Big Changes for Jesuit Spirituality

Newsflash! Pope announces changes to the Spiritual Exercises

13 March 2024

Pope Francis will hold a joint press conference with Arturo Marcelino Sosa Abascal SJ, the Father General of the Society of Jesus to announce the first major revision of the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius in 500 years. This follows the discovery of a document found in Saint Ignatius’s desk with instructions not to open until the tenth year of the reign of the first Jesuit Pope. 

The Jesuit Curia has released a translation of the text of Saint Ignatius's letter.

Rome, January 4, 1556

As I near the end of my life, I pray (and worry) constantly about the future of our Company. Although it seems to be thriving, supplying extremely well trained priests to stem the tide of the reform movement and missionaries around the globe, something haunts me. The vision that I had by the River Cardoner is fading. I have been particularly troubled by the prospect of losing that vision after I die.

The administration of the Society will not suffer, there are plenty of talented men, but I fear our collective understanding of God’s will is more than slightly cloudy. .I am worried for the visionaries. Our men are certainly a cut above regular priests. We have a lot of second sons of high ranking families, bright kids, eager, many are extremely devout, but it is almost that they do everything too perfectly. The gay ones have to hide out because there are so many trying to prove themselves. Damn macho post medieval tribal culture is deadly.

Then I had an experience with a young applicant to the Society, a mestizo who came back with some missionaries from the Americas. He can neither read nor write, and his Latin is rudimentary so I had to have him work in the kitchen while he catches up, but he claimed to have had a vision of the Blessed Mother that directed him. He started to talk to me about it, and I was very moved. I have weighed the spirits carefully and it is clear to me that Mariano had an authentic vision.

Mariano says that the Virgin told him that we Jesuits place too much emphasis on earning God’s Love. I blame myself for the emphasis on love through actions and not in our hearts. (Love is expressed through actions, but it has to do with intent). He says that the Virgin told him that priests who are privileged and jealous of their position become blind to the immediacy of God’s love and can’t see that this love comes without any conditions. He’s absolutely right, but centuries of fighting have conditioned us to enforce conditions rather than seeing beyond them.

I would turn our enterprise over to Mariano if I could. I know that this is God’s will, but I can’t execute it. The Inquisition would go ballistic. The Pope’s funding scheme for Saint Peter’s would collapse. The Society would split apart with the infighting. Sometimes I am tempted to just let the cards fall where they may, those snobby Jesuits who spend years studying the minute distinctions in the writings of Avicenna and Aquinas need to do more quiet meditation, but I will have to leave that aside. I have decided to send Mariano into hiding,

This is where I am being led right now. I have to get this young man to safety and protect his vision. The time will be ripe at some point, but not at this moment. Until then we must protect this inspiration. The fires of the Inquisition need to be extinguished, and warring factions need to at least reach a detente. The church does need reform and a strong hand is necessary right now so fight fire with fire, but make sure that the proposition of “ends justify means” is discussed in the ratio. Keep an open mind. Things change.

I have authorized the foundation of a clandestine cell of Jesuits near Buenos Aires in the New World. Mariano will lead this small community. Their practice will be kept alive by recruits from the indigenous community that they will serve for as long as it takes. I want to keep the flame alive while things sort themselves out. Mariano has told me that the Virgin told him that Jesuits will begin to practice the quiet meditation that Xavier wrote about from Japan, and she approves. I find that perhaps the hardest thing to believe of all the wonders he shared with me, but I suppose it is possible.

Mariano has my permission to restructure the Spiritual Exercises. I will note them here so that anyone who reads this will know that I approve of the changes. He has turned them on their head. The first week will be the Contemplatio ad Amorem. The main meditation instruction will be the fourth method, to follow the breath as it rides on the sound of a word in prayer. Mariano says that human beings can find God in all things instinctively. He is right. In my version of the Exercises I thought I had to lead the retreatant by the nose. We don’t need to go through hell to experience the Presence in rocks and stones, mothers and babies, even in the clanging of pots and pans.

