Prayer in Daily Life

There are two ways in which to make the full Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius.

 

You can go off for thirty days, usually to a retreat house, usually with a group of people doing the same thing, and spend your time in silence, meeting with a retreat director every day to discuss your prayer life as you make your way through the pattern of prayer "exercises" suggested by Ignatius and deeper into relationship with God.  The advantage?  Thirty days of concentrated time with God.  The disadvantages?  Time, money, those sorts of things . . .

 

Or you can do what's often referred to as a "retreat in daily life" or a "19th Annotation retreat" (so named for one of Ignatius' annotations in the book used by spiritual directors to companion others through the Exercises) ~ stretch the 30 days to 30 weeks (or more), spend an hour or so a day in prayer, rather than several hours, and meet with a director each week rather than each day.  (This is how I did it.) The advantage: Daily life experiences becoming a part of an intense prayer life.  The disadvantage: Daily life experiences getting in the way.

 

Some folks make 19th annotation retreats in concert with others; many retreat houses offer them during the academic year, with varying degrees of contact among group members.  The advantages: Structure, expense, perhaps community. The disadvantage? The loss of the individuality of timing and often, therefore, of the journey itself.

 

I'm accompanying someone through the 19th Annotation these days.  We've been at it for about four months now, and I am remembering something my own 19th Annotation director often says: When you see someone's entire life becoming wound up in the prayer, you know the retreat is starting to take hold.

 

It's really and incredibly wonderful, to listen in as someone makes connections between the stories of the gospel and the events and challenges of his or her own daily life. and begins to find in every ongoing thing ~  family life, work plans, relationships, memories, celebrations, crises ~ threads of God's love and activity previously unnoticed.

 

This is the best thing I get to do.

 

 

Picking Up a Pen . . .

OK, not a pen.

 

But I've blogged very little this year, and I do think that I'll pick that up again.

 

What am I wondering about these days?

 

Ministry, the church, the world, of course.  What are we doing??? Yesterday, I took some time to write out my thoughts about what my call to ministry entails and then a job description based on what I actually do on a daily basis.  Few points of intersection ~ much to consider there.

 

What happens to relationships in the wake of earth-shaking loss?  The picture isn't a pretty one.

 

Spiritual direction ~ what's that all about?  I mean, I know what it's about; perhaps it's where I want to focus my life much more completely?  I am accompanying someone through the Spiritual Exercises ~ fifth time, which isn't a lot for five years, but it's such a huge commitment that I can't manage it with more than one person at a time.  As always, though, I am in awe.

 

Preaching ~ what's that all about?  How much I wish I had had a series of decent preaching courses in seminary! 

 

I am a bit envious of my son as he begins his new law practice.  He's in court nearly every day, and learning quickly that the practice of law is about far more than advocating for folks in adversarial contexts.  It's about being present to them, about letting them know that they are heard, and about helping to quell the fears arising from uncertainty and lack of control. 

 

Suicide prevention.  Is there such a thing, really?  I spend a lot of time and effort on projects in the hope that there is. 

 

Aging.  Sixty-one next month.  Thinking a lot about what I would do if I had less than a decade left.  Not in a morose kind of way, but in a priority-setting kind of way.  I really don't have my act together at all.

 

Grief.  Learning to live alongside it.  I guess it gets better, in the sense that I am more functional all the time.  Clarity of thought has become a reasonable expectation on most days.  But the pain of it -- oh, God. 

 

Intentional solitude.  I need a lot more of that.  I have LOTS of time alone, but I am making a poor showing where taking advantage of it is concerned. 

 

Books.  I have been reading.  A lot.

 

So, yeah.  More writing.  In shorter gusts, I think.

 

Two Years Ordained Today!

Fall 2005 - Opening conversation at the beginning of the Spiritual Exercises, taking place in a small office at John Carroll University, where I am taking a course on Ignatian spirituality and have decided to dive in and make the Exercises with my professor.  We barely know one another.



