Ignatian Spirituality and Interreligious Dialogue

Reading Love's Mystery

Michael Barnes SJ, Michael Barnes

• Publisher: Messenger Publications
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781788123464
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Comparative Religion

This is a book about dialogue, specifically about the dialogue between religions. But it is also a book formed in dialogue. I seek to bring together the two sides of my experience as an academic teacher and pastoral worker: on the one hand, the extraordinary world of the religions that is such an important feature of contemporary Western culture; on the other, my spiritual formation and religious practice which has acted as the primary motivation for everything that I do as a Jesuit priest. The book can be read both as a practical correlate to what I have written elsewhere on the theology of religions, and, at a more personal level, as a reflection on my experience 'on the streets', as it were. I am guided throughout by the conviction that Christian faith comes truly alive when it is communicated, brought into dialogue with what is 'other', different, even strange. God's own story, what God seeks to reveal of God's own self through the witness of the Bible, enters into dialogue with the story of one Jesuit who seeks to respond to the mystery of a loving God through the lens of Ignatian spirituality. The twelve linked chapters form a personal introduction, with a degree of autobiography and illustrative anecdote, to an interior dialogue between Christian faith and the challenging context of contemporary religious pluralism. Michael Barnes is the author of Religions in Conversation (SPCK 1989), God East and West (SPCK 1991), Theology and the Dialogue of Religions (CUP 2002), Interreligious Learning: Dialogue, Spirituality and the Christian Imagination (CUP 2012), Waiting on Grace: a Theology of Dialogue ( OUP 2020).

CHAPTER ONE

With Ignatius to India

OLD GOA lies on the banks of the Mandovi river, some eight miles up the estuary from the modern state capital of Panaji. Much has changed since the day, 6 May 1542, when the first and greatest of Jesuit missionaries, Francis Xavier, arrived after a voyage from Lisbon, which had taken thirteen months to complete. Today the river is bordered by vast advertising hoardings, choked by dozens of fishing boats and cruised by creepy casino-vessels aimed at the tourist trade – a far-cry from the trading centre first established by Afonso de Albuquerque in 1510.

The Portuguese have long gone, their enclave swallowed up by the State of India since 1961. But many churches in classical Renaissance style survive, not least the Jesuit Basilica of Bom Jesus – the ‘good’ or infant Jesus – where Xavier’s body is enshrined in a finely wrought tomb. There is a charming naivety about many of the artefacts decorating these churches. The ever-proliferating angels look more like dumb cartoon characters than unearthly divine presences. For all its generous proportions, the Bom Jesus is more understated, as if to draw attention to the magnificent baroque reredos that stands above the main altar. St Ignatius Loyola, his arms raised, looks up in ecstasy to what appears like a sunburst exploding from the three Greek letters IHS, a traditional shorthand for the name of Jesus.

Whatever else the Society of Jesus may stand for, without the name of Jesus it would lose the heart of its charism. Officially recognised in 1540, it was expected that the new and untried religious community would call themselves Ignatians, along the lines of earlier orders – Benedictines, Franciscans, Dominicans. Ignatius insisted, however, that the true founder was Jesus; he alone was to be the inspiration that would animate his companions. That did not go down well in some ecclesiastical quarters, but Ignatius was a determined man and he got his way.

Basilica of the Bom Jesus, Goa

The Spiritual Exercises, which were forged out of the intensity of his own mystical experience, are intended as an introduction to the Christian life. They teach people how to pray, and how, in praying with the story of Jesus, to enter into the life-giving mystery of the Trinitarian God. Just as Ignatius found his deepest motivation in the experience of being placed by the Father in companionship with the Son, so everyone who prays their way through the carefully constructed dynamic pattern of the Exercises finds a similar sense of following in the footsteps of Christ, with that name of Jesus indelibly stamped on their hearts.

Different Experiences

I got to know that extraordinary little book when I spent some months in India completing what Jesuits call tertianship, the third year of probation that comes at the end of a long period of training, study and ministry. Nearly two decades earlier, during the first two years of formation, I had experienced the Spiritual Exercises as a novice. At that time we never read the text, never even saw it. For thirty long days we were subjected to what would now be called a ‘preached retreat’. Each meditation was introduced by a conference from the Novice Master before our hapless little band was sent off, for what seemed an interminable length of time, to ponder on the import of some distinctly abstract theology. This version of the Spiritual Exercises was not calculated to inspire a generation of restless young men more interested in the revolution of the Second Vatican Council than the dusty pedantry of sixteenth-century Spanish asceticism.

By the time I went through that thirty-day experience again, the manner of delivery, not to mention the way the text was interpreted, had changed dramatically. We still had conferences, but we were guided mainly by one-to-one individual meetings with the director, a charming and wise old bird with a great deal of experience of teaching and leadership in his beloved homeland. I had been practising yoga for some years, and it seemed entirely natural to relax into a mode of contemplative prayer that seemed appropriate to two very different cultural worlds.