This experience will be the basis of the meditations on the events and sayings in the life of our Lord Jesus Christ during the second week which will stand as they are with the exclusion of the stories about Mary. The third week also remains as it is, but without my interpretation. We can approach the meditation on His sacrifice and death and allow them to speak for themselves, and create their own inner narrative. But again the story of Mary going to the tomb will be left for the entirely new fourth week.. 

The new fourth week is a series of meditations which Mariano received in his vision of the Blessed Virgin. She was the person who really allowed God to become human. I hope we don't have to wait 500 years to experience how Mary the Virgin can help guide us to continue the Incarnation, but 500 years is just a drop in the bucket of eternity. We can all begin to experience immediacy right now in the moment. We don’t have to wait. Waiting for the present moment is an oxymoron. However the changes in my Exercises will have to wait.

Mariano tells me that in the clandestine Buenos Aires cell, washing dishes will be part of everyone's daily practice. It should smooth out the rough edges between Avicenna and Aquinas. There may be random occurrences in the universe, but few mistakes.

Father Ignatius

Head versus Heart, Faith and Reason, Reason and the Emotions

The Discernment of Spirits in the Spiritual Exercises

After I published my discussion of Ignatius’s Discernment of the Spirits and William of Ockham's Razor, Occam’s Razor of Emotional Discernment, I received several careful and astute objections from the Companions, a group of former Jesuits. Ed Mowrey said: “a subject worth discussion—head vs heart in discernment I’d call it.  His reminder to ‘bring all of ourselves into the process of discernment’ is of course easy to hear.  Ironically Ken’s own approach in this little essay is all head-based.  I don’t fault him for that because it’s the inevitable outcome of growing up and being educated in a culture that clearly values head over heart. . .  .” 

I’d like to rise in my own defense, and attempt to spell out my reasoning. This is indeed a subject worth discussion. I contend that “Head versus Heart” is at best an oversimplification and, in the context of Ignatian spirituality, it may also be a strawman. 

 

I remember back to my college days, sitting through rambling one-note sermons of the Newman chaplain at Dartmouth, Father Bill Nolan. He came from the rigid, classical Thomistic theology taught in all seminaries pre-Vatican 2 (he’d been a Redemptorist before returning to the regular priesthood). Looking back it seems a rather defensive position at one the premiere liberal arts colleges in America, and in the end, didn’t hit the mark. He articulated in a rather rudimentary way what was a pretty widely held position that there was no essential conflict between faith and reason; that a good Catholic could hold the “supernatural” doctrine of the Church, and still be a thoroughly modern, scientific, clear thinking, rational human being. That in fact some doctrinal statements were amenable to the process of reason. After all, we had Saint Thomas Aquinas as our guide.

I graduated from college in 1966 and entered the Society. In Philosophy Edward MacKinnon, S.J., and a few others were trying to continue the appropriation of modern philosophy to the doctrinal bandwagon of Catholic theology. Foggy Mac, a slur more than a humorous Jesuit style nickname that reflected in my view some deep anti-intellectual bias in the rank and file, Ed left the Jesuits and, we imagined, the Church, as if a purely intellectual pursuit inevitably led one astray. Actually I think that he just decided to honor his sexual instinct in the normal way and give his emotional, sexual life a larger playing field. A simple explanation, but religious discourse is sometimes susceptible to far fetched and exaggerated stories. 

However, before moving onto considering the post-Vatican 2 fallout, especially in the new playing field of sexual freedom, let me make one observation: the fields, or domains, of faith and reason were held as essentially separate. Christianity is a revealed religion of the book. It has its roots in (quasi) historical personages and events which are themselves not easily amenable to reason. They behave more like myths. Thus the narrative of faith and its doctrines have to be held in an essentially different way than, say,  the Laws of Thermodynamics or Euclidean Geometry. As long as the wall between the domains stands, we confidently claim that we maintain our integrity. This is not to deny that grace, charm, even fun and play are available in the faith domain. That can be seductive which is also problematic.

Post Vatican 2, emotion, sexuality, our immediate feelings and their expression entered the world of religious practice. They just did. And as with the release of any repression, it lead to both a whole new world as well as unleashing a host of issues heretofore unattended. I may be exaggerating, but certainly in my own case, I would describe it as a kind of unravelling. 

