Many people find the New Year to be a helpful time to refocus and recenter on their relationship with God. This series will provide some concrete ways for you to do just that.
The series uses Epiphany (Jan. 6) as a launching point for engaging in specific practices designed to help you find God all day, every day this New Year.
The first four posts in this series will lay out the biblical vision for a life of connecting with God at all times. They will also explore some particular ways for doing this based on the work of St. Ignatius in his Spiritual Exercises.
Beginning Jan. 6, the posts in this series will give you specific practices to engage in each day in order to grow in your own awareness of and attentiveness to God. These posts will run through Transfiguration Sunday (Feb. 7). The practices in these posts will help you focus on the life of Jesus from his baptism to his Transfiguration.
The previous posts explored David’s testimony in Ps. 16 that God can be connected with all day, every day; and the way in which all of Psalms proclaim a similar promise. Finally, we looked at how the church/liturgical calendar became a way for early Christians to focus on Jesus all year-long and thus grow in their attentiveness to God. In this third background post we look at how Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises became a tool for Christians to grow in their capacity for connecting with God all day, every day. The fourth background post will explore the importance of Epiphany and introduce Epiphany as a way of focusing on Jesus for the first two months of the New Year.
Subsequent posts will provide specific practices for you to engage in Jan-Feb based on the Spiritual Exercises which will help you grow in your ability to find God in all things this New Year.
Finding God in the Exercises
St. Ignatius Loyola was a sixteenth-century soldier-turned-mystic who founded a Catholic order called the Society of Jesus, also known as the Jesuits. One of the most significant ways of summarizing Ignatian spirituality is with this phrase: “finding God in all things.” Ignatius believed what David declared: fullness can be found in God and God can be found everywhere. This isn’t some type of new age spirituality or animism which believes there is a god in the tree and a god in the rock, etc. It’s merely another way of stating what David, the Psalms, and the early church stated: God is so present in our lives and in our world that it is possible to connect with him in all situations and seasons.
Inigo (Ignatius) of Loyola was a Basque soldier who was seriously wounded in a battle at the French at the town of Pamplona. He was transported to his brother’s castle in Loyola where he endured two operations to repair his shattered leg. With a great deal of time on his hands as he recuperated, and with a significant injury to provide some perspective on life, Ignatius began to think about his future. Until this point in life he had nurtured dreams of doing great deeds of chivalry and winning the favor of a great lady. But as he began to read the life of Christ and his followers, another dream took hold—that of following Jesus wholeheartedly. Eventually he gave in to the latter dream. He was twenty-six when he left the castle for Manresa, not far from a Benedictine monastery called Montserrat. He spent the next eight months in prayer and reflection. This intense time of contemplation and meditation of Scripture, the life of Jesus and of his own life changed him. It created within him a new attentiveness to God, a desire to “find God in all things.” Using that experience and building upon it, he developed what he later called “Spiritual Exercises.” These were a series of structured reflections on biblical texts and topics tied primarily to the biblical accounts of Jesus that were designed to help others grow in their own attentiveness to God.
The Spiritual Exercises became Ignatius’ manual for a four-week period of intense focus on the life of Jesus. It was first published in 1548. It is organized into four sections, which he calls “weeks.” One version calls for a person to withdraw from daily life for four weeks of meditation, usually at a retreat house with a spiritual director. But Ignatius wanted as many as possible to enjoy the exercises, so he included many notes and annotations which gave flexibility as to how the exercises are practiced. The “19th Annotation” suggested that a person might meditate for an hour a day over several months, usually eight or nine months. Regardless of how it was practiced–over thirty full days or during a part of each day during eight to nine months–the Spiritual Exercises involved studying and meditating on biblical texts that were organized into four “weeks” or categories.
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The first week looks at gratitude for God’s gifts in your life and then at your own sinfulness. In the end, you are led to realize that you are a sinner still loved by God.
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The second week is a series of meditations on the birth and ministry of Jesus.
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The third week focuses on the Passion: Jesus’ final entry into Jerusalem, the Last Supper, his trial and crucifixion.
