the Lord is
using our imaginations for his purposes and our good. Doubts
about such prayer can be seen as temptations, especially if the
doubts and questions allow of no clear answers, that is, remain
only as nagging doubts and questions and do not lead to new and
better ways to pray.
In this matter of discernment it also helps to have someone
we can talk to about our prayer. That is, it is good to have a spir-
itual director.44 For now it suffices to note that it is very helpful
for retreatants' confidence in the direction of their prayer life to
be able to describe what is happening to someone who is inter-
ested in listening to it. Just the act of describing to another what
happens when they pray helps them to be more attentive to the
conscious relationship with God and more appreciative of the
gifts they have been given, even if the other person does nothing
more than listen attentively and sympathetically. In the process
of describing their experience they often see where they are
being led by God and where they are straying from the path. It is
even more helpful, of course, if the spiritual director can also, by
judicious questions and comments, help retreatants to see that
their prayer is leading toward a deeper intimacy with the Lord
that fits the pattern of how God has dealt with people, even if
each person is a unique exemplar of the pattern.
The main point of this chapter is to encourage directors to
be as free as Ignatius in encouraging retreatants to use whatever
helps them to meet the living God. In the lgnatian tradition
imagination has been a great help. If this is their way, let them
trust it as one of God's gifts to help them to know God better.
 7

THE DISCERNMENT OF SPIRITS

Ignatius of Loyola lived in an age comparable in its tur-

moil and promise to our own. He, too, lived on the cusp as one
world order crumbled and a new one was struggling to be born.
One could say that he was one of the religious geniuses the
Catholic Church needed at that time to see its way into the new
world being born during his lifetime. His genius lay in realizing
that God can be found in all things, that every human experience
has a religious dimension, has religious meaning, for those who
want to discover it. This discovery of the religious meaning of
one's inner experience is called the discernment of spirits, a
term that was. rich in tradition long before the life of Ignatius,
but one which received new impetus and use with the publica-
tion of the Spiritual Exercises. In this book Ignatius codified the
"Rules for the Discernment of Spirits" which he learned from
his own experience (nn. 313-336). But because discernment of
spirits is often viewed as an arcane and mysterious process,
something left to the mystics and masters of spirituality, we
need to look more closely at this process to see how it can
become an ordinary event in the life of any Christian.

Ignatius' Own Discernment

In the last chapter we referred to the first discernment of
spirits Ignatius fell into. He noticed that two sets of daydreams
led to different affective states, and he drew the conclusion that
God was leading him toward a new way of life, away from the
life of chivalry which gave him so much apparent pleasure. The
72
 The Discernment of Spirits 73
interesting point about this first discernment is that it occurred to
a layman quite innocent of any theological or spiritual knowl-
edge. Moreover, it happened in the ordinary event of daydream-
ing. Nothing could be further from the esoteric or mystical as
these are ordinarily understood. Thus, we have in this story a
description of the discernment of spirits in ordinary life, a
description that lays to rest any theory of the discernment of
spirits that makes it an esoteric or arcane spiritual discipline
open only to the spiritually gifted and theologically trained.
Ignatius was theologically ignorant, and was so far from being
spiritually gifted that even after this first discernment and a
vision of the Madonna he could not make up his mind about
whether to kill a Moor or not, as the story from the next chapter
of his autobiography attests.
Right after he left Loyola to take up his new life of follow-
ing Jesus, he and a Moor met on the road, both riding mules.
They began to converse and the conversation turned to the topic
of Mary, the mother of Jesus. The Moor could well imagine that
Mary had conceived Jesus without benefit of a man, but he
could not agree that she was a virgin after giving birth. Ignatius
tried to dissuade him from this opinion, but could not succeed.
The Autobiography tells us that the Moor raced on ahead of
Ignatius. We can imagine that the Moor felt Ignatius getting
more and more irate. After the Moor left, Ignatius began to have
misgivings about his behavior; perhaps he had not done enough
to uphold the honor of Our Lady. The desire came over him to
race after the Moor and strike him with his dagger. He couldn't
make up his mind. He couldn't discern what to do, in other
words. And he was in an agony of indecision. Finally in desper-
ation he decided to let the mule make the decision for him. He
let the reins go slack. If the mule followed the broad road to the
town to which the Moor was heading, Ignatius would seek him
and strike him; if the mule kept to the road he was on, then he
would let the Moor go. The mule kept to the road he was on.45
74 Allowing the Creator to Deal with the Creature
Obviously Ignatius did not immediately become a master of dis-
cernment.
Nonetheless, with the first discernment he made on his
sickbed, we have the essential elements for an understanding of
Ignatian discernment. Life is a battleground where the stakes are
enormous. The two great protagonists in this battle are God and
Satan. Both are in a dialogical relationship with all human
beings, but for absolutely different ends. God wants all human
beings to live as God's sons and daughters, as brothers and sis-
ters of Jesus Christ. In other words, God wants all human beings
to be saved, and God is working all the time in this world to
achieve that end. Satan diametrically opposes God's purpose.
He wants to estrange all human beings not only from God but
also from one another. The battlegrounds are the hearts and
minds of human beings. Thus, for Ignatius, the struggle is dia-
logical; God is trying to attract human beings to enter the com-
munity life of the Trinity, and Satan is trying to draw us away
from that community. In ordinary human experience both God
and the Evil One are at their work of attracting us. Hence, in
ordinary human experience the influences of the two great pro-
tagonists can be discerned. Nothing in human experience is, for
Ignatius, insignificant, because at every moment God and Satan
are at work. Careful attention to inner experience, therefore, is a
hallmark of lgnatian spirituality; such attention is absolutely
necessary if the individual wants to know God's desires for him
or her.
This aspect of Ignatius' spirituality has great relevance for
our own age, when many of the institutions, structures and cus-
toms by which people lived their lives without much thought
have been called into question. There are few outside criteria by
which men and women of today can make clear decisions about
right and wrong, or about the better way to live their lives.
Moreover, as John Macmurray long ago pointed out, our civi-
lization has arrived at the point where our intellects are refined
and highly honed but our emotions (our hearts) are relatively
 The Discernment of Spirits 75
undeveloped and immature. In a trenchant series of B.B.C.
broadcasts in the early 1930's he argued forcefully that western-
ers needed to submit to the discipline of developing more adult
and civilized hearts. 46 I have developed his thoughts and tried to
show that the discernment of spirits is a primary way to attain
that maturity of heart. 47 The genius of this sixteenth century
saint, Ignatius of Loyola, still has relevance for our day.
However, another aspect of this spirituality may be much
more difficult for modern men and women to accept. At
[Link], Ignatius was tutored by God and gradually became a
master of discernment. During these months of prayer he
became convinced that God wanted him to live out his days in
Jerusalem, and with the single-mindedness so characteristic of
him he proceeded to go there. "He made a firm decision to
remain in Jerusalem, constantly visiting the Holy Places. In
addition to this devout desire of his, he was also intent on help-
ing souls." 48 When the provincial of the Franciscans told him
that he could not remain, Ignatius told him quite frankly that he
was determined to stay. Only when the provincial threatened
him with excommunication did Ignatius agree to obey, conclud-
ing that "it was not Our Lord's will for him to remain in the
Holy Places .... " 49
One commentator on the rules for discernment, Leo
Bakker, maintains that the decision to remain in Jerusalem was
made around the time of the vision by the river Cardoner and
was an election in the "first time," that is, "an occasion when
God our Lord moves and attracts the will in such a way that a
devout person, without doubting or being able to doubt, carries
out what was proposed" (Sp. Ex. #175). According to Bakker,
the decision of the provincial in Jerusalem posed to Ignatius the
question of trying to figure out how a decision clearly God's (his
election to stay in Jerusalem) could be contrary to a decision
clearly God's (the provincial's decision). In Bakker's view
reflection on this question led to the eighth rule of the rules for
discernment appropriate to the Second Week of the Exercises
76 Allowing the Creator to Deal with the Creature
(#336) in which Ignatius cautions the exercitant to distinguish
carefully the moment of a consolation without previous cause
from succeeding [Link] Bakker also traces the Rules for
Thinking with the Church in the Spiritual Exercises
(nn.352-370) to this experience in Jerusalem. For Ignatius,
authority in the church was clearly a mediator of the will of
God. Discernment of spirits was always in creative tension with
obedience to legitimate authority as a means of knowing God's
will. For many modern Christians, Catholics among them,
authority does not have the same sharp relevance that it had for
Ignatius. Many would find inexplicable the complete acquies-
cence of a man of such obvious strength of character to the
provincial's authority. Yet lgnatian discernment must be under-
stood as embedded in the "Catholic thing," in the belief that the
institutional church also mediates the will of God. lgnation spir-
ituality is decidedly realistic and Catholic. Discernment takes
place in the real world where all things are not possible and in
the Catholic Church where legitimate authority may have the
final word.

Discernment and the "Principle and Foundation"

Now let us develop at more length some of the central ele-
ments of lgnatian discernment of spirits. First, the discernment
of spirits must be understood against the background of the First
Principle and Foundation, "The Fundamentum" elucidated by
Joseph Tetlow.s1 Tetlow argues that behind the seemingly dry
and catechism-like words of Ignatius, as we have argued in
chapter 4, lies an experience of God's creative and continually
creating action. I have found the philosophy of action of the
Scottish philosopher John Macmurray particularly helpful in
understanding what Ignatius intended with the Fundamentum.s2
Macmurray comes to the conclusion that the universe is the one
action of God, an action governed by one intention. We only
know anyone's intention through that person's revelation; a for-
 The Discernment of Spirits 77
tiori we can only know God's intention through revelation.
Christians believe that God has revealed God's intention in
Christ Jesus. At the least we can say that God has revealed
God's intention for our world, whatever may be said of the
whole universe. "God's intention, it seems, is that all human
beings live as brothers and sisters in a community of faith, hope
and love united with Jesus Christ as sons and daughters of God,
our Father and in harmony with the whole created universe. 53 I
have argued elsewhere that this one action of God can be under-
stood as the kingdom of God, the central theme of the preaching
Jesus.54 God is always actively bringing about God's kingdom,
and we can be in tune with God's intention, out of tune or more
or less in tune. With absolute clarity and consequentiality
Ignatius saw that for our own best interests and blessedness we
need to be in tune with God's one action. The First Principle and
Foundation is a pithy statement of this insight. Let me para-
phrase the first two sentences of the Principle in the language of
this chapter. "Human beings are created for community with the
Trinity and hence with one another. All the other things on the
face of the earth are created to help us to attain this community."
We have to understand this statement not as an external demand
put on human beings by a sovereign and implacable God, but as
an expression of what is for our good. The Spiritual Exercises
are a means to become attuned to God's one action and inten-
tion, to become contemplatives in action, people who quite liter-
ally find God in all things even in the hurly-burly of a very
active life.