Me, former lawyer, teacher in Orthodox Jewish school, Presby elder: 

I'm thinking that I might be, you know, called to ordained ministry in my own denomination, but obviously that would be ridiculous, so there's no need for us to discuss it.


Spiritual director, 75-year-old Jesuit: 

Umm hmm.

Things the Spiritual Exercises Taught Me About Jesus

 

 

This month's 31 Days with Saint Ignatius festival at Loyola Press (see the sidebar and click on the badge) highlights a wonderful post by Becky Eldridge, a spiritual director and retreat leader, on "Five Things the Exercises Taught Me About Jesus."

 

It took me the course of about a year to make the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises, in the company of a wise and experienced older Jesuit - a year of daily prayer and weekly discussion through the pattern of prayer devised by Ignatius 500 years ago.  It's hard to remember now, without going back to that year's worth of journals, what I learned from the Exercises themselves and what came later, as the Exercises have shaped my life of prayer ever since, but I think I could trace some of it back to the following:

 

Jesus is extremely persistent.  I was not a particularly devout and certainly not any holy kind of person when I embarked upon the Exercises.  I had the sense almost immediately that I had dived into waters way, way over my head.  But Jesus kept after me.  You can say all you want about God being a God of invitation rather than a God of imposition, but I can tell you that Jesus is a tenacious pursuer.  Which reminds me . . .

 

Jesus is also extremely creative.  An elder in the Presbyterian Church and a teacher in a Jewish school gets the idea to hang out with a Jesuit and pray through Scripture for a year.  Really?  How weird is that?

 

Jesus is interested in each of us as an individual.  Try settling in with some of those narratives of individual encounter for awhile.  Do it the way Ignatius would: sights, sounds, odors (well, okay, not having a sense of smell meant that I could never do that one). Touch, taste.   Zacchaeus, Nicodemus, the Woman at the Well, Bartimaeus,  Mary Magdalene, Thomas. Was that well water icy cold or was it sort of lukewarm?  Was the sky clear that day, or was it overcast?  Pay attention to the details as you experience them.  Sooner or later it occurs to you that Jesus is paying attention to the details in your own life, and you should, too, because he can make something of them.  In fact . . .

 

Jesus wants us to do stuff.  Mostly he wants us to tell other people how much he loves them, in whatever way we are called to do that.  It turns out, and this has been a startling discovery for me in ministry, although I should have known it from my own family and friends, but people in church have surprised me ~ anyway, it turns out to be harder than you might think, because a lot of people don't believe you.  They think there are all kinds of rules. So Jesus wants us to do stuff  ~ doctoring and nursing and parenting and teaching and grocery bagging and typing and lawyering and farming and building and even ministering ~ to share his love in ways that might help people get it.  It would be nice to sit around all day and talk about prayer, but he wants us to do other stuff, too.  He really does want us to be contemplatives in action.

 

Jesus will sit around with you when life becomes almost completely unbearable and when all you want to do is die.  That one I didn't learn until later.  My year of the Exercises was one of the most optimistic and open-hearted years of my life.  I can't say that I experienced the portion of the Exercises (it's called Week Three, but it isn't really a week, which  doesn't matter for our purposes here) in which you pray through Jesus's passion and death ~ I can't say that I experienced it with much depth or fervor ~ but a lot of people don't.  Not then, anyway.  I was a pretty average Week 3 person.  I was a lot more interested in Mary Magdalene at that point  than I was in Jesus.  But later I got dealt a Week 3 life, and when I came up gasping for air eighteen months later, I found that the Jesus I had gotten to know a little during the Exercises was someone willing to sit around with me for a long, long time.  Despite my own utter lack of hospitality.  (An understatement.)

 

There's more, but I think that Becky's limit of five is a good one.  And we have most of the month of July left.  So I'll leave it at this:  Getting to know Jesus is an excellent way in which to spend a year.


