This Ignatian Life

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.

Ignatius left his sword before a statue of the Virgin, however, his transformation was not instantaneous. He had to learn how to live. Over many years he struggled to come to terms with what his symbolic gesture was intended to reveal. He went from noble, to beggar, to pariah, to crazy-man on campus.  He eventually made friends, but he was neither the most affable nor appreciated of young Catholic thinkers (see: inquisition).  In time, however, he learned how to live in a new way that allowed what he believed in his heart to be revealed in his actions.  He gained understanding.  He gained wisdom.

Some say that Wisdom only comes with learning how to live with love in the midst of difficult circumstances. This is a hard truth for many of us because it reminds us that the one problem we all share, our inability to understand how to live with one another, cannot be addressed in any way but through our experience. We have to learn how to live with one another.  No merely symbolic action will suffice to create the change in our lives that we desire. Words and gestures give us something visible to hold onto, but they are nothing if they are not experienced in our hearts.

Wisdom is a mix of love and understanding that only comes with time.  Wisdom cannot be extracted with machines from the earth, or mapped out with a set of instructions; we become aware of it as we learn how to love even when faced with the hardest choices of our lives. Wisdom is more than a set of tools or rules. It must be pulled from the depths of our experience as creatures, living in uncertainty, clinging to our belief in the goodness of God.

There are really own two questions that I ever ask: God, how are you loving me, and how have I been loving you? From these two questions come of a slew of others: Was I open to the kindness that was offered to me today? Have I learned to care for others? Do I seek to understand others even when it’s difficult, even when they bother me? Am I willing to face hardship and misery as I encounter it in my own life, in my doubts about God, humanity and my own nature? Lord…How do I love when I hurt? How can I be forgiving when I am so angry? How can I live with creativity when I see so much destruction? How do I live a life of integrity when it seems so difficult and so few seem to value it? How do I acknowledge both the fact that I am called to serve you, my God, but I am, too, a sinner? All of these questions are about loving and being loved. How I handle these questions, whether I honestly grapple with who I am, what I desire, and what I desire to desire, tells me who my true God is.

I like to think that when Ignatius was laying down his sword, it was not just a symbolic act of fidelity, but revelatory of his movement away from weapons, both exterior and interior, that were harming his relationships with God and others. The act, in itself, would have meant nothing if Ignatius had not learned to live in another way. His prayers, thereafter, were not an assertion of the way he lived, but they way he desired to live. He sought in his own heart to be wholly faithful to God, without counting the cost, heeding the wounds, seeking for rest, or asking for any reward except for knowing that he did God’s will. He sought these things not because he did them well already, but because they were an articulation of what he desired in the depths of his soul. He had to grow into these words. He had to learn how to live his desires. Like Ignatius, I am still learning how to love. I am still growing into wisdom. In this way, each prayer is a reminder not only of who I am, but who it is that I desire to become.

Where do we begin?  How do we speak of you?

We say that Jesus is the Son, eternally begotten from the Father.  We are still not sure how this works.  We say that the Father and the Son are analogous terms, used to describe something of the nature of God and how God relates to humanity.  These terms, though, speak of things that are in eternity.  We do not understand eternity.  We might recognize that eternity is not forever, that it is a state of being outside of time, but all that we know has been revealed in time.  Time is limited.  Humans are limited.  We use terms to describe what we perceive and what we believe has been revealed, but the words are lacking.  So, we are not sure what it means to say that the Son became human.  We do not understand the Christ’s divinity – any more than we understand eternity.  Instead, we only accept that the ultimate truth is something that we can ponder.  The words we use are intended to stretch our perception and make us aware of what might be.

The Holy Spirit, which I believe is present and loving us even now, will have to wait for another post.  What has been continuing to enthrall me lately is the experience of God and humanity.  Human experience is, after all, something that we can account for.  Our experience with the source of being we call God, and our accounts of the human Jesus, they lead us to a worldly experience.  Even when our encounter with God is described in supernatural terms, the words are still human terms.  It is the humanity of Jesus that enthralls me.  It is the ways that he was described that draw me into contemplation of him.  I can believe that there was a man named Jesus.  He was born of woman.  He had the same muddy beginning as us.  At the same time, there was something about the way he was that set him apart.  This difference was so powerful that people intentionally spoke of him in terms that were different from the ways that they spoke of others.

The words that people used to speak of their experience with Jesus were not the same glowing variety as used to describe mythological gods or ancient heroes.  He was not the mighty, yellow-haired Achilles or the courageous Odysseus performing feats of strength and daring.  His greatness did not reveal itself in an ascendance to worldly power or with righteousness rewarded by material wealth, like the heroic David or the stalwart Job.  In fact, it was just the opposite.  His miraculous feats gave others strength.  His power healed those who were injured.  His ascendance to power was without reward and without acclaim.  He was great because he served and cared for others; he shared in their struggles and rejoiced with their return to wholeness.  He did not pursue titles, and when they were given, he demurred.  He looked at his life, even when speaking of his Father, not as the right to do as he saw fit, but as the choice to do as he thought the Father saw fit.

I sometimes wonder what prompted the author of John to write, “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the Word was God.”  These passages are some of my favorite in the bible, some of the first that I came to believe, and some of the first that led my mind into a new way of thinking.  Still, I do not know what they mean.  The words we have for Jesus cannot adequately describe his divinity – only what people have experienced of his humanity as it related to divinity.  The way of Jesus was different from other people’s ways.  How Jesus revealed God was different than what people expected.  He defied categorization.  He was something other.  Perhaps since people did not understand this, they gave him names that described just how “other” they perceived him to be; these title came not from his likeness to God (which they did not and could not know), but came from a way of being that was so unlike what humans had experienced that he must be somehow divine.  And so they say, he was like us in all things but sin.  That he was born of a virgin and became man.