Discernment and Action

Historically the purpose of the Exercises has been under-
stood in two different senses. One tendency stressed the aim of
union with God; the other stressed the discovery of God's will.
With Bakker and other modem commentators, I prefer to join
the two and see the Spiritual Exercises as a means of helping
78 Allowing the Creator to Deal with the Creature

exercitants to union with God in action. Bakker notes, for exam-

ple, that for Ignatius, consolation was not first and foremost a
pleasant and moving emotion nor encouragement to continue on
a chosen path nor help in prayer; consolation includes all of
these, but first and foremost it is an experience that makes it
possible to know and choose the will of God.

From the time of the illumination at Cardoner the dis-

cernment of inner movements and consolation flow
together with the election (e.g., the choice of a way
of life) for Ignatius. The fact that Ignatius reflexively
emphasizes this flowing together of consolation and
election and then methodically works it out as the
center and source of the spiritual life is the new ele-
ment brought into the history of spirituality by the
Spiritual Exercises.55

In other words, in lgnation spirituality union with God

occurs in the decision to act in a certain way and in the action
itself. In Macmurray's terminology, we become one with God
insofar as we are in tune with the one action of God in our own
actions. To put it another way, we become one with God insofar
as our actions are in tune with the kingdom of God. 56
In the Autobiography Ignatius tells us that he learned to
distrust consolations that came to him as he was about to go to
sleep. These consolations kept him from the little sleep he had
allotted to himself.

Now and then reflecting on this loss of sleep, he con-

sidered how he had allotted a fixed amount of time
each day to converse with God, and then the remain-
der of the day as well, and thus he came to doubt
whether those lights came from the good spirit. He
concluded that it was better to set them aside and
sleep the allotted time. This he did.57
 The Discernmentof Spirits 79
Later, in Barcelona and in Paris, he found that consolations
kept him from paying attention in class or from memorizing his
grammar lessons. Gradually he came to the conclusion that these
consolations were temptations. 58 In these two vignettes Ignatius
shows how deeply he has penetrated the mystery of God's uni-
tive action in this world. Even profound spiritual consolations
can be discovered as temptations by reference to their deleteri-
ous effects on action which one has discerned to be in tune with
God's one action. Asceticism requires that one eschew such con-
solations in order to be in union with God.
For Ignatius the discernment of spirits became so important
in ordinary life that he frequently made examens of conscious-
ness.59 Moreover, he would allow a Jesuit to miss all other spiri-
tual exercises for the sake of the apostolate except the examen of
consciousness. For Ignatius, as I have argued elsewhere, 60 the
examen functioned much as the period of reflection after each
prayer time in the Spiritual Exercises. Just as the exercitant is
asked to reflect on the period of prayer to discern the movements
of the spirits so, too, for Ignatius, the contemplative in action, a
period of the day could be considered a time of encountering the
different spirits, and so he reflected on that period to discover the
movements of these spirits.

Rules for Discernment

For our own good God desires that each of us be in tune
with his one action in our actions; in our best moments we, too,
desire to be in tune with God's action. How do we know
whether we are in tune or not? I believe that when we are out of
tune with God's one action, we experience ourselves as alienat-
ed, unhappy, unfulfilled, even though we do not know the source
of the malaise. These feelings of malaise are, I believe, what
Ignatius calls the actions of the "good spirit" in his first rule for
the discernment of spirits.
80 Allowing the Creator to Deal with the Creature

In the case of persons who are going from one mortal

sin to another, the enemy ordinarily proposes appar-
ent pleasures. He makes them imagine delights and
pleasures of the senses, in order to hold them fast and
plunge them deeper into their sins and vices.
But with persons of this type the good spirit uses a
contrary procedure. Through their good judgment on
problems of morality he stings their consciences with
remorse (Sp. Ex., #314).

In other words, when I am out of tune with the one action

of God, when I am acting predominantly out of fear for myself
and, therefore, against the community of the Trinity, rather than
out of love for others, then I experience the action of God as a
troubling of my spirit, as a sting of conscience. Ignatius' own
experience of sadness after the daydreams about knightly deeds
is an example of this action of God. God continually acts in the
universe to draw all of us into community with the Trinity and
with one another. When we act counter to that action, we experi-
ence ourselves as somehow out of sorts with ourselves and with
others. In this understanding there is no need of special interven-
tions by God or the good spirit although we may experience the
one action of God as an external intervention.
The second rule for the discernment of spirits in the
Exercises speaks "of persons who are earnestly purging away
their sins, and who are progressing from good to better in the
service of God our Lord." In our terminology these are people
who desire to attune their actions with the one action of God and
desire it effectively. In this case, Ignatius says,

... it is characteristic of the evil spirit to cause gnaw-

ing anxiety, to sadden, and to set up obstacles. In this
he unsettles these persons by false reasons aimed at
preventing their progress.
But with persons of this type it is characteristic of the
 The Discernment of Spirits 81
good spirit to stir up courage and strength, consola-
tions, tears, inspirations, and tranquillity. He makes
things easier and eliminates all obstacles, so that the
persons may move forward in doing good (Sp. Ex.,
315).

Can we make sense of this for our times? In an earlier

book I answered the question in this way:

If you have ever experienced a time when you were

"in the flow," able to live with relative unambiva-
lence and lack of fear in the now, attuned to the pres-
ence of God, then you have an idea of what it might
be like to be at one with the one action of God. In
such a state you are a contemplative in action. You
know that you are at the right place at the right time.
There are no doubts about whether you should be
someone else or somewhere else. You do not need to
justify being married or single or a religious; it is
right to be who you are here and now. And you live
and act comfortably with the knowledge of your own
limitations, of your finitude, of your small part in the
immense history of the world. To be attuned to the
one action of God, to his will, is to be extraordinarily
free, happy and fulfilled even in the midst of a world
of sorrow and pain. One can, perhaps, understand
how Jesus could celebrate the Last Supper even
though he knew in his bones that it would be "last." 61

To be in tune with God's intention in this way is to experi-

ence what Ignatius calls "consolation" in the next rule:

By [this kind of] consolation I mean that which

occurs when some interior motion is caused within
the soul through which it comes to be inflamed with
82 Allowing the Creator to Deal with the Creature

love of its Creator and Lord. As a result it can love

no created thing on the face of the earth in itself, but
only in the Creator of them all.
Similarly, this consolation is experienced when the
soul sheds tears which move it to love for its Lord-
whether they are tears of grief for its own sins, or
about the Passion of Christ our Lord, or about other
matters directly ordered to his service and praise.
Finally, under the word consolation I include every
increase in faith, hope, and charity, and every interior
joy which calls and attracts toward heavenly things
and to the salvation of one's soul, by bringing it tran-
quillity and peace in its Creator and Lord (Sp. Ex.,
316.).

With Josef Sudbrack we can equate the modem concept of

identity with Ignatius' concept of consolation. 62 According to
this theory the best criterion for discerning whether we are in
tune with God's one action in our daily choices is the sense of
developing inner and outer harmony, a growing sense of our-
selves as related harmoniously to other people, our world and
our God. A person who has come to an habitual way of discern-
ing in this way is well on the way to being a contemplative in
action.
To be out of tune with God's intention is to experience
what Ignatius calls "desolation" in the fourth rule:

By [this kind of] desolation I mean everything which

is contrary of what was described in the Third Rule;
for example, obtuseness of soul, turmoil within it, an
impulsive motion toward low and earthly things, or
disquiet from various agitations and temptations.
These move one toward lack of faith and leave one
without hope and without love. One is completely
 The Discernment of Spirits 83
listless, tepid, and unhappy, and feels separated from
our Creator and Lord (317).

I believe that it is easy enough to recognize such desolation

when its source is personal sinfulness, when the person is per-
sonally alienated from God's intention. What directors need to
be alert to is the possibility that such "desolation" comes from a
sense of hopelessness about our social lives. The attitude of
alienation from institutions is all-pervasive in our society. We
see corruption all around us, in government, in business, even in
the churches. There is a wholesale lack of trust not only of "City
Hall" (meaning any institution that governs), but also of fellow
citizens. Crime in the streets, in schools, in our homes, is an
everyday affair. Anger and hatred often seem only barely con-
cealed, and violence only with great control avoided. Many, if
not most, of us experience a sense of frustration and helpless-
ness about the structures and patterns that govern our lives. We
may also vaguely feel a complicity in these structures or pat-
terns. For example, race and class seem to keep so many of our
fellow citizens trapped in the inner cities of our country. We
become aware of the possibility that we ourselves are part of the
problem, not of the solution. Such feelings can make prayer very
difficult, if not impossible.
However, if these feelings do not lead to a deeper conver-
sation with the Lord and to a concerted effort to do our part to
change the sinful social structures that condition our lives as a
people, then they are "desolation," what I would call, for lack of
a better word, "social desolation." When we encounter such des-
olation in ourselves or in our directees, we need to bring these
feelings of helplessness and lack of hope to the Lord for healing.
At a meeting in Brussels on the Spiritual Exercises, Gerard W.
Hughes, S.J. made a very interesting observation. He has found
that people who have spent time working for social justice often
feel, during the First Week, "shame and confusion" (what they
desire in the First Week, n. 48) because of the sorry state of the
84 Allowing the Creator to Deal with the Creature
society they are part of. Interestingly enough, this shame and
confusion is liberating; they discover that God does not want
society to be so unjust, but that God still loves the world and
this society and wants people who will help to change it.