 

How Do You Pray? (Friday Five on Monday)

Jan shared the following Friday Five last week.  I didn't have the time then even to think about it, but the questions address one of my favorite topics, so I thought I'd work through them this morning:

Jan says, "At the beginning of this past week, I attended a conference on contemplative prayer entitled "Turning to the Mystics" at the 2013 Summer Institute at the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX. The speakers were James Finley, author and former novice of Thomas Merton; Mirabai Starr, author, translator, and speaker; and Father Ronald Rolheiser, author and president of OST. We were encouraged to regularly sit in quiet to come to realize our union with the Divine, who continually loves us into being."

So for this Friday Five, let us share about our prayer practices, whether silent or not:

 

1. How do you pray?

Most often I use the website Pray As You Go, which provides a daily 12-15 minutes of music, scripture, and questions to ponder.  Some days I sit with a journal and spend an hour on it, some days I listen as I get dressed, some days I listen as I walk. 

 

Other than that I tend to vary what I do.  Some days the Daily Office readings at this site, some days the lectionary or other Scripture passages, some days some sort of devotional book, my favorite being Celtic Benediction.  Some days silence for long periods of time. I tend to use my walks for intercessory prayer. 

 

Sometimes my prayer is all about journaling; sometimes, coloring; sometimes, photography; sometimes, listening to music. 

 

I try to pray the daily examen, which I have been moving to mornings, since I tend to fall asleep in the middle if I leave it till nighttime!

2. How has your idea of prayer changed over time? 

I was introduced to imaginative prayer, to repetitive reflection, to prayer as listening, and to "everything as prayer" when I made the Spiritual Exercises.  I suppose that I had been praying reflectively, mulling things over in the context of scripture, music, and sermons, for a long time before I stumbled upon the Exercises, but without any sort of framework. 

 

The biggest change over the past decade is that prayer is now a constant for me.  Something that at one time I struggled to incorporate into my life in some form or other, even for just a few minutes, now pervades my days. 

3. Do you ever sit in silent prayer? How does it go?

Often, and it varies. I am challenged by distractions the same as everyone else is. 

4. Do you have any difficulties and/or pleasures in prayer?

I have difficulties, but these days most of them have to do with exercising forbearance in the face of the language others often use to pray.  Pleasures these days have mostly to do with listening to others describe their own lives of prayer. So often one would never guess at the profound interior lives of and spirit-led transformations occurring in people who look just like the rest of us, ordinary people going about ordinary lives of family, friends, and work. And so often they exert far more impact on me and my own journey with God than I could ever expect to foster in them.

 

5. What is the best advice that helped you with prayer?

 

I have been graced with extraordinary teachers in the life of prayer; it would be impossible to and ferret out one strand of best advice.   I suppose that there are probably two succinct phrases that I try to remember: "We are all always beginners" and "Listen."

 

Bonus: Share something about prayer or an example of a prayer you like.

 

These days I am listening to two sets of CDs in the car that each, in its own way, is affecting my life of prayer.  One is a new series on the daily examen, the practice reviewing your day in the light of your movements toward and away from God.   I've read lots of material on the examen (reading is always so much easier than practicing!), but this particular series by Howard Gray, S.J., my spiritual director through the Exercises, is filled with riches in insight and eloquence. 

 

The other is Barbara Brown Taylor's sermon series on water, preached at Chautauqua last summer.  Each summer week of the Chautauqua season is devoted to a theme around which morning lectures, daily worship, afternoon speakers, and other special programming spins. BBT did a magnificent job last year of drawing drink from, as she says, "the big book of creation and the little book of scripture."


 

Ten Years of Ignatius

Yesterday afternoon as I wandered through the O'Malley Building at John Carroll University, it occurred to me that it has been nearly ten years since I was a member of one of the small groups sitting in a lounge area there, deep in a class discussion on spirituality and narrative. 

 

I didn't know it then, but that class, taught by Howard Gray, S.J., which I was taking for a master's degree in Humanities (ultimately to be abandoned for an M.Div. instead), was my introduction to Ignatian spirituality.   I don't think that Ignatius was ever explicitly mentioned in that course, but now that I've known Howard for a decade, I know that we were soaking in Ignatian spirituality as we discussed Flannery O'Connor and William Shakespeare.  Howard is one of the world's foremost interpreters and teachers of all things Ignatian, and his love of literature is almost equally renowned.  I have a degree in English literature from an Ivy League university, but I don't think I've ever had a better course in that field than the one for which I had signed up quite by accident in 2003.

