This Ignatian Life

Today it poured rain in Omaha. I ran through it to get from my car to the school where I teach a early morning dance class on Fridays, then from the school to my car where I sat, hoping it would let up so I could make it into the office without arriving totally drenched. At this moment, mid afternoon, outside it is a sunny, bright Nebraska  clear sky sun day that makes you squint your eyes just from looking out the window. Appropriately my eyes are drawn to a Mary Oliver poem that is hanging by my desk:

…meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies… announcing your place in the family of things.

Finding God in all things is easy when you are about to get married, which I know because I am exactly three weeks away from my wedding. The love of friends, family, priest, fiancé, God’s provision; a wedding seems ordained the time to know that you are in the place of the family of things that you should be. I see so many tangible reminders of God’s guidance through Calvin’s and my discernment to get married and am thankful for them. There is a consolation of “yes, this is the person, this is the place, this is the covenant we are supposed to be making.”

Finding God is harder in the silence of my contemplative prayer sits that are still filled with anxious thoughts and worries. I liked Paul’s most recent post about a conversation between himself and St. Ignatius. He talks about the forces that work against us when we are in consolation, forces that want us to end up back in a state of desolation. Are those forces why so many things that are good; like our days, our jobs, even our weddings, leave the taste of frustration and failure in our mouths? I often find myself while sitting in contemplative prayer thinking ”Wasn’t I anxious about something earlier today? What was that? Oh yeah, that’s right.” and I let my thoughts take me away from peace and consolation.

What a comfort to be reminded today that there is rain and sun and just like the rain and sun we too have a place in the family of things! It’s ok to let the thoughts that plague us during contemplative prayer go their way, we have a sense of consolation to look forward to and a God who will be the voice we hear behind us, whether we turn to the right or to the left, saying “this is the way, walk in it.”

The other day, someone asked me where I like to pray.  I started to respond back quickly with the familiar: church, before meals, on retreats, before I go to bed.  And then I started thinking about the past month and the times when I remember intentionally turning to God to share a laugh, mutter a desire, say a thank-you or to simply be aware of God’s presence.  Laying in bed after the alarm went off, in the shower, on the subway, at PETCO, after I tripped but saved myself from falling, watching my niece and nephew blow out their birthday candles, stuck in traffic while road tripping to Upstate NY, and looking at pictures on Facebook of summer weddings, baby arrivals, family vacations, anniversaries & beyond.  Each of these places and circumstances, though far different from the next, share the common thread of my need for, and turning towards, God’s presence.

I’m not sure what made me pause before responding to the initial question that was asked of me, but in the 20 seconds that I stopped to make this mental list I was yet again reminded of one of the most valuable gifts my Jesuit education and Ignatian spirituality…to look for, and actually find, God in all things.  Mother Theresa put it another way: “Be faithful in small things because it is in them that your strength lies.”  When we are actually setting out every morning with this mindset it becomes difficult, near impossible, to separate what is “prayer,” what is “religious,” and what is “my faith” from what is “not prayer” or “not my faith.”  How wonderfully solid and purposeful life becomes when it’s all faith— starting from the tiny little crevices of life that blend together, bond together, to give us the strength we need to be true disciples of Christ.

As a teacher, like most professions, I oftentimes have to carefully divide my time, my duties and my attention into concrete categories.  If I didn’t I’d never get anything done.  It is important that I plan a certain number of minutes of grammar instruction weekly, I have to set aside a particular number of hours to grade each week or else June would come and no grades would appear, and literary discussions must give way to the algebra class next door after a mere 55 minutes have past. But, when it comes to my faith, I’ve learned to embrace taking it out of the boxes and throwing it all around.  The mental image of a teenager’s bedroom with clothes strewn about comes to mind.

When I was on the road trip Upstate, I had the luxury of XM radio.  I’m not so good with technology even when I have nothing else to focus on, so driving in the car made it a darn near impossible task to master.  Luckily, my co-pilot was quick with the buttons and didn’t complain too much when my eclectic musical tastes shifted from Bluegrass Junction to 90’s on 9 to The Fish.  At a brief stop on The Fish, a radio announcer somewhat sheepishly dealt listeners the line: “God’s spreads His goodness like a 3 year-old spreads his peanut butter.  He just gets it all over the place.”  What a perfect image for our prayer life—spread it out all over the place and get it in every nook and cranny.  That’s how I like to pray.

I would love to say that by this point in my Jesuit formation, I have become a master discerner. The truth of that matter is that I am still learning how to live with my own consciousness. It is sometimes so easy to tell when someone else is being whipped around by the dark spirit. However, when it comes to myself, there are times when I just cannot see what is happening until I am up to my neck in negativity. The following is a paraphrase of a brief exchange that occurred some time ago.

Seriously? Seriously?? Again with the anger and frustration. Yes. Thanks, Ignatius. I am seriously confused and baffled…by my own idiocy…right now! I am glad I asked for the “grace.” Ugh. Hello? Is there anyone up there listening to this? Yeah. I didn’t think so. What am I doing anyway, sitting here talking to myself like a freakin idiot…stupid voodoo religion piety.

Uh…Paul?

I swear to God…

Alright brother…eeeeasy. Take a breath. That’s it. What just happened? Weren’t you just in consolation a couple of minutes ago? Seriously – you were sitting there in total peace thinking about how many good things are in your life. You even made note of a couple of things that you used to think of as “sucking” that had recently shifted. You had an experience of gratitude that was totally unforced and completely suffused your perception of reality with peace. You also had an inexplicable sense of love for the people in your life. What happened?