An Example That Illustrates the Use of the Rules

It would take us too far afield to go through all the Rules
for Discernment in the Spiritual Exercises. What I wanted to
show here is that these rules are not esoteric and out of the ordi-
nary. They can be verified in our ordinary lives if we take the
time to pay attention to our experience. However, a recent
novel, Glamorous Powers, by Susan Howatch might well be
read as a description of the discernment of spirits. It reads like a
spiritual mystery story.
Two of Ignatius' rules can be illustrated by one section of
the novel. The protagonist is Father Darrow, an abbot of the
Fordite Congregation noted for his psychic and spiritual gifts
(the "glamorous powers" of the title). On the occasion of the
death of the founder of the Fordites, Darrow's mentor, and the
accession to the office of Abbot-General of his rival, Father
Francis, Darrow has a vision which he interprets as a call to
leave the Fordites and return to life as a priest in the "world."
Abbot Francis, however, has doubts about the authenticity of the
call and demands that Darrow enter into a period of discernment
with him. Darrow tries to use his psychic powers and his self-
control to bend the process of discernment toward his interpreta-
tion of the vision. He lies, in fact. In Rule Thirteen of the Rules
for the First Week (n.326) Ignatius notes that the bad spirit tries
to seduce the directee into secrecy about what is actually hap-
pening in his or her experience. In Rule One of the Rules for the
Second Week he notes that "it is characteristic of the enemy to
fight against this happiness and spiritual consolation, by using
specious reasons, subtleties, and persistent deceits" (n. 329). In
his attempts to sidetrack an authentic discernment of spirits,
 The Discernment of Spirits 85
Darrow becomes an angry and very unhappy man. The tum
toward real discernment comes in the following scene. Darrow
is narrating.

"I lied to you yesterday," I said to Francis when we

met again. "I'm sorry. I know very well I've got to be
entirely truthful in order to help you reach the right
decision."
Francis never asked what the lie was. That impressed
me. Nor did he make any attempt to humiliate me fur-
ther by embarking on a justifiable reproof. That
impressed me even more. Instead he motioned me to
sit down and said abruptly:
"It's a question of trust, isn't it, and you don't trust
me yet."
I forced myself to say: "I do want to trust you."
"Well, at least that's a step in the right direction."
"And I do accept that you're a first-class monk-"
"No, you don't. You accept that I'm a first-class
administrator and you accept that the old man gave
me a first-class training, but I've still to prove I'm a
first-class monk, and that's why it's just as vital for
me as it is for you that I should deal with your crisis
correctly. I know perfectly well that you believe the
only reason why I became Abbot-General was
because I knew how to exploit the old man's secret
longing for a son. Well, now I have to prove the old
man wasn't completely off his head and that I really
am the right man for the job, so accept that I have a
powerful motive to behave properly here, Jonathan,
and do please discard your fear that I'll be unable to
wield the charism of discernment unless you regular-
ly throw in a lie or two to help me along."
Yet again I was impressed. I heard myself say: "It
takes courage to be as honest as that. Thank you. I
86 Allowing the Creator to Deal with the Creature
can't promise you I'll succeed in matching your hon-
esty, but I can promise I'll do my best to try."
"Then put on your boxing-gloves," said Francis, not
ill-pleased by this exchange, "and let's step back into
the ring for the next round."63

The novel as a whole concerns the struggle of Darrow to

discern the meaning of his vocation.

Conclusion
On his sickbed Ignatius had two sets of daydreams which
had different repercussions in his emotional life. One day he
noticed the difference and then decided that one set of day-
dreams was from God, the other not. Yet God was also in the
worldly daydreams, as the spirit that left him feeling disconso-
late afterwards. From these simple beginnings Ignatian spiritual-
ity developed. Ignatius learned from experience that God could
be found in all things. The phrase "finding God in all things"
has become a hallmark of Ignatian spirituality. What Ignatius
learned on his sickbed and later is part of the heritage of the
church's tradition. It still has relevance for our own time. We
need only begin to pay attention to our experience and to ask
where God is present in it.
 8

THE CHANGING SELF-GOD IMAGE OF

IGNATIUS OF LOYOLA
IN RELATION TO DISCERNMENT

Since the assimilation of modem psychology into contem-

porary spirituality, we have become accustomed to describing
the developing relationship of a person with God in interperson-
al terms. I have tried such a description in Spiritual Direction
and the Encounter with God where I described prayer as con-
scious relationship and then attempted to describe the develop-
ment of that relationship in terms of the dynamic of the Spiritual
Exercises.64 Those of us who use such a framework often use a
form of what Freudians call "object relations theory" and apply
it to the relationship with God.65 According to this theory, we all
carry around with us self-other schemata (internal "images" or
psychic structures of the self in relation to others) learned in our
interactions with significant people. With these schemata we
approach all new people. Such a theory serves to explain instant
likes and dislikes. A new person is assimilated into an image of
someone in my past life whom I liked or disliked. The theory is
also used to explain how people get into repetitive destructive
relationships without ever learning from experience. These
schemata are self-other psychic structures; they are relational in
nature because they are learned through relationships. In other
words, the images with their associated feelings and thoughts are
of the self in relation to another and others. All our images of
self are relational.
According to this theory, we also meet God with learned
87
88 Allowing the Creatorto Deal with the Creature
self-God schemata which derive from our relationships with
parents and others, from teachings about God, and from past
experiences of the Mystery we call God. 66 These schemata are
always distorted and untrue to the reality of who God really is
for us. In other words, our experience of God is impoverished
because of our self-God schemata. We could say that the devel-
opment of the relationship with God consists in the learning of
progressively more realistic images of self and God in relation-
ship through the actual encounter with God in sacraments,
prayer, and life in general. The development could be seen as a
process of losing our idols or false images of God (and self)
through the encounter itself, just as the actual encounter with a
new person in our life will teach us something new about our-
selves and that person if we let the relationship develop.
I contend that one criterion for assessing whether
retreatants or directees are heading in the right direction in their
lives might be to help them to look at the quality of the relation-
ship with God and the changes that have taken place in the rela-
tionship. Thus shifts in a certain direction in a person's self-God
schema could be used to discern whether certain experiences are
of God or not, and whether the thrust of a person's life is mov-
ing forward or regressing.
In this chapter I want to illustrate such a progression by
using the Autobiography of Ignatius. I believe that the experi-
ences Ignatius describes in the first three chapters of that work
can be understood in terms of Ignatius' progressive education
about his relationship with God. In other words, the changes he
describes can be understood as changes in his self-God schema.
In the course of demonstrating this thesis we will discover that
Ignatius, who calls himself the pilgrim in the Autobiography,
shows himself to be a pilgrim from an impoverished image of
God to an image of God as Lover par excellence. In the process
his own self-image changes as well.
First, let us once again note that Ignatius' initial conver-
sion experience came about through noticing the difference
 The Changing Self-God Image of Ignatius of Loyola 89
between two sets of daydreams as he convalesced from his
wounds and the leg operations those wounds entailed. In one set
of daydreams Ignatius spent hours on end imagining the great
deeds he would do, the fine words he would say to win the heart
of a great lady. In the other set Ignatius spent equally long hours
dreaming of the great deeds he would do for Christ in imitation
of saints like Dominic and Francis. He notes that there was a dif-
ference in the two experiences:

When he thought of worldly matters he found much

delight, but after growing weary and dismissing them
he found that he was dry and unhappy. But when he
thought of going barefoot to Jerusalem and of eating
nothing but vegetables and of imitating the saints in
all the austerities they performed, he not only found
consolation in these thoughts but even after they had
left him he remained happy and joyful. He did not
consider nor did he stop to examine this difference
until one day his eyes were partially opened and he
began to wonder at this difference and to reflect upon
it. From experience he knew that some thoughts left
him sad while others made him happy, and little by
little he came to perceive the different spirits that
were moving him; one coming from the devil, the
other coming from God.67

In these two sets of daydreams the same vaulting ambition,

the same vivid imagination are at work, but to different ends.
The reading of the life of Christ and of the lives of the saints
piqued Ignatius' interest and fired his imagination much as did
the romantic literature he so enjoyed and would have preferred
to read during his convalescence. Finally, he noticed that the two
sets of daydreams had different emotional consequences in his
heart, and then he discerned that one set is from God, the other
from the demon.
90 Allowing the Creator to Deal with the Creature

With this decisive discernment Ignatius was set upon a

new path, but he was not yet a new person. The rather amusing
story of his encounter with the Moor on the road to Montserrat,
recounted earlier, shows how far he was from being a man of
discemment. 68 What was Ignatius' image of himself in relation
to God at this time? A telling phrase occurs in the passage
where he recounts his desire to enter the Carthusian house in
Seville.

But when he again thought of the penances he want-

ed to fulfill as he went about the world, the desire for
the Carthusian way of life cooled since he feared that
there he would not be able to give vent to the hatred
that he had conceived against himself.69

That self-hatred tells us much about his image of God at

this time of preparation for the journey that would end up in
Manresa. If Ignatius hates himself so violently, we can speculate
that he harbors an image of himself before an implacable God.
Not long after his arrival in Manresa we hear ominous hints of
where such a self-God image can lead.

While in Manresa he begged alms every day. He ate

no meat, nor did he drink wine, though both were
offered to him. On Sundays he did not fast, and if
someone gave him wine, he drank it. And because he
had been quite meticulous in caring for his hair,
which was according to the fashion of the day -and
he had a good crop of hair-he decided to let it grow
naturally without combing, cutting, or covering it
with anything either during the day or night. For the
same reason he let the nails of his feet and hands
grow since he had also been overly neat with regard
to them. 70
 The Changing Self-God Image of Ignatius of Loyola 91
He began to attack his body and his former attitudes with
reckless abandon to the point where he did permanent harm to
his health, as he notes later. It is at this point that he mentions
the serpent-like image that "gave him much consolation." "He
received much delight and consolation from gazing upon this
object and the more he looked upon it, the more his consolation
increased, but when the object vanished he became disconso-
late."71 Ignatius did not make the connection with the earlier dis-
cernment when he noted that the daydreams of doing knightly
deeds delighted him during the dreaming, but left him sad after-
ward. Moreover, he notes that around the time when this vision
began, "a disturbing thought came to torment him, pointing out
to him the burdensomeness of his life. It was like someone
speaking within his soul: 'And how will you be able to put up
with this for the seventy years you have ahead of you?"' 72 With
this temptation began the great swings of mood which led him
into the terrible bout of scruples which he so poignantly
describes in the following pages of the Autobiography.
The agony of his struggle with these scruples brought him
to this point:

Once, being very disturbed because of them, he set

himself to pray and with great fervor he cried aloud
to God, saying, "Help me, Lord, for I find no remedy
among men, nor in any creature. No task would be
too irksome for me if I thought I could get help. Lord,
show me where I may get it, and even if I have to fol-
low after a little dog to get the remedy I need, I will
do it."
Taken up with these thoughts he was many times
vehemently tempted to throw himself into a deep hole
in his room which was near the place where he used
to pray.73

His self-hatred has taken a very violent tum. What kind of

92 Allowing the Creator to Deal with the Creature

image of God lies behind such scruples? It has to be a God who,

in the words of the psychiatrist J. S. Mackenzie cited earlier, "is
always snooping around after sinners." 74 Ignatius felt that he had
not completely confessed his sins. At one point a confessor
ordered him not to confess any sins of the past "unless it was
something abundantly clear. But since he considered everything
manifestly clear, the order benefited him not at all..." 75 For
Ignatius at this time God must have been a terrible judge ready
to pounce on every sin.
Finally, Ignatius had a couple of days in which he felt free
from scruples:

But on the third day, which was Tuesday, the remem-

brance of his sins returned to him while he was at
prayer, and as one thing leads to another, he thought
of sin after sin from his past life and felt obliged to
confess them again. After these thoughts, there came
upon him a loathing for the life he was then living
and he had a strong temptation to give it up. In this
manner the Lord chose to awaken him as from a
dream.76

Ignatius, we can speculate, has realized that the image of

God with which he has operated thus far in Manresa was a prod-
uct of the demon, and not an image of the true God. He contin-
ues:

Now that he had some experience with the different

spirits-through the lessons that God had given
him-he began to think about the way that that spirit
had come to him. Thus he decided, and with great
clarity of mind, never to confess his past sins again
and from that day forward he was free of his scru-
ples, and he held it for certain that Our Lord had
desired to set him free because of his mercy.77
 The Changing Self-God Image of Ignatius of Loyola 93
God is not implacable, but merciful, and Ignatius can count on
this God. Thus he need not continually grub around in his mind
for possible unconfessed sins.
Immediately after recounting this discernment Ignatius
describes how he rather easily discerned God's will in two mat-
ters which before would have led to agonizing indecision. The
first we have already mentioned, namely, how he came to realize
that great spiritual consolations at bed time were a temptation
and not of God. 78 How his image of God has changed! In the
next paragraph he describes how an experience of the image of
meat compelled him to abandon, without any hesitation or
doubt, his firm practice of never eating meat. Even when his
confessor asked him to consider whether this was a temptation,
Ignatius could not doubt that the good spirit was the source of
the image. He then says: "During this period God was dealing
with him in the same way a schoolteacher deals with a child
while instructing him." 79 He then goes on to describe in five
points the ways God revealed himself, culminating in the
description of the extraordinary enlightenment on the banks of
the Cardoner. After this experience he recognized the image of
the serpent-like figure as a temptation.
The final demonstration that the encounter with God
changed Ignatius' self-God schema comes from the very next
paragraphs where Ignatius describes three instances when he
faced death. The first occurred at Manresa when a fever brought
him to death's door. He was convinced that he was about to die.

At that instant the thought came into his mind that he

was numbered among the righteous, but this brought
him so much distress that he tried everything to dis-
miss it and to dwell on his sins. He had more difficul-
ty with that thought than with the fever, but no matter
how much he toiled to overcome it, he was unable to
do so. When the fever lessened and he was no longer
in danger of death, he loudly cried out to certain
94 Allowing the Creator to Deal with the Creature
ladies who had come to visit him that the next time
they saw him at death's door they were, for the love
of God, to shout aloud that he was a sinner and that
he should be ever mindful of the sins he had commit-
ted against God.80

Contrast this experience with the next one he describes. He

was on ship from Spain to Italy and in a storm everyone on
board was convinced that death was inevitable.

Thus, making use of his time, he made a careful

examination of conscience and prepared himself for
death, but he felt no fear because of his sins nor was
he afraid of being condemned, but he was especially
disturbed and sorry, knowing that he had not put to
good use all the gifts and graces that God our Lord
had granted him.81

Now Ignatius knows that he is a sinner and that knowledge sad-

dens him, but it does not frighten him. He trusts in the mercy of
God. The self-God image seems to be that of a person who is
convinced that he is a sinner loved and forgiven by an all-merci-
ful God.
Then Ignatius describes a time in the year 1550 when he
and everyone else were convinced that he was about to die of a
fever:

Thinking of death at that time, he experienced such

joy and such spiritual consolation in the thought of
having to die that he burst into tears. This came to be
of such frequent occurrence that many times he
stopped thinking of death just so as not to have so
much consolation. 82

Now Ignatius seems to be enamored of God, totally caught up

 The Changing Self-God Image of Ignatius of Loyola 95
with the desire for ultimate union with God. Thoughts of his sins
do not seem to arise. The self-God image seems to be that of
beloved to lover. God has taught Ignatius the ultimate lesson of
who God really is for Ignatius, and for all of us, Lover par
excellence. Fidelity to the relationship with God has changed
Ignatius' image of God as well as his image of himself.
Ignatius urges the one who directs the Spiritual Exercises
to ''allow the Creator to deal immediately with the creature and
the creature with its Creator and Lord" (n. 15). In that encounter
with God the retreatant can learn a new and more realistic self-
God schema. All of us have schemata that impoverish our expe-
rience of God and, thus, of ourselves. In his Autobiography
Ignatius shows himself as a pilgrim who moves from a small
view of God to one of God as Lover. Ignatius believed that the
same change can happen to us.
 9

TOUCHSTONE EXPERIENCES AS
DIVINING RODS IN DISCERNMENT

In The Practice of Spiritual Direction William Connolly

and I describe how Ignatius of Loyola finally recognized the
demonic origin of his "serpent" image after his illumination at
the river Cardoner, a point we noted in the last chapter. We then
note:

Here we see one of the criteria that people use to

decide whether an experience is of God: They com-
pare it to another experience that they are sure is of
God. Then, if they see that in some respect the two
conflict, they decide which experience to accept.
Many people have a touchstone experience of God.
Any other experience that seems to run counter to
that touchstone they look upon with suspicion. God
can be so manifestly present to them during such a
touchstone experience that they cannot doubt it any
more than they can doubt their own existence. 83

People may wonder what such experiences could be. I

believe that the resurrection appearances of Jesus in the gospels
illustrate the positive use of touchstone experiences to recognize
the risen Lord. Reflection on some of these stories may help us
to discover our own touchstone experiences and to help
directees to discover theirs.
Mary Magdalene saw a stranger whom she took to be a
gardener. Her own love for Jesus shows itself poignantly when
96
 Touchstone Experiences 97
the "gardener" asks her: "Woman, why are you weeping? Whom
are you looking for?" "Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me
where you have laid him, and I will take him away." Then the
stranger said: "Mary." "She turned and said to him in Hebrew,
'Rabbouni!' (which means Teacher)" (Jn 20: 15-16). The famil-
iar voice speaking her name instantly tells her that the stranger is
her beloved Jesus.
The two disciples walking sadly toward Emmaus also met
a stranger who spoke meaningfully about the scriptures and the
suffering Messiah. Yet, though their hearts were burning as they
walked along with him, they did not recognize him. Still they
did not want to let him go when they reached their destination.
Perhaps something was tugging at the sleeves of their memories.
When they had prevailed on the stranger to stay for a meal with
them, "he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them.
Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him" (Lk 24:
30-31). The familiar gesture of blessing bread and breaking and
giving it, a gesture which before the crucifixion must have
burned itself into their hearts as an archetypal experience of
Jesus, lets them see in this stranger the Lord whose death had
dashed all their hopes. Only now do they pay attention to the
fact that their hearts were burning during the whole time the
stranger was with them.
In the twenty-first chapter of John's gospel we read that
Peter and the other disciples went fishing and caught nothing all
night. In the morning a stranger told them: "Cast the net to the
right side of the boat, and you will find some." "So they cast it,
and now they were not able to haul it in because there were so
many fish. That disciple whom Jesus loved said to Peter, "It is
the Lord!" (Jn 21: 6-7). The gospel writer seems to be alluding
to the miraculous catch of fish which, in the synoptic gospels,
inaugurates the call of the disciples as apostles. Again a touch-
stone experience of Jesus is brought back to memory and leads
to the recognition of the Lord in a new situation.
I suspect that many (most) people have such touchstone
98 • Allowing the Creator to Deal with the Creature

experiences of God. In fact, social science research indicates

that the majority of people, at least in the United States and
Great Britain, have rather powerful experiences of God.84 But I
also suspect that most of us who do have such experiences do
not give them enough credit. We do not pay enough attention to
them and fix them in memory. As a result they are episodic
events in our lives, like passing stomach aches, to which we pay
little heed once they have passed. Hence, they cannot serve as
the divining rods for the discernment of God's presence in new
situations. I write this short chapter to encourage us to help peo-
ple (and ourselves) to pay attention to the moments when they
feel their hearts burning, as it were.
Perhaps just reading this chapter this will jog the reader's
memory and bring back to mind an experience that was deeply
felt and could serve as such a touchstone. On occasion it has
happened to me that the very act of telling my spiritual director
about an experience that had not seemed important sparks a
memory of the experience that is even more powerful than the
original. Some people I direct have come to realize that experi-
ences that initially seemed minor were profound revelations of
God as they described them in direction. Sometimes we need to
be asked about experiences before we recognize how important
they are to us. The Religious Experience Research Unit at
Oxford University in England has received thousands of
accounts of religious experiences since its founding in 1969 by
putting ads in newspapers and through pamphlets. They asked
readers to send in records of religious experiences they had had
along with relevant personal information. Replies poured in
from all over Britain. Many of them are striking and could be
the touchstone experiences we have been discussing. A few
examples from Alister Hardy's book will give the flavor.

