Kindle Notes & Highlights
Servant of God Dorothy Day affirmed that “you write about yourself because in the long run all man’s problems are the same.”3
becoming aware and understanding to some extent the different movements which are caused in the soul, the good, to receive them, and the bad to reject them.
hold them more and make them grow in their vices and sins.
thoughts that come from consolation are contrary to the thoughts that come from desolation. (317)
If, in fact, this was Catherine, a lovely historical postscript followed. Thirty-two years later, Catherine, now queen of Portugal, made the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises.14 Her director, Jesuit Father Diego Miró, wrote to Ignatius in Rome, telling him of how he planned to guide her Exercises.15 I have often wondered what it must have meant for Ignatius to receive that letter and realize that, by following God’s plan for his life, he served his lady in a way he could never have guessed so many years before.
When I share Ignatius’s conversion experience, at this point I ask the group, “What if, that day, Ignatius’s eyes had not been ‘opened a little’? What if he had never become aware of, understood, and taken action in response to this interior spiritual experience? What would have been different in his life?” “Most probably,” I answer, “he would have continued to live as before, as his father and his brothers were living. What would have been different,” I further ask, “in the life of his university companion, the future St. Francis Xavier, and the Church in Asia? In the life of another
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“The Good, to Receive Them” To receive: this is our primary stance before God, the God who endlessly pours out gifts of love upon us.
Ignatius will dedicate most of his rules to helping us reject the enemy’s desolations and temptations. He does so because this is where most of us especially need help. That need, however, can never obscure the truth that the primary call in discernment is to receive (recibir) the love and gifts that God ceaselessly offers us.
How do I receive when I am so used to manipulating to take
One reason for the power of Ignatius’s rules today is, I believe, that they take Christian anthropology seriously and render it practical. Our secularized culture generally consigns the movements of the heart and their related thoughts to psychology.
first two rules were composed later than the rules that follow.3 Why then did Ignatius add these two rules and place them at the beginning of the series? Time and experience most likely revealed to Ignatius the need to clarify from the outset that the actions of the good spirit and of the enemy change according to the subjective disposition of the persons in whom they act—that is, the direction these persons have chosen and are pursuing in their spiritual lives.
The latter widens the range of rule 1 to include even small areas of regression in otherwise progressing Christians.13 In such areas of regression—lighter or venial sins, negligence in prayer, diminishment of apostolic zeal, and so forth—the enemy, this interpretation says, induces contentment of heart and the good spirit induces trouble of heart. Such areas of regression obviously exist, and in this interpretation, Ignatius intended rule 1 to clarify how the spirits work in them. Though the broader interpretation is textually possible, I incline to the first interpretation, that when Ignatius
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In both, the goal is the same: if the person is open to the action of the good spirit, that unsettling action will lead the person to a spiritually healthy change. The unsettling action, however, of rule 9 (spiritual desolation) is less stark than that of rule 1 (stinging and biting in the conscience). We would expect this to be so, since the faults of rule 9 (negligence, sloth, or tepidity in spiritual exercises) are lesser than those of rule 1 (grave sins). I believe that rule 9, more than rule 1, reveals Ignatius’s thought on discernment regarding lesser faults.18
rational power of moral judgment.” A more literal translation would read: “stinging and biting their consciences through the synderesis of reason [por el sindérese de la razón].”
“going from mortal sin to mortal sin,” sins of the flesh are more widespread than other sins; second, this kind of sin, by contrast with others, can be repeated frequently and become a constant preoccupation; finally, from this kind of sin the passage to other sins easily takes place.32 I often wondered about the question Denis raises and have found no other author who seeks to answer it. Most probably, Ignatius formulated this rule as he did the others from his own experience—recalling his life before his conversion—and the experience of the many who sought his spiritual help. Such experience
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“And now I think for the first time in my whole life I really began to pray—praying not with my lips and with my intellect and my imagination, but praying out of the very roots of my life and of my being . . . to help me get free of the thousand terrible things that held my will in their slavery. There were a lot of tears connected with this, and they did me good.”
May I ask, Have any of us heard
In everything, whatever burdens you carry, turn quickly to the Persons of the Trinity, to Mary, and ask for help.
They are eager to be with you and help you. Move from a stance in which you feel that you must make things happen, and open your heart to receive the grace and strength the Lord wants to give you as you do these things.
When one making the Ignatian retreat is desolate and struggling with temptation, Ignatius writes, his director should not be severe with him but gentle, “giving him courage and strength to go forward” (SpirEx 7).
in endlessly creative ways, the good spirit gives courage and strength to those who love and seek God.
“Spiritual,” therefore, as Ignatius intends it, denotes a supernatural consolation, something that our human nature alone cannot produce, a consolation that is a gift of God’s grace.
Adjectives modify and limit the nouns they precede. Ignatius wants us to understand that the consolation he envisages in rule 3 must be such that these adjectives can apply to it, that is, it must be “spiritual” and “divine,” on the supernatural level, a gift of God’s grace.
“spiritual,” as Ignatius employs it here, does not apply? Various possibilities may be proposed: we may speak of “natural consolation,” “human consolation,” “psychological consolation,” “emotional consolation,” or similar terms.
“nonspiritual” as synonymous with these and as the closest to Ignatius’s own adjective, “spiritual.” I first encountered this term in Jules Toner’s Commentary on these rules.
balance between spiritual and nonspiritual consolation must also be maintained.
often the two will be found together: healthy nonspiritual consolation as the space into which God infuses the grace of spiritual consolation. The combination of this distinction and this balance permits us to apply the rules well.