 

I was at John Carroll  yesterday to meet with someone who is just finishing up his year with the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises ~ a year of weekly meetings in which he tells me what's going on in his life of prayer and his relationship with God, and I offer some suggestions for the next week.  I guess it's been seven years since Howard was the director and I was the directee, and it was May, and I had decided to go to seminary, and there was a family of young foxes growing up in the cemetery where I walk, and life was shimmering with loveliness and possibility ~ and so what with my own directee coming to the end of his year, and my memories of those years past and all that has intervened, I was feeling rather melancholy, in a Romantic sort of way.

 

And then I sat down with my directee and was moved almost to tears as he began to reflect over the past year.  Sometimes it seems almost unbearably fragile and beautiful, those moments in which you brush against another's encounter with God. 

 

I was also struck by the unexpectedness of, well, all of it.  I've never lost the sense of wonder that I, a Protestant, should have encountered Ignatian spirituality through a Jesuit so devoted to his tradition and so gifted in sharing it.   And yesterday afternoon, that sense of wonder seemed to ripple a little further outward, as I, that Protestant, moved toward the final days of sharing the Exercises with a man whose faith is generally other than Christian.

 

For me, in particular, someone whose faith has been so sorely tried in the past few years, someone who has experienced God so much more in God's absence and silence than in any other form, someone who has had great reason to believe that she could never do this work ~ yes, it does cause me to wipe my eyes a bit, when another person entrusts me with the story of God in his life.

 

It looks so ordinary: two people sitting in an empty office in a university itself largely emptied of students, engaged in quiet conversation.

 

It's so wonderful. Wonder-filled with not a small bit of awe tossed in.



 

Pope SJ

Among those ironic twists of fate or unpredictable wanderings of the Holy Spirit, depending upon how you look at it, it's been one of the great privileges of my life during the last decade to have been influenced by and become friends with some Jesuits.  They have been extravagantly generous with their brilliance, their knowledge, their pastoral presence, and their encouragement. There is no question whatever that I would not be a pastor today, nor would I have survived (in the most literal sense of the word) my son's death without their Spiritual Exercises and their personal support, attentiveness, concern, and help during what I surely hope will turn out to have been the darkest period of my life.

 

The Jesuits with whom I correspond generally simply sign their names at the ends of their emails and notes, but one of them always signs his as "Bill SJ."  And I am always touched by that signature at the bottom of a page, as it bespeaks such a commitment to and identification with the 450-year-old Society of Jesus.

 

And so I feel an unexpected connection to this new pope.  I haven't paid much attention to what's been going on in Rome; most of my very brief updates have come from, ironically again, members of my first Presbyterian church, who are on a long-planned journey to Rome during this of all weeks.  But the news of a Jesuit pope -- yes, to that I'm attentive.

 

I'm still wondering whether the Francis refers to Assisi or Xavier -- one of my friends responded to that question on FB with the words "both/and."   !  (See my previous completely unrelated post.)  I don't have the impression that the newscasters have a clue, but they've heard more about the former saint than the latter.

 

At any rate, we are perhaps about to get a lesson on the complexities of faith and the hopelessness of labels with respect thereto.  The poor in Argentina?  The right-wing dictatorship?  Gay marriage?  The celibate priesthood?  The words are flying on the news.  And, finally, someone on CNN has just uttered the name "Francis Xavier."

 

I have hopes for this pope, and I had not expected that.  (The unexpected ~ a  sign of the Spirit laboring, yes?)  From what I know of the men formed by the Spiritual Exercises, we have every reason to expect a profound depth of intellect and an expansive pastoral capacity.  So, yes ~ high hopes.