I heard nothing, yet it was as if I were surrounded by

golden light and as if I only had to reach out my hand
 TouchstoneExperiences 99
to touch God himself who was so surrounding me
with his compassion.85
It seemed to me that, in some way, I was extending
into my surroundings and was becoming one with
them. At the same time I felt a sense of lightness,
exhilaration and power as if I was beginning to
understand the true meaning of the whole universe.86
One night I suddenly had an experience as if I was
buoyed up by waves of utterly sustaining power and
love. The only words that came near to describing it
were "underneath are the everlasting arms," though
this sounds like a picture, and my experience was not
a picture but a feeling, and there were the arms. This I
am sure has affected my life as it has made me know
the love and sustaining power of God. It came from
outside and unasked. 87
On the first night I knelt to say my prayers, which I
had now made a constant practice, I was aware of a
glowing light which seemed to envelop me and which
was accompanied by a sense of warmth all round
[Link]
Suddenly I felt a great joyousness sweeping over me.
I use the word "sweeping" because this feeling
seemed to do just that. I actually felt it as coming
from my left and sweeping round and through me,
completely engulfing me. I do not know how to
describe it. It was not like a wind. But suddenly it
was there, and I felt it move around and through me.
Great joy was in it. Exaltation might be a better
word.89

Whether these experiences would have meant as much to

the writers had they not been asked to send them to the Research
Unit I do not know. However, I venture to say that the interest of
the Unit in hearing about such experiences may well have
100 Allowing the Creator to Deal with the Creature

jogged the memories of some of the writers to recall the experi-

ences and to savor them more deeply. Now they could be used
as the kind of touchstone for discerning new experiences of
God. However, they might need the help of another person like
a spiritual director to see the possibility of such use.
As indicated earlier, for St. Ignatius of Loyola the illumi-
nation at the river Cardoner seems to have been such a touch-
stone experience. In his autobiography he describes how he sat
down at the river:

As he sat there the eyes of his understanding were

opened and though he saw no vision he understood
and perceived many things, numerous spiritual things
as well as matters touching on faith and learning, and
this was with an elucidation so bright that all these
things seemed new to him ... he received such a
lucidity in understanding that during the course of his
entire life-now having passed his sixty-second
year-if he were to gather all the helps he received
from God and everything he knew, and add them
together, he does not think they would add up to all
that he received on that one occasion?>

Not only does Ignatius emphasize how strong an impres-

sion this illumination made on him for the rest of his life, but
immediately after the experience he is able to discern that the
serpent-like vision which had formerly given him such comfort
was a temptation. The touchstone experience at the river
Cardoner enabled him to discern wheat from chaff in other
experiences.
Just as Mary and the other disciples recognized the
"stranger" as their risen Lord through some gesture that remind-
ed them of a profound experience of Jesus, so too all of us can
use the memory of touchstone experiences of God to discern
whether our present experiences are of the same "stuff," as it
 Touchstone Experiences 101
were. But we need to savor and nourish the memory of such
experiences and tell them to our spiritual directors.
Telling one's spiritual director about such experiences can
have two consequences. First, as noted earlier, the telling itself
both etches the experience in memory and can help me to
remember even more of the experience than I initially recalled.
In the telling I remember details I had not paid attention to but
which still made an impression on me. The disciples on the road
to Emmaus only realized that their hearts had been burning with-
in them throughout the journey with the stranger after the break-
ing of the bread. So, too, we often only realize the full impact of
touchstone experiences after the fact and in the telling. Second,
telling the spiritual director can have unintended and beneficial
consequences for future spiritual direction sessions. Often
enough in spiritual direction sessions I remember profound
experiences that a directee has told me when the directee,
because of desolation and/or resistance, does not remember
them. I have, in many such instances, reminded the directee of
the past experience of intense consolation, either to help the
directee to resist the pull of profound desolation, or to help
him/her to discern what is happening at the present moment and
to decide which experience to trust. It sometimes happens that
the desolation is a resistance reaction to experiences of profound
intimacy with the Lord.91 Remembering and telling about pro-
found experiences of closeness to the Lord can be a royal road to
an ever-deepening intimacy.
 10

TOWARD COMMUNAL DISCERNMENT:

SOME PRACTICAL SUGGESTIONS

Something interesting happened in the Society of Jesus

between the 31st General Congregation (1965--66) and the 32nd
(1974-75). Every reference to spiritual discernment or the dis-
cernment of spirits in the documents of G.C. 31 refers to indi-
vidual discernment, whereas the preponderance of such refer-
ences in G.C. 32 are to discernment in common. G.C. 31 is
obviously concerned that the Society recover the dynamic of the
Spiritual Exercises and especially the individual discernment of
spirits. While not neglecting the need for such a continuing
recovery G.C. 32 makes an effort to encourage communities to
become communities of discernment.

Clearly, the requisite dispositions for true communi-

tarian discernment are such that they will not be veri-
fied as often as those for ordinary community dia-
logue. Nevertheless, every community should seek to
acquire them, so that when need arises it can enter
into this special way of seeking the will of God.92

What happened between 1966 and 1975?

In North America the directed retreat movement (giving
the Spiritual Exercises individually) spread like a brush fire
through the Society. At G.C. 31 it was almost timidly suggested:
"The scholastics should be permitted on occasion during their
formation to make the Spiritual Exercises alone under the direc-
tion of an experienced spiritual father ... "93 By the time of G.C.
102
 Toward Communal Discernment 103
32 hardly a scholastic in North America made the Exercises in
any other way. Spiritual direction with an emphasis on the dis-
cussion of the actual religious experience of the directee also
took on great importance.
But along with this increased interest in individual spiritual
direction and this recovery of the original intention of St.
Ignatius in giving the Exercises, also went a renewed interest in
other aspects of lgnatian spirituality. The Institute of Jesuit
Sources under George Ganss began publishing English transla-
tions of original Jesuit documents, the most important being the
appearance in 1970 of Ganss' own translation of the
Constitutions.94 The Institute also made available in translation
such scholarly works as de Guibert's The Jesuits: Their Spiritual
Doctrine and Practice 95 and began publishing original studies
that made it possible for English-speaking Jesuits to recover
their spiritual heritage. Finally, in 1969 the American Assistancy
Seminar on Jesuit Spirituality under the direction of George
Ganss began publishing the very influential monograph series,
Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits. Thus, the Society in North
America responded to the call of Vatican II and G.C. 31 that reli-
gious try to recover the charism of their founders.
Very early in the Studies series, in April, 1970, "Ignatian
Discernment" by John Futrell appeared. 96 This monograph,
based on Futrell's doctoral dissertation, focused not only on
individual discernment but also on communal discernment mod-
eled on the deliberation that led to the founding of the Society of
Jesus. A year and a half later Jules Toner's "A Method for
Communal Discernment" 97 appeared to be followed in
November, 1972, by Futrell 's "Communal Discernment:
Reflections on Experience." 98 Finally, in June, 1974, Toner's
"The Deliberation That Started the Jesuits" 99 made its appear-
ance. Since that time nothing more on communal discernment
has appeared in the Studies series.
Even a cursory reading of these four publications makes it
clear that Futrell, Toner and other Jesuits were giving numerous
104 Allowing the Creator to Deal with the Creature
workshops on communal discernment to groups of religious.
During these same years William J. Connolly, S.J., of the Center
for Religious Development in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was
in demand to conduct similar workshops and introduced me to
the process when together we facilitated such a workshop for all
the Jesuit superiors of the New England province in 1972. In
short order I was asked to facilitate a number of such workshops
in New England and abroad. A stint as vice-provincial for for-
mation took me out of circulation for such work until 1984
when, with Joseph McCormick, S.J., I was asked to work with
the Jesuits of a large urban area to help them move toward com-
munal discernment. What intrigues me is the silence about com-
munal discernment since the surge of interest in the early 1970s
which culminated in the call of G.C. 32. I suspect that attempts
at communal discernment have foundered because the prerequi-
sites were not present in groups.
Whenever I conducted a communal discernment workshop
I kept detailed process notes on what went on. I want to describe
the process as I saw it, with the hope that such a description will
be helpful to others. If the process of communal discernment
has, in fact, fallen into disuse, perhaps we need a stimulus to
bring it back into use. In 1970 Futrell argued strongly that the
times required a recovery of the lgnatian practice of communal
discernment.

If true communal discernment of experiments to

enable the Society of Jesus to renew itself and to
adapt to the signs of the times today is a condition for
the survival of the Society in the modem Church,
then it is vital that all Jesuits learn to engage in
authentic lgnatian communal discernment. 100

More than twenty years later, I believe the need is still there, and
not just for Jesuits.
I have entitled the chapter "Toward Communal Discern-
 Toward Communal Discernment 105
ment" quite deliberately. Many of the workshops in which I
have participated have not reached the point of engaging in true
communal discernment, either because no question for discern-
ment arose, or because of lack of time or because other things
needed to happen first. I suspect that many attempts at commu-
nal discernment falter for lack of the prerequisites outlined by
both Futrell (1970 and 1972) and Toner (1971 ). Since both of
these men have provided relatively detailed outlines of the actu-
al process of discernment they use once these prerequisites are
attained, I want to concentrate on the process of moving toward
that attainment.
Communal discernment presupposes before all else that
those who will engage in it have experienced the discernment of
spirits·in themselves. That is, each individual must have engaged
in a process of contemplative prayer such as that proposed in the
Spiritual Exercises and have experienced the movements of the
different "spirits" and have discerned which movements were of
God, which not.· Secondly, communal discernment presupposes
that the individuals can and will communicate to others their
experiences in prayer and in prayerful reflection. The ability to
do so cannot be presupposed since many of us were brought up
in a tradition where such communication was not only not
encouraged but often enough actively discouraged. The recovery
of the individually directed retreat and the development of a type
of spiritual direction which requires the communication of reli-
gious experience are giving us the tools for the kind of commu-
nication communal discernment requires. But the willingness to
communicate experience must also be present, and this is often
the rock upon which attempts at communal discernment shatter.
Let me elaborate on this point.
When will any of us-unless we are inveterate narcis-
sists-reveal our intimate selves to others? Is it not when we
trust the other, trust the other not to laugh or scorn or downplay
our experience? Suppose that you start to tell me about an expe-
rience of prayer that meant something to you and I swiftly
106 Allowing the Creator to Deal with the Creature

