Now, when I was in the Jesuit order (1979-1987) in the Roman Catholic Church, I made a 30-day directed retreat in silence (except for the one-to-one daily conferences with the retreat director) following the Spiritual Exercises of the Spanish Renaissance mystic St. Ignatius Loyola (1491-1556), the co-founder, along with his younger companions, of the Jesuit order (known formally as the Society of Jesus - abbreviated as S.J.). It was one of the most memorable experiences of my life.
The text of the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola includes terse detailed instructions for what I would style guided imagistic meditation/contemplation - for the person(s) making a retreat to follow - and also terse guidance for the retreat director about certain matters that may come up. Overall, reading the text is a bit like reading a cookbook. Clearly the way to learn the meditation/contemplation process is to follow the terse detailed instructions in practice, not just to read them.
The guided imagistic meditation/contemplation usually involves certain scriptural texts - texts that are themselves imagistic (i.e., involving images). It involves memory and imagination. Guided imagistic meditation/contemplation is different, on the one hand, from the deliberately unguided form of meditation that C. G. Jung refers to as active imagination and, on the other hand, from the deliberately unimaginative form of meditation known today as mindfulness.
(In the present essay, I will use imagistic meditation and contemplation interchangeably, because both involve the use of memory and imagination. Similarly, I will use Jesuit spirituality and Ignatian spirituality interchangeably.)
The structure of the so-called weeks in the 30-day retreat following the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola and the specific scriptural passages selected for meditation/contemplation are based on the Spanish Renaissance mystic's own personal experience. So his formative religious/spiritual experiences are the basis for the path of formative religious/spiritual experiences that Jesuit and others who make a 30-day retreat following the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola make their own path at least for the 30 days of the retreat. Figuratively speaking, they thereby become spiritual sons and daughters of St. Ignatius Loyola. (When men enter the Jesuit order, they thereby follow a life path that makes them spiritual sons of St. Ignatius Loyola, his followers.)
The meditation/contemplation on certain scriptural passages involve the so-called application of the senses to each passage in turn. That is, the person uses his or her memory and imagination regarding the passage in question to "apply" each of the five senses in turn to imagining the passage as fully as possible.
In a preached retreat following the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola, the persons making the group retreat meet daily with the retreat directors to hear his exhortation for the day and to receive the instructions for the next meditation/contemplation. The Irish novelist James Joyce provides an example of a preached Jesuit retreat in his novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916).
However, in a directed retreat, which may include a group making an individualized 30-day retreat following the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola, the retreat director does not devote the one-to-one daily conference with each person making the retreat to preaching. Rather, the retreat director listens to each person report about his experiences of meditation/contemplation. Then the retreat director offers his or her instructions for the next meditation/contemplation.
Briefly, when I made a 30-day directed retreat in silence (except for the one-to-one daily conferences with the retreat director) following the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola, I found the meditation/contemplation exercises deeply quieting. I found the one-to-one daily conferences with the retreat director reassuring and affirming and therefore, in effect, consoling.
Ah, but what contributed to making those one-to-one daily conferences with the retreat director consoling? They involved the kind of person-to-person encounter that Martin Buber discusses in his 1923 book in German that is translated into English as I and Thou.
Martin Buber is the author of the acclaimed 1923 book in German that is known in English as I and Thou, second edition translated by Ronald Gregor Smith (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1958). Scribner's also subsequently published the second edition of I and Thou that includes the "Postscript" by Buber in 1970 as translated, with a "Prologue" and notes, by Walter Kaufman.
The American Rabbi Dennis S. Ross celebrates Buber's thought in his new 2021 book A Year with Martin Buber: Wisdom on the Weekly Torah Portion (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press).
For further discussion of it, see my 1,400-word review essay "Rabbi Dennis S. Ross' 2021 Book A Year with Martin Buber, and Walter J. Ong's Thought" that is available online through the University of Minnesota's digital conservancy: https://hdl.handle.net/11299/225595
The American Jesuit Renaissance specialist and cultural historian Walter J. Ong (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955) never tired of touting Buber's 1923 book I and Thou - perhaps because one-to-one conversation between individual Jesuits and other individual Jesuits in the context of spiritual direction is a big part of Jesuit life.
More recently, the first Jesuit pope, Pope Francis, has emphasized the importance of encounter and dialogue.
Twice in the course of their lengthy Jesuit formation, both Father Ong and Pope Francis made 30-day retreats in silence (except for the daily conferences with the retreat director) following the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola.
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