THE WAY

a review of Christian spirituality published by the British Jesuits

April 2023 Volume 62, Number 2

LABOURS OF LOVE
THE WAY April 2023

Foreword 5–7

A Spirituality of Encounter: St Ignatius, Pope Francis and 9–21

Lessons from the School of the Poor
Thomas M. Kelly
Thomas Kelly identifies St Ignatius’ understanding of poverty in terms of an
encounter with the poor, a desire to experience actual poverty and a spiritual
dependence upon God. He argues that Pope Francis extends this understanding
by emphasizing that the poor are collaborators in the project of evangelization
because they teach us about God.

God's Tricksters: Lessons from Esther for Religious Life 23–36

Paul Dominic
The Book of Esther recounts a story from the Jewish Diaspora in the Persian
court. Queen Esther and her cousin Mordecai resist idolatry and their trickery
reveals how human action is entwined with the hidden action of God. The
narrative will help all those troubled by internal conflicts and religious politics.

Robert Southwell: The Lyrics of the Jesuit Baroque 37–50

Ian G. Coleman
In his continuing reflection on the Jesuit Baroque, Ian Coleman turns to the
poetry and mission of Robert Southwell. In the work Mary Magdalen’s Funeral
Tears he discerns a new style that opened a door to contemporary European
art but was animated by Southwell’s zeal to labour in the dangerous mission
back home in England.

A Prayer of Lamentation: The History and Uncertain Future 51–63

of the Jesuits in Tomsk, Russia
Eric A. Clayton
The Jesuit School in Tomsk was the only Roman Catholic secondary school in
Russia, founded when Jesuits returned in 1992 after an absence of 200 years.
Eric A. Clayton traces the history of the Jesuit mission and the labour of Jesuits
who worked there in a spiritual landscape marred by decades of dehumanisation.

Authentic Selfhood from Silence: Francis de Sales’s Dextrous 65–75

Invitation into Contemplation
Brett McLaughlin
The writings of St Francis de Sales orientate the reader in the direction of
contemplative silence. It is there where authentic selfhood is formed in the
presence of God. It bears fruit in the numerous acts of devout love with
which his writings are permeated.
THE WAY April 2023

The Spiritual Exercises and Psychological Capital 77–87

Mukti Clarence
‘Psychological capital’ is a term used to describe the positive sum total of
what someone is. Mukti Clarence explains how hope, efficacy, resilience
and optimism offer a thematic paradigm for the developing awareness of
oneself as an active agent of God.

Our Common Home

Laudato si’ and the Spiritual Exercises Revisited 89–96
Iain Radvan
The dynamic of the Spiritual Exercises is a powerful tool to bring about
ecological conversion. Iain Radvan recounts how he immersed participants
in nature at the International Ignatian Ecospiritual Conference in 2022.
The method resulted in a change of heart and a passionate determination
to work for the care of God’s creation.

The Spirit in Contemporary Culture

Synodality at Work 97–104
Gerry O'Neill
As the desire for a more synodal Church begins to deepen, Gerry O’Neill
draws parallels with the secular terms ‘collaboration’ or ‘synergy’. He presents
a straightforward framework to help workplaces and communities develop a
more synodal approach and invites us to follow the promptings of the Holy
Spirit towards creative engagement within organizations.

Thinking Faith
Ignatius of Loyola: Theology as a Way of Living 105–114
James Hanvey
St Ignatius gives us an everyday theology of lived experience that comes to
shape the course of our whole lives. Although expressed in a sparse
language, it enables us to appropriate a theology of our own experience
rooted in the radical freedom to labour for Christ.

Bulletin
Bishop Rolando Álvarez: Prophetic Voice of Latin America 115–116
Today
Luis Orlando Pérez
The Mexican human rights activist and theologian Luis Orlando Pérez SJ
reports on the false imprisonment of the Nicaraguan bishop Rolando Álvarez.
He reminds us that the Church in Latin America is still on the side of the poor.
THE WAY April 2023

Book Reviews
Philip Harrison on essays by Rob Marsh on spiritual direction
John Pridmore on loneliness
Christopher Stabb on St Alberto Hurtado
Simon Bishop on the language of grace
Edward Howells on contemplation in Thomas Aquinas
Luke Penkett on Hildegard of Bingen, music and ecotheology
Kensy Joseph on Thomas Stephens

FOR AUTHORS
The Way warmly invites readers to submit articles with a view to publication. They should normally be about
4,000 words long, and be in keeping with the journal’s aims. The Editor is always ready to discuss possible
ideas. A Special Issue is planned on spiritual conversation, so articles in this area will be particularly welcome.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The frontispiece image is © Maximino Cerezo Barredo. Foreign-language quotations are translated by the
article author unless otherwise noted. The scripture quotations herein are generally from the New Revised
Standard Version Bible © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the
Churches of Christ in the USA, and are used by permission. All rights reserved.

ABBREVIATIONS
Autobiography Ignatius of Loyola, ‘Reminiscences (Autobiography)’, in Personal Writings
Constitutions in The Constitutions of the Society of Jesus and Their Complementary Norms (St Louis:
Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1996)
Diary ‘The Spiritual Diary’, in Personal Writings
Dir On Giving the Spiritual Exercises: The Early Manuscript Directories and the Official Directory
of 1599, translated and edited by Martin E. Palmer (St Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources,
1996)
Exx The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius, translated by George E. Ganss (St Louis: Institute of
Jesuit Sources, 1992)
GC General Congregation, in Jesuit Life and Mission Today: The Decrees and Accompanying
Documents of the 31st – 35th General Congregations of the Society of Jesus (St Louis: Institute of
Jesuit Sources, 2009) and Jesuit Life and Mission Today: The Decrees and Accompanying
Documents of the 36th General Congregation of the Society of Jesus (Boston: Institute of Jesuit
Sources, 2017)
MHSJ Monumenta Historica Societatis Jesu, 157 volumes (Madrid and Rome: Institutum
Historicum Societatis Iesu, 1898– )
Personal Ignatius of Loyola: Personal Writings, translated by Philip Endean and Joseph A. Munitiz
Writings (London: Penguin, 1996)
Papal documents may be found at www.vatican.va
 FOREWORD

W HETHER AS INDIVIDUALS or communities, we are invited to

collaborate with God in our everyday lives. This issue of The Way
explores the dynamics of that collaboration through labour undertaken,
not for reward, but out of love. While motivations from outside can
sustain us, only those from within can us give us a lasting sense of
accomplishment. Many who have devoted their lives to quiet labours
of love have gone unnoticed. However the role they have played in the
fulfilment of God’s will has often been decisive. While the articles
in this issue touch upon varied spheres of human life, they coincide in
affirming that love is reward enough.
In his account of the writings of St Francis de Sales, Brett McLaughlin
notes that, despite their contemplative character, they are permeated
with numerous acts of love. These compose the devout life in which
‘contemplation spurs the reader to action’. St Francis de Sales envisions
collaboration with God through the image of a beekeeper attending to
the work of bees. Such collaboration can only be brought about through
silent prayer in which human authenticity emerges and a disposition of
spiritual freedom, akin to the Ignatian ideal of indifference, begins to
grow.
If the source of God’s collaboration with human beings is born in
silence, then perhaps this is why it passes unmentioned in the Book of
Esther. There, God is waiting to be discovered only as ‘a hidden but
active presence entwined with human action’. Paul Dominic comments
that God’s discreet action, and even God’s apparent failure, are relevant
to our contemporary experience in which the personhood of God is
minimised by secular culture. There is an invitation to rediscover this
personhood in our everyday lives.
The war in Ukraine has reminded us that even in the darkest
moments of history God is present. The violent political ideology of the
Russian elite has been met by astonishing acts of compassion and
resilience on the part of ordinary Ukrainians. In his article, Eric Clayton
gives an intriguing insight into the history of the only Roman Catholic
secondary school in Russia, where Jesuits have laboured in ‘a spiritual
landscape marred by decades of dehumanisation’. Such accounts reveal
that collaboration with God is a form of resistance. A similar commitment
is demonstrated in Robert Southwell’s zeal for the English mission

The W ay, 62/2 (A pril 2023), 5–7

6 Foreword

during the reign of Elizabeth I, which Ian Coleman argues strengthened

his poetic voice. Our bulletin on the false imprisonment of the
Nicaraguan bishop Rolando Álvarez is a reminder that in Latin
America the Church is still on the side of the oppressed.
The concept of ‘psychological capital’ helps Mukti Clarence to
describe how collaboration with God can lead to human resilience. He
draws upon it to understand the dynamic of the Spiritual Exercises, but
is critical of the naïve use of psychological theories when they fail to
appreciate the gratuitous action of God’s grace on the human person.
And Gerry O’Neill looks at how Pope Francis’s emphasis on synodality
in the Church can be reflected in other organizations in order to
collaborate with the God by attending to the movements of the Holy
Spirit.
As we learn to labour out of love we discover more and more that
love is its own reward. This insight is implicit in Thomas Kelly’s article,
available for free download, that shows how Pope Francis’s social
commitment developed from that of St Ignatius. He argues that the poor
can teach us something through their involuntary dependence upon
God. Those who minister to the poor discover that their reward is a mutual
encounter of love. One of the principal causes of poverty is the
degradation of the human environment. Responding to Peter Saunders
(The Way, October 2015), Iain Radvan describes how immersing the
participants of a conference in ecology prepared them to collaborate
with God in nature.
Taking a step back, James Hanvey, in an article reprinted from our
sister journal Thinking Faith, rebuts the oft-repeated notion that St
Ignatius was not a theologian by sketching his theology of human
experience. Hanvey concludes that for St Ignatius theology was ‘not a
speculative endeavour of the intellect but a life that lives in Christ;
a love that comes to be—in deeds and not words—for the life of the
world’. Each of the authors writing in this issue reminds us that our
collaboration with God does not rest upon speculation or ideology but
upon responding to the promptings of the Spirit in everyday life. Our
labours of love remain forever an affair of the heart.
Finally, I am especially pleased to be reviewing a new Way Books
publication in this issue, a set of essays by Rob Marsh entitled Imagination,
Discernment and Spiritual Direction. This book will be of interest to
anyone involved in spiritual ministry and is available from The Way’s
online bookshop and the editorial office, along with a deep-reading
Foreword 7

guide for individuals or groups. An online formation day is being held

on 12 May 2023 at the London Jesuit Centre, details of which can be
found on their website (www.londonjesuitcentre.org). Although little
known outside the United Kingdom, Rob Marsh’s long-standing work
in retreat-giving and the formation of spiritual directors has truly been
a quiet labour of love.
Philip Harrison SJ
Editor
 New from

WAY BOOKS

Robert R. Marsh SJ, Imagination, Discernment and
Spiritual Direction
ROB MARSH SJ has been a leading
light in the ministry of the Spiritual
Exercises over recent decades.
His subtle insights have not only
been a mainstay of training courses
for spiritual directors, but have
illuminated the lives of many others
who have come into contact with
his work. This collection of essays
brings together some of his most
insightful writings to explain
how the techniques of spiritual
conversation, discernment and
direction can bring people into an
encounter with God. Written with
humour, accessibility and cultural
awareness, the essays outline a
much needed world view in which
the personhood of God takes its
rightful place in our awareness.
All those who wish to develop the skill of discernment, especially
Spiritual Directors and those who have made the Spiritual Exercises of
Ignatius of Loyola, will find in this book a treasure trove of spiritual
insight.

ISBN 978 0 904717 52 6 • £10.00

To purchase, please contact The Way, Campion Hall, Brewer Street,

Oxford OX1 1QS, UK
44/0 1865 286117 • [email protected] •
Or go to our website at www.theway.org.uk/bookservice.shtml
 A SPIRITUALITY OF
ENCOUNTER
St Ignatius, Pope Francis and
Lessons from the School of the Poor

Thomas M. Kelly

A N ENCOUNTER WITH the ‘least among us’ can be many things. It can
reinforce our prejudices; it can lead to objectification of the ‘other’;
or it can transform how we understand ourselves, our God and our social
responsibilities to the world—including our spirituality. St Ignatius of
Loyola offers us a foundation to explore the encounter between the
poorest and those with opportunity and privilege. Pope Francis extends
this Ignatian insight by arguing that not only do the poor need us, but we
benefit from an encounter of mutuality with them. Encountering the
poor allows us to listen to the will of God and discern our way in this
world free of culturally reinforced (and rewarded) constraints. The root
of this experience has been repeatedly emphasized by Pope Francis:
‘The text of Matthew 25:35–36 is “not a simple invitation to charity: it is a
page of Christology which sheds a ray of light on the mystery of Christ”’.1
Shortly after Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio became Pope Francis,
he demonstrated not only a commitment to the poor, but an interest
in how they evangelize the non-poor.2 In his first apostolic letter, Evangelii
gaudium, he states:
This is why I want a Church which is poor and for the poor. They
have much to teach us. Not only do they share in the sensus fidei,
but in their difficulties they know the suffering Christ. We need to
let ourselves be evangelized by them. The new evangelization is an
invitation to acknowledge the saving power at work in their lives
3
and to put them at the center of the Church’s pilgrim way.

1
Pope Francis, Gaudete et exsultate, n. 96, quoting John Paul II, Novo millennio ineunte, n. 49.
2
The term ‘poor’ refers to human persons suffering under economic and sociological poverty in a
variety of ways. The non-poor are not subject to the same limitations on human flourishing.
3
Pope Francis, Evangelii gaudium, n. 198. Compare Lumen gentium, n. 8: ‘Similarly, the Church
encompasses with love all who are afflicted with human suffering and in the poor and afflicted sees
the image of its poor and suffering Founder’.

The W ay, 62/2 (A pril 2023), 9–21

10 Thomas M. Kelly

Francis introduces here a mutual evangelization between poor and

non-poor which, if taken seriously, constitutes a fundamental change
in Catholic spirituality. No longer are the poor simply the recipients of
charity or justice. Now there is a voluntary mutuality by which the
prosperous and rich also discover something about themselves and God
that only the poor can teach. This possibility of the poor evangelizing
the non-poor emerges from an understanding of the life of Ignatius of
Loyola which is rarely emphasized or deeply explored outside intra-
Jesuit conversations on the vow of poverty.