Well…I was thinking about my life and how much I appreciate the people in it, and then I started thinking about the place I do ministry; I was having all of these ideas about how I could interact in a new way with some people there, which was great because I have been wondering about them. I saw how our relationship had changed and how glad I was that things were different. Then I started thinking about all of the work I have been putting in. Then I realized how much work still had to be done and I started wondering how I would do it. I felt a little angry that I had so much to do. Then I wondered if that was selfish of me, or if other people were being selfish. Then the ideas that I was having about how to interact with others started to seem kind of stilted, like they might not work. Then I realized that there were a lot of things in my life – a lot of people – who I had difficulty with. Then the whole situation started looking impossible. I mean, how was I going to accomplish anything? Why do I even bother? Why do things never change? Why am I dealing with the same issues and the same people after months of working on this and praying with it? Does prayer even work? Why am I sitting here talking to myself? Seriously…what does it even mean to “talk to God?” It is not like the voice of God ever sounds any different from whatever other voice is in my head. Then I just got annoyed with the whole thing – the prayer, the work, the life. Aiagh!

Ok…so can you figure out which spirit that was and how it started to work? Do you see when the shift occurred? Do you see how your perception of grace was shifted to create unrest? At what point did your conscience and awareness of your own shortcoming begin to convince you of your inability, which led you to believe in the ultimate futility of the venture? Where did you begin listening to that voice that created fear instead of the one that was bringing peace and a sense of love? How do you come to know the difference between those two voices? How do you learn to discern better the shift when it occurs?

It is no secret that when we are in a good space, there is the tendency for internal backlash. Ignatius warns that the evil spirit might enter in and attempt to subvert our awareness of grace. Another interpretation is that anytime the ego is pushed outside of its place of comfort it tends to retract due to the uncertainty caused by new cares and concerns that the new awareness brings to mind. However one conceptualizes the experience, it is necessary to be aware that there is often a force working against us when we are in places of consolation. For myself, the tendency is to start to pick apart, piece by piece, the things that lead me to consolation, telling myself that I am being careful and insightful. If I let it go, this spirit of distortion starts to attack whatever I happen to be thinking of, quickly finding fault in the best of things. The result can range anywhere from being in a “bad mood” to entering into a more prolonged period of agitation and frustration.

Luckily, there are a number of ways to deal with these movements of the spirit. In this case, I was reminded that the consolation I had experienced was real consolation, and that it was likely that I had somehow been sidetracked – the spirit of darkness was obscuring the goodness that had been so evident a short time before. When I came to realize this, my recourse was to sit for a while in prayer, just resting in the awareness that these thoughts would pass. I returned to the place of previous consolation and allowed my awareness to slowly shift back to a place of equilibrium.

So why did I have so much difficulty understanding what was occurring when it was happening?  While it might be easy to pick out spirits when we are really looking for them, it strikes me that when I am in my day-to-day routine I am not always in discernment mode. I mean, I have done the reading and sat through the classes on discernment, but in general practice, when I am not being graded, that is when the capacity to discern is really tested. Learning how to recognize the movements of spirits, Holy and otherwise, in the midst of my day is what it is all about. Will I ever become a master discerner? I would like to hope so. The longer I am around, however, the more I am beginning to suspect that it is a skill we never master, only learn to practice better.

Saturday was the feast of St. Ignatius. I have been thinking about his legacy quite a bit these last few days.  So much of what we call Ignatian spirituality has been reduced to sound bits — “finding God in all things,” “magis,” “cura personalis.”  These are fine, as far as they go, but they do tend, I think, to deflect our attention away from the man’s actual achievement, and, in so deflecting, to insulate us from the core insight of the Ignatian way.

The Church at the beginning of the 16th century was not pretty.  Ignatius was born in 1491, one year before Columbus sailed to America.  In 1517 Martin Luther published his 95 theses and launched the Protestant Reformation.  The Society of Jesus was founded, officially, in 1540, five years before the beginning of the Council of Trent. Ignatius died in 1556, seven years before the end of that Council.

These are not just random dates strewn here and there. The arrival of Columbus marked the end of a way of life for the indigenous peoples of America.  In much of their suffering the Church was complicit. The Reformation is more aptly described as a schism that ruptured the fabric of a 1200-year old experiment in Christian civilization.  It also introduced centuries of religious violence into Christian Europe, laying the foundation for the current post-Christian reality of that place. The Council of Trent, while innovative and creative in some ways, rigidified Catholicism for 400 years, until the relative softening of Vatican II.  So, Ignatius was born in complicated times.

The spirituality that he forged through the teaching of the exercises and the practice of discernment was not a Borders-style self-help manual to make us feel good about ourselves and our relationships, and God.  Rather, it was a way to navigate the complexities of a world that seemed to be in the process of becoming unhinged.  Ignatius asked how should I respond to God in the face of these new realities, and God’s answer was “do something new.” Build schools. Travel to newly discovered parts of the world. Try to do no harm, and hopefully do some good. The response of Ignatius and his followers was not always perfect, but it was certainly original, and it was certainly timely.

I wonder how to recover this part of Ignatius’ legacy.  Like him, we live in a world that seems in the process of becoming unhinged.  In this reality the slogans ring hollow. Can we really “find God in all things” when “all things” means massive suffering in the developing world, melting icecaps, oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico, corrupt politicians, pedophile priests, do I really need to go on?

Finding God in these things does not mean pretending that they are good. Finding God in these hard things means finding out what God wants us to do and doing it.  So, in this season of Ignatius’ feast, I invite all of us inspired by his witness to pray for a good discernment and to get busy.

Photo: “Letter from St. Ignatius of Loyola I” by “Nick in exsillio” from Flickr (Used under Creative Commons license)