change the subject or say: "That sounds odd to me." It will be a

long time before you will take the chance again. When people
approach a counselor for help because they are deeply troubled,
they will test the waters with him or her before they reveal their
intimate selves. And directees only gradually reveal the most
intimate aspects of their relationship with God as they come to
trust their spiritual directors. So it is not easy to entrust our inner
experience to others.
If this is the case in one-to-one relationships, how much
more difficult to reveal ourselves in a group. Very often our
reluctance to reveal ourselves comes from fear. What follows is
a description of some of the processes we have used to help peo-
ple in groups to overcome their fears and to entrust themselves
more to one another.
First we explain the role of the facilitators by an analogy to
the role of the spiritual director. The spiritual director helps indi-
viduals to recognize their desires with regard to the Lord, to
make these known to the Lord, and to put themselves into a
receptive position so that the Lord's response may be heard. The
spiritual director does not manufacture desires or prayer experi-
ences for the directee, but helps the person to notice what is hap-
pening in the relationship with the Lord, to discern what leads
toward the Lord, and to decide what to do about the discern-
ment. So, too, the facilitators of the group try to help the group
to articulate its desire as a group with regard to the Lord and to
help them to approach the Lord in prayer with that desire. Here
it is important to remind the individuals that they are asking the
Lord to relate to them precisely as members of this group with
the group's desire, e.g., to know that the Lord has hopes for us
as a group. Just as individuals ask the Lord for what they desire,
trusting that the Lord has their good at heart, so too the individ-
uals in this group context approach the Lord with the group's
desire trusting that the Lord has the good of this group at heart.
The facilitators suggest a way for the members to approach
the Lord in personal prayer with the desire for the Lord's help
 Toward Communal Discernment 107
precisely as a member of this group. After the prayer period is
over, they return to the group. The facilitators then help them to
report to one another as much or as little as they wish of what
happened during the prayer. Just as the spiritual director of an
individual helps the person to notice and articulate what hap-
pened as much as possible without judging it, so too the facilita-
tors of a group ask the group to try to listen without judgment to
the experiences shared. Indeed, since the assumption of such
group sharing is that we are hoping to hear what God is saying
to us as a group, these periods of sharing are approached, as far
as possible, with the same contemplative attitude one hopes to
have in private prayer.
Secondly, we point out that the process is a slow one of
growing in trust in the Lord and in one another. They already
trust the Lord, but they probably have not thought much about
the Lord's desires and hopes for the group as such. And most
groups need to develop a trust in one another as deeply prayerful
and honestly searching for God's will for the group. Communal
discernment means that each member of the group trusts that
God will reveal his will for the group through their individual
prayer and through their sharing of the fruits of that prayer. To
engage in this process I must trust that all the others are sincere-
ly praying and trying to remain open to discern God's will. After
all, my future is on the line since I am willing to abide by the
group's decision.
We have usually structured the day into three sessions,
morning, afternoon and evening. The whole group gathers at the
beginning of each session, and we give them some orientation
for private prayer. Each one prays for forty-five minutes to an
hour and then takes a few minutes for reflection. If the group is
less than ten, all the sharing sessions are in one group. If it is
larger, we break it up into groups of ten or less for the sharing
and ask that someone summarize for the whole group in a report.
Each session, therefore, lasts at least two and one-half hours. As
the process goes on, we may have to vary the structure accord-
108 Allowing the Creator to Deal with the Creature

ing to what is needed. For example, at the beginning of a session

we may need to canvass the group to find out what their desires
are.
Some groups begin the discernment process with much
good will toward one another. Even so, the individuals will still
need time to develop the deeper trust in one another and the
Lord that this process entails. Suppose that such a group's pur-
pose is to discover how they might best use their talent apostoli-
cally. Their numbers have declined and they feel strained and
overworked and realize that they can no longer continue to do
all the work that they have been doing. We would suggest for
the first period of prayer that they use a text like Isaiah 43: 1-7:

Do not fear, for I have redeemed you;

I have called you by name, you are mine.
When you pass through the waters, I will be with you;
and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm
you;
when you walk through fire, you shall not be burned,
and the flame shall not consume you.
For I am the Lord your God,
the Holy One of Israel, your Savior.
Because you are precious in my eyes,
and honored, and I love you,
I give people in return for you,
nations in exchange for your life.
Do not fear, for I am with you.

We indicate that the Israelites heard these consoling words

when they were in exile, their temple destroyed and their hopes
at their lowest. We suggest that they ask the Lord to give them a
sense of hearing these words as applying to them as members of
this group.
They then pray privately for forty-five minutes or so, and
afterwards return to the group where each one is asked to share
 Toward Communal Discernment 109
whatever he or she wishes of what happened during the prayer.
For most groups such an ice-breaker is reassuring and the vari-
ety of experiences enlightening. In a felt way they realize how
sincere and faith-filled each one is. They are often surprised at
how easy and enjoyable it is to talk about prayer with one anoth-
er. Depending on how this first session goes, we might either
suggest a repetition for the next session or suggest that they ask
the Lord to help them to know his dreams for them as a group.
During the group meetings we remind them to listen to one
another contemplatively and to note inner reactions as they lis-
ten. If they feel antipathy to what one member is saying, for
example, they might want to ask the Lord's help to see things
from that person's perspective: After the group has articulated its
vision and dream as best it can, they might be ready to ask the
Lord's help to discover what blocks them from realizing the
dream. Now the hard part begins, because they will be address-
ing neuralgic issues that may bring to light resentments, mis-
trust, and other "negative" emotions. The facilitators now begin
to earn their keep.
Any group that has a history together has got some bodies
buried somewhere. We have been talking about groups who
begin the process with much good will toward one another.
Often enough, however, groups do not begin with much good
will and trust. Then the negative feelings may have to be
addressed even earlier.
One group displayed so much anger, resentment, suspicion,
and misunderstanding at the very first session that even the facil-
itators wondered whether they had opened Pandora's box. But
we pointed out that their reality had surfaced rather quickly, and
suggested that they might feel as the apostles did after the cruci-
fixion when they boarded themselves up in the upper room.
Imagine their feelings of guilt and anger and suspicion and fear.
And into their midst came Jesus saying, "Peace be with you."
We suggested that they might want to spend an hour in prayer
with this text (Jn 20: 19-23) and then return. When they
110 Allowing the Creator to Deal with the Creature
returned to the group, the atmosphere had noticeably shifted.
Where before accusations and angry denunciations of others
prevailed, now each one spoke of his own fears and failings and
at the same time voiced a trust that the Lord would be with
them. We had not yet reached the promised land, but we were
on the way toward becoming a group that eventually might be
able to engage in communal discernment.
In his 1972 monograph, Futrell makes a perceptive com-
ment: "A community must have achieved the fruit of the First
Week of the Spiritual Exercises as a community in order to
begin true communal spiritual discernment." 101 He does not spell
out what that might mean, but I believe that this prerequisite is
crucial, and in at least one case, I believe, I saw a group achieve
that fruit. It was a group of male religious who were chapter del-
egates. They asked two of us to facilitate a four-and-a-half-day
process that would help them toward being more discerning and
open during the chapter which would follow. The congregation
was reeling from a heavy financial blow and from departures
that had left them demoralized, angry, and suspicious. Among
the members of the group were some whom the others held
responsible for their problems. Early in our sessions feelings of
anger, suspicion, guilt, and helplessness emerged. The first two
days were stormy, but we could sense a gradual growth in trust.
As one man said: "We have thought the unthinkable and said the
unsayable."
Toward the end of the second day we summarized the situ-
ation in this fashion. "You sense yourselves as broken, needy,
helpless, and sinful precisely as members of this congregation
and as chapter delegates. A number of you have identified with
Simon the Pharisee who scorned Jesus for letting the sinful
woman wash his feet. Some of you have voiced resentment at
being put into the position of picking up the pieces of a mess
caused by others. Some have voiced fears that as a group you
will not have the courage to make the necessary decisions. Some
fear that even God cannot change you. And yet you have also
 Toward Communal Discernment 111
desired healing, have desired that Jesus make you brothers
again. We suggest that you present yourselves to Jesus as you
are and ask him for what you want. Perhaps you might want to
do a repetition of Luke 7: 36-50 or you might want to use the
washing of the feet in John 13." We also suggested speaking to
Jesus on the cross and using the triple colloquy of the First Week
of the Exercises.
The sharing after this period of prayer was very emotional
and very honest. One man asked with tears for the forgiveness of
the group. Another reported emptiness in prayer and asked the
group to pray for him. A couple of men said that the desire for
healing was growing in them. Most of the others reported conso-
lation and a sense of being healed. Tears were shed. At the end
of the sharing they broke up into dyads for reconciliation. The
next day men continued to ask one another for reconciliation.
We spent the last two days focusing on Jesus' relationship with
his apostles in the gospel of Mark. At the end of the process they
felt hopeful and much more trusting as they prepared to enter
their chapter. As a result of the "First Week experience" they
seemed able to dream and to hope again as a group.
If spiritual directors need to have great trust in the Lord as
their directees face some of the very painful and harrowing
experiences sometimes associated with the process of conver-
sion, it is even more imperative for those who facilitate groups
toward communal discernment. It is all too easy to gloss over
serious divisions in a group, to let sleeping dogs lie, as it were. It
is all too easy to present techniques that only can work if prereq-
uisites of trust and contemplative prayer are present. It is also all
too easy to give up hope that the Lord can work his wonders
even on a group that seems at first hopelessly divided. Perhaps
they do want to be healed as a group. I have never been a facili-
tator alone, precisely because I feel the need for another, so that
together we can remind one another to pray ourselves and to
entrust the group to the Lord, and to trust the good will of the
group in spite of everything. After all, we try to say to one
112 Allowing the Creator to Deal with the Creature

another, they have invi~d us to help them to become a discern-

ing group; so they must have some hope in the Lord who has
called them together. A group is close to becoming discerning
when the members can say, as one man did, "During the
Spiritual Exercises I came to trust deeply that Jesus had a dream
for me. Now I believe that he has a dream for us."
 11

THE CONTEMPLATION TO OBTAIN LOVE

No one doubts that this contemplation is both "the conclu-

sion and the apt climax of the spiritual experience of the
Exercises." 102 What needs to be emphasized, however, is that this
exercise is a contemplation, not a meditation. In other words,
Ignatius does not expect that the fruit of this exercise will be
attained by meditation or reflection on the four points in the
manner of the First Week, using the intellect, memory and will
to move oneself to the desired end. Rather, this exercise expects
that retreatants will have arrived at the point where they desire
experiences of God such that their hearts will be inflamed with a
greater love of God "in all things." The desire of this contempla-
tion is expressed this way: "to ask for interior knowledge of all
the great good I have received, in order that, stirred to profound
gratitude, I may become able to love and serve the Divine
Majesty in all things" (n. 233). In the Second Week retreatants
desired "interior knowledge" of Jesus, an interior knowledge
that can only come if Jesus reveals himself to them; and this
interior knowledge is expected to issue in greater love and ser-
vice. So, too, in this exercise retreatants desire a revelation of
God, "interior knowledge," such that their hearts will sponta-
neously be moved to love and service. Let me spell out the
implications of this contemplation as I see them.
It lies close to hand to see the text of this contemplation as
the fruit of Ignatius' own mystical experiences at Manresa. He
describes five of them in rapid succession in the Autobiography,
beginning immediately after he has explained that "God was
113
114 Allowing the Creator to Deal with the Creature
dealing with him in the same way a schoolteacher deals with a
child while instructing him." 103