Ignatius and the Poor

It is true that Ignatius was inspired by versions of holiness dominant in
his time. But to reduce his actions to only this excludes an authentic
intentionality. Ignatius did more than mimic the ‘saints’ who inspired
him. It is clear that many of the stories which make up his Autobiography
were later crafted by editors with a specific purpose and audience in mind.4
This does not mean the Autobiography is completely hagiographical,
nor does it mean we should interpret everything in it as historical fact.
One theme in the Autobiography and in the Spiritual Exercises is the
importance of encounters with the poor, as well as ‘actual’ and ‘spiritual’
poverty.5 It would be reasonable to assert (if we believe that Ignatius
made free and authentic choices) that the commitment to poverty inspired
by the saints became integral for Ignatius through personal experiences
with the poor of his time. If he was merely imitating expectations
of holiness, the authenticity of ‘poverty’ (in all its forms) in the life of
Ignatius would be put into question.
There are three elements to the leitmotif of actual and spiritual
poverty which appear, both separately and together, throughout the
various works of Ignatius. The first is his commitment to direct service of
the poor, which he first demonstrated in Azpeitia during the latter part
of his convalescence and which continued throughout his life. Second

4
Barton T. Geger, ‘Hidden Theology in the “Autobiography” of St Ignatius’, Studies in the Spirituality
of Jesuits, 46/3 (Autumn, 2014): ‘Certainly we miss the forest for the trees when we focus on
individual stories to the neglect of wider themes’ (32).
5
This theme is also present through early days of the first companions and later codified in the Jesuit
Constitutions. See Horacio de la Costa and Edward D. Sheridan, ‘On Becoming Poor: A Symposium on
Evangelical Poverty’, Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits, 8/2–3 (March and May 1976) and Dean
Brackley, ‘Downward Mobility: Social Implications of St Ignatius’s Two Standards’, Studies in the Spirituality
of Jesuits, 20/1 (January 1988).
A Spirituality of Encounter 11

is the deepening of his commitment to living out the beatitudes by

addressing some of the root causes of sinful conditions—what we would
call the work of social justice today. Finally, his institutional commitment
to both actual and spiritual poverty is embodied by the ‘Deliberation on
Poverty’, dated to the early 1540s.6 This third element instantiates both
the life of poverty (actual) and what one learns from it—total dependence
on God (spiritual)—for what would become the Society of Jesus.

Direct Encounters
At the time of Ignatius, the ‘poor’ were,

… those with no particular protection, who could in good times live

by their labor, but without any margin of security. The poor also
included the destitute, the beggars wandering from town to town,
7
charitably moved on from hospice to hospice.

Hospices were poorly maintained city refuges that usually accommodated

a person for a night. In many cases they existed to keep those suffering
from disease outside medieval towns. Occasionally cities would recognise
the ‘privileged poor’, those who were well known in a town and
‘allowed to sleep in the porches of churches and in the streets’.8 Thus,
the poor were the sick, as well as common folk who fell on hard times
and sometimes became wandering beggars.
When Ignatius began to follow his vocation, he adopted ‘the socially
recognised status of a penitent’.9 Part of this meant giving up his noble
clothing in exchange for poor clothing. The story about this, later told
in his Autobiography, reveals two important insights. After Ignatius
approached a poor man to exchange clothes with him, the man was
later accused of stealing his clothes and subsequently beaten. When
Ignatius heard what happened to the poor man, ‘the tears poured from
his eyes, tears of compassion for the poor man to whom he had given his
clothes’.10 This response of ‘compassion for the poor man’ is important.
Why did Ignatius react this way and what did his tears mean? This

6
See ‘The Deliberation on Poverty’, in Ignatius of Loyola: Spiritual Exercises and Selected Works, edited
by George Ganss (New York: Paulist, 1991), 225–228.
7
Adrian Demoustier, ‘The First Companions of the Poor’, Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits, 21/2
(March 1989), 4–20, here 5.
8
Demoustier, ‘First Companions of the Poor’, 5.
9
Demoustier, ‘First Companions of the Poor’, 6.
10
Autobiography, n. 18.
12 Thomas M. Kelly

experience of tears of compassion

is mentioned in the Spiritual
Exercises as consolation.11
Consolation, for Ignatius, is
an affective feeling that leads
towards God.12 Perhaps this
innocent poor person, unjustly
accused and punished, brought
him to a deeper understanding
of the passion of Christ. The
helplessness of this man inspired
Ignatius’ desire to ‘depend only
on God while pursuing his
pilgrimage; so, he renounced the
security of either companionship
or financial resources’.13 As a
consequence he experienced
St Ignatius exchanges clothes with a poor man, destitution, maltreatment and
by Peter Paul Rubens, 1609 other humiliations.

Root Causes
While Ignatius served in hospices throughout his pilgrimage, he also
considered the root causes of different social evils. When he returned
home to Azpeitia, he sought to address social and moral issues such as
gambling and ‘priestly concubinage’, and the need for a more dependable
and constant provision for poor people.14 His efforts to end incarceration
for debt as well as trying to establish community assistance for the
chronically poor were something more than individual ministry.
The Martha House in Rome tried to address the causes of prostitution
by giving women another skill set to make a living, reconciling them

11
Demoustier states that the Spiritual Exercises names it explicitly in reference to ‘spiritual consolation’
(‘First Companions of the Poor’, 6) : ‘Similarly, this consolation is experienced when the soul sheds
tears which move it to love for its Lord—whether they are tears of grief for its own sins, or about the
Passion of Christ our Lord, or about other matters directly ordered to his service and praise’ (Exx 316).
12
Michael Buckley, ‘The Structures of the Rules for the Discernment of Spirits’, The Way Supplement,
20 (1973), 19–37, here 28: ‘The good spirit moves in conjunction with the developmental effort of the
person; and the affect of his movement within affectivity is courage and strength, consolation, tears,
inspiration and calmness’.
13
Demoustier, ‘First Companions of the Poor’, 6.
14
Demoustier, ‘First Companions of the Poor’, 10.
A Spirituality of Encounter 13

with estranged husbands or offering them the opportunity to embrace

religious life. Finally, when the Society of Jesus committed itself to the
ministry of education, the inclusion of the poor was essential. Ignatius
refused to open a school until it was fully endowed because he desired to
educate the poor and rich together for the common good.15 According
to Demoustier, the colleges were situated ‘between the service of the
great, who had no need of them since their children were educated by
private tutors, and the little people, who did not go to school at all’.16
Because of its social location, this ministry embodied something between
private charitable action and a social service.

The social effect was to facilitate access for the greatest possible
number to the new culture of the book and of the written word,
without adding new barriers on the basis of social class or class
distinctions over and above those that already existed. It was the
genius of Ignatius to have refused any such selectivity for entrance
into the colleges and to have understood that it was necessary to
17
begin with the lower age groups.

Ignatius first served the poor, but this was later extended to addressing
the social structures which marginalised those who were in debt,
engaged in prostitution or unable to access an education. While language
about structures is anachronistic, it is clear that Ignatius was committed
to more than individual charity to the poor.

Listening to God with the Poor

The various elements of the leitmotif of encountering the poor, voluntary
poverty and the benefits of spiritual poverty can be brought together
through a letter Ignatius wrote to members of the Society of Jesus in
Padua. Here the various threads we have seen throughout his life come
together—the importance of encountering the poor, and the benefits
received when actual and spiritual poverty intersect.18 Becoming actually
and spiritually poor gives us the interior freedom to listen to God.

15
John O’Malley, The Jesuits: A History from Ignatius to the Present (New York: Rowman and Littlefield,
2014), 14.
16
Demoustier, ‘First Companions of the Poor’, 17.
17
Demoustier, ‘First Companions of the Poor’, 18.
18
Ignatius of Loyola to the members of the Society in Padua, 7 August 1547, in Ignatius of Loyola:
Letters and Instructions, edited by Martin Palmer, John W. Padberg and John L. McCarthy (St Louis:
Institute of Jesuit Sources, 2006), 203–207.
14 Thomas M. Kelly

According to the letter, the poor themselves are important to know.

Those chosen by Jesus as friends were ‘for the most part poor’. It was
for the poor ‘that Jesus Christ was sent on earth’. Furthermore, ‘The
friendship of the poor makes us friends of the Eternal King’. When
voluntary poverty is assumed, a person receives similar benefits by
extension through a preference for the ‘precious treasure’ of Christ and
the Church as opposed to the treasures of the world. Friendship with the
poor is both ministry to those who suffer and voluntary assumption of
their (involuntary) dependence upon God. This understanding of the
dual nature of ‘poverty’ (encountering the poor and depending on God)
benefits the Society of Jesus. ‘Poverty enables us in every circumstance
to hear the voice (that is, the inspiration) of the Holy Spirit better,
because it removes the obstructions that keep it out.’ 19
Demoustier reminds us that Ignatius learnt much through his
encounters with those who could depend on no one but God.
In the school of the poor, Ignatius learnt how to renounce every
project properly his own. It was thanks to this humility, which enabled
him to recognise what his conversion and experience of the Lord
had inscribed in the very depths of his being, that he discerned his
true future in the desire to acquire some education and to enter
fully into the dynamism of contemporary culture …. The poor
person, according to the ‘sacred teaching’ of the Spiritual Exercises,
is the one who is not protected or does not protect himself from
humiliations, and who thus achieves the humility which permits a
genuinely free election. This is the first guideline: the rejection of
20
society’s standard as a criterion of decision. Blessed are the poor.

Poverty for the Early Companions

While it is brief, the ‘Deliberation on Poverty’ gives insight into the
discernment process used by Ignatius and his early companions. The
first phase of the discernment is titled ‘The Disadvantages of Having No
Fixed Income Are Also the Advantages of Having Such Income Either
in Part or in Whole’. The benefits of having a fixed income included:
better maintenance of the Society, less annoying and unedifying begging,
more order and peace, more time to do spiritual works, better maintained
churches, and more time to study, offer spiritual help and care for their
own health. The disadvantages included being less disposed to travel and

19
Ignatius of Loyola to the members of the Society in Padua, 204–205.
20
Demoustier, ‘First Companions of the Poor’, 7.
A Spirituality of Encounter 15

hardship, being less exemplary of true poverty and self-abnegation, and

the possibility that a fixed income might create inequality within the
Society itself.21
The ‘Advantages and Reasons for Having No Fixed Income’ included:
greater spiritual strength, less worldly avarice, deeper unity, closeness
to Christ, increased dependence on God, more humiliations and by
this a more faithful imitation of Christ, life in more divine hope, greater
edification, greater freedom of spirit to speak of spiritual things, daily
encouragement to serve by receiving alms, better exemplification of ‘true
poverty’, greater diligence and willingness to travel and endure. In
addition, poverty with no fixed income is more perfect than half-measures
and, finally, Jesus chose poverty.22 Following this second list, the ten
early companions chose this latter course and then requested and
obtained the papal bull for the formation of the Society of Jesus.
The process used to discern this form of poverty appears to have
been communal, and consistent with the First Principle and Foundation
and the process for discernment outlined in the Spiritual Exercises. It
takes as its end the desire to serve God seriously in the
The link between
world, and constantly refers to the Jesus of the Gospels in his
spiritual and
actual poverty. It tries to evaluate material security by asking
material poverty
whether it glorifies, praises or honours God. The standard
gospel opposition between love of God and neighbour, and
and dependence
love of wealth and security is operative throughout—as is the on God
avoidance of avarice. Finally, the link between spiritual and material
poverty and dependence on God is critical for Ignatius and the companions.
It seems to be the way they understand the value of Christ’s poverty
within the historical life he lived.

Pope Francis: Evangelized by the Poor

Pope Francis approaches the topic of encountering the poor, voluntary
poverty and spiritual poverty in a way with many similarities to that of
Ignatius, but with a different emphasis. He recognises and includes the
main contributions of Ignatius but extends them in how the poor and
voluntary poverty evangelize others—that is, how they explicitly teach us
about God. In his first apostolic exhortation upon assuming the papacy he
extends the importance of the poor and voluntary poverty to the Church

21
‘Deliberation on Poverty’, 225–226.
22
‘Deliberation on Poverty’, 226.
16 Thomas M. Kelly

as a whole, not just vowed religious: ‘The new evangelization is an

invitation to acknowledge the saving power at work in their lives and to
put them at the center of the Church’s pilgrim way’.23 This new approach
is inspired by Ignatius but extended to all believers in light of the signs
of the times. It is possible to follow the categories used to understand
the Ignatian leitmotif, with one addition—how the poor evangelize the
non-poor—something already present, albeit only implicitly, for Ignatius.

Encountering the Poor in Mutuality

Pope Francis discusses how we can encounter the poor if we want to
learn from them. He emphasizes that we should encounter the poor
through the Ignatian dictum of seeking God in all things.
We are called to find Christ in them, to lend our voice to their
causes, but also to be their friends, to listen to them, to speak for
them and to embrace the mysterious wisdom which God wishes to
share with us through them .
24

The equality of friendship comes first, then the humility to listen and
use our position to speak for the poor. If this is done carefully, we may
discover something about God. This encounter recognises the inner
goodness of the poor and does not stop at meeting their material needs.
It engages in dialogue which assumes mutuality and is motivated by the
ultimate goal of the human journey: to love others through sharing,
commitment and service, and, in this, to love God.25 What we have
received first and freely (God’s grace and love) we share freely. The
poor receive in this encounter a genuine hope from our freely given
commitment that seeks no reward. They are lifted up, need our hearts,
feel our affection, and overcome loneliness because they also need love.
There is also a challenging dimension to our encounter with the
poor—one that creates discomfort, anxiety and frustration. Francis
suggests that, if we allow them to do so, those who suffer through
poverty and marginalisation can bring us face to face with our own
deepest fears and insecurities—and this is a good thing. Our culture of
wealth is afraid of insecurity, uncertainty, anxiety and the vulnerability

23
Pope Francis, Evangelii gaudium, n. 198.
24
Pope Francis, Evangelii gaudium, n. 198.
25
When using the term ‘love’ I mean the Thomistic definition as the ‘effective willing of the good of the
other’. See Michael Himes, Doing the Truth in Love: Conversations about God, Relationships and Service
(Mahwah: Paulist, 1995), chapter 1.
A Spirituality of Encounter 17

of depending on others for our basic needs. Contemporary consumerist

materialism has enculturated this self-sufficiency deeply into our
identity as human beings.26
Encountering those who suffer through poverty and discovering their
and our own vulnerability militates against and liberates us from some of
the most deeply held Western cultural ideals. Self-sufficiency, libertarian
notions of freedom and a preference for self-interest over the common
good all collapse if we are serious about the evangelizing possibilities of
encountering the poor. Pope Francis mentions this specifically.
The Gospel invites us to peer into the depths of our heart, to see
where we find our security in life. Usually, the rich feel secure in
their wealth, and think that, if that wealth is threatened, the whole
meaning of their earthly life can collapse. Jesus himself tells us this
in the parable of the rich fool: he speaks of a man who was sure of
himself, yet foolish, for it did not dawn on him that he might die
27
that very day (cf. Luke 12:16–21).