 

Looking Back

A couple of weeks ago I was invited to emcee an event next April: the dinner celebration of the tenth anniversary year of the Ignatian Spirituality Institute, the program in which I studied spiritual direction. I started wondering what I had been up to during the April in which I was making the Exercises, and dug back through my journals to see whether I could uncover something that might help me introduce the event.  (I may have.)  

Then, as long as I had my file boxes of prayer reflection journals out (twenty-some over the past eight years!), I wondered what the October entries would show.  How life has changed  .  .  .   .

October 19, 2005

A few weeks into the Spiritual Exercises, which means that I have made a commitment to an hour or so of prayer time each day (I am nowhere close to meeting that commitment) and a weekly meeting with a spiritual director, who is very gentle and very funny, and takes my beginning efforts very seriously.  Recently returned from visiting Josh at The University of Chicago.  I am an elder in my home Presbyterian church and a teacher in an Orthdox Jewish school, and my life of prayer is in its infancy.

" 'Be still and know that I am God.'

Really, these are words that you could put into use anywhere, any day, in the middle of anything.  Staring with the 'be still.'  Meaning: Create an interior stillness.  Lose all the internal chatter.  That in itself would be a discipline.

Just right now: I can hear the tv in the living room, the dog walking around hopefully in the kitchen, the clatter of these [computer] keys.  But I can try to create an inner stillness.  A hollow place.  Not an empty place, but a warm, hollow, inviting place for God to rest.  How would I do that during the day?"

October 17, 2006

The Exercises are, officially, behind me, and have become the framework for my spiritual life.  I am embarking upon the ordination journey, and have just been endorsed by the Session of my home church as an Inquirer in the official process.  I'm visiting and applying to seminaries, and there's no reason to think that all will not go splendidly.

In my journal: A brief email exchange with my spiritual director on the continual dilemma in my life: Protestant/Catholic; Ignatius/Calvin (both studying in Paris in the 1530s, where I spent time in July imagining them both).  He has some reading suggestions. 

October 20, 2007

I am a brand-new new seminary student, reflecting on the Eucharist, which had been transformed for me the previous year from a boring ritual to a deeply significant sacrament, thanks to a Seder dinner at the home of one of my students, a meal shared in the context of Week 3 of the Exercises with its many imaginative prayers based on Jesus' final days.

"The seminary feels physically bereft to me.  No labyrinth.  No stained glass.  No statues.  No art. Puritan starkness in the extreme  It has its own beauty but it seems, as a day-after-day-after-day experience, on the empty side.  I begin to see how much I depend upon material, substantial reference points for faith."

Mid October, 2008

The entries are not dated, but they are stacked in order in a folder.  Josh has been gone for seven weeks.  My father thinks his cancer had recurred.  (It had not.) Spiritual director emeritus does have cancer.  ( From which he eventually recovered.) How much? I wondered, sitting in my living room late in the afternoon, hair dripping from the shower, looking in despair at the emails on my laptop. 

"What does it mean that people keep speaking and writing to me in this way -- you teach us so much, you will have more wisdom and compassion for others?  Does it mean that even in the midst of such a horrific loss, I am still called to serve?  Even though I am now a person who can barely get out of bed in the morning?  A person who could not be trusted with the life of her own child?"

October 19, 2009

I am back in seminary.  I am taking Worship and Sacraments and Hebrew Exegesis and something else (I have no idea what that might have been).  This is the fall that I spend almost entirely on Psalm 88, which probably helps to save my life.  

In my journal: A long email received this day from SDE, which I carried around, crumpled up in my pocket, for months, because I needed to read and re-read what was, in effect, an extended meditation on the Suscipe,  a prayer at the end of the Spiritual Exercises.  He writes, among other things, about coming to an acceptance of the mystery of faith.   I will get no answers, he tells me.  It is oddly reassuring, to be offered companionship in the articulation of that hard reality. 

Not a bad re-read this week, as I am contending with Job in the pulpit.  Odd, to look back at these entries from this vantage point.  What a terrible and strange and wonderful journey this has become.