Enter, or rather re-enter Father Ignatius and his revolutionary spiritual insight at Manresa. In 1522, he began an interior search to discern the will of God for himself as an individual, and eventually for his burgeoning religious order. Never veering from the given commandments and injunctions of the established Church (and perhaps fearing the harsh sentence imposed by the Inquisition), he sought to discover his personal destiny. What was the Spirit calling him to do? Where, or in the service of what mission, should he devote all his energy, his life, his entire will? When we undertook this discernment ourselves, he counseled us to weigh actual feelings, consolation and desolation, in a focused, orderly way which, over time, led to an “election” or an informed spiritual choice.

Voila! Here in this morass of unleashed emotional religious enthusiasm, sexual feelings, exploration of our underlying subconscious motivations, we have the example of a revered saint who used these very human parts of our psyche to discern the will of God. We got to play in a new ball park, and include an unexplored domain in our spiritual lives. 

There have been many positive things that have emerged from this exploration. Not only did we learn to use “I” statements, but therapists began to experiment with meditation as a tool for resolving or at least relieving the effects of trauma, while other psychologists mapped the distinct language of the emotions. They invented the new field of Emotional Intelligence. We have even begun to pinpoint the locus of the origin of emotions in the brain, and distinguish between what are broadly described as base emotions--fear, anger, and derivative feelings such as shame and guilt. The same can be said for distinguishing between the human sexual instinct and love.

The above description of the “Heart Domain” is not intended to be in any way definitive, but rather to indicate that the terrain is rich, varied, and bumpy, with lots of threads, sometimes conflicting, that require our attention. It is also a relatively new discipline, a work in progress. But we have to acknowledge that it is a far step from what Ignatius described in the early 16th century as the movement, conflict, even outright clash between the spirits of good and evil. I would contend that even though his mental model was viscerally real, his descriptive language was charged with an almost gnostic flavor which is very different from what we understand today as the science of mental health. 

It is not a bridge too far to take what we understand of our emotional life and interchange it with Ignatius' experience of conflicting spiritual forces. This exchange or interpolation, however, is not simply a case of X = Y where Y has all the attributes, causes and conditions of X! 

How are we to use this new rich “heart” vein to inform our spiritual lives and the real life decisions that we face in our day to day lives? I have spent a great deal of time over the past 35 or 40 years actually trying to understand the inner-working of our emotional lives, our basic drives, our instincts--the many facets of what we might generally for convenience call our “spiritual” selves. In the beginning of my search I immersed myself in Enneagram studies with Claudio Naranjo, then I explored every human potential school that I could find. I described my experience in the post Vatican 2 opening to the world of emotion, feeling, and sexuality as an unraveling. And to some degree, all those pieces remain in heaps on the floor where they fell. 

At the beginning of this short paper, I began to defend myself against the observation, perhaps opinion, that my use of Ockham’s Razor in analyzing the flow of emotions, felt impulses, attraction and antipathy, and trying to use this “information” was “head-driven.” Reading emotions is not the objective exercise where creating a list of pro’s and con’s helps yield a larger profit on the bottom line. On the other hand, listening to the language of our hearts is not learning to decode the strange language of Mars or Venus. It does not require that we suspend our intellectual judgement. It simply requires that we pay attention in a different, inclusive way. We have to bring all of ourselves to the endeavor of arriving at a good decision, especially one driven by a desire to do the will of God. 

I talked about the pre-Vatican 2 attempts to reconcile Faith and Reason. Following Aquinas, Bill Nolan et al tried to use the structures of Aristotelian analysis to negotiate the world of faith, but, I contend we had to maintain a wall between the world of Faith and that of our ordinary lives, which includes everything from making coffee to deciphering the algorithms of a Google search. Aristotle might help us distinguish between the human and divine natures of Jesus as long as the virginity of his mother Mary remained intact as a matter of faith. 