For me it was India, with all its anarchic energy, that put a very different gloss on both the Society’s ‘manner of proceeding’ – as Jesuits say – and life in the post-conciliar Church. Those long slow months in a large Jesuit community on the fringes of an unremarkable little town in the south of India allowed time and space, not just to pray over the text of the Exercises with the benefit of some experience of Jesuit life, but to read and study it in a very specific, and very challenging, context.

Returning to the Sources

That complex and contested experience of ‘inculturation’, to use the familiar jargon of the missiologists, forms the deep structure that runs through this book. We shall return to it in different shapes and forms at various points. Sufficient for the moment to note that faith and culture coexist, not as oppositions, but in a creative tension or dialogue. Faith is not some sort of special knowledge about divine things infused from on high, but a theological virtue that, in St Anselm’s evocative little phrase, is ‘seeking understanding’. Faith always demands to be spoken, to be shaped by what we say and how we say it, for human beings are nothing if not creatures who are defined by their use of language.

Culture has a history, just as any language bears the marks of the tradition that has formed it. One of the great gifts of the Second Vatican Council to the Church was to commend a return to the sources that underpin the Church’s inner and outer life. That process had begun many years before Pope St John XXIII announced the calling of the Council to a stunned Church in 1959. The renewal of the liturgy, the critical-historical study of Scripture and the publication of patristic commentaries were all part of a profound movement of ressourcement that put the Church back in touch with its inner heart. An earlier generation of Jesuits would have used a Latin translation of the Spiritual Exercises which had been authorised since the middle of the nineteenth century. As a result of the conciliar reforms, it has been replaced by the original Spanish version of Ignatius.

This fascinating text, careful and precise, puts Jesuits back in touch with the history of the early Society and the life of Ignatius himself. For the depths of its meaning to emerge, it cannot be read as if it were a treatise in theology or a piece of personal devotion. It appeals to the imagination as well as the intellect, and has to be prayed, its simple yet profound themes repeated over and over again until they become rooted in the heart.

What is revealed is not an unchanging and timeless truth, a great nugget hidden from view yet suddenly exploding into consciousness. Faith does not work like that; any proper conversion of heart takes time and perseverance. Using the analogy of physical training, Ignatius gives us plenty of ways of praying, and lots of useful advice about structuring each day. As a novice, I found it all rather pedantic. As a tertian, I began to appreciate the understated subtlety with which Ignatius commends his convictions and ideas. By the time I arrived in that Indian town, the Church itself had learned that reading any ancient text, let alone seeking to interpret its meaning for today, demands attention to the contingencies of time and place. At stake is not the appropriation of the asceticism that belongs in another world, but a carefully graduated introduction to the contemplation of this world in which the Spirit of Christ unfolds the mystery of what God has been doing – and goes on doing.

Discerning the Spirit

I had to go to India to discover what a classic text of Catholic spirituality meant in its own terms. I had not expected to be touched in this way. My reason for choosing India for the tertianship year was that I was already committed to interreligious dialogue and wanted to explore further the Indian background to much of my work. But it was there that I began to appreciate what the broader Jesuit mission in the contemporary world is all about. Ignatius and Francis Xavier came alive. Of the first ten companions, these two dominate Jesuit history and continue to exercise an extraordinary influence over Christians everywhere.

Despite their similar backgrounds, it was an unlikely relationship. Francis was born in 1506, the youngest son of a noble family in the Pyrenean kingdom of Navarre. His early years were happy and secure, and he received a solid schooling. But, at the age of ten, his father, treasurer to the King, died and the family fortunes declined rapidly. His elder brothers became embroiled in the war between France and Spain that saw Navarre torn apart. In 1521 they were with the French army that laid siege to the citadel of Pamplona. The town was defended – by a wonderful stroke of irony – by a Basque army, which included another nobleman who then styled himself Iñigo de Loyola. Ignatius, as he later became, was born in 1491 and was therefore Francis’s senior by some fifteen years. As a young man, his was the life of a carefree nobleman at the court of the Duke of Najera, the viceroy of Ferdinand and Isabella in Navarre. There seemed no reason why he should be doing anything else. But at that fateful siege of Pamplona his leg was smashed by a French cannonball and he ended up an unwilling invalid back at the castle of Loyola.

The details of what happened there are well known. To while away the long hours of convalescence, he started reading the only books available in the castle, a life of Christ and lives of the saints. At first, he dreamed of returning to a military career, cutting a fine figure and impressing the ladies. Gradually reality broke in, however, and with it an alternative: emulation not of soldiers but saints. Where dreams of the former left him feeling dispirited and empty, the latter rendered him contented and even joyful. Such was the first experience Ignatius had of inner movements of what he came to call consolation and desolation – the sphere of the good spirit and the evil spirit respectively.

