The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything (2 page)

Finally, Ignatian spirituality is about
freedom and detachment
.

Ignatius was acutely aware of what kept him, and others, from leading a life of freedom and joy. Much of his classic text,
The Spiritual Exercises,
which was written between 1522 and 1548, was geared toward helping people find the freedom to make good decisions. Its original title was
Spiritual Exercises to Overcome Oneself, and to Order One’s Life, Without Reaching a Decision Through Some Disordered Affection
. Most Jesuits just call it the Spiritual Exercises or simply the Exercises.

Buried within that clunky title are some important ideas. One comes at the end: “disordered affections” is his way of describing whatever keeps us from being free. When Ignatius says that we should be “detached,” he’s talking about not being tied down by unimportant things.

Here’s a quick example. What happens if your overriding concern in life is making money? Well, in that case you might not be as open to spending time with people who won’t advance your career. You might be less likely to take time off. You might even begin to see other people only as tools—or worse, obstacles—in your quest for upward mobility. Gradually, you might start to see everything as revolving around your job, career, and desire to make money.

Now, work is part of everyone’s vocation in life. But if, over time, you find yourself sacrificing everything else to that one end, you might discover that work has become a kind of “god” for you.

When people ask me whether anyone could ever break the first commandment (“You shall have no other gods before me.”) I often say that while few people today believe in multiple gods, as in the past, many more may believe in newer “gods.” For some people their “god” is career. Or money. Or status.

What would St. Ignatius say about all this?

Most likely he would furrow his brow and say (in Basque, Spanish, or Latin, of course) that while you need to earn a living, you have to be careful not to let your career become a “disordered affection” that prevents you from being free to meet new people, spending time with those you love, and viewing people as ends rather than means. It’s an “affection” since it’s something that appeals to you. It’s “disordered” because it’s not ordered toward something life-giving.

Ignatius would invite you to move toward “detachment.” Once you did so, you would become freer and happier.

That’s why Ignatius counseled people to avoid disordered affections. They block the path to detachment, to growing more in freedom, growing as a person, and growing closer to God. If that sounds surprisingly Buddhist, it is: that particular goal has long been a part of many spiritual traditions.

So if anyone asks you to define Ignatian spirituality in a few words, you could say that it is:

1. Finding God in all things
   
2. Becoming a contemplative in action
   
3. Looking at the world in an incarnational way
   
4. Seeking freedom and detachment
   

You could say any of those things, or all of them, and you would be correct. In this book we’ll talk in depth about each of these answers, and we’ll also look at how each relates to, well, everything.

To understand the Ignatian vision, it helps to know about the man himself. Like all of the spiritual masters, Ignatius’s experiences influenced his worldview and his spiritual practices. Plus, the story of St. Ignatius Loyola is a good reminder that everyone’s life—whether sixteenth-century mystic or modern-day seeker—is primarily a journey of the spirit.

First, I’ll give you a short sketch of his life. Then, throughout the book, I’ll return to a few episodes to highlight various themes and insights. And you might be surprised to discover that like many people today, Ignatius wasn’t always “religious” or even, to use the more popular term, “spiritual.”

A (V
ERY
S
HORT
) L
IFE OF
I
GNATIUS
L
OYOLA

Iñigo de Loyola was born in the Basque region of northern Spain in 1491 and spent much of his young adult life preparing to be a courtier and soldier. The young Basque was something of a ladies’ man and, according to some sources, a real hothead. The first sentence of his autobiography tells us that he was “given over the vanities of the world” and primarily concerned with “a great and foolish desire to win fame.”

In other words, he was a vain fellow mainly interested in worldly success. “He is in the habit of going around in cuirass and coat of mail,” a contemporary wrote about the twentyish Ignatius, who “wears his hair long to the shoulder, and walks around in a two-colored, slashed doublet with a bright cap.”

Like many of the saints, Iñigo (he switched to the Latin-sounding Ignatius later on) was not always “saintly.” John W. Padberg, a Jesuit historian, recently told me that Ignatius may be the only saint with a notarized police record: for nighttime brawling with an intent to inflict serious harm.

During a battle in Pamplona in 1521, the aspiring soldier’s leg was struck and shattered by a cannonball, which led to several months of painful recuperation. The initial operation on the leg was botched, and Iñigo, who wanted his leg to look good in the fashionable tights of the day, submitted to a further series of gruesome operations. The surgery would leave him with a lifelong limp.

While he was convalescing at his family castle, in Loyola, his brother’s wife gave him a book on the life of Jesus and another one on the lives of the saints. These were about the last things Iñigo wanted to read. The budding soldier preferred stirring tales of chivalry, of knights doing gallant deeds to impress noble women. “But in that house none of those he usually read could be found,” he wrote in his
Autobiography
. (In his autobiography, dictated late in life to one of his Jesuit friends, Ignatius, probably out of modesty, refers to himself as “he” or “the pilgrim.”)

As he idly leafed through the seemingly dull lives of the saints, something surprising happened. Iñigo began to wonder if he could emulate them. Within him stirred a strange desire—to become like the saints and serve God. He wrote, “What if I should do this which Saint Francis did and this which Saint Dominic did?” In other words,
“I could do that!”

Here was an average man without much prior interest in religious observance assuming he could emulate two of the greatest saints in the Christian tradition.

Did Ignatius trade ambition in the military life for ambition in the spiritual life? David, my spiritual director in the Jesuit novitiate, put it differently: God used even Ignatius’s overweening pride for the good. For no part of a life cannot be transformed by God’s love. Even the aspects of ourselves that we consider worthless, or sinful, can be made worthwhile and holy. As the proverb has it, God writes straight with crooked lines.