First. ... One day ... his understanding was raised on

high, so as to see the Most Holy Trinity under the
aspect of three keys on a musical instrument, and as a
result he shed many tears and sobbed so strongly that
he could not control himself .... This experience
remained with him for the rest of his life so that
whenever he prayed to the Most Holy Trinity he felt
great devotion. 104
Second. One day it was granted him to understand,
with great spiritual joy, the way in which God had
created the world. He seemed to see a white object
with rays stemming from it, from which God made
light. 105
Third .... One day, while in town attending Mass ... , he
saw with inward eyes, at the time of the elevation of
the body of the Lord, some white rays coming from
above ... he clearly saw with his understanding how
our Lord Jesus Christ was present in that most holy
Sacrament. 106
Fourth. During prayer he often, and for an extended
period of time, saw with inward eyes the humanity of
Christ, whose form appeared to him as a white body,
neither very large nor very small; nor did he see any
differentiation of members ... These things that he saw
at that time fortified him and gave such great support
to his faith that many times he thought to himself: if
there were no Scriptures ... , he would still resolve to
die for them on the basis of what he had seen. 101
Fifth. [Facing the river Cardoner] ... the eyes of his
understanding were opened and though he saw no
vision he understood and perceived many things,
numerous spiritual things as well as matters touching
 The Contemplation to Obtain Love 115
on faith and learning, and this with an elucidation so
bright that all these things seemed new to him. 108

When Ignatius had these experiences, he was still a novice

in the spiritual life; moreover, he was practically innocent of any
theological knowledge. By the time retreatants come to the
Contemplation to Attain Love Ignatius expects that they will
have the desire for such personal revelations of God. They ask
for an "interior knowledge." Ignatius, it seems, does not believe
that he was singled out for the revelations he received because
of any merit of his; everything he received he considered a gift,
and a gift that others could also desire of God. Ignatius expects
that anyone can ask God for such a revelation and then hope that
God will respond.
The four points of the Contemplation recapitulate the inte-
rior meaning of the Principle and Foundation. The retreatant
now wants such a felt knowledge of the uniqueness of God and
of God's intention in creation, that it will be second nature to
live in a spirit of gratitude and in tune with God's intention for
the universe. Directors need to stress that these points are not so
much for meditation as openings to contemplation, as ways to
make oneself ready for divine revelation. Let retreatants note
well the two preliminary observations. "First. Love ought to
manifest itself more by deeds than by words" (n. 230). As we
noted earlier, following Egan, the mysticism of Ignatius is a ser-
vant mysticism, a mysticism of action in tune with the one
action of God. 109 Even this Contemplation to Obtain Love does
not deviate from this perspective. "Second. Love consists in a
mutual communication between the two persons" (n. 231). What
is extraordinary in this statement, and what follows it, is the
mutuality which Ignatius presupposes that God wants. God, by
free choice, depends on our free choice to be who God wants to
be for us. If we do not choose to respond in mutuality, then God
cannot be for us who God wants to be, namely, one who com-
municates in mutuality.
116 Allowing the Creator to Deal with the Creature

In the first point I ask to remember with deep affection all

the gifts I have received both as part of the universe and the
human race and as a particular individual with a particular histo-
ry. This point recalls our reference to asking God to reveal to us
our personal salvation history in the chapter on the Principle and
Foundation. Moreover, Ignatius notes how much God "desires
to give me even his very self, in accordance with his divine
design" (n. 234). To the extent that we experience such divine
love and let it penetrate our hearts, to that extent we will want to
say with all our hearts, "Lord, I want to give you all that I am in
return." Ignatius expresses it in his justly famous prayer:

Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory,'

my understanding, and all my will-all that I have
and possess. You, Lord, have given all that to me. I
now give it back to you, 0 Lord. All of it is yours.
Dispose of it according to your will. Give me love of
yourself along with your grace, for that is enough for
me (n. 234).

Someone in the throes of such love has no fear to tell God any-
thing or to entrust God with all one's life and hopes and aspira-
tions. He or she will "desire and choose only what is more con-
ducive to the end for which we are created" (n. 23).
In the second point I ask to experience "how God dwells in
creatures ... ; and finally, how in this way he dwells also in
myself, giving me existence, life, sensation, and intelligence;
and even further, making me his temple ... " (n. 235). If we have
a deep experience of God's divine indwelling in all things, then
we will indeed find God in all things and tend to reverence all
things and people and ourselves. One who has such a deep expe-
rience will never want to misuse any creature or oneself.
In the third point I ask to experience "how God labors
and works for me in all the creatures on the face of the
earth ... "(n. 236). If God does reveal Godself so personally to
 The Contemplation to Obtain Love 117
me, then I will have an experience of God's one action in creat-
ing and sustaining the universe and will want with all my heart
to live in tune with that one action. Macmurray's philosophy of
action finds an echo in this point.
Finally, in the fourth point I ask to experience "how all
good things and gifts descend from above ... just as the rays come
down from the sun, or the rains from their source" (n. 237). Here
we see a clear echo of Ignatius' own mystical experiences as he
described them in the Autobiography. If we could only experi-
ence all blessings and gifts as descending to us from above, then
we would be able to live in spiritual poverty. We would be "indif-
ferent to," "at balance toward," all created gifts and blessings
because we would have intimate knowledge that these are only
pale, even though wonderful, reflections of the One "from whom
all blessings flow," the One who is the deepest desire of our
hearts.
Thus, retreatants who come to this climax of the Spiritual
Exercises come full circle. But now they know more intimately
the Mystery we call God, and in the process know more inti-
mately themselves and their world. They are well on the way to
being contemplatives in action, people who find God regularly
in their actual lives of prayer and action. Indeed, for such people
prayer and action are not two different activities, but in some
mysterious fashion one.
 Notes

1 Gilles Cusson, Biblical Theology and the Spiritual

Exercises: A Method toward a Personal Experience of God as
Accomplishing within Us His Plan of Salvation. Tr. Mary
Angela Roduit and George E. Ganss. St. Louis, MO: The
Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1988, 80.
2Harvey Egan notes that Ignatius has a service mysticism,
not a bridal mysticism. His spirituality cannot rest in union with
God or Jesus alone unless it is union in service. Cf. Harvey D.
Egan, Ignatius Loyola the Mystic. Wilmington, DE: Michael
Glazier, 1987.
3Henry Guntrip, Psychotherapy and Religion. New York:
Harper, 1957, 194-195. The citation of Mackenzie is from
Nervous Disorders and Character.
4Cited in Henry Gun trip, op. cit., 194-195. Of course,
Ignatius would not agree that such enjoyment of God is the
supreme end of spiritual technique. For him consolation had an
orientation to action in accordance with God's will.
5 Cf. Sebastian Moore, Let This Mind Be in You: The Quest
for Identity through Oedipus to Christ. San Francisco: Harper &
Row (Winston), 1985.
6 Cf. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early
Life. London: Geoffrey Bies, 1955.
118
 Notes 119
7 C. S. Lewis, The Pilgrims Regress: An Allegorical Apology

for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism. New York: Sheed &

Ward, 1944, 7-10.
8 In a recent monograph Joseph Tetlow draws similar conclu-
sions. Cf. "The Fundamentum: Creation in the Principle and
Foundation," Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits 21, no. 4
(September, 1989). "When I talk about creation here, I have in
mind the In principio of John's prologue and the first chapter of
Ephesians. Hence, I mean a different beginning, a beginning in
no way limited by time or place but always ongoing in specific
time and concrete place. When I talk about creation in these
pages, I refer to God's constantly making each creature out of
nothing at each moment of its existence, anteceding and causing
all secondary causes" (4-5). We shall deal more with the
Principle in chapter 4.
9 There is an analogy here to the developmental stages of Erik

H. Erikson and of others. Cf. Erik H. Erikson, Childhood and

Society (2nd. ed. New York: Norton, 1963) and for psychologists
more influenced by Piaget, cf. Elizabeth Ann Liebert, The
Developmental Context of Spiritual Direction (New Yorlc/
Mahwah: Paulist, 1992).
10For a helpful introduction to such counseling skills, cf.
Gerard Egan, The Skilled Helper: A Systematic Approach to
Effective Helping. 3rd ed. (Belmont, CA: Brooks/Cole, 1986).
For a further development of this approach to spiritual direction
cf. William A. Barry and William J. Connolly, The Practice of
Spiritual Direction (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982).
11Leo Bakker, Freiheit und Erfahrung: Redaktions-
geschichtliche Untersuchungen uber die Unterscheidung der
Geister bei Ignatius von Loyola (Wiirzburg: Echter Verlag,
1970), 255, (translation mine). Harvey D. Egan makes a similiar
point in The Spiritual Exercises and the Ignatian Mystical
Horizon (St. Louis, MO: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1976).
120 Allowing the Creator to Deal with the Creature

I am citing Gerard Manley Hopkins'

12 poem "God's
Grandeur."
Cf. William A. Barry and William J. Connolly, op. cit,
13

chapter 11.
14Sebastian Moore, Let This Mind Be in You: The Quest for
Identity through Oedipus to Christ. Minneapolis: Winston-
Seabury, 1985.
15 In another context I have discussed the courage of
Bartimaeus. Cf. "Surrender: Key to Wholeness," in Paying
Attention to God: Discernment in Prayer. Notre Dame, IN: Ave
Maria, 1990, chapter 6.
16 Joseph A. Tetlow, "The Fundamentum: Creation in the
Principle and Foundation," Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits,
21/4 (September 1989).
11 Ibid., 7.
18 In the section which follows I borrow liberally from chapter
2 of my book Finding God in All Things: A Companion to the
Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. Notre Dame, IN: Ave Maria
Press, 1991.
19 Sebastian Moore, Let This Mind Be in You: The Quest for
Identity through Oedipus to Christ. Minneapolis, Chicago, New
York: Winston, 1985, 36.
2° C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life.