Ministry: Cultivate Imagination; Interpret Experience

I wrote the following during my days walking alongside the water at Birch Bay, on almost the northernmost edge of Washington State, last June.  After two weeks of preaching Job, with two to go, and a bedside vigil Tuesday and funeral Saturday, I'm off to the beach here on the North Coast of Ohio, to ponder it anew.

I think that those might be the tasks to which I am called: to cultivate imagination and to interpret experience.

I've been trying to distill the diffuse activities, plans, thoughts, and priorities of my daily life into a short phrase that might provide me with a sort of plumb line by which to gauge whether I am in alignment with who I am supposed to be and what I am supposed to be doing.  Life as a pastor is, as I had suspected, much like life as a mother in the variety of its demands, which often materialize as if out of nowhere and on the turn of a dime.  (The analogy between pastoring and mothering occurred to me when I was deep in the discernment process with respect to seminary, and has caused me to wonder ever since exactly how it was that men managed to reserve ordained ministry to themselves for nearly twenty centuries.)

While we were on vacation a couple of weeks ago, I intently focused my thoughts away from the church and my role therein.  The consequence has been that the cauldron of  ideas bubbling away beneath the surface of my consciousness has now boiled over.  It's possible that trying to contain them will be as elusive a prospect as would be attempting to scoop up tangible bubbles which lie glistening on the ground after having overflowed their pot.

Four little stories to illustrate where I might be going with all this:

Some months ago, I sat talking with a lifelong and actively engaged church woman whose death appeared to be imminent.  She had insisted on pursuing further medical treatment, which even her doctors had suggested was futile at that point. (And, as my son says, when the doctors finally say so, then you know that you should have stopped six months ago.)  I suggested that perhaps God was inviting her into a new path on her journey.  "What are you talking about?" she asked.  I paused, confused.  Was it possible that our death-defying culture had so permeated her approach to her illness that she was incapable of envisioning a change in direction?  Of course it was.  And I was stymied as it dawned on me that I had, at most, a few days in which to help her gain a sense that God was at work in the heartbreaking and agonizing road she had begun to walk.

Last night, I spoke with a man who has invested several weeks in tests that may (or may not) reveal very bad news and will no doubt indicate a need for a prolonged course of treatment of some sort.  How well I remember the unsettled frustration of last fall, when the wait for results and the complications of decision-making were far worse than the concrete reality of diagnosis.  Recognizing that he has at least several more days of uncertainty ahead of him, I told him that the morning's reading had been Mark's narrative of Jesus stilling the storm.  I suggested that he is in a rocking boat in the midst of a veritable storm of unhappy symptoms and medical testing, and that perhaps he might pray to know the presence of Jesus in the boat with him, stilling that storm with the gift of peace.  "Thank you," he said,  And again, "Thank you."

I see, finally (because I am often extremely slow on the uptake), that I cannot merely ask the question, "Do you think . . .?" but that I need to offer the beginnings of an answer, in order to help someone see and understand his or her experience in the light of religious faith.

When I was seven years old, and my family was in the terrible car accident that took two lives, the adults responded by walking away from God, from church, from any conviction that there was anyone or anything at work beyond the obvious and horrific reality that confronted us.  I have often wondered, especially in the past few years, whether my outlook on life might be dramatically different from the one I possess if someone at that time had tried to articulate something, anything at all, about God's relational presence to us.  Even something sappy about angels in heaven.  What if someone had offered the slightest hint that our experience might be interpreted in light of something beyond the devastation that lay before us? 

Decades later, when I was making the Spiritual Exercises (yes, there they are again), someone finally did.  By that time, I had become a leader and teacher in the church myself, but it was not until that year of gentle prodding that I sensed my own spiritual imagination being cultivated, my own experience being opened to an interpretation in the light of Christian faith.  There wasn't much in the way of verbally articulated direction, which is no doubt why I hesitate to impose much on others, knowing that I learned from a master how to step out of the way and let God issue the invitations.  But there was a question here, a directional pointer there.  "Have you considered?"  Have you ever looked at it this way?"  "Maybe you should consider thinking about it that way."