What would allow us to learn from those who suffer through poverty
and marginalisation? What cultural, economic, social and spiritual
defences or ‘buffers’ hinder us from learning from them? These defences
are real, and the encounter can be frightening.28 Pope Francis is correct
when he states, ‘To depend on God sets us free from every form of
enslavement and leads us to recognize our great dignity’.29 The question
is sharpened. What hinders us from seeking voluntary dependence
upon God?
Traditional academic theology, the kind taught at many Roman
Catholic universities and seminaries, relies overwhelmingly on the
intellect, reason—the mind. While this has been indispensable to
the tradition we have inherited, it has never been the complete story.
The danger in relying exclusively on the intellect is that Christianity
becomes a set of ideas, rather than a way of being and acting in the world.
St Ignatius was keenly aware of this and encouraged the use of all the

26
See Robert Bellah and others, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life
(Berkeley: U. of California, 1985) chapter 6. One need only think of the media preoccupation with
the ontologically impossible ‘self-made man’.
27
Pope Francis, Gaudete et exsultate, n. 67.
28
I have taught immersion courses for fifteen years, as well as guided immersion for the Ignatian
Colleagues Program of the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities. The barriers to such
encounters usually take the form of analysis and problem-solving the situation of the poor rather than
any real possibility of direct encounter.
29
Pope Francis, Evangelii gaudium, n. 32.
18 Thomas M. Kelly

senses to discern the will of God—one’s imagination, feelings, intuition,

experience and wisdom. Pope Francis continues this emphasis by
encouraging real encounters of mutuality with the poor—relationships
which can be mutually transformative in their depth. These encounters
are very different from short-term service work, for they assume such
deep relationships. For Pope Francis, discerning the movements of one’s
heart honestly by using all of the Ignatian contemplative ‘senses’ is one
way to discover, nurture and allow such encounters to claim us.
Such contemplation extends Ignatius’ understanding and allows us
to participate in divine compassion. Generosity is necessary for a fully
human life and, in this encounter, the poor unlock our isolation from
them and their situation. With the proper posture towards this
relationship, we can grow in maturity and wisdom as we discern our own
vocations. This is ultimately an imitation of Jesus. ‘Jesus’ whole life, his
way of dealing with the poor, his actions, his integrity, his simple daily
acts of generosity, and finally his complete self-giving, is precious and
reveals the mystery of his divine life.’30
And the concreteness of this encounter is crucial. He emphasizes,
… a poverty learned with the humble, the poor, the sick and all those
who are on the existential peripheries of life. A theoretical poverty
is of no use to us. Poverty is learned by touching the flesh of the poor
31
Christ, in the humble, in the poor, in the sick, and in children.

Pope Francis sees this encounter as a revelation of Christ when he

says, ‘In this call to recognize him in the poor and the suffering, we see
revealed the very heart of Christ, his deepest feelings and choices, which
every saint seeks to imitate’.32
All of this encourages a new emphasis on traditional approaches to
spirituality as well as the theology that flows from them. Spirituality
can be understood as the intersection of three relationships—how we
relate to ourselves, how we relate to the world and how we relate to
God. These relationships define who we are and what we do. They are
set out by Ignatius in the First Principle and Foundation and are critical
to freedom understood as the capacity to choose God in a world that
prefers the security of riches, honours and pride. Pope Francis suggests

30
Pope Francis, Evangelii gaudium, n. 265.
31
Pope Francis, address to the plenary assembly of the international union of superiors general, 8 May
2013, n. 1.
32
Pope Francis, Gaudete et exsultate, n. 96.
A Spirituality of Encounter 19

that the poor teach us dimensions of our own spirituality that only
come from a real, personal and dialogical encounter with them. There
are two benefits to entering into relationship with people who suffer in
actual poverty. The first is a deeper insight into our limits and the
unearned privileges most of us enjoy.33 The second is the invitation to
suffer-with, which is a call to participate in the very life of God.34

Dependence on God
An example of an encounter with the poor can be found in the various
‘immersion trips’ offered between US educational institutions and places
of poverty around the world. US participants on immersions to the
US–Mexico border or other Latin American communities are amazed
at how the poor and marginalised live when their limits and constraints
are so clear to us. This is often framed as they are poor but so happy, or I
have never seen a people live in such a caring community. What the
participants mean, but lack the language to explain, is to ask how, apart
from our material prosperity, it is possible to find joy.
Pope Francis reminds us that the poor ‘practice the special solidarity
that exists among those who are poor and suffering, and which our

33
Pope Francis, retreat for priests, 2 June 2016: ‘If we start by feeling compassion for the poor and the
outcast, surely we will come to realize that we ourselves stand in need of mercy’.
34
‘Suffering with’ is the literal meaning of compassion. See Henri Nouwen, Donald McNeill and
Douglas Morrison, Compassion: A Reflection on the Christian Life (New York: Image, 1983), chapter 1.
20 Thomas M. Kelly

civilization seems to have forgotten or would prefer in fact to forget’.35

Seeing and accepting our limits as human beings is the key to dependence
on God. This is what the school of the poor has to teach us. This is
made more difficult in societies that worship wealth, strive for honours
and truly believe that anyone could somehow be ‘self-made’.

Unless we can acknowledge our concrete and limited situation, we will

not be able to see the real and possible steps that the Lord demands
of us at every moment, once we are attracted and empowered by
36
his gift.

For the non-poor to experience this dependence on God in solidarity,

we must allow the actual situation of real poverty to make a claim on
us. Can we see and experience the desperation of the migrant fleeing
violence? Can we see and experience the powerlessness of people trapped
in poverty, victims of racism, marginalisation or oppression? To see
and experience is to encounter, but the possibilities of that encounter
only emerge when hearts are predisposed to ‘suffer with’. To see with the
eyes of compassion, and to live out its consequences, is to imitate Jesus.37
The ‘acknowledgement of our limitations’—moral, emotional,
spiritual, physical—can occur for wealthy Western people in a unique
way through encounters with those who suffer in poverty and oppression.38
Listening to them, reflecting on what they say, integrating it into a world
view and acting upon it concretely are some of the ways to learn from
this ‘school of the poor’. Praying with our encounters (the reflecting
moment) allows the Spirit to make claims upon us in ways that are
personal and unique. When such encounters become normative for who
we are becoming, the root causes of this suffering become something we
must confront.
Ignatian discernment first requires freedom from sources of identity,
power and stability that are not of God. Ignatius served the poor and
lived in voluntary poverty to be available for what God wanted for him.
This availability resulted in spiritual growth when the humility of which
Ignatius spoke made it possible to discern with freedom. Ignatius left

35
Pope Francis, Fratelli tutti, n. 116.
36
Pope Francis, Gaudete et exsultate, n. 50.
37
‘The cry of the poor and the excluded awakens us and helps us to understand the compassion Jesus
felt for the people (Matthew 15:32)’: Pope Francis, address to the general chapter of the Order of
Preachers, 4 August 2016.
38
Pope Francis, Gaudete et exsultate, n. 50.
A Spirituality of Encounter 21

his bodyguards behind after his first day on pilgrimage. He left his sword
and dagger at the altar in Montserrat. He left his fine clothes with the
beggar who was punished by those who treated him unjustly. Ignatius
rid himself of these sources of identity because they signified his noble
status—not God. This status was a barrier for Ignatius. Voluntary
poverty was the means to free himself in order to depend upon God
and listen to Christ.
Spiritual poverty can be glimpsed when the lives and vulnerability
of those who suffer poverty and oppression begin to make a claim on
our own. This is what solidarity means. ‘Solidarity’ is not an idea, feeling
or theory but an action for the good of others. It is best summed up by
Ignatius in his Contemplation to Attain Love—‘love ought to manifest
itself in deeds rather than in words’ (Exx 230). When an encounter
with exploitative labour in factories in Latin America begins to change
how we consume, we glimpse solidarity. When encounters with poor and
marginalised people on our streets shift the way we use resources or
vote, we glimpse solidarity. When the environmental cost of our lifestyles
turns other people into climate refugees and prompts a change in our
everyday living, we glimpse solidarity. Within these encounters we listen
to God’s call as it becomes the foundation for considering everything else.
For as we relate to those who suffer through poverty and marginalisation,
we relate to Christ.
While St Ignatius and Pope Francis have different emphases in
their interpretations of how the poor, voluntary poverty and spiritual
poverty are essential to our evangelization, there is enough similarity to
see connections. Both emphasize that discerning God’s will for us
requires interior freedom. For Pope Francis, the poor and marginalised
of the world are a unique source of this freedom, first for what they
teach us (recalling Ignatius) and second, for what they elicit from us (a
share in divine compassion). If we encounter the poor in ways that are
mutual and life-giving, such encounters can be transformative.

Thomas Kelly is professor of theology at Creighton University, Omaha, Nebraska,

USA.
A place of peace, prayer and beauty in North Wales

Away in the loveable west,

On a pastoral forehead of Wales,
I was under a roof here, I was at rest
Gerard Manley Hopkins, Jesuit poet

St Beunos is a Jesuit retreat house offering the Spiritual

Exercises of St Ignatius, silent individually guided retreats
and various themed retreats. We also provide courses
and training in spiritual accompaniment.

For the full programme of retreats and courses, see

www.beunos.com
Contact: The Secretary, St Beuno’s, St Asaph,
Denbighshire, N. Wales, LL17 0AS
Tel: +44 (0)1745 583444
[email protected]
 GOD'S TRICKSTERS
Lessons from Esther for Religious Life

Paul Dominic

T HERE ARE FEW PLACES for the book of Esther in liturgy. In spite of
the fact that (the Hebrew version of) it is part of the Protestant
Bible, none of it finds the tiniest mention in the lectionaries, apart
from the Roman Catholic one.1 This is something very strange, especially
if one knows its genre. As ‘written literature with no stylistic traits of oral
literature’, it was meant to be read publicly, especially on the feast of
Purim.2 Whatever the reason for its omission in the official proclamation
of the Word, it is to be hoped that this is not in the line of hostility
that made people such as Martin Luther wish the book did not exist.3
If he found in it too much Judaizing he was not wrong; but, perhaps, he
ignored the fact that ‘despite certain objections, including its failure to
mention God even once (in the Hebrew text), it made its way into the
Jewish canon by popular acclaim’.4
The primitive Church, holy and apostolic, had its catholic instincts
right when it used not only the Jewish canon in Hebrew but also the
larger Greek canon used by the Diaspora, even as they added to it
certain variety of newly emerging Christian writings of their time (known
to us as the New Testament) to form the whole Christian Bible. That
early biblical canon includes the whole of Esther as it has come down
to us with its Hebrew original and Greek additions (which comprise six
chapters). So, giving credence to Esther as part of scripture, it is only
proper to read it as it is and for what it is, without any bias as to what a
biblical book should be. Incidentally, India appears in the very first verse
of the book—which is certainly a matter of pleasure for us in India.

1
Which has Esther 14:1, 3–5, 12–14 (= Addition C:12, 14–16, 23–25) for Lent, Week 1, Thursday.
2
See Sidnie White Crawford,¶7KH%RRNRI(VWKHU¶ in The New Interpreter’s Bible (Nashville: Abingdon,
1999), volume 3, 770. Purim, unlike the Passover, did not pass into Christian tradition.
3
The principle of the Reformation should embrace all scripture. On Luther and Esther see Heinrich
Bornkamm, Luther and the Old Testament, translated by Eric W. and Ruth C. Gritsch (Philadelphia:
Fortress, 1969 ), 188–189.
4
Crawford,‘Book of Esther’, 855.

The W ay, 62/2 (A pril 2023), 23– 36

24 Paul Dominic

The Story of the Lots

Esther is a story at once entertaining and uplifting, addressing the
dispersed Jewish minority oppressed by various political powers. Though
a story, in the perennial situation of persecution faced by the audience,
Esther appears ‘more real than many historical books’.5 Mordecai, a
Jewish captive in the Persian city of Susa, rose to power in King
Ahasuerus’ court because of his goodness in reporting a plot against the
king and so saving him from death. At the same time, Mordecai excited
envy and hatred in Haman, the grand vizier, because of his refusal, as a
Jew, to show deference to the vizier with a bow, as others did. Infuriated,
Haman planned Mordecai’s undoing. Turning his ire not only against
one man but also against his whole race, Haman poisoned the king’s
mind against his bête noire and argued him round to ordering the
genocide of his Jewish subjects. Hearing of this danger to his people
Mordecai sent word to his cousin Esther, who had become queen
(replacing Queen Vashti, who had been deposed for her refusal to parade
her beauty before the whole court when ordered to do so by the king).
Esther responded, at first reluctantly but soon enough with
determination, hoping to change her royal husband’s mind against all
odds. Planning with hopeful prayer, she played slyly on the king’s
emotions and tried her tricks. Using feminine delaying tactics, she swayed
him enough to make him see her perilous condition as one of the
innocent victims caught in the murderous plot of Haman. Thus, finally,
she turned him against Haman. No sooner said than done! Seeing the
king seething with rage, his servants hanged Haman on the same gibbet
that Haman had erected for Mordecai.
However the story does not conclude with Esther taking vengeance
on the enemy Haman and winning reprieve along with her people. To
tell it to the bitter end, Esther did not rest till she had made the king
decree the destruction of all the enemies of the Jews. The enduring result
was the institution of a feast, Purim, in remembrance and perpetuation
of the real victory of the Jews, when their sorrow turned into gladness
and their mourning into a holiday. The highpoint of the annual feast
was ‘sending gifts of food to one another and presents to the poor’
(Esther 9:22). If Haman, the enemy of all the Jews, had plotted against
the Jews, and had cast Pūr—that is, ‘the lot’ (9:23, 26)—to crush and
destroy them, Esther submitted to her own sad lot and sought, in fear

5
Christian Community Bible, 50th edn (Bangalore: Claretian, 2011), 917.
God's Tricksters 25

and trembling, the lot cast by God to turn the hostile world upside
down. Those memorable days, therefore, came to be called Purim: the
lot first cast was by Haman, human and evil, but it had to give place
necessarily to what Esther cast, thanks to the unseen agency of God.

