The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything: A Spirituality for Real Life

by James Martin

St. Ignatius Loyola was a sixteenth-century soldier-turned-mystic who founded a Catholic religious order called the Society of Jesus, also known as the Jesuits.

The way of Ignatius is about finding freedom: the freedom to become the person you’re meant to be, to love and to accept love, to make good decisions, and to experience the beauty of creation and the mystery of God’s love.

In brief, a spirituality is a way of living in relationship with God.

Jesuits take their cue from Ignatius in terms of a practical spirituality. One joke has a Franciscan, a Dominican, and a Jesuit celebrating Mass together when the lights suddenly go out in the church. The Franciscan praises the chance to live more simply. The Dominican gives a learned homily on how God brings light to the world. The Jesuit goes to the basement to fix the fuses.

In the United States, Jesuits are probably best known as educators, currently running twenty-eight colleges and universities (including Georgetown, Fordham, Boston College, and every college named Loyola) and dozens of high schools and, more recently, middle schools in the inner city.

If asked to define Ignatian spirituality, the first thing out of their mouths would most likely be finding God in all things.

Ignatian spirituality considers everything an important element of your life. That includes religious services, sacred Scriptures, prayer, and charitable works, to be sure, but it also includes friends, family, work, relationships, sex, suffering, and joy, as well as nature, music, and pop culture.

In Ignatian spirituality there is nothing that you have to put in a box and hide. Nothing has to be feared. Nothing has to be hidden away. Everything can be opened up before God.

After “finding God in all things,” the second answer you would probably get from those five hypothetical Jesuits is that Ignatian spirituality is about being a contemplative in action.

Instead of seeing the spiritual life as one that can exist only if it is enclosed by the walls of a monastery, Ignatius asks you to see the world as your monastery.

The third way of understanding the way of Ignatius is as an incarnational spirituality.

one of the best definitions of prayer is from Walter Burghardt, a twentieth-century Jesuit theologian, who called it a “long, loving look at the real.”

St. Augustine, the fourth-century theologian, said that if you can comprehend it, then “it” cannot be God, because God is incomprehensible.

Finally, Ignatian spirituality is about freedom and detachment.

Much of his classic text, The Spiritual Exercises, which was written between 1522 and 1548, was geared toward helping people find the freedom to make good decisions. Its original title was Spiritual Exercises to Overcome Oneself, and to Order One’s Life, Without Reaching a Decision Through Some Disordered Affection.

So if anyone asks you to define Ignatian spirituality in a few words, you could say that it is: 1. Finding God in all things 2. Becoming a contemplative in action 3. Looking at the world in an incarnational way 4. Seeking freedom and detachment

Ignatian spirituality is..

John W. Padberg, a Jesuit historian, recently told me that Ignatius may be the only saint with a notarized police record: for nighttime brawling with an intent to inflict serious harm.

For no part of a life cannot be transformed by God’s love. Even the aspects of ourselves that we consider worthless, or sinful, can be made worthwhile and holy.

As early as 1526, when Ignatius was studying in the Spanish town of Alcalá, his new ideas on prayer attracted suspicion, and he was thrown in jail by the Inquisition. “He was in prison for seventeen days without being examined or knowing the reason for it,” he wrote.

The notion of being “contemplatives in action” also struck many in the Vatican as nearly heretical.

That a member of a religious order would be “in the world,” without gathering for prayer every few hours, was shocking. But Ignatius stood firm: his men were to be contemplatives in action, leading others to find God in all things.

In 1540, the Society of Jesus was officially approved by Pope Paul III. The goal of the Jesuits was both simple and ambitious: not, as is usually thought, to “counter” the Protestant Reformation, but, rather, to “help souls.” This is the phrase that appears most often in the early documents of the Society of Jesus.

Thanks to his spiritual practices, Ignatius enjoyed remarkable interior freedom: he considered himself “detached” about even the Jesuit Order. He once said that if the pope ever ordered the Jesuits to disband, he would need only fifteen minutes in prayer to compose himself and be on his way.

In a sense, the Exercises are like a dance. If you want to learn how to dance, you can’t simply read a book on dancing; you have to dance! Or at least have someone help you to dance.

For the Jesuit, if the Exercises are about how to live your own life, the Constitutions are about how to live your life with others.

During his lifetime he wrote an astonishing 6,813 letters to a wide array of men and women. He was one of the most prolific letter writers of his age, writing more than Martin Luther and John Calvin combined, and more than Erasmus, one of the great letter writers of the time.

The way of Ignatius means there is nothing in our lives that is not part of our spiritual lives.

Ultimately, faith is a gift from God. But faith isn’t something that you just have. Perhaps a better metaphor is that faith is like a garden: while you may already have the basics— soil, seeds, water—you have to cultivate and nourish it. Like a garden, faith takes patience, persistence, and even work.