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The fourth week is based on the Gospel accounts of the resurrection and of God’s love for you.
The order was significant. Participants were to follow this general flow of thought from gratitude for God’s gifts in spite of our sinfulness, to celebrating and meditating upon the birth of Jesus, to learning from the ministry of Jesus, to walking with Jesus to Jerusalem and his cross, to celebrating the resurrection. Ignatius and the Society of Jesus believed that by devoting oneself to meditation and contemplation upon biblical texts and topics related to these four areas, that you could grow immensely in your capacity for finding God in all things.
In particular, Ignatius seemed to believe that an intense focus on one subject alone would yield the greatest growth in our ability to attend to God: Jesus. The Spiritual Exercises are ultimately just a series of different ways of looking intently at one thing–Jesus.
The benefit of a prolonged focus on one subject is illustrated by author David McCullough. McCullough was born in Pittsburgh in 1933. He attended Yale, where he studied English and visual arts, and he wrote for several magazines before publishing his first book at the age of thirty five. Since that first book he has won the Pulitzer Prize, two National Book Awards, the Francis Parkman Prize and dozens of other honors. Not a single one of his books has ever been out of print.
A sign hangs above his writing desk: “Look at your fish.” He explains its significance in this way:
It’s the test that Louis Agassiz, the nineteenth-century Harvard naturalist, gave every new student. He would take an odorous old fish out of a jar, set it in a tin pan in front of the student and say, Look at your fish. Then Agassiz would leave. When he came back, he would ask the student what he’d seen. Not very much, they would most often say, and Agassiz would say it again: Look at your fish. This could go on for days. The student would be encouraged to draw the fish but could use no tools for the examination, just hands and eyes. Samuel Scudder, who later became a famous entomologist and expert on grasshoppers, left us the best account of the “ordeal with the fish.” After several days, he still could not see whatever it was Agassiz wanted him to see. But, he said, I see how little I saw before. Then Scudder had a brainstorm and he announced it to Agassiz the next morning: Paired organs, the same on both sides. Of course! Of course! Agassiz said, very pleased. So Scudder naturally asked what he should do next, and Agassiz said, Look at your fish.
I love that story and have used it often when teaching classes on writing, because seeing is so important in this work. Insight comes, more often than not, from looking at what’s been on the table all along, in front of everybody, rather than from discovering something new. Seeing is as much the job of an historian as it is of a poet or a painter, it seems to me. That’s Dickens’s great admonition to all writers, “Make me see.”
This seems to have been Ignatius’ admonition to us as well. He wanted to help us truly see Jesus. In a way each Spiritual Exercise was his way of simply saying,”Look at your Jesus.” Rather than calling on us to look at something new, he calls us to look at what has been on the Christian table all along. Again and again he tells us through the Spiritual Exercises, “Look at your Jesus.”
I’ve engaged in the Spiritual Exercises in a formal way twice. In July 2013, Jackie L. Halstead, Ph.D., founder and president of Selah, was my Spiritual Director for a thirty-day experience of the exercises. Six to eight hours each day for thirty days were devoted to working through Ignatius’ four collections of biblical texts/topics. A silent retreat in Nashville, began and ended the experience, with the remaining time spent in retreat in Memphis, TN.
In addition, from October 2014-May 2015, Fr David Graham at St. Anne Parish in the Memphis Diocese was my Spiritual Director for an eight month journey through the exercises. Half an hour to an hour a day for about two hundred forty days was spent in meditation and contemplation focused on the biblical texts and topics collected in Ignatius’ exercises.
Both of these experiences radically impacted my capacity for attending to the presence of God every day, all day.
While the Spiritual Exercises are multi-faceted, four spiritual practices make up a large portion of the experience:
#1 – Meditation
Ignatius and the Jesuits use this word to describe what others have called “Lectio Divina.” It is a way of reflecting on a particular passage and listening for how God may be speaking through that passage about something in your present life/season. Timothy Gallagher explains it in these words:
“In Ignatius’s vocabulary, such loving reflection on revealed truth is meditation — the reflective process by which we enter the richness of God’s Word and hear that Word as spoken personally to us today.”