Twin Interpretations: God as Absentee and God as Trickster

This story of tit for tat is smaller and subtler in its original Hebrew version
than the later and longer Greek one. Its peculiar character (not shared
with any other biblical historical book), is not without import for its
interpretation. For one thing, the story as found in Hebrew is obviously
secular; void of any religious elements: it has not even a single mention
of God, strange as that may be. Almost making up for this lacuna, the
Greek version of the story brings in God no fewer than fifty times. Since
both the versions are part of the canonical Bible, both ought to lend
themselves to an interpretation that can be at once valid and inspiring,
but with different emphases.
The context of the story is the situation of the Jews, scattered among
foreign peoples and ruled by Gentile powers. The conscientious Jews
would certainly face problems in practising their faith, especially in times
of enmity with others for reasons not only religious but political or racial—
or even merely egoistical, or all of them combined together (as Christians
do today in India, Pakistan, China and elsewhere).6 Whatever their
personal reaction to the situation there is an empowering lesson for
them in the victorious tale of Esther, who takes the bull by the horns.
God not being mentioned in the Hebrew version of the story, it centred
round Mordecai and his uncle’s daughter, Esther, both of whom believed
in God; and it was addressed to believers like them, obviously enough, to
activate their faith and excite them to a personal, even social, response.
Hearers of the story, with its victory over viciousness, would certainly
be enthused by the initiative taken by Mordecai to thwart the impending
genocide planned by Haman; they would be enthralled by the conduct
of Esther who comes into her own on the brink of danger and rises to
the occasion to carry out her rescue plan. From such a perspective the
‘historicised Wisdom tale’ of Esther offered them a compelling religious
and social message.7

6
‘Today … almost 340 million Christians around the world—or 1 out of every 8—live in a country where
they suffer some form of persecution, such as arbitrary arrest, violence, a full range of human rights violations
and even murder.’ (https://www.churchinneed.org/christian-persecution/, accessed 14 November 2022)
7
Crawford,‘Book of Esther’ 869.
26 Paul Dominic

When they found themselves caught up in social or political

upheavals they would have to know when and how to cooperate with
whoever could serve their common good. In the absence of any divine
manifestation they would not simply wait but rather assume responsibility
for suitable action. Highlighting and urging this theme of personal
responsibility, the Hebrew story of Esther hides God. After all, God is
ever unseen, even if God’s intervention (4:14; 6:13b) is not. In this
daily darkness of implicit but unexpressed faith the original story, older
and shorter, brings to the fore the deliberate action of Mordecai that
sets in motion the drama of Esther in all her daring resourcefulness.8 It
nevertheless embraces the 72-hour fast (4:15–17) expressive of utter
trust in God (Ezra 8:21).
The twin truth of God’s hidden but active presence entwined with
human action may possibly strike some, intuitively taking in the story’s
series of dramatic reversals (Queen Vashti’s dethronement followed by
Esther’s enthronement; Haman being forced to honour Mordecai publicly
rather than destroy him; the gibbet Haman prepared for Mordecai
becoming the instrument of Haman’s own death), each one related to the
other, from beginning till end, in which the good turn the tables on
the bad and rejoice in their conquest. In these unsuspected coincidences
one may well suspect unseen providence making itself conspicuous: ‘a
hidden causality behind the surface of human history, both concealing
and governing the order and significance of events’.9
The hidden, invisible causality will, however, be frustrated unless it
is followed by a corresponding visible causality on the human level. For
example, the elevation of Esther as queen, altogether unanticipated by
her, will achieve nothing for her or her people unless and until she, for
her part, decides to act for them when the situation demands. If the
coincidences reveal the nearness of God to humans it is incumbent on
humans to seize opportunity and achieve their urgent goal. Thus, in the
Hebrew version of the story, even though God goes unmentioned, God is
inconspicuously present, heightening the ubiquitous truth ‘that it is God
who controls and directs all the seemingly insignificant coincidences …
that make up the plot and issue in deliverance for the Jews’.10

8
See The New Jerusalem Bible Commentary, edited by Raymond E. Brown, Joseph A. Fitzmyer and
Roland E. Murphy (Bangalore: TPI, 1991), 576, no. 38:53.
9
Crawford,’Book of Esther¶ 867.
10
NIV Study Bible (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 2002), 714.
God's Tricksters 27

In the Greek version of the story God is mentioned again and

again (almost to the point of tedium) but still does not appear to the
protagonists as in the narrative of Genesis or Exodus.11 True, the dream
of Mordecai, that begins and ends the story (in Greek), foretelling the
initial struggle and eventual victory of the Jews, is understood as a
definite action of God. However, even in the dream God does not
appear to Mordecai; but the dreamer understands the dream as a divine
experience—something sent by God in the first place, and something
fulfilled by God at the end. And, in between, Mordecai and Esther turn
to their God for saving help, believing rather than seeing, hoping in their
invisible God who nevertheless acts palpably. Their hoping against
hope in the story’s various situations may visualise and symbolize God
as master trickster, albeit without
visible features, as in mythology
(and so above mythology), so that
they come to act likewise.12
Trickster, like absentee God, may
not be a biblical or a theological
term, but it truly represents one
aspect of God: God in relation to
people, outsmarting them, despite
their own characteristic trickery
and cunning, whenever they choose
to act contrarily towards God. God
appears as the best of tricksters
when people try to trick God (as
in the story of Eve and Adam in
Paradise [Genesis 3]), or attempt
to outdo God’s chosen (as when
rulers such as Pharaoh plot against
God’s anointed leader [Psalm 2;
Exodus 7:7–10:29]). By the same
token, when they are tricked by
the bloodthirsty Haman and his
pliant king Ahasuerus, Mordecai Esther, by John Everett Millais, 1865

11
See New Jerusalem Bible Commentary, 576, no. 38:53.
12
This is worth mentioning especially to those, such as Joseph Campbell, so enamoured of mythology
that they cannot see anything beyond it. Campbell has developed the Jungian archetype of the Trickster
in numerous studies of world mythology.
28 Paul Dominic

and Esther turn to God the greater, master Trickster, the One who draws
straight with crooked lines. As they believe they pray and plan, hoping
to turn the tables on their foes. Inspired and empowered thus, Esther, in
particular, acts using her divine gifts of charm and beauty, and tricks the
king for the deliverance of her people as Haman did for their slaughter.

The Greek Esther: In the World but Not of the World

And so, in the dim light of the distant Greek story of Esther, all
Christians, but in particular consecrated men and women, who have to
live their vocations scattered across a world that is foreign and sometimes
hostile, may see glimmerings of a revived or even strikingly new version
of their life. This is especially true if they view Mary, the exemplar of
holiness, in terms of Esther.13 They may find a precedent for such
thinking in the parallelism between Esther and Mary made by St Bernard,
besides others, who looked upon Mary as quasi altera Esther (almost
another Esther).14 Writing on Esther in Renaissance art, one author
has recently made a bolder statement: ‘Esther is a type for the Virgin’,
with her radiant beauty equated ‘with virtue or moral beauty’—the
kind that saves the world, as Fyodor Dostoyevsky suggested.15
No doubt, from the biblical text it is clear that Esther, like Mary
later (Luke 1:46–52), was (caught) in the thick of the world, Gentile and
hostile, but kept herself safe above its contagious contamination. Again,
like Mary pondering her response to God in relation to the universal,
salvific mission, Esther prayed before going to the king on her limited
saving mission thus, in a passage that only appears in the Greek:

Remember, O Lord; make yourself known in this time of our

affliction, and give me courage, O King of the gods and Master of
all dominion! … But save us by your hand, and help me, who am
alone and have no helper but you, O Lord. You have knowledge of
all things, and you know that I hate the splendour of the wicked
and abhor the bed of the uncircumcised and of any alien. You know
my necessity—that I abhor the sign of my proud position, which is
upon my head on days when I appear in public. I abhor it like a

13
See Robert L. Fastiggi, ‘Mary as the Model of Faithful Love for Families, Spouses, and Consecrated
Persons’, Marian Studies, 66 (2015), 171–183.
14
See Cristelle L. Baskins, ‘Typology, Sexuality, and the Renaissance Esther’, in Sexuality and Gender in Early
Modern Europe: Institutions, Texts, Images, edited by James Turner (New York: Cambridge U, 1993), 40.
15
Baskins, ‘Typology, Sexuality, and the Renaissance Esther’, 40, 48. And see Fyodor Dostoevsky, The
Idiot, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (London: Granta, 2003), 382.
God's Tricksters 29

filthy rag, and I do not wear it on the days when I am at leisure ….

Your servant has had no joy since the day that I was brought here
until now, except in you, O Lord God of Abraham. O God, whose
might is over all, hear the voice of the despairing, and save us from
the hands of evildoers. And save me from my fear! (4:12–19)

Jews, though scattered all over the Persian and Roman empires, lived
in a markedly separate way, following their own laws (3:8). Such a
principled separation was bound to occasion a backlash against them
from the envious and ill-willed such as Haman, who planned their
destruction for its own sake, with the unthinking connivance of the king.
But, in the imminence of persecution, they had their own shrewdness
knowing that their God, ‘whose might is over all’, can trick the haughty
and outdo their cunning and so deliver the humble from the powerful.
Esther and Mordecai gave voice to their faith and asked God to
turn the hearts of their enemies against each other and so save them
from their downfall (13–14). Mary, for her part, foresaw the victory of
such faith (Luke 1:5–55). As consecrated men and women represent
their faith in the world, they cannot but recognise this spirit reverberating
in the example of Christ. He was not of the world and so he was hated
by the world. In the same way, his disciples in the world had to share
his lot, as he had chosen them out of the world, to be in the world but
not of the world. He warned them to be aware of ‘the yeast of the
Pharisees and the yeast of Herod’ (Mark 8:15). They had to watch and
pray so that they might win out over the temptations of the world. They
had to keep energetic in faith and so overcome the world. All this did
not mean they should play safe, keeping themselves distant from the
world. They were sent to the world as sheep daring to enter into, if not
change, the world of wolves.
So consecrated men and women should know that they will not be
above attacks of the worldly powers, just as Christ had forewarned his
disciples; but, at the same time, they must rest assured of his protection
and their safety because of his marvellous encouragement: ‘You will be
hated by all because of my name. But not a hair of your head will
perish. By your endurance you will gain your souls.’ (Luke 21:17–19)
Experiences of this kind among consecrated religious as individuals
and societies have been part of their birth and growth, through their own
history and that of the wider Church. When consecrated people of
today live up to this challenging call they can trace it as far back as the
times of Esther or Mary.
30 Paul Dominic

Mary Ward (1585–1645), for example, who was inspired to take

after Ignatius of Loyola, suffered like him for her new vision of religious
life; and the society founded by her also faced opposition and suppression
for more than two centuries. She broke new ground, founding an order of
consecrated women without the confinements of cloister or distinctive
habit. Her religious ambition for her companions (who were nicknamed
Jesuitesses) was to found schools and to work with the poor and
persecuted, empowering women beyond the gender discrimination of
her time. Her love for God and for the group sharing her mission was
stronger than death; and so, her chosen successors continued their work
as they sought official recognition, which finally came through the good
offices of St Pius X in the 1900s. With successive popes acknowledging
her novel and holy leadership, she is now on the way to beatification.
So is another woman, named Mary Elizabeth Lange (c.1780–1882),
an Afro-Caribbean of refugee parentage who arrived in Baltimore,
USA, as an immigrant. Educated herself, she was quick to recognise
the lack of education among other immigrants. With the means at her
disposal, thanks to her father, she opened a school in her own house. It
was a time when slavery held such sway that the state law forbade the
education of Black children. Her bold work, carried on for a decade
with her friend Marie Magdaleine Balas, attracted the attention of the
archbishop of Baltimore, who invited her to make her work permanent
and take up the challenge of founding a congregation for the education
of Black children. Thus, in 1829, a time when Black people were not
admitted into sisterhood or priesthood, she began, in the Oblate Sisters
of Providence, the first congregation for Black women. She, like Mary
Ward, proved herself a Christian Esther.

The Hebrew Esther: Consecrated Life in a Godless Society

The Hebrew story of Esther, which never mentions God, ‘may have
more direct relevance in our secular culture than stories in which God
intervenes directly and miraculously’.16 For one thing, there is no
guarantee till the end of the story that the wish of Mordecai and Esther
will be definitely fulfilled. There is suspense and even a measure of
doubt about the outcome of whatever they plan. Nevertheless, for the
Hebrew author,

16
Crawford, ’Book of Esther’, 781.
God's Tricksters 31

… the failure of Esther and Mordecai would not prove the absence
of God … since Esther and Mordecai can never be completely sure
that they are acting in concord with God. This is certainly theologically
ambiguous, but it corresponds with the modern believer’s daily struggle
to discern the will of God. The best anyone can do, the author of
Esther implies, is to act within those circumstances in which one finds
oneself and to take advantage of those opportunities with an attitude
of hope, … ‘an openness to the possibility of providence, even when
history seems to weigh against its likelihood’. It is this openness that
speaks to the sceptical end of the twentieth century and becomes a
17
posture of profound faith.

Such an outlook may well be the hidden spring of a new and

unsettling form of consecrated life. Inspired by the French visionary
Charles de Foucauld (1858–1916), a Christian-turned-atheist who found
his faith again, it was actually initiated by two like-minded followers,
René Voillaume (1905–2003) and Magdeleine Hutin (1898–1989), who
founded apostolic-contemplative congregations named Little Brothers
of Jesus and Little Sisters of Jesus, in 1933 and 1939, independently of
each other, in Algeria.
Cherishing the ideal of living like Jesus at Nazareth they sought to
insert themselves among the poor working class and other disempowered
groups. Living with the poor, in the manner of the Nazarene, the Little
Brothers and Sisters exercise their faith exposed to all possible situations
of human weakness, bearing all the trials of the poor, enduring worldly
temptations and facing the seeming absence of God. In this stark darkness
of faith, they seek to grow strong without the usual supports of faith
enjoyed by the common, settled forms of consecrated living.
If they are the same as other congregations in the traditional ideal
of vowed commitment, the Little Brothers and Sisters are very unlike
them in the practical expression of it; they have no particular, distinctive
apostolate apart from immersion in society like Jesus at Nazareth.
Their very style of living and working becomes evangelization as their
neighbours and co-workers begin asking them (as people asked Jesus)
why they live as they do, like the rest of the populace without drawing
attention to their status. Their life of consecration is so different from
what other consecrated people are comfortably used to that most
Catholics, not only lay but religious and clerical, fail to understand

17
Crawford, ‘Book of Esther’, 781, quoting Michael V. Fox, Character and Ideology in the Book of
Esther: Studies in Biblical Personalities (Columbia: U. of South Carolina, 1991), 242.
32 Paul Dominic

their peculiar vocation and so discourage those called to join them.