It may be a useful practice to suspend our habitual intellectual judgement when we first experience an onrush of newly discovered or released thread of emotions. In fact, it’s recommended in most psychological practice, a kind of agere contra to our normal head-driven way of experiencing the world. But this does not mean that the heart, our emotions deliver a kind of coded message that is separate from our heads, or normal intellectual processing. There is no need to erect a wall between our reason and emotions, our heart and our head. In fact, I would argue that the exact opposite is called for--to tear down any walls that exist. This is why Ignatius recommended the careful weighing of consolation and desolation over time. They have a natural way of sifting themselves out, and providing useful input for our decision making. 

Ockham’s Razor for our emotional life.

Occam’s Razor of Emotional Discernment

Novacula Occami

Asking another question of Occam’s Razor

In the process of doing his own spiritual work, my friend Daniel Shurman carefully teased out another layer in my understanding of Saint Ignatius’s Discernment of the Spirits by insisting on a dimension that is perhaps overlooked--seeking the Truth. 

When we studied scholastic philosophy, our Jesuit masters teased our intellects with an absurd question posed by Thomas Aquinas, “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” It’s a question ad absurdum because it was designed to demonstrate that the time and space between heaven and earth cannot be measured no matter how hard you try.

Daniel tossed out the rigid philosophical reduction, and in its place created a generous space for the spiritual dimension of joyfully watching The Dance of Angels. 

Here’s how he did it. Daniel loves an elegant solution, and this pointed me back to William of Ockham’s Law of Parsimony.1 Occam’s Latin is of course succinct and worthy of a renowned philosopher: Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate, which translates as "Plurality ought never be posited without necessity.” Precise but also misleading—the word “parsimony” throws truth into a dustbin for the stingy. I prefer a more generous interpretation. Let’s try this: “The simplest, most beautiful solution is probably true.” A logical problem arises because non sunt multiplicanda entia sine necessitate cannot be a tight fisted rule. Sometimes there is more than one reason or argument. Still a more elegant line of argument points to the truth. It also gives angels the freedom to dance.

Ockham actually gives us a tool rather than an ironclad rule; its metal is called “Occam’s Razor.” It shapes a proposition: whittle away the random thoughts; pare down your idea, the plan, the problem by shaving off unnecessary words, feelings, resentments, withholds, and you get closer to the truth of the matter. Wittgenstein said: "If a sign is not necessary then it is meaningless. That is the meaning of Occam's Razor" (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: 3.328).

While stuffy old Aquinas was puzzling over his absurd question about the quantity of angels,  Daniel invited Steve Jobs, along with Ockham, to observe the angels dance. Daniel and Steve zoomed out to watch a multitude of angels dance on the razor’s edge, and make connections. Then Daniel with his relentless and unflinching honesty zoomed in to observe the single angel pointing to a solution or, at least, marvel at the graceful lead dancer in the choreography. (And I’ve watched him dance with one very beautiful angel. He is masterful).

I was alerted to the emotional ambiguity of the discernment process by the renowned Jesuit Cardinal, Avery Dulles. In one of our last meetings, he held up the small volume of the Spiritual Exercises, and said, this is a book to be used, not just read. Then he said that there was a tendency to assign the simplest of feelings to the weighing of what Ignatius called “consolation and desolation” which tended to reduce it to a kind of “feel good” spirituality. He confessed that he was more inclined to be directed by reason than feelings, but still he thought that Ignatius’s recommendation of inclining towards the solution of what feels best pointed to perhaps something far deeper than one that just feels good in the moment.

Like Jobs who would “zoom out to connect the dots, then zoom in and simplify,”2 and Ockham who used a process of simplification as a rigorous arbiter between candidate models, Daniel examined the panorama of his own feelings to see a clear line that led to an elegant solution. 

Daniel reminded me in the most beautiful way that if we bring all of ourselves into the process of discernment, with patience, compassion and rigor, we true up our course of action.

 "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all

  Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."3

____________________

1The Law of Parsimony is attributed to William of Ockham. And perhaps here he’s Plato to the genius of many schoolmen which is why I dragged Aquinas into the battle.

2“Steve would zoom out to connect the dots, then zoom in and simplify.” [John Sculley’s quote].

3 From “Ode on a Grecian Urn” By JOHN KEATS.

I’ve used William of Occam’s principle to discuss the use of condoms to combat HIV/AIDS in Africa in my blog Buddha S.J.