Such availability to God is a second experience of spiritual consolation that may be given when the first is present. When “the soul is inflamed with love of its Creator and Lord,” Ignatius writes, a further grace may be given: “and consequently when it can love no created thing on the face of the earth in itself, but only in the Creator of them all.”
Author Evelyn Waugh describes Monsignor Ronald Knox’s prayer after his entrance into the Catholic Church: He told a friend that in his first months as a Catholic he received the “consolations” he needed and often ran to church in his impatience to begin his prayers. He looked forward to his meditations as periods of pure joy. And at St. Edmund’s it was his radiant devotion which most impressed his more discerning colleagues. The present Bishop of Lancaster, Dr. Flynn, writes: “My most outstanding memory of him [at St. Edmund’s] is his absorption in prayer before the Blessed Sacrament. That
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Spiritual desolation, like spiritual consolation, is an experience on the level of the heart. It signifies a heavy movement of the heart, such as sadness, discouragement, anxiety, hopelessness, and the like, (and so “desolation”) on the level of the spiritual life, of faith, and of our relationship with God (and so “spiritual”).
nonspiritual desolation—when we are vulnerable through tiredness or depression or both—is often the space into which the enemy brings the further trap of spiritual desolation. The enemy readily works in our nonspiritual vulnerabilities.
It is important to note, however, that a certain amount of nonspiritual desolation is normal and even holy in a well-lived life.
What very often resolves that for me is exercise. I get some healthy exercise, and then I am ready to pray. The problem never was that I did not want to pray; the problem was that I had not paid wise attention to a nonspiritual need of my humanity.
Sleep exercise shower hot tub movie friendship nap leisure
One of the best things we can do for our spiritual lives is to take wise care of our humanity on the nonspiritual (natural) level. St. Teresa of Avila writes, “Take care, then, of the body for the love of God, because at many times the body must serve the soul.”2 For the love of God: for the sake of our spiritual lives and for our progress in the love of God.
Spiritual Desolation and the Dark Night
In our own time, the experience of St. Teresa of Calcutta provides a remarkable example of a decades-long willingness to accept the dark night. Her spiritual director, Joseph Neuner, SJ, identified her long interior trial as the dark night of John of the Cross. At his request, Mother Teresa described her interior experience in writing. Years later, Neuner affirmed, “My answer to the confession of these pages was simple: there was no indication of any serious failure on her part that could explain the spiritual dryness. It was simply the dark night of which all masters of the spiritual life
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How will we recognize in practice the difference between spiritual desolation and the dark night?
The responsibility to distinguish accurately between the two, however, lies not with the person but with a competent spiritual director.
dryness (sequedad)
spiritual desolation may bring a sense of irreparable disaster. Its message is this: “Things are going badly for you. You are in a bad way spiritually, and things will continue to go badly. It’s all over. The harm can’t be undone. Even if it could, you won’t take the necessary steps. You won’t change. Don’t think it’s ever going to be different.”
There Is No Shame in Experiencing Spiritual Desolation
there is no shame in experiencing spiritual desolation, that times of spiritual desolation are normal in a well-lived spiritual life (SpirEx 6), and that, therefore, we are not the only ones. Experiencing spiritual desolation is simply part of what it means to live the spiritual life in a fallen, redeemed, and loved world. What does matter is to live the discerning life: to be aware of spiritual desolation when it is present, to name it for the lie of the enemy that it is, and to reject it.
Ignatius never speaks of the two as simultaneous, or of a person as experiencing both spiritual consolation and spiritual desolation at the same time. His language in rule 10 renders explicit his perception that the one experience follows the other rather than mingles with it: “Let the one who is in consolation think how he will conduct himself in the desolation that will come after.”
As he sits at his desk, a few inches in front of one hand is the Bible, and a few inches in front of the other is his smartphone. Nothing in Philip now wants to reach out for the Bible, and everything in him wants to reach out for the smartphone—and one touch of the screen will become fifty, then a hundred . . . or more. Philip is experiencing the movement to low and earthly things that characterizes spiritual desolation. We may repeat once again that there is no shame in experiencing this pull: this is simply what happens in living the spiritual life in a fallen, redeemed, and loved world.
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Let us note Ignatius’s pairing of spiritual desolation (heaviness of heart in our spiritual lives) and temptation (deceptive suggestions of the enemy).
Persons in desolation experience themselves as totally—a powerful adverb—slothful (without energy for spiritual things), tepid (without fervor), and sad (without joy).
The feeling, however, in spiritual desolation is that “I am here, and you, God, are very far away. I am alone.”
The beauty of all this—to use a somewhat unexpected word when speaking of spiritual desolation—is that everything about it is a lie: either an outright lie or a truth that desolation skews and mixes with a lie. When we perceive this, captives are set free to reject the lie and walk firmly toward the Lord they love.
EVERYTHING about desolation is a lie. Everything. Just like the lie of I’ve never experienced consolation, I, not experiencing it now and I never will again. It is ALL a lie,
Just as the affective experiences of spiritual consolation and spiritual desolation are contrary, so too the thoughts that arise from the one and the other are contrary.
As one author comments, the difference between “myself-in-desolation,” just submerged in it, and “myself-reflecting-on-myself-in-desolation,” that is, examining it objectively before the Lord, is great.30
Surrender to his Heart as best you can today. The surrender is not a surrender to “the worst” but to his faithful love for you. This is the one you surrender to.