Not surprisingly, therefore, since their entry into India in the 1950s the
brothers have been able to count just five Indians among them. Also,
incidentally, they cannot boast of even a single Anglo-Saxon in the
congregation. The Little Sisters have fared slightly better.
Proper understanding of their mission includes not only their choice
of insertion into the thick of secular humanity (who may be both
crassly godless and grossly deprived) but also their awareness of the
divine mission embracing and penetrating their unadorned and humble
work of earning their livelihood and contributing to mundane society. It
is a novel, acute form of what happens—should happen—in consecrated
living exposed to the constant struggle that Christ himself passed
through in the encounter with the evil one. It reveals not only the
eschatological but the apocalyptic outlook, which is to say that, in
the present time (viewed as the final period of world history), ‘the powers
of evil make the supreme struggle against God and are finally routed after
a dreadful and bloody combat’.18
Alert readers will see indications of such an outlook in the story of
Esther. For, though the story begins as court rivalry between two high
officials, Haman and Mordecai, it turns into a racial conflict, assuming
even cosmic proportions, in which the unjustly oppressed turn out
victorious against all expectations because of God’s intervention.19 All
this happens in accordance with a dream that is fully understood only
at the end. When, at the mercy of the Gentile oppressors, the Jews find
themselves threatened by ‘noises and confusion, thunders and earthquake,
tumult on the earth’ (Esther 11:5), like a groan or convulsion of nature
and society, they cry out to God only to find ready divine visitation
that leads them to surprise and victorious repose.20
Such an apocalyptic spirit stirs and marks the Little Sisters and
Brothers of Jesus as they carry on their humdrum chores, struggling
with the temptations, doubts and failures of their workaday world but
buttressed by hope against hope. Indeed, it should in some way mark
any sort of consecrated life. Without it consecrated life may have a
surface propriety but will lack depth and lose its vibrant spirit.

18
John L. McKenzie, Dictionary of the Bible (Bangalore: Asian Trading Corporation, 1998), 42.
19
The Women’s Bible Commentary, edited by Carol A. Newsom and Sharon H. Ringe (London: SPCK
and Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1992), 126.
20
See New Jerusalem Bible Commentary, 576–577, nn. 53, 55.
God's Tricksters 33

Esther and Mordecai, by Aert de Gelder, 1675

Higher Consecration
The apocalyptic story of Esther not only evokes God as the supreme
Trickster, whether present covertly or overtly, but also presents its
human characters as tricksters. On that level, too, it may be read and
reread by consecrated people seeking to divine or plumb their life. The
path of these human tricksters may be straight but can sometimes
deviate; for, even if they start rightly, they may come to turn aside from
the good. Even from this perspective, consecrated women and men
may discover, in their pursuit of perfection, something unsuspected but
necessary.
Esther and Mordecai believed that God had saved them and their
nation according to God’s fidelity to them. But they went on to do to
their enemies with a vengeance what the latter wished to do to them.
If they had had their own sense of goodness and righteousness till they
gained their freedom, still they certainly fell short of divine goodness in
the end: after their inverted pogrom they observed a day of feasting
and gladness (9:17).
Obviously, consecrated men and women can take no part in the glee
and glory of violent victors. Conversely, they cannot ignore how such
34 Paul Dominic

events occur repeatedly in history and today, uprooting and displacing

people, driving them out of their homes and towns and countries, and
so reducing many to the luckless state of migrants, refugees, captives or
stateless people. Men and women in consecrated life cannot be cut off
from these people and continue their cosy religious way of life; they
ought to situate themselves not too far from them—near enough to share
their lot, especially if that is the divine lot for them.
They need, therefore, to transport their consecration also to centres
of the homeless or camps of the stateless or shelters of asylum seekers
or even to the front line, like Sister Ann Rose Nu Twang. who knelt
before the soldiers of the Myanmar junta with her hands raised, begging
them to kill her instead of a group of peaceful protesters. In their very
vulnerability, can consecrated men and women reimagine and recreate
themselves and their corporate personality in terms of relationship to
the people whom they love after God?
Such a response was instigated in a comparable situation in the late
twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Two religious orders, the
Trinitarians and Mercedarians, came into existence for the sole purpose
of rescuing Christian slaves and captives from Muslim powers. The
Mercedarians even took a vow of becoming themselves ransom for the
captives’ release. Though this type of slavery has gone, other forms of
persecution and injustice remain. Responding to them has become a
vital, if not glamorous, part of the ongoing reform of consecrated life
after Vatican II. The old Trinitarians have demonstrated their vitality
and updated their charism, creating in 1999 the Trinitarian International
Solidarity organization to address the ongoing problem of migrants and
refugees, on the eighth centenary of their original foundation. It is not
unlike the Jesuit Relief Service that began functioning in 1980.

Politics and Laughter

The story of Esther, in its very human telling, may evoke some amusement
in its hearers. There is an interplay of irony and humour throughout.
Right at the beginning, the way King Ahasuerus consults his experts
about Queen Vashti’s obstinacy makes him laughable. What is more
laughable is their legalistic approach: they feel that they also, together
with the whole populace, have been wronged by Vashti; and they fear
that other women will copy her and dishonour their husbands and,
of course, the royal officials too, and thus pose a threat to the stability of
the kingdom. The king comes across as a puppet monarch who appears
God's Tricksters 35

in every scene dancing to others’ tune according to his passing mood,

making and revoking so-called irrevocable decrees.
The irony and humour found throughout the book mask, in a pleasant
way, the author’s very serious intent: to teach Diaspora Jews that it
is possible to lead a successful life in the sometimes inexplicable
21
Gentile world in which they find themselves.

From this humorous and ironic perspective, the story of Esther can
become a parable of consecrated life and its own world of pompous
authority which can go awry and harm others. The lesson is obvious
enough. All those who find themselves troubled by internal conflicts and
religious politics within their secretive world must grow in peace and even
find good cheer. They must have humanity enough, with maturity and
humour, not to take seriously the likes of Ahasuerus and Haman in their
midst but to wish and laugh their hurts away, knowing that God the
Trickster, who befriended Esther and Mordecai, is equally on their side.
St Francis of Assisi demonstrated this divine character and played the
trickster after God when he went about preaching a new way of gospel
living, claiming with conviction: ‘The Lord has told me that he wanted
to make a new fool of me’.22 Accordingly, as Chesterton appreciated:
‘He would go on being a fool; he would become more and more of a
fool; he would be the court fool of the King of Paradise’.23 This was to
distinguish the new rule, as Francis intended, from the earlier monastic
rules. Still, it is true to say, all consecrated life before or after Francis
could not be innocent of the foolishness that knows how subtly to
subvert supposed orthodoxy or orthopraxis and to signify the truth beyond
customary conformity. For truly consecrated people reflect Jesus as the
sign of death and resurrection (John 12:32).
Compared to religious politics, the larger politics of the world is far
more dirty, divisive, oppressive and violent. How does consecrated
life cope with this? Two lives reveal its best response in the darkness of
the Second World War: the Franciscan nun Maria Restituta Kafka
(1894–1943) and the Carmelite St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith
Stein; 1891–1942). The former was the only religious sister to be formally
condemned to death by the Nazis, for displaying the crucifix in the

21
Crawford, ‘Book of Esther’, 858.
22
‘The Legend of Perugia’, n. 114, in St Francis of Assisi, Writings and Early Biographies: English Omnibus
of the Sources for the Life of St Francis, edited by Marion A. Habig (Chicago: Franciscan Herald, 1973), 1089.
23
Gilbert Keith Chesterton, St Francis of Assisi (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2008), 57.
36 Paul Dominic

hospital of her congregation, the Franciscan Sisters of Christian Charity.

Benedicta, a Jew who left her Jewish faith and learned philosophy (under
Husserl), ended up discovering Christianity through the autobiography
of Teresa of Ávila, and became a Carmelite in the very year Hitler came
to power. She explained her vocation thus: ‘Those who join the Carmelite
Order are not lost to their near and dear ones, but have been won for
them, because it is our vocation to intercede to God for everyone’. She
reasoned thus:

I keep thinking of Queen Esther who was taken away from her people
precisely because God wanted her to plead with the king on behalf
of her nation. I am a very poor and powerless little Esther, but the
King who has chosen me is infinitely great and merciful. This is
24
great comfort.

In the small conflicts of consecrated life that appear big, and also
in the bigger ones assaulting all manifestation of faith and Christian life,
here is a prayer that may comfort us, with its resonant voice of Esther:

With the loyal you show yourself loyal;

with the blameless you show yourself blameless;
with the pure you show yourself pure;
and with the crooked you show yourself perverse.
For you deliver a humble people,
but the haughty eyes you bring down. (Psalm 18:25–27)

Paul Dominic SJ was born in 1941 in Tamil Nadu, India, and ordained in 1972.
After a stint of lecturing in maths, from 1980 he worked at Satyodayam, the retreat
house in Secunderabad, India, giving the Spiritual Exercises and writing. From 2007
to 2010 he worked in the Jesuit Region of Guyana (part of the British Province), and
is now back at Satyodayam. He has published in India, the Philippines, Europe
and the USA.

24
St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross to Mother Petra Brüning, 31 October 1938, in Edith Stein, Self-
Portrait in Letters, 1916–1942, translated by Josephine Koeppel (Washington, DC: ICS, 1993), 32.
 ROBERT SOUTHWELL
The Lyrics of the Jesuit Baroque

Ian G. Coleman

For when shee heard thee call her in thy wonted manner, and with thy usuall
voyce, her only name issuing from thy mouth, wrought so strange an alteration
1
in her, as if shee had beene wholly new made, when shee was only named.

R OBERT SOUTHWELL, JESUIT SAINT and martyr, is remembered as a

missionary like the more famous Edmund Campion, as well as an
accomplished poet. He lived from 1561 to 1595, and so belongs to
what one might describe as the second generation of Jesuits, no longer
in direct contact with Ignatius of Loyola, who died in 1556, but close
enough in date for the memory of the founder and his first companions
to be a real and living influence on Southwell’s formation—especially
since, unlike Campion, he spent most of his years of training in Rome,
where such memories would be strongest.
Southwell’s dates would, at first sight, place him firmly in the era of
the High Renaissance, but the cultural context in Rome was rather
different from that of England, France or the Bohemia that Campion
encountered. The period of construction of the church of the Gesù,
which began in 1568 and was not completed until 1584, overlaps with
Southwell’s period of formation and must have been a massive and
exciting physical presence for a Jesuit living in Rome. The significance
of this building, the mother-church of the Society of Jesus to this day,
and model for countless Jesuit churches throughout the world, cannot
be over-estimated: it practically launched the start of a new artistic
era—that of the Baroque.
At the same time, although ‘Baroque’ is a familiar and well-understood
term in art, architecture and music, it is a little more surprising to find
it applied to literature. A good case can be made for certain continental

1
Robert Southwell, Marie Magdalen’s Funeral Tears for the Death of Our Saviour (London: Charles
Baldwin, 1823), 175 (subsequent references in the text). There is no modern edition of Mary Magdalen’s
Funeral Tears, but the text of this 1823 edition is freely available online at https://babel.hathitrust.
org/cgi/pt?id=uc2.ark%3A%2F13960%2Ft3hx18c5m.

The W ay, 62/2 (A pril 2023), 37– 50

38 Ian G. Coleman

schools of poetry, notably that associated with the German Jesuit poet
Friedrich Spee (1591–1635) and the Frenchman François de Malherbe
(1555–1628), but the term is rarely found applied to English writers, with
the significant exception, perhaps, of Richard Crashaw (c.1612–1649).
What sense can there be, then, in using the expression ‘the lyrics of
the Jesuit Baroque’ to refer to Robert Southwell?
The literary critic and scholar Odette de Mourgues, who did think
Robert Southwell a poet of the Baroque, offers this characterisation:
The notion of a certain distortion, of a lack of balance, is in
keeping with the original meaning of the word baroque. It also
takes into account the sharp contrasts, never reconciled, which we
2
find in baroque poetry.