But that degree of restraint often leaves people in the lurch.  And so I am trying to learn ~ how to teach and model and then invite them to mine their experiences and utilize their imaginative gifts to begin to see where God is at work.

Ignatius and Religious Experience

Here is my big personal take-away, something that has never occurred to me before, from the Friday evening portion of the week-end's program on Ignatius and his incarnational theology:

Ignatius was able to discover what he did about religious experience precisely because he had an inadequate education.

Irony of ironies.  Especially if you know about or have any connection with the Society of Jesus, which runs schools and universities all over the world, and which requires a formal education of its members that is the envy of anyone who wishes she had been directed into three years of philosophy studies before she touched theology.

Let's step back a bit.  Ignatius was a minor 16th century Spanish nobleman, a youngest child, and was therefore provided with only the rudimentary education needed to sustain a military career.  He was a soldier who drank and caroused (career choices which instill great affection for him in college students, when they discover through his biography that lifelong perfection is not a prerequisite for idealistic service to God), and then through an arrogant misjudgment in battle encountered a cannonball that altered the course of his life.  

It was while he lay in bed recovering from his injuries and in the months of pilgrimage following that he had the experiences in prayer and began to develop the practices that became the Spiritual Exercises. 

Our presenter pointed out that it is through higher education that we are given the framework that enables us to analyze and understand and discuss the world ~ but Ignatius did not have that particular advantage.  And so he fell back on his own experience of God.  

That experience created some bewildering difficulties for him, and he did eventually pursue the course of education that made it possible for him to be ordained a priest and, eventually, to become one of the most gifted of organizational administrators.

But his experience also enabled him first to encounter God deeply and affectively, with his feelings more than with his mind, and to pass on to succeeding generations his confidence in our capacity to meet God in our experiences, and to learn to evaluate them, and to proceed accordingly.

I was struck for a number of reasons by the assertion that it was his lack of education that enabled him to develop an experiential approach that can so profoundly change lives.

For one, I have been the beneficiary of excellent formal education in many guises, but it was the experience of the Exercises that changed my life.

For another, my seminary education was extremely lopsided, with a heavy bent toward the academic, and I will be forever grateful that it was balanced by my simultaneous immersion in Ignatian spirituality.  Many of my classmates found their own balance in other ways, especially through travel and mission, or through worship and service in congregations focused on experimentation, but for me, it was Ignatius who opened other doors.

And for a third, while I have an intense bent toward the intellectual and academic myself, and made good use of that approach to contend with Josh's death during my last two years of seminary, when the formal theology all splattered outward, as Aquinas described it, as "so much straw," and God seemed truly and eternally gone, my feelings were both legitimized and challenged through the gifts of Ignatius.

I'm so glad that he wasn't an eldest son destined for university from the outset!

The Purpose of Ignatian Repetition

The following was posted this morning on the dotMagis blog of Loyola Press, from which I've "borrowed" the title of my post: 

Howard Gray, SJ, explains why much of the prayer in the Spiritual Exercises is repetition—multiple meditations on the same subjects or scripture passages.

The repetitions are efforts to engage mystery, to center on the depth of riches within revelation, and to discover how God specifically invites this particular man or woman to find the meaning of a gospel event for him or her.

In other words, the aim of Ignatian repetition is to personalize prayer. For example, a person hears Mary’s yes in Luke 1:38. In the initial encounter with this scene, the yes of Mary may have been admirable, challenging, and vaguely inviting. In the course of the prayers of repetition, the man or woman making the Exercises may begin to feel drawn to pronounce his or her own yes, to recognize a developing attraction to stand with Mary in personal solidarity with her kind of discipleship. Such a movement will lead in time to a willingness to stand with Mary beneath the cross of her son.

 George Traub, SJ
An Ignatian Spirituality Reader

Howard Gray was my director through the Ignatian Exercises. This quotation took me back to a morning as I sat in his office, talking about my prayer of the preceding week, and he said, "You're not finished with this yet, are you?"

