God's Voice Within: The Ignatian Way to Discover God's Will

by Mark E. Thibodeaux

The first [cause for desolation] is because we have been tepid and slothful or negligent in our exercises of piety, and so through our own fault spiritual consolation has been taken away from us. —SE, Rules for Discernment of Spirits, First Week, #9 Of the three causes, only this first one implies culpability on my part. It’s important to note that if I am in desolation I should not presume that it is my fault. On the contrary, for a devout Christian, desolation does not usually come because of sin. Furthermore, even within this first cause, I would like to propose a qualifier to Ignatius’s rule. I believe that in addition to moral problems that lead to desolation, there could be logistical problems or psychological problems as well. Ignatius did not include these possibilities because the sixteenth-century mind-set tended to blame “the sinner” for even logistical problems and because the entire field of psychology had not yet come about. With this in mind, I propose that the first reason desolation has come is because of moral, logistical, or psychological problems. When a person finds himself in desolation, then, it would be good to do a sort of inventory of these three factors to see if, by making some changes here or there, he might begin to ease out of desolation.