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)

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