Here, meditation is not sitting cross-legged and saying, “Ohm…Ohm.” Neither is it what is often called “Centering Prayer” or “Contemplative Prayer.” In Ignatian spirituality, meditation is simply quiet reflection upon a biblical passage with the goal of hearing God speaking through that text into some aspect of our life in the present.
In Ten Minute Transformation, I walk through a four-fold way of practicing meditation or Lectio Divina:
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read a text slowly and prayerfully until a particular word or phrase stands out;
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reflect on why that word or phrase stands out and why God may be saying to us through it regarding our present life;
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respond to God in prayer based on what we’ve heard in the text;
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rest quietly in God’s presence.
Many of the Spiritual Exercises simply invite us to meditate upon texts flowing from the birth, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus. In subsequent posts, I will provide you an opportunity to practice meditation on texts drawn from the Spiritual Exercises which are tied to Epiphany. Through meditation you will grow in your ability to listen to and become attentive to God. This ability will carry on beyond your brief time of meditation each day and will stay with you through much of the day, increasing your ability to find God in all things.
#2 – Contemplation
Ignatius and the Jesuits use this word to describe a slightly different form of reflecting on a biblical text. Ignatius calls us to use the “five senses” as we contemplate a text. We try to enter into the text and see, hear, smell, taste and touch: Ignatius writes:
“The first point is to see the persons with the sight of the imagination, meditating and contemplating in particular the details about them and drawing some profit from the sight…The second, to hear with the hearing what they are, or might be, talking about and, reflecting on oneself, to draw some profit from it…The third, to smell and to taste with the smell and the taste the invite fragrance and sweetness of the Divinity, of the soul, and of its virtues, and of all, according to the person who is being contemplated…The fourth, the touch with the touch, as for instance, to embrace and kiss the places where such person put their feet and sit, always seeing to my drawing profit from it.”
In other words, in contemplation we use our imagination to place ourselves in the text and experience it as fully as possible. Then we reflect on that experience and what God may be saying to us about our present life through that experience.
Timothy Gallagher explains further:
“In Ignatius’s vocabulary, such imaginative participation in a Gospel event is contemplation: the loving imaginative process by which we enter God’s Word and hear that Word as spoken personally to us today. In this manner of praying, Ignatius tells us, we imaginatively see the persons in the Gospel event, we hear the words they speak, and we observe the actions they accomplish in the event.”
We might think of meditation as a journalist using interviews and other resources to analyze and observe a situation such as a war. We might think of contemplation as that same journalist being embedded with a particular military unit and experiencing that war first-hand. Both approaches bear fruit. In meditation, we analyze, reflect upon and listen to a biblical text/topic, striving to hear what God is saying specifically to us about our present lives through it. In contemplation, we attempt to embed ourselves in that same text/topic, striving to experience it and thus hear what God may be saying to us about something in our present lives.
Jesuit Michael Harter describes the process of contemplation in this way:
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Read through the passage slowly and attentively. Read aloud if you wish.
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Enter into the scene as one of the participants.
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Speak with the people in the passage. Share their attitudes. Respond to what Jesus says.
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Some words or phrases may carry special meaning to you. Savor them. Repeat them. Think about them.
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When something strikes you, pause. “Pause, for example, when
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you experience a new meaning of a new way of being with Christ…
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you experience God’s love
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you are moved to do something good
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you are peaceful
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you are happy and content just to be in the presence of God
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you are struggling with or disturbed by what the words are saying.”
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This is God speaking.
Many of the Spiritual Exercises provide the opportunity for contemplation on a text related to the birth, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus. It may be obvious, of course, that meditation and contemplation do not have a hard line between them. One easily leads to the other. They blend into each other. They overlap. Yet it can be helpful to consider the distinctions between them as unique ways of using a biblical text to increase our capacity for hearing God and finding God in all things. In subsequent posts I will provide you the opportunity to practice contemplation on biblical texts drawn from the Spiritual Exercises and tied to Epiphany. Through contemplation you will grow in your ability to listen to and become attentive to God. This ability will carry on beyond your brief time of meditation each day and will stay with you through much of the day, increasing your ability to find God in all things.