As the Trappist monk Thomas Merton wrote in The Seven Storey Mountain, “The first and most elementary test of one’s call to the religious life—whether as a Jesuit, Franciscan, Cistercian or Carthusian—is the willingness to accept life in a community in which everybody is more or less imperfect.”

The maxim of “illusory religion” is as follows: “Fear not; trust in God and He will see that none of the things you fear will happen to you.” “Real religion,” said Macmurray, has a different maxim: “Fear not; the things you are afraid of are quite likely to happen to you, but they are nothing to be afraid of.”

the beginning of the path to finding God is awareness. Not simply awareness of the ways that you can find God, but an awareness that God desires to find you.

he began to see that his desires of winning fame by impressing others drew him away from God. His desires to surrender to a more generous and selfless way of life drew him toward God. What religious writers call a “grace” was not simply that he had these insights, but that he understood them as coming from God. As a result of his experience, Ignatius began to understand that God wants to communicate with us. Directly.

But God often speaks in ways that are beyond our intellect or reason, beyond philosophical proofs. While many are brought to God through the mind, just as many are brought to God through the heart. Here God often speaks more gently, more quietly, as he did during Ignatius’s convalescence. In these quiet moments God often speaks the loudest.

Gratitude, peace, and joy are ways that God communicates with us. During these times, we are feeling a real connection with God, though we might not initially identify it as such. The key insight is accepting that these are ways that God is communicating with us. That is, the first step involves a bit of trust. Conversely, during times of stress and doubt and sorrow and anger, we can also experience God’s communication.

Jesus asks Bartimaeus what he wants, not so much for himself as for the blind man. Jesus was helping the man identify his desire, and to be clear about it.

desire is a key way that God speaks to us.

Our deep desires help us know God’s desires for us and how much God desires to be with us. And God, I believe, encourages us to notice and name these desires, in the same way that Jesus encouraged Bartimaeus to articulate his desire. Recognizing our desires means recognizing God’s desires for us.

Desire is energy, the energy of creativity, the energy of life itself.

Naming our desires tells us something about who we are.

Naming our desires may also make us more grateful when we finally receive the fulfillment of our hopes.

Expressing these desires brings us into a closer relationship with God. Otherwise, it would be like never telling a friend your innermost thoughts. Your friend would remain distant. When we tell God our desires, our relationship with God deepens. Desire is a primary way that God leads people to discover who they are and what they are meant to do.

Even if you don’t want it, do you want to want it? Do you wish that you were the kind of person that wanted this? Even this can be seen as an invitation from God. It is a way of glimpsing God’s invitation even in the faintest traces of desire.

Desire is a key part of Ignatian spirituality because desire is a key way that God’s voice is heard in our lives. And ultimately our deepest desire, planted within us, is our desire for God.

Way back in the 1960s Peggy Lee sang “Is That All There Is?” In the 1980s, U2 sang “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” We all feel that restlessness, the nagging feeling that there must be something more to life than our day-to-day existence.

Nouwen, a Dutch Catholic priest and psychologist, wrote a perceptive book called The Selfless Way of Christ in which he examined this relentless quest to fill the empty hole in our lives. He observes that those rushing to fill that hole already sense that it is a useless quest. Somewhere deep in our hearts we already know that success, fame, influence, power, and money do not give us the inner joy and peace we crave. Somewhere we can even sense a certain envy of those who have shed all false ambitions and found a deeper fulfillment in their relationship with God. Yes, somewhere we can even get a taste of that mysterious joy in the smile of those who have nothing to lose.

Common longings and heartfelt connections are ways of becoming conscious of the desire for God. We yearn for an understanding of feelings that seem to come from outside of us. We experience what the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic St. John of the Cross calls the desire for “I know not what.”

Many of us have had experiences like this. We feel that we are standing on the brink of something important, on the edge of experiencing something just beyond us. We experience wonder. So why don’t you hear more about these times? Because many times we ignore them, reject them, or deny them. We chalk them up to being overwhelmed, overwrought, overly emotional. “Oh, I was just being silly!” you might say to yourself. Or we are not encouraged or invited to talk about them as spiritual experiences. So you disregard that longing you feel when the first breath of a spring breeze caresses your face after a long dark winter, because you tell yourself (or others tell you) that you were simply being emotional. This happens even to those practiced in the spiritual life: often, after an intense experience in prayer during a retreat, people are tempted to dismiss it as simply something that “just happened.” Or we simply don’t recognize these moments as possibly having their origins in God.

“I don’t believe in God, but I miss Him.” That’s Julian Barnes, beginning his memoir No...

Barnes writes, “I miss the God that inspired Italian painting and French stained glass, German music and English chapter houses, and those tumbledown heaps of stone on Celtic headlands which were once symbolic beacons in the darkness and the storm.” Barnes misses God. Who is to say that this “missing” does not arise from the very desire for God, which comes from God?

much in Western culture tries to tamp down or even deny these naturally spiritual experiences and explain them away in purely rational terms. It’s chalked up to something other than God. Likewise we may dismiss these events as being too common, too simple to come from God.