The focus of her study is principally French authors, who cannot really
have had much of an influence on Southwell, but she does consider his
poetry, along with that of Crashaw, and the rather more obscure Giles
Fletcher (c.1586–1623).
Mention of Crashaw and Fletcher raises the question of why
Southwell should be classed as Baroque, rather than an early member of
that more familiar group of English poets known as ‘Metaphysical’. The
greatest name in this group was the dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, John
Donne (1572–1631), and he certainly had Jesuit connections: two of
his uncles, Jasper and Ellis Heywood were priests of the Society. Jasper
Heywood (1535–1598) worked in the English Mission but, unlike Campion
and Southwell, was exiled rather than executed when apprehended, and
is remembered now as the first translator of the tragedies of the
ancient Roman author Seneca into English. Both his dates and style
place him firmly in the world of the Renaissance, and four of his own
poems found their way into the 1576 collection named The Paradise of
Dainty Devices, a quintessential anthology of Tudor verse.
Donne, however, despite the examples of Campion, Southwell and
Heywood, became a bitter and somewhat scurrilous critic of all things
Ignatian, penning the notorious satire Ignatius His Conclave in 1611, in
which he portrayed the Society as a band of demonic subversives, as
well the more ponderously anti-Catholic tract Pseudo-Martyr in 1610.3

2
Odette de Mourgues, Metaphysical, Baroque and Précieux Poetry (Oxford, OUP: 1953), 75.
3
Strangely enough, Giles Fletcher’s son Phineas also wrote an anti-Jesuit diatribe. Combatively entitled
Locustae, vel Pietas Jesuitica (the locusts or Jesuitical piety), it was published, in Latin and English verse,
in 1627. Phineas Fletcher is, however, best known for the hymn text ‘Drop, drop, slow tears’, set to
Robert Southwell 39

Donne’s poetry, too, parts company with the nascent Baroque, despite
sharing many traits with its literary character; this fact, along with
his own, somewhat violent break with his Catholic past, is, I think,
significant, and we will return to it.
Among the ‘Metaphysicals’ (a notoriously difficult label to define),
it is perhaps the gentler style of George Herbert (1593–1632), whose
connection with a contemplative, not to say Ignatian spirituality came to
him through the quasi-monastic world of Nicholas Ferrar (1592–1637),
which comes closer to Southwell’s own poetic voice. However one deals
with these slippery definitions, it is certainly fascinating to catch a
glimpse of the sheer wealth of interconnections that existed in the
English literary world towards the end of the sixteenth century, and
one element in this ferment is certainly the Ignatian influence of
Southwell and Heywood.
Louis Martz has examined this and other spiritual influences on
English writers of the early seventeenth century in his celebrated work
The Poetry of Meditation.4 Nevertheless, as I hope will become clear, I
do not feel Martz really captures
the essence of Southwell’s
genius in his study. To address
this delicate and vexed question
of the relationship between
Ignatian spirituality, the early
Jesuit literary world and the
birth of a true Baroque style, we
must turn, paradoxical as it may
seem, not to Robert Southwell
as poet, but rather as the author
of a piece of ‘poetic prose’,
indeed a piece of writing which
defies easy definition, the work
that he published in 1591 under
the title Mary Magdalen’s Funeral
Tears. Robert Southwell, artist uncertain, 1608

music by Orlando Gibbons, putting him squarely in the ‘Literature of Tears’ movement. This particularly
vicious strain of polemic seems to betray a concern on the part of both Donne and Fletcher that they
would be too closely identified with the Ignatian tradition.
4
Louis Martz, The Poetry of Meditation (New Haven: Yale U, 1954).
40 Ian G. Coleman

Southwell composed a letter of dedication for this prose-poem (to

‘A.D.’—probably Dorothy Arundell, an acquaintance and patron) and,
in it, he sets out in detail his reasons for writing in the way he did. It is
worth quoting this dedicatory letter at some length:

Madam, your virtuous requests … won mee to satisfie your devotion

in penning some little Discourse of the blessed Marie Magdalene.
And among other glorious examples of this Saint’s life, I have made
choice of her Funerall Teares, in which as she most uttered the
great vehemency of her fervent love to Christ, so hath shee given
therein largest scope to dilate upon the same: a theme pleasing I
hope unto yourselfe, and fittest for the time .… Passions I allow,
and loves I approve, only I would wish that men would alter their
object, and better their intent .…
This love [of Mary’s], and these passions, are the subject of this
Discourse. (iii–iv, ix)

There follows a more brief address ‘To the Reader’, which also
sheds some light on the nature of Southwell’s project:
It may be that courteous skill will reckon [this work] … not unfit
to entertain well tempered humours both with pleasure and profit;
the ground thereof being in scripture, and the form of enlarging it
an imitation of the ancient doctours in the same and other points
of like tenour. (14)

This florid and somewhat opaque language is characteristic of literary

prefaces at this period; Shakespeare’s dedications to the earl of
Southampton in Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece are very
comparable. But, as well as giving us a foretaste of Southwell’s
bewilderingly ornate language in the work itself, the addresses quoted
above give us three crucial insights into Mary Magdalen’s Funeral Tears:
1. ‘Great vehemency of love’ and ‘passions’ are at the centre of
Southwell’s ‘Discourse’.
2. This theme is ‘fittest for the time’; Southwell is aware of the
fascination of his contemporaries for ‘passions … and loves’
and seeks to address that theme.
3. Starting from scripture, he ‘enlarges’ on it, by imitating ‘the
ancient doctours’.
We would, of course, love to know which ‘ancient doctours’ Southwell had
in mind, but it may be that he uses this phrase in order not to mention
Robert Southwell 41

the principal, and most controversial, influence on his ‘Discourse’, namely

the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius.5
For it soon becomes obvious to any well-informed reader of these
Funeral Tears that what Southwell has produced is, in fact, an Ignatian
meditation, and perhaps the most perfect (certainly one of the earliest)
examples of such a meditation ‘written out’, so to speak. In her detailed
and perceptive study of Southwell and his works, Anne Sweeney draws
a fascinating parallel between the process by which he composed the
Funeral Tears and his own brief notes in his surviving spiritual diary:6

The effect of the intense self-searching carried out through the diary
entries is clearly visible in later English work like Mary Magdalen.
This reconstruction of a ‘real’ interiority was brought new to England
7
by Southwell in the shape of his expansion of Gospel characters …

This is useful reminder that Southwell writes about—and addresses—

other gospel figures than Mary Magdalen: Joseph, Peter and, most
famously, the Christ-child himself all appear and address the reader in
his poetry.
In ‘The Burning Babe’, he presents us with a strange and rather
disturbing image of the baby Jesus, a vision or dream in which the child
appears to the poet while he ‘in hoary Winter’s night stood shiveringe
in the snowe’. This baby, however, is ‘all burninge bright’, recalling the
Three Holy Children in the burning fiery furnace of Daniel 3, and
explains his mysterious and troubling appearance directly to the author:
The mettall in this fornace wrought are men’s defilèd soules,
For which, as nowe on fire I am, to worke them to their good,
So will I melt into a bath to washe them in My bloode:
With this He vanisht out of sight, and swiftly shroncke awaye,
8
And straight I callèd unto mynde that it was Christmas-daye.

Mary Magdalen herself figures in two of Southwell’s poems, ‘Mary

Magdalen’s Blushe’ and ‘Mary Magdalen’s Complaint’, and it is fascinating

5
Louis Martz suggests St Bonaventure, to whom an extended meditation on Mary Magdalen is
attributed; see Martz, Poetry of Meditation, 200.
6
Robert Southwell, Spiritual Exercises and Devotions, edited by J. M. de Buck (London: Sheed and
Ward, 1974).
7
Anne R. Sweeney, Robert Southwell: Snow in Arcadia. Redrawing the English Lyric Landscape 1586–95
(Manchester: MUP, 2006), 44.
8
‘The Burning Babe’, in The Complete Poems of Robert Southwell, edited by Alexander Grosart
(privately printed, 1872), 109–110.
42 Ian G. Coleman

to compare these works with the Funeral Tears. Mary addresses the
reader in both poems, but the second, which relates her reaction to
the death of Jesus, is closer in feel to the longer prose-poem:
Sith my life from life is parted,
Death come take thy portion;
Who survives when life is murdred,
Lives by mere extortion:
All that live, and not in God,
9
Couche their life in deathe’s abode.

However, it is also clear that Southwell’s verse-style here is,

deliberately one assumes, an imitation of the long-established popular
song or madrigalian forms of Elizabethan England.10 In a similar way,
‘Mary Magdalen’s Blushe’ adopts the six-line stanza form of Shakespeare’s
Venus and Adonis, as does Southwell’s longest and most sophisticated
poem, ‘St Peter’s Complaint’. The stanzas of this last poem that consider
the moment when Peter’s eyes meet Jesus just after he has denied
knowing him must count as some of the most intensely wrought poetry
in the English language:

O eyes! whose glaunces are a silent speach,

In cipherd words high mysteries disclosing;
Which, with a look, all sciences can teach,
Whose textes to faithfull harts need little glosing;
Witnesse vnworthie I, who in a looke
11
Learn’d more by rote, then all the Scribes by book.

Here, there seems a clear connection between this intensity of

Southwell’s language and that of his successor Richard Crashaw:

Haile, Sister Springs,

Parents of silver-forded rills!
Ever bubling things!
Thawing Christall! Snowy Hills!
Still spending, never spent; I meane
12
Thy faire Eyes sweet Magdalene.

9
‘Mary Magdalen’s Complaint at Christ’s Death’, in Complete Poems of Robert Southwell, 62.
10
Three stanzas of it were, in fact, set to music by Thomas Morley, under the title ‘With Love My
Life Was Nestled’; see Thomas Morley, First Book of Ayres (1600), edited by E. H. Fellowes (London:
Stainer and Bell, 1932), 18–19.
11
‘St Peter’s Complaint’, in Complete Poems of Robert Southwell, 74.
12
Richard Crashaw, Poems, edited by L. C. Martin (Oxford: OUP, 1957), 308.
Robert Southwell 43

Crashaw’s poem ‘The Weeper’,

to be sure, takes up the person
of Mary Magdalen, but it is
‘St Peter’s Complaint’ which
is his starting point. One should
note, though, that Southwell’s
version of St Peter is only one
of many from roughly the
same period: Malherbe wrote
Les larmes de S. Pierre in 1596,
and—more relevant perhaps
as a model for Southwell—
the Italian poet Luigi Tansillo
had published his Lagrime di
San Pietro in 1560, poems which
were set to music by Orlando di
Lasso in 1594. A work written
in response to Tansillo’s, Le
lagrime di S. Maria Maddalena, by
the Italian Erasmo di Valvasone Mary Magdalen as Melancholy, by Artemisia
Gentileschi, 1622–1625
in 1586 makes it a virtual
certainty that Southwell saw himself as part of this lineage, and all of
these works can also be seen as part of a wider ‘Literature of Tears’
which was fashionable at the end of the sixteenth century, and to which
we might even add that most evocative of Elizabethan musical works,
the ‘Lacrimae’ pavane of John Dowland.
So, once again, why single out from this list Mary Magdalen’s
Funeral Tears? The answer lies in the difficult task of explaining how this
work differs from Southwell’s other writings. On the one hand, as we
have seen, we have the poems, Renaissance in style and verse-form, often
deliberately ‘traditional’ or even archaic in their language. On the other
are a handful of prose works, the Epistle of Comfort, printed clandestinely
in 1587 or 1588, the Triumphs over Death from 1595—both ostensibly
written for the encouragement of the persecuted Catholics, but no doubt
aiming for a wider audience as well—and An Humble Supplication to Her
Majesty, circulated in manuscript copies at first. This latter is Southwell’s
equivalent to Campion’s Brag, and, while it is not so self-confidently
political as the Brag, nevertheless it indicates Southwell’s determination
not to remain silent in the face of the mounting persecution of his
44 Ian G. Coleman

co-religionists. The Funeral Tears, however, do not fit in either of these

categories. Rather, they are something quite new to English literature:
a worked-out and intense prose meditation, but with an organizing
principle that is drawn straight from Southwell’s poetic art.
Basically, Southwell’s disingenuous claim that Mary Magdalen’s
Funeral Tears are ‘an imitation of the ancient doctours’ turns out to be
perfectly correct. What he performs is a lectio divina on the gospel
narratives concerning Mary Magdalene and her encounter with the
risen Jesus. The whole work can be summed up in the movement from
‘But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb’ (John 20:11) to ‘Mary
Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord”;
and she told them that he had said these things to her’ (John 20:18).
Southwell punctuates and articulates his text, and quotes a small
portion of the text of John’s Gospel, together with a few other relevant
scriptural passages. He seems to use his own translation, although the
wording is very close to the Douai-Rheims version—which he could
conceivably have known, since the New Testament portion was published
in 1582, and then reflects on it. In this process, it seems very likely that
he is following exemplars such as Bernard of Clairvaux, whose works
were delivered to him, along with a Bible and breviary, during his
imprisonment in the Tower of London. Not that he could have had
leisure (or even, horrible as it is to imagine, proper use of his limbs) to
write in this extremity of suffering, but the fact that Bernard is named
indicates, perhaps a personal preference.13
However, Southwell goes well beyond the ‘ancient doctours’ in
adopting the technique of colloquy, addressing the persons in the gospel
narrative, usually Mary herself or Jesus, but also the angels at the tomb.
This style of colloquy within the scriptural text is quite clearly Ignatian,
from the famous Note on Colloquies in the First Week of the Spiritual
Exercises: ‘A colloquy is made, properly speaking, in the way one friend
speaks to another, or a servant to one in authority’ (Exx 54).
Here are some of the more striking ‘colloquy moments’ from the
Funeral Tears:
O good Iesu, what hath thus estranged thee from her? thou hast
heretofore so pittied her teares, that seeing them, thou couldest
not refrain thine. (40)

13
See Philip Caraman, A Study in Friendship: Saint Robert Southwell and Henry Garnet (St Louis:
Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1995), 87.
Robert Southwell 45

While Marie thus lost herselfe in a labyrinth of doubts, watering

her words with teares, and warming them with sighs, seeing the
angels with a kinde of reverence rise, as though they had done
honour to one behind her: She turned backe, and she saw Jesus standing,
but that it was Jesus she knew not.
O Marie, is it possible that thou hast forgotten Jesus? (134)
But though shee humbly fell downe at his feet to kiss them, yet
Christ did forbid her, saying: Do not touch me, for I am not yet ascended
to my Father.
O Iesu, what mistery is in this? Being dead in sinne, shee touched
thy mortall feet that were to dye for her sake, and being now alive
in grace, may shee not touch thy glorious feet, that are no lesse for
her benefit revived? (183–184)

These three extracts give some flavour of the intensely dramatic

moments at which Southwell makes a point of interrupting both the
gospel narrative and the complex, hypnotic rhetoric he weaves around
it—almost as if he were aware of the dangers of excess into which his
language, like Mary’s grief, might fall. The events of the story punctuate
and correct the wanderings of the praying mind and heart, and
Southwell’s literary style imitates these wanderings with such uncanny
accuracy that it is not too fanciful to call it both mimetic and performative.
Here, for instance, is a passage from near the very start of the work:
But not finding the favour accompany him in death, and loathing
after him to remain in life, the fire of her true affection inflamed
her hart, and her inflamed hart resolved into uncessant teares: so
that burning and bathing in love and griefe, she led a life ever dying,
and felt a death never ending .… (17–18)

The author forces us to follow his parallelism and chiasmus, almost

to the point of tedium. The hypertrophied language that Southwell uses
is sometimes labelled ‘euphuistic’ after the didactic work of John Lyly
(c.1554–1606) entitled Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit, which appeared in
1578; and it is very much a feature also of Southwell’s long poem ‘St
Peter’s Complaint’. The excesses of this style, coupled with the influence
of the literature of tears, probably explain the pejorative expression
‘maudlin’ repentance which appears to enter the English language at this
period; indeed, it may well be that Mary Magdalen’s Funeral Tears, or
rather the cynical reactions to it, actually gave rise to this expression.14

14
The Oxford English Dictionary dates this particular use of ‘maudlin’ as ‘around 1600’.
46 Ian G. Coleman

But it cannot be stressed too highly that, unlike in ‘St Peter’s

Complaint’, Southwell is knowingly using this excess to build his case—
the case for an extended and profound meditative discourse on the
inner meaning of this most powerful of gospel passages. The most
astonishing example of this comes, not surprisingly, at the point when
Mary finally recognises Jesus:

This water hath better graced thy lookes, than thy former alluring
glances. It hath setled worthier beauties in thy face, than all thy
artificial paintings. Yea, this only water hath quenched God’s anger,
qualified his justice, recovered his mercy, merited his love, purchassed
his pardon, and brought forth the spring of all thy favours .…
In the meane time reare up thy fallen hopes, and gather confidence
both of thy speedy comfort, and thy Lord’s well being.
Iesus saith unto her, Marie; She turning, saith unto him, Rabboni.
(171, 173)

There then follows the passage from which my very first extract is
taken, closing with the motto ‘wholly new made, when shee was only
named’. This contains, in essence, the whole journey that Mary makes
through the work and which, by extension, and with reference to a name
taken in baptism, becomes the journey of every Christian: when we are
named by our Lord, we are, in fact, new made. What is left unstated,
but is perhaps implied, is that Mary is baptized by her own tears.
I hope that it is now clear what parallels between Southwell’s
technique in Mary Magdalen’s Funeral Tears and other ornate and
expressionistic artworks of the period allow us to talk about Baroque
lyric in this context. Odette de Mourgues’ evocation of ‘a certain
distortion, of a lack of balance’ in the citation above certainly describes
the prose style which Southwell weaves around Mary, in imitation of
her own mental ‘lack of balance’. ‘But alas, why doe I urge her with
reason, whose reason is altered into love?’ (32) is how his ‘narrator’
characterizes the excesses of the Magdalen, and we might well look to
the exuberance of the ceiling of the Gesù or Bernini’s famous sculpture
of the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (both admittedly much later in date) for
visual equivalents of this ‘lack of balance’. The aim of the artists in all
three cases is the same: through the sense of disorientation that is
created, either by a trompe l’oeil visual effect, or by Southwell’s verbal
‘lack of balance’, the reader or spectator is drawn mimetically into the
scene, in this case, into the ‘labyrinth of doubts’ that Mary feels.
Robert Southwell 47

This is, indeed, a powerful literary technique—and it is wholly

different from the approach of the Metaphysical poets. A good pair
of terms to use here are ‘distortion of perspective’ and ‘analysis of
perspective’. The mimetic art of Southwell is completely alien to the
fine poise of Donne, and even somewhat removed from what must be,
despite its accomplishment, the rather decadent approach of Crashaw.
A trivial, but revealing example of this can be found by considering
how the two later poets deal with eyes and eyesight. First, from Donne’s
ravishing love-poem ‘The Ecstasy’:
Where, like a pillow on a bed,
A Pregnant banke swel’d up, to rest
The violets reclining head,
Sat we two, one another’s best,
Our hands were firmely cimented
With a fast balme, which thence did spring,
Our eye-beames twisted, and did thred
15
Our eyes, upon one double string …

The eyes of the lovers meet, but this moment is captured by the poet in
a typical metaphysical ‘conceit’—their eyes send out beams of light. The
metaphor is a scientific one, albeit limited by the imperfect understanding
of Donne’s time; the poet ‘analyses’ the gaze of the lovers, finding an
‘objective’ explanation for their inability to take their eyes off each other.
By way of contrast, from Crashaw’s poem on Mary Magdalen, ‘The
Weeper’, again:

And now where’re he strayes,

Among the Galilean mountaines,
Or more vnwellcome wayes,
He’s follow’d by two faithfull fountaines;
Two walking baths; two weeping motions;
16
Portable, & compendious oceans.

The imagery used here for Mary’s eyes, though certainly inventive, verges
on the ridiculous—the distortion of language has gone awry. We can
recognise the imagery as Baroque, but rather more in its pejorative
sense, of bizarre excess; Crashaw has distorted the perspective of the
ever-weeping eyes so we find ourselves repelled rather than drawn in

15
John Donne, Poems, edited by Herbert J. C. Grierson (Oxford: OUP, 1912), 51.
16
Crashaw, Poems, 312.
48 Ian G. Coleman

by its intensely ‘subjective’

expressivity. Southwell’s style,
by contrast, uses this apparent
excess to construct a bridge
(perhaps for the first time)
between Ignatius’ Spiritual
Exercises and the Baroque art
of the hyper-real, that art by
which the observer or reader
becomes part the work itself.
In this, he establishes a similar
path to that of the sculptor
and architect Gian Lorenzo
Detail from Lamentation over the Dead Christ Bernini some fifty years later.
with the Three Marys, by Bergognone, 1515–1520
Robert Southwell is, in
the end, an enigma. Many commentators have struggled to define the
essence of his literary style: for Pierre Janelle, it lies in an acute sense that
Southwell had of his ‘apostolate of letters’,17 and certainly this explains
the many points in his poetry where he takes up and imitates the
Elizabethan milieu of his contemporaries—sometimes quite overtly, as
in ‘Dyer’s Phancy Turned to a Sinner’s Complaint’, a simple rewriting
or parody of a love-poem by his contemporary Nicholas Dyer.18 In fact,
the phrase Fancy turned to a sinner’s complaint could almost be taken as
Southwell’s motto throughout his ‘apostolate of letters’.
But others have seen in the poetry more of a dark premonition of
Southwell’s martyrdom; two fascinating articles in this vein are Gary
Kuchar’s analysis of Southwell’s powerful ‘A Vale of Tears’,19 and
Geoffrey Hill’s influential ‘The Absolute Reasonableness of Robert
Southwell’, a piece which serves as a preface to a whole vein of Hill’s
poetry (mostly to be found in his collection Tenebrae) deeply influenced
by what one might term the ‘Southwell myth’.20 Louis Martz, meanwhile,
sees Southwell as the founder of a school of meditative poetry which

17
Pierre Janelle, Robert Southwell the Writer: A Study in Religious Inspiration (London: Sheed and Ward,
1935), 34 following.
18
Complete Poems of Robert Southwell, 96.
19
Gary Kuchar, ‘Southwell’s “A Vale of Teares”: A Psychoanalysis of Form’, Mosaic, 34/1 (2001),
107–120. To my mind, an even better candidate for such analysis would be the chilling ‘Love’s
Gardyne Greife’ (Complete Poems of Robert Southwell, 92).
20
Geoffrey Hill. ‘The Absolute Reasonableness of Robert Southwell’ in The Lords of Limit (New York:
OUP, 1984).
Robert Southwell 49

overlaps with, but is not quite the same as, the Metaphysical poets.21 To a
greater or lesser extent, all of these authors are affected, understandably,
by the appalling manner of Southwell’s end—a gruesome or glorious
martyrdom (depending on your point of view); and it is entirely fair, I
think, to see in much of the urgent and overwrought imagery of his
poems a foretaste of that tragedy.
But none of this quite accounts for Mary Magdalen’s Funeral Tears.
It seems very likely that the work was conceived in Rome, long before
Southwell was submerged in the nightmare of the English mission;
certainly it bears none of the hallmarks of the social and political
engagement of much of his poetry and other prose works. Two little
details from Anne Sweeney’s account shed considerable light on this
area.22 First, there is the fact that Southwell was, during his time in Rome,
made prefect of studies of the newly formed English College, and secretary
to its Jesuit rector Alfonso Agazzari. This was a role of considerable
importance, especially in what was a situation of some ambiguity and
conflict as to the orientation and aims of the college. Secondly, there is
a very moving reference to the Jesuits on the English mission from the
pen of the superior general of the Society, Claudio Acquaviva, who
considered them ‘lambs to the slaughter’, and had already specifically
refused Robert Persons’s request that Southwell be sent into England in
1584, only to accede (one imagines, reluctantly) the following year.
Southwell was a bright star in the Roman firmament; Acquaviva
clearly considered him to be a valuable asset, intellectually and spiritually,
to both the Roman College and the nascent English College. And it
should be remembered that two of his teachers, other stars in this same
firmament, were giants of the Society of Jesus: Robert Bellarmine and
Francisco Suárez. Southwell himself, however, like Robert Persons, his
English Superior, apparently thought only in terms of his mission and
likely martyrdom back in his home country.
What would have become of Southwell’s zeal and his art if he had
lived? Asking this most unanswerable of questions brings us right up
against the whole edifice and ideal of the Jesuit Baroque. Claudio
Acquaviva’s instinct seems to have been that Southwell, along with his
immensely gifted Jesuit compatriots, had a role to play in the work of
re-evangelization, through preaching and writing and teaching—in

21
Martz, Poetry of Meditation, especially 179–210.
22
Sweeney, Robert Southwell, 63, 88.
50 Ian G. Coleman

Southwell’s case, a role that was artistic as well as polemical or

theological. The instinct of the English Jesuits themselves seems largely
to have been orientated towards the return to a missionary activity at
the sharp end—a return that bordered on the suicidal.
If Southwell had lived for another twenty or thirty years, his unique
and distinctively Baroque voice, a voice of the Roman and cosmopolitan
aesthetic would certainly have rivalled Donne’s and Herbert’s—perhaps
even that of John Milton who, strange as it may seem, stayed briefly at
the English College himself during a continental tour in 1638. Like
Shakespeare—but unlike Campion, Heywood and Donne—Southwell was
an outsider. He owed nothing to the disputatious theological atmosphere
of Oxford and Cambridge, and this, as well as his European outlook,
should be borne in mind when we consider not only the pejorative tag
‘maudlin’, but also the fact that, while Donne clearly idolizes women in
his love lyrics, he never places the ‘loves and passions’ of a woman, and
a ‘fallen woman’ at that, at the centre of his writing—indeed, at the
centre of the whole question of what faith in the Risen Jesus really
means.
The significance of Mary Magdalen’s Funeral Tears, then, turns out
not only to be one of the creation of a new style and genre in English
literature, but the opening of a door into the world of the European—
and specifically Jesuit—Baroque, precisely because it does not really move
in the same, somewhat narrow perspective of Southwell’s poetry. The
tragedy for us—perhaps for England as a whole—is that the grinding
gears of history, between the dark police state of Elizabethan England,
and the heartless renewal of the Bull Regnans in excelsis in 1588, by
which Sixtus V declared Elizabeth deposed and all her Catholic subjects
traitors, ensured that this door was forever slammed shut.

Ian G. Coleman is a permanent deacon of the diocese of Westminster, and is also

director of music at the church of Holy Redeemer and St Thomas More, Chelsea,
London.
 A PRAYER OF LAMENTATION
The History and Uncertain Future of the
Jesuits in Tomsk, Russia

Eric A. Clayton

B EFORE 24 FEBRUARY 2022, the Society of Jesus ran the only Roman
Catholic secondary school in all Russia—Tomsk Catholic School
in Siberia—and Thomas Simisky, a Jesuit of the US East Province, was
its executive director. I interviewed Fr Simisky in January 2022; we
exchanged e-mails throughout the following month. Despite the darkening
clouds on the horizon, one thing remained clear: The school was
thriving, a place of interreligious dialogue and learning, where young
minds were formed in the Ignatian tradition.
But since that fateful day—the day on which Russian forces marched
into Ukraine, setting off a conflict in which peace still feels so far away—
the fate of Tomsk Catholic School has become uncertain. Fr Simisky
could not remain in Russia, and the role of the Jesuits in this country
that was once so important to the global Society’s survival is unclear.
This article was conceived as a celebration of new beginnings and new
opportunities. It has become a testament to what has been lost. Still,
understanding what Tomsk means in the wide-ranging history of the
Society of Jesus in Russia is important. And, as we will see, the Jesuits
and the Russian people have rebuilt from ruined relationships in the past.
From the earliest days of the Society until the present, the Jesuits
have had a fickle relationship with Russia and its people. And yet, that
relationship has proved essential: to the survival of the Society, and to the
spiritual rebirth of a burgeoning community in Siberia and beyond. How
did this come to be—and why? What sustained this relationship? In these
pages I hope to situate the Jesuit presence in Russia in general, and the
Jesuit mission in Tomsk in particular, within the larger Ignatian tradition,
and to explore how this mission embodied essential lessons of Ignatian
humanism. The context in which I began to write may be different from
the one in which this article is being read, but the future is still unfolding.
What that means for the Ignatian imagination in Tomsk is yet to be seen.

The W ay, 62/2 (A pril 2023), 51– 63

 52 Eric A. Clayton

© Wikimapia CC-BY-SA

Tomsk Catholic School

The Hope That Was

Tomsk Catholic School is part of the Catholic Community of the
Intercession of the Holy Mother of God, Queen of the Rosary. Tsar
Alexander I permitted the formation of this Catholic enclave in 1806,
and Jesuit missionaries arrived in 1815.1 From 1816 until 1820, the
Jesuits of Tomsk, under the leadership of Marceli KamieĔski, travelled
‘throughout the vast region … administering the sacraments to the
Catholics they encountered, instructing them, and distributing religious
publications to them’. In 1820, the Jesuits were expelled from the
Russian empire. It was not until 1992 that the Society of Jesus again
‘obtained official permission to exist in the Russian Federation’.2
A lot happened in the intervening years. The Society of Jesus
cautiously returned to the global stage, traumatized by a 41-year suppression
in which it had very nearly ceased to exist. In Russia, mistrust of the
West became personified in literature and culture through the depiction
of Jesuits as wily, villainous characters, embodying the worst of Western
influence. Following on from the Second Vatican Council—which
opened new horizons in interreligious dialogue—the Thirty-Fourth
General Congregation of the Society of Jesus clearly stated: ‘to be religious
today is to be interreligious in the sense that a positive relationship

1
History of Tomsk parish, at https://catholic-tomsk.ru/history (in Russian), accessed 29 March 2023.
2
Marek Inglot, How the Jesuits Survived Their Suppression: The Society of Jesus in the Russian Empire
(1773–1814), edited and translated by Daniel L. Schlafly (Philadelphia: Saint Joseph’s U, 2015), 81, 204.
A Prayer of Lamentation 53

with believers of other faiths is a requirement in a world of religious

pluralism’.3
For the Jesuit–Russia relationship, so often paralyzed by worry over
proselytizing and conversion, this reorientation changed the approach
and perception of any future Jesuit mission. The 1918 and 1929 Soviet
laws suppressing religious expression—and their subsequent unravelling
with the fall of the Soviet Union—created a great spiritual hunger
among the people. The mission of the Jesuits in Tomsk, who officially
returned to ministry in Siberia after an absence of nearly 200 years,
blended the old and the new. ‘There are probably 400 parishioners in
our parish’, Fr Simisky noted in early 2022. But the parish itself
‘geographically is larger than the country of Poland’.4
It is not hard to draw a parallel between the Jesuits of Tomsk and the
early Jesuits: ‘With the early Jesuits, it was really only in mission lands
that you’d see them running parishes. [This] is definitely mission
territory.’ 5 Contrary to the popular belief that the early Jesuits were solely
foot soldiers of the Catholic Reformation, ‘most Jesuits were not engaged
in converting unbelievers to the faith, or even heretics to orthodoxy,
but were labouring with Catholics for their “progress in Christian life
and doctrine”’.6 This was familiar language to the Jesuits of Tomsk who,
cognisant of historical missteps and the national role of the Russian
Orthodox Church, spent much of their time deepening the already
existing Catholic faith and identity of parishioners, old and new alike.
Most importantly, though, this seemingly small Jesuit presence in an
otherwise very large country embodies the first of the Universal Apostolic
Preferences taken up by the global Society of Jesus in 2019: a desire to
show others the way to God. No trickery, no forced conversions, but
rather genuine accompaniment that invites the would-be believer on a
journey to the Divine. Arturo Sosa, superior general of the global Society,
wrote, ‘We resolve to collaborate with the Church in experiencing
secular society as a sign of the times that affords us the opportunity to
renew our presence in the heart of human history’.7 There may be few
better case studies than the Jesuit mission in Russia to prove the point.