#3 – Examen
In meditation and contemplation we use Scripture as an opportunity to become more attentive to what God is doing in our lives/speaking to us about our lives. In the Examen we use a portion of the past to do something similar. Typically the Examen is a guided reflection on our experience of the past ½ day or past full day. It can, however, be used to reflect on larger portions of our lives.
Kevin O’Brien writes this:
“St. Ignatius believed that we can find God in all things, at every moment, even in the most ordinary times. To do this, we must take time to reflect on our experience, to look at the data of a day and discern their meaning. Ignatius encourages us to look back over a period of time and pay attention to what is happening in and around us. Then he invites us to look ahead, to what comes next, so that we can act in a way worthy of our vocation as Christians. A daily practice of praying the Examen (perhaps for about ten or fifteen minutes) helps us discern how God is calling us in small and large ways.”
Ignatius urged participants in the Spiritual Exercises not only to reflect upon Scripture related to the life of Jesus, but to reflect upon their daily lives in a strategic and intentional way. In exercises 24-26 and 32-43 he urges participants to reflect upon ways in which God has been present during our day and ways in which we have been attentive or inattentive to God during the day. The Examen was a critical practice in the Spiritual Exercises.
In Ten Minute Transformation I walk through a four-fold way of practicing the Examen:
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Recognize that you are in the presence of God. While we are always in God’s presence, the Examen begins with an intentional remembering that God is present at this very moment.
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Request enlightenment from God as you review the previous day or a portion of the day. We ask God to fill us with wisdom and discernment. We seek greater eyesight so that we might truly see how God was with us during the day/portion of the day we will review in the next step.
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Review the day’s highs and lows with God. Like an athlete and coach watching a video from a recent contest, we and God watch the past few hours of our day as they are projected on the screen of our minds. We are striving not just to assess what happened during that day/ half-day. We are seeking to recognize ways in which we were/were not attentive to God and ways in which God was present with us in the triumphs and the tragedies.
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Resolve to live today and tomorrow in light of what you learned about the Examen of yesterday. Now that you recognize how God was active in your life in that past period, you are equipped to live differently into the future.
This is a typical way of practicing the Examen. Jesuits, however, have practiced the Examen in a wide variety of ways. Mark E. Thibodeaux in Reimagining the Ignatian Examen: Fresh Ways to Pray from Your Day (Loyola Press, 2015) explores more than thirty varieties of the Examen. It is a fundamental part of the Spiritual Exercises. In subsequent posts I will provide you a structured time for practicing the Examen in a way that ties it to the Spiritual Exercises and Epiphany. Through the Examen you will grow in your ability to listen to and become attentive to God. This ability will carry on beyond your brief time of reflection each day and will stay with you through much of the day, increasing your ability to find God in all things.
#4 – Colloquy
Ignatius urged those participating in the Spiritual Exercises to include a “colloquy” as a practice to accompany each of the above practices. Most simply, a colloquy is an intimate conversation we have with the Father, Son or Spirit. It involves speaking as well as listening.
Sometimes a colloquy takes the form of writing a letter to God the Father, Son or Spirit. The word “colloquy” derives from a Latin word meaning “conversation.” In his book on the Spiritual Exercises Larry Warmer urges participants to write a letter to God and a letter from God as they reflect on Scriptures. The wildly popular Jesus Calling by Sarah Young is an example of this type of writing and listening; a type of colloquy. In the book Young merely records in letter-like form what she imagines Jesus saying to her based on her reflection of a particular text. Though her book has been misunderstood and maligned, it falls within a long-standing practice, of which the Spiritual Exercises are a part, of striving to converse with Father/Jesus/Spirit as with a friend. In subsequent posts I will provide you a structured time for practicing a letter-writing colloquy in a way that ties it to the Spiritual Exercises and Epiphany. By writing to God and from God you will grow in your ability to listen to and become attentive to God. This ability will carry on beyond your brief time of meditation each day and will stay with you through much of the day, increasing your ability to find God in all things.
[to be continued]