This began Iñigo’s transformation. Rather than wanting to chalk up heroic military exploits to impress “a certain lady,” as he wrote, he felt an ardent desire to serve God, just as his new heroes, the saints, had done.

Today in Loyola, the family castle stands a few yards from a colossal church that commemorates the saint’s conversion. Despite additions, the castle itself looks much as it did in the sixteenth century, with its two-meters-thick defensive stone walls on the lower floors and graceful red brickwork on the upper floors, which served as the family’s living quarters.

On the fourth floor is the bedroom where Ignatius convalesced: a spacious room with whitewashed walls and a ceiling supported by massive wooden beams. A dusty brocaded canopy hangs over the location of Iñigo’s sickbed. Underneath the canopy is a polychrome wooden statue of the bedridden saint holding a book in his left hand and gazing heavenward. Painted in gold on a beam overhead is a legend:
Aquí Se Entrego à Dios Iñigo de Loyola
. Here Ignatius of Loyola surrendered to God.

After recuperating, Iñigo considered the insights he had received and, despite his family’s protests, decided to relinquish the soldier’s life and devote himself entirely to God. So in 1522, at the age of thirty-one, he made a pilgrimage to the Benedictine abbey in Montserrat, Spain, where, with a dramatic gesture right out of his beloved books on chivalry, he stripped off “all his garments and gave them to a beggar.” Then he laid his armor and sword before a statue of the Virgin Mary.

Afterward he spent almost a year living in a small town nearby, called Manresa, and embarked on a series of austere practices: fasting, praying for hours on end, and allowing his hair and fingernails to grow, as a way of surrendering his previous desire for a pleasing appearance. It was a dark period in his life, during which he experienced a great spiritual dryness, worried obsessively about his sins, and was even tempted to commit suicide.

The difficulty of what he was about to do—trying to live like a saint—tempted him to despair. How could he ever change his life so dramatically? “How will you be able to endure this [new] life for the seventy years you have to live?” a voice within him seemed to say. But he rejected those thoughts as not coming from God. With God’s help, he decided, he
could
change. So he moved away from despair.

Gradually he moderated his extreme practices and regained a sense of interior equilibrium. Later in Manresa he underwent a series of mystical experiences in prayer that convinced him he was being called to a deeper relationship with God.

For Iñigo this was a time of learning about the spiritual life. In a touching analogy, he wrote, “God treated him at the time as a schoolmaster treats a child whom he is teaching.”

One day, walking on the banks of the nearby Cardoner River, deep in prayer, Iñigo experienced a mystical sense of union with God. The passage in his autobiography describing this pivotal experience deserves to be quoted in full.

The time in Manresa formed him anew. It also helped to form the ideas that would one day be collected in
The Spiritual Exercises
. He began to “note some things in his book; this he carried along carefully, and he was greatly consoled by it.”

After several false starts, including a pilgrimage to the Holy Land (where he found it impossible to receive official permission to work), Iñigo decided that he could best serve the church with an education and by being an ordained priest. So the proud swashbuckler recommenced his education at two Spanish universities, after dutifully enrolling in lower-level classes with young boys, studying remedial Latin. Eventually, he made his way to the University of Paris, where he begged alms to support himself.

While in Paris he gathered around him several new friends who would become the original “companions,” or first Jesuits. These included men like Francisco Javier, later known as the great missionary St. Francis Xavier. In 1534 Iñigo and six friends bound themselves together with a communal vow of poverty and chastity.

In time, Ignatius (as he now called himself, mistakenly thinking that Iñigo was a variant of this Latin name) decided that his little group could do more good if they received approval from the pope. Already they were showing their “detachment.” They would do whatever the pope felt was best, since he presumably had a better idea of where they could do the most good.

Ultimately, Ignatius and his companions asked the pope for formal approval to start a new religious order, the
Compañia de Jesús,
or the Society of Jesus. They had a tough time winning approval. As early as 1526, when Ignatius was studying in the Spanish town of Alcalá, his new ideas on prayer attracted suspicion, and he was thrown in jail by the Inquisition. “He was in prison for seventeen days without being examined or knowing the reason for it,” he wrote.

The notion of being “contemplatives in action” also struck many in the Vatican as nearly heretical. Some prominent clerics believed that members of religious orders should be cloistered behind monastery walls, like the Cistercians or Carmelites, or at least lead a life removed from the “follies of the world,” like the Franciscans. That a member of a religious order would be “in the world,” without gathering for prayer every few hours, was shocking. But Ignatius stood firm: his men were to be contemplatives
in action,
leading others to find God in all things.

Some found even their name arrogant. Who were these unknown men to claim that
they
were the Society of Jesus? The name “Jesuit” was initially applied derisively soon after the founding of the Order, but it was eventually taken up as a badge of honor. Today we use it proudly. (Some say too proudly!)

In 1537, Ignatius and several other companions were ordained. The newly humble man postponed celebrating his first Mass for over a year, to prepare himself spiritually for this signal event and perhaps, he hoped, to celebrate it in Bethlehem. When that proved impossible, he settled on a Mass at St. Mary Major Church in Rome, which was believed to contain the “true crib” of Jesus.

In time, Ignatius won over his critics by carefully explaining the aims of his group and also by leading a few of his detractors through the Spiritual Exercises. In 1540, the Society of Jesus was officially approved by Pope Paul III. The goal of the Jesuits was both simple and ambitious: not, as is usually thought, to “counter” the Protestant Reformation, but, rather, to “help souls.” This is the phrase that appears most often in the early documents of the Society of Jesus.