Getting Here (IX): Ignatian Encounter

I wish that I could do justice to the experience of the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. This is the first time I've tried to write about the process in any depth (other than in the voluminous journals I kept for myself), and I think some brief notes will have to do for now.

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Ignatius wrote the Exercises (1530s-1540s) out of his own experience of creating them as, recovering from a battle injury, he spent months contemplating the life of Christ. You can pick up a little paperback containing the Exercises just about anywhere, but it's not something I'd recommend. It's not of much use in the absence of guidance. (Of course, I ignored that advice when I got it. I knew that I was an intelligent and insightful reader, so I purchased a copy, took it home, and curled up to read. I lasted maybe, oh, five minutes, six max. The book is really written for the guidance of the one giving the Exercises, not the one doing them. It is, unless you have a helper, almost completely unintelligible.)

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The Exercises are divided into four "weeks" of contemplation. We might call them "sections" rather than weeks; they were never intended as chronological weeks. Week One addresses the creation of the universe and humankind and our subsequent fall from grace; the retreatant contemplates God's creativity and love and his or her own separation from same (otherwise known as "sin"). Week Two (usually about ten days in a Thirty Day Retreat) addresses the ministerial life of Christ and includes the famous discernment portion of the Exercises. Weeks Three and Four are shorter; their themes are the Passion and Crucifixion, and the Resurrection.

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I'm sure that there are countless ways in which to present and experience the Exercises. My director (who doesn't much care for that word) does so with great fluidity. The booklet I used, a gentle and contemporary guide, offers reflections and questions and several Scriptural passages for contemplation each "day." (I think it contains about 30 "days," which took me most of a real-time year.) Some weeks (real life weeks), I would be almost comprehensive in my coverage of the material. Some weeks I would spend all my time ~ hours of it ~ on a few sentences. Sometimes my director (for want of better shorthand) would ask if I had read this or that novel, or play, or poem, and suggest that I give some time to that alternative.

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The Exercises presume a variety of prayer forms. "Contemplation" in Ignatian-ese means an imaginative form of prayer, not the self-emptying sort of prayer so often implied in the use of the term. Ignatian contemplation involves imagining yourself into a scene or event or conversation in the Bible, or imagining one of them into your own life. It's an extraordinarily powerful way of experiencing God, Christ, the Holy Spirit ~ especially when you practice it day after day after day.

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The weekly or so conversation with a director is an integral part of the Exercises. It is often said that the "real director" of the Exercises is the Holy Spirit ~ but you do need a regular human being to help with the work. For me ~ a person always caught in the tension between individuality and community ~ it was nothing short of spectacular to receive the gift of another person's calm, kind, and thoughtful consideration of what I had to say about my life of prayer as it became entangled with everything that was going on in my most ordinary of daily lives. As I look back now, I find myself extremely moved by the very existence of the Exercises, created as an offering within the community of the church but passed on from one individual to another over a period of four and one-half centuries. I am particularly touched that in my case the "passing on" was from a seventy-something Jesuit priest to a fifty-something Protestant woman. The Holy Spirit does create the most miraculous possibilities.

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Some people use the Exercises primarily to learn to pray: to listen and be in relationship with God. Some, to make a major decision. Some, to find a way to follow Christ more closely in the lives they are already leading (also a major decision!). The advantage of pursuing all of those objectives in the form of a 19th Annotation retreat is that your movement in and out of your daily life (as opposed to a 30-day withdrawal to a retreat center) enables you to bring almost anything and everything, just as it is happening, to the table of prayer and discussion.

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Everyone's retreat is his or her own. In some ways, the course is probably fairly predictable. There is a certain pattern. Many of us may think that we want to demonstrate some kind of brilliant and unique spirituality, but in reality, the growth of a spirituality is like any other kind of growth, and what we really want is for it to follow a healthy pattern ~ just as we want to see our children grow from healthy infants into healthy toddlers and so on. Of course, as with anything else, sometimes dramatic differences emerge. But for most of us, our retreat is unique within some fairly typical parameters.

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I found that my retreat, in retrospect, seemed to fall into three sort of "chapters." At first, I experienced a great deal of resistance. I didn't give up, but I think that I had a very strong sense of self-preservation which was being challenged, and it was quite difficult to abandon my sense of control and fall into the process. Then I began to sense strongly that Christ was walking around in my life. I can't claim to have found comfort in that. I was . . . alert, observant, curious, challenged ~ but not comfortable. And then, finally, I began to feel that I was walking around in his. The world, and all of us in it, took on a different appearance to me.

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I said to someone a few weeks ago that the Exercises do not change who you are; they make you more of who you are. When I first came into the church, I was captivated by the sermons I've mentioned in an earlier entry on the topic of "What would Jesus do?" By the time I had finished my retreat (if, that is, one ever really finishes), I had a different question. We are not Jesus, and so the real question becomes: what would Jesus have you do? You may see anew, with eyes that have been changed by Christ, but it is still you doing the seeing and you who must respond. How would you live your life, the exact one given to the unique person you are?

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Doing the Exercises, excavating your spiritual self and developing a depth of aquaintance with Jesus Christ, is serious business. There are frustrations and tears and sometimes there is terrible sadness. But there is also a great deal of laughter and tremendous joy in finding that you really are created and called to be exactly who you are, and that in who you are you do have much to share and a role to play in Christ's continual gift of recreation.