"No," I responded in relief, grateful to have been heard and understood, and to know that there was no requirement to "move on" ~ to know, that, in fact, a deeper immersion was called for.

"So stick with it for this next week," he suggested.

I don't remember the substance of the conversation at all (although I'm sure that I could find it in one of the several journals I filled that year).  

What I do remember is how much I learned about prayer from that brief interaction ~ how important repetition is in prayer, how essential it is, in plumbing our relationship with God, to reflect, to wonder, to savor, to wander around, to repeat.  Again and again and again.

Walt Farrell, S.J.

Two or three weeks ago, I learned via email that Father Walt Farrell, S.J. had moved to hospice care, and tonight I've learned, via the blog of Joe Koczera, S.J., that he died last night.  Father Farrell was my director during the retreat that wasn't, the retreat that I was making when Josh died.

I had met Walt once or twice before; he had come to Cleveland to make presentations to those of us working on our certificates in spiritual direction.  When I learned that he was to be my director for my week in Michigan, I was elated: seventy-plus years of Jesuit experience and wisdom at my disposal! You can read more about what that entailed in the biography at Joe's place.  My story is about my two personal experiences with Walt.

My first retreat day that year was an intense one.  I had spent the summer doing my CPE (clinical pastoral education, i.e. chaplaincy education) at The Cleveland Clinic, and when I went to meet with Walt for the second time, he wondered aloud why every movement in my prayer brought me back to that experience.

"Because I have been completely traumatized by my summer," I said in surprise, beginning to see my days in the MICU differently than had been possible when I was in the midst of them.  All that illness; all those deaths.  Walt told me to take it easy for the next twenty-four hours.  Get some rest.  Don't feel that you have to focus on prayer.  Enjoy the grounds.

If only.  

I got the message about Josh late that afternoon.  I went back to the main building and told someone that it was urgent that they find Father Farrell immediately. After I told him what had happened, I said in a vague sort of way that I needed a computer, and he graciously turned his office over to me so that I could begin the terrible, terrible process of notifying people while I waited for friends to make the long drive to get me.  I spent a long hour or two on the computer and phone, engaged in one complicated interaction after another, and then Walt and I stood in the hallway for another hour and talked about an astonishing array of topics and people. Shock produces some of the world's most bizarre conversations.

My friends came, I went home, and I think that I wrote him a thank-you email at some point, and that he responded. I didn't expect to encounter him again; I knew that I would never be able to return to the Manresa retreat house.

Two Christmases later I ran into Walt at a mass at the Carmelite monastery in Cleveland.  I was back in seminary; I was, in fact, doing my field education in a big downtown church, which meant that I had acquired some responsibilities in public leadership.  But I was still hiding out at the Carmelites' on a regular basis.  

It took him a minute to place me ~ "You were with me when my son died," I said ~ and then he said, "Of course."  And then, without missing a beat, "How's seminary?"

When I wrote to him a couple of weeks ago, I recalled that conversation and how wonderfully affirming it was for me.  Serving in the church, I must have looked pretty functional on the outside, but  it was still a struggle to get up ~ every single morning.  And there wasn't an hour that passed that I didn't wonder whether I had lost my mind, in the most literal sense of the phrase, to imagine that I would ever be either a pastor or a spiritual director.  Every day I expected someone else to see reason, and to tell me that no one was going to be interested in a minister whose child had died of suicide.

But the 93-year-old Father Walt Farrell didn't ask me whether I had gone back, or speak in a pitying tone of voice, or otherwise imply anything other than an expectation that I would have found my way back.  He simply asked how school was going.

Such a little thing, but it meant a great deal to me.

I see from his biography that, as I knew, he was a man of wide-ranging experience and great accomplishment.  But I do believe that it's in the smallest of encounters that you can really take the measure of a person.  I have no major Walt Farrell speeches on which to report, no honors or recognitions to recall.  Only a couple of days of encounter that helped to shape my own story ~ which is what, in the end, makes a great director of the Spiritual Exercises.

(I've stolen Joe's photograph. I think it's a beautiful one, so I hope he doesn't mind.)