London: Geoffrey Bies, 1955, 22.

21Frederick Buechner, The Sacred Journey. San Francisco:
Harper & Row, 1965, 52.
22 Ibid., 56.
23Anne Tyler, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. New York:
Berkley Books, 1983, 284.
 Notes 121
24C. S. Lewis, The Pilgrim's Regress: An Allegorical Apology
for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism. New York: Sheed &
Ward, 1944, 7-10.
25I develop the thought of John Macmurray and apply it to the
encounter with God and spiritual direction in Spiritual Direction
and the Encounter with God: A Theological Inquiry. New
York/Mahwah: Paulist, 1992.
26 Tetlow, "The Fundamentum," op. cit. 8-9.
21 George E. Ganss, The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius:
A Translation and Commentary. St. Louis, MO: The Institute of
Jesuit Sources, 1992, 151.
Roger Haight, S.J., Dynamics of Theology. New Yorlc/
28

Mahwah: Paulist, 1990, 153.

29 Ibid., 156-157.
3° [Link] G. May, Addiction and Grace. San Francisco:
Harper & Row, 1988.
31 Cited in chapter 1 and quoted in Henry Guntrip,
Psychotherapy and Religion (New York: Harper, 1957),
194-195.
32 Cf. Joseph N. Tylenda, A Pilgrim's Journey: The
Autobiography of Ignatius of Loyola. Wilmington, DE: Michael
Glazier, 1985, n. 24.
33 For this insight I am indebted to William J. Connolly, S.J.
34John Macmurray, Persons in Relation. Atlantic Highlands,
NJ: Humanities Press, I 979, 171.
35Cf. Edward E. Jones, Amerigo Farina, Albert H. Hastorf,
Hazel Markus, Dale T. Miller, and Robert Scott, Social Stigma:
The Psychology of Marked Relationships. New York: Freeman,
1984.
122 Allowing the Creator to Deal with the Creature
36Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death. New York: Free Press,
1973.
37From my own Finding God in All Things: A Companion to
the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. Notre Dame, In: Ave
Maria, 1991, 124-125.
38John Macmurray, Persons in Relation. Atlantic Highlands,
NJ: Humanities Press, 1979, 171.
39 Cf. Barry, Finding God in All Things, op. cit., 127-128.
40 Joseph N. Tylenda, A Pilgrim's Journey: The
Autobiography of Ignatius of Loyola. Wilmington, DE: Michael
Glazier, 1985, n. 8.
41 The Jesuit psychoanalyst William W. Meissner, in his psy-
chobiography Ignatius of Loyola: The Psychology of a Saint
(New Haven: Yale, 1992), shows rather convincingly that God's
grace built on the psychic structure of Ignatius and that this psy-
chic structure never disappeared.
42Cf. M. Basil Pennington, Centering Prayer: Renewing an
Ancient Christian Prayer Form. Garden City, NY: Doubleday,
1980.
43 Cf. John Main, The Heart of Creation. London: Darton,

Longman and Todd, 1988.

44 For a description of the kind of spiritual direction needed,
cf. William A. Barry and William J. Connolly, The Practice of
Spiritual Direction. San Francisco: Harper & Row-Seabury,
1982.
45 Tylenda, op. cit., nn. 15-16.
46 John Macmurray, Freedom in the Modem World. London:

Faber & Faber, 1968.

 Notes 123
47Cf. William A. Barry, Spiritual Direction and the Encounter
with God: A Theological Inquiry. New York and Mahwah:
Paulist, 1992, chapter 6.
48 Tylenda, op. cit., n. 45.
49 Ibid., n. 47.
5 ° Cf.
Leo Bakker, Freiheit und Erfahrung: Redaktions-
geschichtliche Untersuchungen uber die Unterscheidung der
Geister bei Ignatius von Loyola. Wiirzburg: Echter Verlag, 1970.
51 Cf. Joseph A. Tetlow, "The Fundamentum: Creation in the
Principle and Foundation," Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits
21, no. 4 (September, 1989).
52 Cf. John Macmurray, The Self as Agent and Persons in
Relation. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1978 and
1979. These two volumes contain the Gifford Lectures delivered
in 1953-54.
53 William A. Barry, Spiritual Direction and the Encounter
with God: A Theological Inquiry. New York/Mahwah: Paulist,
1992,22.
54 William A. Barry, "The Kingdom of God and
Discernment," in Paying Attention to God: Discernment in
Prayer. Notre Dame, IN: Ave Maria Press, 1990, 77-85.
5s Bakker, op. cit., 105 (translation mine). In a recent article
Joao MacDowell makes the same point: "Ignatius gives a second
function to consolation/desolation, thus making an original and
inestimable contribution to Christian spirituality. He uses them
(consolation/desolation) as elements for the discernment of the
movements of the spirits and, through such discernment, for the
discovery of the will of God in my regard: election." Joao A.
MacDowell, "Nota Sohre as No96es de 'Mo9ao', 'Consola9ao'
et 'Desola9ao' nos Exercfcios Espirituais," ltaici: Cadernos de
Espiritualidade lnaciana, 1 (1989), 51 (translation mine).
124 Allowingthe Creatorto Deal with the Creature
56 For a more extensive development of these ideas, cf.
William A. Barry, Spiritual Direction and the Encounter with
God: A Theological Inquiry, op. cit.
57 Tylenda, op. cit., n. 26.
58 Ibid., n 55; n. 82.
59 This is the felicitous phrase of George Aschenbrenner and
far better expresses what Ignatius was about than the term
"examination of conscience." Cf. George A. Aschenbrenner,
"Consciousness Examen," Review for Religious, 31 (1972),
14-21. (Reprinted in David L. Fleming, ed., Notes on the
Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola. St. Louis: Review
for Religious, 1983, 175-185.)
60 William A. Barry, Spiritual Direction and the Encounter
with God, chapter 6.
61 William A. Barry, Spiritual Direction and the Encounter
with God, op. cit., 78.
62 Josef Sudbrack, "Unterscheidung der Geister-
Unterscheidung im Geiste," in Kurt Niederwimmer, Josef
Sudbrack and Wilhelm Schmidt, Unterscheidung der Geister:
Skizzen zu einer neu zu lernenden Theologie des Heiligen
Geistes. Kassel: Johannes Stauda Verlag, 1972, 48.
63 Susan Howatch, Glamorous Powers. New York: Fawcett
Crest, 1988, 57-58.
64 William A. Barry, Spiritual Direction and the Encounter
with God, op. cit., chapter 5.
65For an application of this theory to the relationship with
God, cf. William A. Barry and William J. Connolly, The
Practice of Spiritual Direction, op. cit., chapter 6.
 Notes 125
66 Cf. Ana-Maria Rizzuto, Birth of the Living God: A
Psychoanalytic Study. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1979.
61 Tylenda, A Pilgrim's Journey, op. cit., n. 8.
68 Ibid., n. 15.
69 Ibid., n. 12. (Italics mine.)
10 Ibid., n. 19.
11 Ibid., n. 19.
12 Ibid., n. 20.
13 Ibid., n. 23-24.
74Quoted in Henry Guntrip, Psychotherapy and Religion.
New York: Harper, 1957, 195.
75 Tylenda, op. cit., n. 23.
16 Ibid., n. 25.
11 Ibid., n. 25.
18 Ibid., n. 26.
79 Ibid.
80 Ibid., n. 32.
81 Ibid., n. 33.
82 Ibid.
83 William A. Barry and William J. Connolly, The Practice of
Spiritual Direction, op. cit., 103-4.
126 Allowingthe Creatorto Deal with the Creature
84 Andrew M. Greeley reports that well over half of his
respondents admit to having had memorable religious experi-
ences. Cf. The Religious Imagination. New York: Sadlier, 1981.
In Great Britain, Alister Hardy's Religious Experience Research
Unit at Oxford University has received thousands of examples
of memorable religious experiences. Cf. Alister Hardy, The
Spiritual Nature of Man: A Study of Contemporary Religious
Experience. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979.
85 Hardy, op. cit., 20.
86 Ibid., 21.
87 Ibid., 76-77 (italics mine).
88 Ibid., 34.
89 Ibid., 57.
90 Tylenda, op. cit., n. 30.
91 Cf. William A. Barry, Paying Attention to God:
Discernment in Prayer (Notre Dame, IN: Ave Maria Press,
1990), chapters 4, 5 and 6 for a discussion of resistance to posi-
tive experiences of God.
92Decree 11, "The Union of Minds and Hearts," of the 32nd
General Congregation, para. 23. In Documents of the 31st and
32nd General Congregations of the Society of Jesus St. Louis,
MO: The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1977, 475.
93Decree 8, "The Spiritual Formation of Jesuits," of the 31st
General Congregation, para. 124. In Ibid., 108.
94 Ignatius of Loyola, The Constitutions of the Society of
Jesus. Tr. George E. Ganss. St. Louis, MO: The Institute of
Jesuit Sources, 1970.
95 Joseph de Guibert, The Jesuits: Their Spiritual Doctrine

and Practice. A Historical Study. Tr. W. J. Young. St. Louis,

MO: The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1964.
 Notes 127
96 John C. Futrell, "Ignatian Discernment," Studies in the
Spirituality of Jesuits, 2/2 (April, 1970).
97 Jules J. Toner, "A Method of Communal Discernment of

God's Will," Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits, 3/4 (Sept.,

1971).
98John C. Futrell, "Communal Discernment: Reflections on
Experience," Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits, 4/5 (Nov.,
1972).
99 Jules J. Toner, "The Deliberation That Started the Jesuits: A
Commentary on the Deliberatio primorum Patrum. Newly
Translated with a Historical Introduction," Studies in the
Spirituality of Jesuits, 6/4 (June, 1974).
100 Futrell, op. cit., 1970, 70.
101 Futrell, op. cit., 1972, 169.
102 George E. Ganss, The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius,

op. cit., 183, n.117.

103 Tylenda, Autobiography, op. cit., n. 27.
' 04 Ibid., n. 28.
105 Ibid., n. 29.
106 Ibid., n. 29.
101 Ibid., n. 29.
108 Ibid., n. 30.
109 Cf. Harvey D. Egan, Ignatius Loyola the Mystic.
Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1987.