Ignatian Spirituality

By Fr Maurice Giuliani, S.J.

Let's begin with the core of our faith. Through our Baptism, a definitive bond is made between God and each person: the Holy spirit becomes the founder of a history that can be called divine but is also a human history - the long journey of a person's freedom through random yes's and no's. All construct in this way their own spirituality that is nothing other than the life of the Spirit within them.

Then, little by little, the interior life develops. Prayer gets rooted and matures. Discernment clarifies relationships and choices. Passivity under the action of divine grace creates a spiritual being able to serve in truth. In all of these, only experience instructs; speculative insights offer nothing. Then where does Ignatian spirituality bring anything specific to all these developments?

The God whom Ignatius incessantly sought - "to do His will" - is not found at the completion of a journey of tests and "nights." He reveals Himself as a creative force to those whom He asks to co-labor with Him in a spirit of humility but also with initiative and in action. Sharing the weakness of Christ in their own weakness, Christians make their own God's foolhardy desire for a society based on love. Each makes a total commitment to this service which opens up all God's secrets. This is how the Christian becomes a "contemplative in action."

The vision that Ignatius places at the beginning of the Exercises keeps sight of both the Creature and the creature, the One and the other swept along in the same movement of love. In it, God offers himself to humankind in an absolute way through the Son, and humankind respond in an absolute way by a total self-donation. There is no longer sacred or profane, natural or supernatural, mortification or prayer - because it is one and the same Spirit who brings it about that the Christian will "love God in all things - and all things in God."

Too optimistic a vision? Not really - simply the faith understanding which at every moment holds each person in the present that is given and establishes the spiritual self.

It remains always possible that a person can deviate from the way of love. How is it possible, Ignatius asks, that the clear activity of God can be clouded, even by the conscience? He recommends some "rules for discerning" the movements that cross the heart. Here, he is no innovator: the content of his rules was long part of traditional wisdom. But for Ignatius, the "discernment of spirits" is done for the sake of deciding - that is, for the sake of a free act by which one commits one's life and remains faithful lifelong through whatever circumstances.

We are touching here on a point which shows as clearly as any the originality of ignatian spirituality. It is summarized in the title itself of the Exercises: "To seek and find the will of God in the disposition of one's life." We may suppose that there are times and occasions when one must make a choice of enormous importance. Still, when it comes to remaining faithful to God alone, there are no petty choices. Every single free act is the occasion for encountering God, as every embrace of what the present brings is a new discovery of the work of the Spirit. So discernment is done beginning in the present, be it simple or be it complex. One asks oneself questions that reveal opportunities or mistakes, allowing one to discover in the concreteness of one's life the will of God.

Ignatian spirituality does not take the shape of some kind of template. It does not lead to the practice of one virtue - say, poverty or obedience. It does not lead to one kind of apostolic work - say, with the sick, the dying, or some particular socioeconomic group. Rather, it reaches right into the very heart of the universal mission of the Church. There, it gets men and women ready for this mission, men and women who are resolved, with the grace of God, to be completely free and disponible.