The Wisdom of the Spirit

Since this is one of the all-pervading themes of Ignatian spirituality, it is important to pause for a moment. The consolation/desolation distinction turned out to be less straightforward than Ignatius imagined. He soon came to realise there is always the possibility that the evil spirit appears as an ‘angel of light’, that what we experience is an illusion, that what we take for peace is actually a self-interested satisfaction or a lazy complacency. The one he calls ‘the enemy of our human nature’ is a master of deception whose purpose is to produce a counterfeit sense of well-being, to disguise the morally dubious as the entirely plausible. Hence the need for discernment, a careful scrutiny of the interior feelings experienced in prayer.

According to Michael Ivens, one of the wisest of modern commentators on the Exercises, discernment is first and foremost a ‘function of the wisdom of the Spirit’. The term was not invented in the mid-sixteenth century. The basic dynamic of testing spiritual influences is found in the Pauline and Johannine writings, where it is inseparable from the work of communicating truth. In Romans, for example, Paul agonises over the fate of his fellow-Jews, ending with that amazing outburst about the ‘depths of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God’ (11:33). He then comes down to earth and exhorts the community:

For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned. (Rom 12:3)

Paul is not talking here about faith as some special revelation, such as he had experienced at Damascus. In commending a sobriety of mind – a virtue of moderation that was familiar in the Hellenistic world, not least in Plato and Aristotle – he insists on a measured response to the way the members of the community are each to perceive how God has bestowed gifts upon them individually. Good discernment begins with that self-acceptance before God that refuses to hanker after what has been given to someone else, but accepts and rejoices in the gift that has been bestowed on each one for the sake of the wider community.

I shall return to this theme at various points, for the work of discernment is as important to the practice of interreligious dialogue as to any aspect of human living. The word has connotations of reflective deliberation or judicious decision-making, and that is certainly the way in which I understood it when I first went to India. There, surrounded by the extraordinary complexity of an ancient yet ever-renewed civilisation, I realised that Ignatius intended something richer and more theological. The conviction that guided him from the earliest days of his convalescence was that Christ recognises in each person the indelible image of the Father. Guided by the Spirit of Christ, he began to recognise the miracle of grace in himself – and then to see it elsewhere, in the life of others, for there can be no limit to the extent of God’s grace except what human sinfulness interposes.

Ignatius and the Companions

That was in the future, however, and Ignatius’s adjustment to the new reality in his life was far from straightforward. Formally relinquishing the armour of the soldier and taking up the staff of the pilgrim was only the beginning of a quest for what God intended for him. He tells us how he let his hair and nails grow, failing to care for his appearance. Today we would probably say he had a nervous breakdown, a crisis of identity that took years of inner and outer wandering to resolve. Precisely where were those deep feelings of consolation and desolation taking him?

Francis Xavier meanwhile had no such doubts, and responded to the collapse of the family fortunes by deciding to become a priest. It took Ignatius much longer to move in that direction. When he arrived at the University of Paris in 1529, Francis had already been there some four years. He was, from all accounts, a brilliant student, self-confident and accomplished, and he rather looked down on the poverty-stricken Basque who had only just learned sufficient Latin to begin the study of theology. Francis poked fun at the plans of Ignatius and mocked the little group of devoted followers who had begun to gather round him. But somewhere between December 1532 and June 1533 there occurred an extraordinary change in Francis: he capitulated to the powerful influence of Ignatius. On 15 August 1534, the first companions took vows together at Montmartre. The next year Ignatius accompanied Francis as he made the Spiritual Exercises, forging a bond between them that lasted for the rest of their lives.

The friendship was all the more remarkable for being maintained almost entirely by letters, for the early Society was characterised not by the stability of the monastic life but by its opposite: an availability for mission, a willingness to be sent to the furthest reaches of the world. Ignatius himself and his companions in those formative years of the late 1530s had dreamed of one great purpose, one all-dominating goal: a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. It proved impossible. But another soon took its place: they would put themselves at the disposal of the Pope, to be directed on whatever mission he desired for them.

The Society of Jesus was given its formal seal of approval by Pope Paul III on 27 September 1540. Almost immediately the dispersal began as the first companions answered calls for work in different parts of the world. One request came from King John III of Portugal who wanted Jesuits to work as missionaries in his rapidly expanding Eastern empire. The original choice of Ignatius fell ill, and he was forced to send his closest friend in his place. So it was that, with scarcely a moment to pack his bags, Francis sailed from Lisbon on 7 April 1541, his thirty-fifth birthday. Ignatius was never to see him again.

Encountering Francis

Fran...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyrights
• Title
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 With Ignatius to India
• 2 Spirituality of the Pilgrim
• 3 Image and Interruption
• 4 Right Channelling of Desire
• 5 Inculturation – Aesthetic and Ethical
• 6 Translating Memory
• 7 Signs of the Times
• 8 Dialogue in the Dust
• 9 Grey Wisdom
• 10 The Power of the Word
• 11 The Craft of Theology
• 12 From Francis to Francis
• Glossary of Terms
• Notes on Sources