At the same time, perhaps it was that he allowed people to experience something of their own call to divinity, too, that he was able to open people up to their experience of relationship with God, present in their lives, in a new way.   I like the idea that Jesus was a bridge, both God and human, introducing the grace of the divine into human existence.  Was the way Jesus experienced the divine different from what we can experience?  I am not so sure that it was.  I mean, obviously, his union with God, to the extent that he was God, cannot be known to any of us.  However, much of what Jesus experienced of God was a human experience of God, and that can somehow be understood.  It has been posited that Jesus, sharing in human ignorance, might have come to know the fullness of his nature over time.  Perhaps, then, like Jesus, we can come to know something of the fullness of our nature, even as we live in the flesh.  We can come to experience the love of God and give that love to others, just like Jesus did.  We can offer ourselves to the possibility of transformation through the contemplation of his life.  We can commit ourselves to pondering the meaning of the confusing words used to describe him.  We can learn better how to perceive the intersection of the human and divine.  Recognizing him creates a space of grace where we can come to understand, if not the eternal nature of the Son, at least how divinity looks when it is fully human and bound in time.

I once had an instructor who remarked, “Whoever heard of someone entering the Catholic Church because of the Nicene Creed?” My difficulty with this statement at the time was that I had returned to the Church specifically because I had found, articulated in the Creed, something about the mystery of God revealed in terms that spoke to my heart. In this instructor’s comment I recognized that something felt wrong. After some thought, I was able to articulate the sense that a sort of caricature was being drawn. There are those who “feel” their relationship with God. Then there are those who think about God. It was as though my instructor was saying that the two were not only separate, but that “feeling” was somehow more important than “thinking about” God. In my professor’s eyes, the statements found in the Creed spoke to people who were attempting to formulate proofs for the existence of God, rather than attempting to know God in their hearts. Though I could not articulate it at the time, intuitively, I knew otherwise.

It is easy for the modern reader to forget that we read the Creed, and indeed early Christian authors in general, through centuries of experience and development of dogma. Perhaps we do not always think of these things the way that early Christians did. We forget to ask why the formulation of the Creed emerged and how it might have affected the lives of the people who developed it. The Creed did not simply spring from someone’s mind and onto a piece of paper. The ideas were argued over, struggled with and refined. The words describe the experience of those who were coming to terms with basic questions about God the Father, who Jesus is, and how the Holy Spirit was being revealed to them. They were passed along through the centuries because there were no better words available. For early Christian writers these were not just matters of the intellect, but matters that were intimately connected to their relationship with God.

As I think about the Creed now, I realize how dependent I am upon the words it contains to help ground my own perception. Statements about the Father, Son and Holy Spirit describe both what I have come to believe through scripture, but also something about my experience of God. I trust there is one God, but I also know that what I understand of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit can appear to be three very different realities. How, then, do I account for these experiences and pieces of revelation while still maintaining belief in the One? Why do I sometimes pray to God, sometimes to Jesus, and sometimes with the Holy Spirit? Why do I feel like certain prayers, with certain Persons of the Trinity, are more appropriate at certain times? I know that this mystery is touching my heart, but how can I describe the nature of that mystery? In this way, the statements of the Creed speak to me as emerging out of a sort of theoretical mysticism that I have not always recognized. These thoughts have to do with how I understand salvation and are an attempt to describe my relationship to God: the Creator, the Sanctifier, the Redeemer, the One and the Three. The words of the Creed help root me and guide me. They give me something a little more tangible to hold onto as I attempt to articulate what is ultimately ineffable.

As we race through the Creed at mass, saying the words by rote, do we remember it took years for the thoughts that our lips are forming to emerge from the heart of Christianity? Who Jesus Christ is continues to be a mystery to Christians. How the Holy Spirit is present is nearly impossible to relate to those who do not believe. None of us are born knowing how to talk about God; we have to learn how to articulate our experience. The words we choose change the ways that we see God at work. The Creed’s words, when carefully considered, help us in this. They speak to the heart of faith by causing us to name our belief and wrestle with the ways that the understanding of our tradition is articulated. The words of the Creed can help still the mind and give a person the sense that there is more to their understanding of God than meets the eye. The Creed offers no easy answers, even though the statements are easy enough to say. Rather than letting this be a stumbling block, however, if we give ourselves to the possibility of wrapping our minds around the words, we might find that the words will enrapture us. Instead of rushing thoughtlessly through the dogmatic tenets of the Creed, we can choose to roll the thoughts over in our minds, allowing them to lead us to a different type of awareness.

Like the early thinkers in the Church, our sense of being Christian can join the spiritual to the theoretical, the intellectual to the emotional. The Creed is not void of affect; it was formed out of affect. In our thoughtful recitation of the Creed every week we are reminded, again and again, that God is always more than humans can comprehend, and that how we think about God ultimately affects our perception of our relationships, with the Father, the Son, and with everyone else. While the intellect and the affect are hardly the same, there is a very specific connection between the two, and we can choose to allow reason to merge with emotion and find light in the eternal mystery. If we believe what we say, the way that we think will ultimately affect how we process what we feel. We can connect our intellect to our hearts, and come to recognize that even in our inadequate statements of belief, there is something of a truth that, while defying logic, somehow expands our understanding and broadens our awareness of our relationship with God.