3
GC 34, decree 5, n. 130.
4
Thomas Simisky, personal interview, January 2022.
5
Simisky, personal interview, January 2022.
6
John W. O’Malley, The First Jesuits (Cambridge, Ma: Harvard U, 1993), 70.
7
Arturo Sosa, letter to the whole Society, ‘Universal Apostolic Preferences of the Society of Jesus,
2019–2029’ (19 February 2019), n. 2 .
54 Eric A. Clayton

A Historical Sketch
The story of the Jesuits in Russia cannot be told apart from the
story of the Jesuits in Poland. Despite initial setbacks, the Society of
Jesus found ‘success in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth’, beginning
in 1564 and ‘became the most dynamic element in the confrontation
with the Reformation movement … from education to court preaching’.8
The Polish king Stefan Batory, recognising the importance of Jesuit
schools, ‘founded and endowed a college at Polock in 1579, which
would become the center of Jesuit life throughout the suppression era’.9
Education, though, was only one focus of this first generation of
Polish Jesuits. Crucially, they sought the reunification of the Russian
Orthodox Church with Rome—a priority of Pope Gregory XIII, and
one that would irrevocably tarnish the image of the Jesuits in Russia. In
1604, Kasper Sawicki SJ converted Dmitrii the Pretender—who claimed
to be the long-lost son of Ivan IV and thus the rightful heir to the
Russian throne—to Catholicism.10 Sawicki ‘and another Polish Jesuit
accompanied the Pretender’s army to Moscow during the Time of
Troubles’. Their crusade ended poorly. ‘Grandiose plans to establish a
network of Jesuit schools in Russia as the first step to bringing the whole
realm into union with Rome collapsed with Dmitrii’s death in 1606.’
More than forty Jesuits were killed during the conflicts that followed.
This was just another episode in the centuries-long struggle by which
‘Russia had felt compelled to protect its faith, its people, and its homeland
from what it saw, with considerable justification, as a Roman Catholic
assault’.11
This series of tragic events makes what comes next all the more
surprising. Bowing to political pressure from the Catholic monarchs of
Europe, Pope Clement XIV issued the 1773 papal brief Dominus ac
Redemptor, which suppressed the Society of Jesus worldwide. Owing to
the nature of the brief and the desires of the Pope, the Church relied
on local leaders to enforce the suppression. Catherine the Great, ruler
of the Russian empire at the time of the suppression, saw an opportunity

8
Daniel L. Schlafly, introduction, in Inglot, How the Jesuits Survived Their Suppression, vii; Stanisław
Obirek, ‘Jesuits in Poland and Eastern Europe’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Jesuits, edited by
Thomas Worcester (Cambridge: CUP, 2008), 138–139.
9
Schlafly, introduction, ix.
10
History of the Jesuits in Russia, at https://catholic-tomsk.ru/sj-in-russia (in Russian), accessed 29
March 2023.
11
Schlafly, introduction, iv, x.
A Prayer of Lamentation 55

to strengthen Russia while simultaneously opposing her geopolitical

adversaries—and break with decades of anti-Jesuit sentiment.
After the First Partition of Poland in 1772, Catherine found herself
with 201 new Jesuit subjects, as well as their educational endeavours.
The tsarina was determined to continue Peter the Great’s legacy,
transforming Russia into a modern state, bolstered by an educated
citizenry. ‘She saw her new Polish Jesuit subjects not as traditional
national or religious enemies, but as potential contributors to her realm:
educators, men of learning, and loyal citizens.’ For this reason, Catherine
proved prophetic in her 1779 response to the papal nuncio in Poland—
inspired in part by what she saw at the college at Polock: she refused to
suppress the Society, unknowingly predicting what other rulers would
learn through hard experience: ‘the example of other countries shows
that no one can replace [the Jesuits] … who have devoted themselves
to the education of youth, and consequently the public good’.12
Subsequent years would prove the wisdom of Catherine’s words, and
subsequent popes would slowly, quietly affirm the re-emerging Society
of Jesus. ‘In 1783, Pope Pius VI approved the Society in the Russian
empire in an oral declaration’, empowering the Jesuits to reorganize
and expand the scope of their apostolates, primarily in teaching and
missionary work. In 1801, Pope Pius VII gave public approval of the
existence of the Jesuits in the Russian empire, in large part thanks to
Gabriel Gruber, who would go on to be elected general in 1802.13
Importantly, though, the story of the suppression-era Jesuits in Russia
is not one of simple survival but of flourishing. The Society began its first
Siberian mission in 1811, with an eye towards ‘restoring their own missions
in China’. ‘The establishment of a forward position in Irkutsk, the Russian
city situated close to the Chinese border, seemed to have a promising
perspective for the future.’ 14 It was during this missionary outreach into
Siberia that the Jesuits first arrived in Tomsk. ‘The greatest paradox in
Jesuit history is that it was Russia which not only saved the Society
from total suppression, but also protected and fostered it for decades.’ 15
All good things come to an end. While Catherine ruled pragmatically,
leveraging religious sentiment—and in so doing, the Jesuits—to serve

12
Schlafly, introduction, xi, vii.
13
Inglot, How the Jesuits Survived Their Suppression, 71, 246.
14
Inglot, How the Jesuits Survived Their Suppression, 81; Anna Peck, ‘Between Russian Reality and Chinese
Dream: The Jesuit Mission in Siberia, 1812–1820’, The Catholic Historical Review, 87/1 (January 2001), 81.
15
Schlafly, introduction, x.
56 Eric A. Clayton

her modernising vision, her successors did not always share her goals. Her
son, Paul I—himself attracted to the Catholic faith, as well as an admirer
of Pope Pius VI—‘granted them extensive privileges and encouraged
their work … as allies in his defense of traditional values’.16 He even
discussed with Father General Gruber the possibility of reuniting the
Catholic and Orthodox Churches, and was instrumental in the papacy’s
official sanctioning of the Society in Russia in 1801.
Alexander I initially supported the Jesuits but would eventually be
responsible for their expulsion from Russia in 1820. Several factors led to
this sudden change of attitude: ‘Alexander was displeased by [the Jesuits’]
opposition to the Russian Bible Society … and his later educational
reforms’, two of the tsar’s pet projects.17 Additionally, a wave of nationalism
that led to increased influence of the Russian Orthodox Church
coupled with the global restoration of the Society of Jesus meant the
ground was shifting beneath the Jesuits; they were again seen as a source
of foreign influence. The conversion from Orthodoxy to Catholicism
by a high-profile Russian student at the Jesuit college in St Petersburg
was the final straw. The Jesuits were expelled.
The next chapter of relations between the Society of Jesus and the
Russian people is best told through literature, and it is a chapter in
which the Jesuits themselves are absent. ‘In the nineteenth century, there
is a debate between Westernizers and Slavophiles. The Slavophiles want
to have these homegrown Slavic traditions, particularly in government
but also in religion.’ 18 In this project, the Jesuits made good villains.

Like the image of Catholicism as a whole, the Jesuits are very useful
to Russian writers. The figure of the Jesuit is a part of the bigger
picture in which writers depicted European society, Western morals
and their infringement on Russia society. The Jesuit can be molded
to represent whatever the author wishes to oppose, to his idea of
what Russian society and culture should be. This is made easier by
the fact that, from the 1820s, Jesuits were exclusively outsiders to
Russian society. In this way, they could be used as shadowy figures
19
to be defined in whatever manner the writer wished.

16
Inglot, How the Jesuits Survived Their Suppression, 3.
17
Schlafly, introduction, xiii.
18
Cameron Bellm, personal interview, February 2022.
19
Elizabeth Harrison, ‘The Image of the Jesuit in Russian Literary Culture of the Nineteenth Century’,
Modern Languages Open, 1 (2014), at https://www.modernlanguagesopen.org/article/10.3828/mlo.v0i1.38/,
accessed 28 January 2022.
A Prayer of Lamentation 57

False Dimitry, by Nikolay V. Nevrev, 1876

Why does this matter? Literature both reflected and moulded culture.
Cameron Bellm, a poet and scholar of Russian literature, drives the point
home: ‘It’s hard for me to think of a place where literature is taken
more seriously. Russian writers … were prophets. They were the voice
of the generation.’20
The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 did little to improve the standing
of the Society of Jesus in Russia. Laws enacted in 1918 and 1929
effectively suppressed religious expression throughout the Soviet Union
until 1988. In celebration of this thousandth anniversary of the Russian
conversion to Orthodoxy, proscriptions against religion were slowly lifted
in line with Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost. The eventual fall of
the USSR and the new constitution of the Russian Federation led to
more acceptance of religious practice. The 1997 ‘Law of the Russian
Federation on the Freedom of Conscience and Religious Associations’
clarified the separation of Church and state, and recognised the special
role played by the Orthodox Church throughout Russian history.21
Nonetheless, decades of religious suppression left ‘what Patriarch
Aleksii II called a “spiritual vacuum” in which “the moral level of the

20
Bellm, personal interview, February 2022.
21
Daniel L. Schlafly, ‘Religious Minorities in Russia: Help or Hindrance to Development of Civil
Society? Roman Catholics’, Occasional Papers on Religion in Eastern Europe, 20/4 (2000), at https://
digitalcommons.georgefox.edu/ree/vol20/iss4/3, accessed 19 January 2022,
58 Eric A. Clayton

people [fell] catastrophically”’.22 This ‘spiritual vacuum’ had left Russian

communities particularly vulnerable to consumerism and materialism.
‘What’s happened in the post-Soviet period has been this explosion of
capitalism that many people privately find soulless’, Bellm reflects.
‘They’re looking for something with more depth, more meaning’: more
humanity.23
At this critical juncture, the Jesuits officially returned to Russia.
No longer consorting with tsars or preaching at court, these Jesuits
stood on the shoulders of men such as Walter Ciszek who, rather than
advising the ruling powers, was imprisoned by them—all for the love of
the gospel and the people of Russia. Stripped of their schools and in
much reduced numbers, the Jesuits of the early 1990s could no longer
hope to convert an entire population by decree—if such a thing was
ever even possible. Rather, in the ashes of the Soviet era, these Jesuits
focused on reminding people of their inherent human dignity.

Ignatian Humanism
Thomas Simisky thought of the communist atheism that the Russian
people endured for seventy years as a deep wound. ‘It really was very
dehumanising’, he said. For him, an Ignatian humanism means recognising
‘that we were created by God in God’s image. And that was exactly
what was negated during those years. People were not able to develop
fully.’24
For some, the idea that Christianity might embrace humanism
sounds anathema. But ‘in its widest sense, humanism describes those
attitudes and beliefs that attach central importance to the human
person and human values’. This makes perfect sense within the Ignatian
tradition; St Ignatius of Loyola trusted God to reveal Godself through
the full range of human experience: desires, dreams and desolations.
The Spiritual Exercises are the fruit of Ignatius’ own prayer, grounded
in his own humanity. The early Jesuits met during their education at
the University of Paris and, not long after their formal recognition as a
religious order, found themselves—quite unintentionally—managing
and working within schools. ‘For Jesuits, there was never anything like

22
Daniel L. Schlafly, ‘Roman Catholicism in Post-Soviet Russia: Searching for Acceptance’,
Occasional Papers on Religion in Eastern Europe, 21/4 (2001), at https://digitalcommons.georgefox.edu/ree/
vol21/iss4/1, accessed 19 January 2022.
23
Bellm, personal interview, February 2022.
24
Simisky, personal interview, January 2022.
A Prayer of Lamentation 59

a flight from the world’; from the outset, Jesuits were thrust into the
heart of humanity.25
It is typical in the Ignatian tradition to speak of finding God in all
things; in other words, all of creation has the potential to reveal
something of its Creator. God is active, too, still labouring within the
world, co-labouring with humanity to bring about God’s dream for all
of creation. Discerning the signs of the times helps us discover our
unique role within God’s design. To that end, ‘no enterprise, no matter
how secular, is merely secular. We live in a universe of grace. From the
Jesuit perspective, therefore, it follow[s] that holiness and humanism
require each other’.26 An Ignatian humanism lifts the gaze of humanity
to what might yet be—the act of contemplation—while keeping the holy
grounded in what readily is—a world in need of action. As a result,
everything, to borrow an oft-quoted Jesuit mantra, has the potential to
be for the greater glory of God and the good of souls.
When Fr Simisky stood in front of his classroom in Tomsk, he was
not simply imparting technical skills or knowledge. ‘Our goal as educators
is to help students recognise the human dignity within the classroom’—
theirs and that of their classmates. ‘If I’m looking at eight kids in front
of me, I’ll think, Hey, each of them was created by God. They have their
gifts, their talents, their human dignity. How do I help them discover that?’
That exploratory path into the heart of their humanity is an inherently
spiritual journey, and one Fr Simisky eagerly embarked upon. ‘How do
we figure out who they are, what their gifts are, recognising that their
gifts are from God? How do we refine these gifts?’ The whole point, Fr
Simisky stressed, is to refine those gifts so as to be of service to others,
‘to be able to love God and to love neighbour’: to reach their full,
human, God-given potential.27

To Siberia with Love

The Jesuits were tasked with running Tomsk Catholic School and
parish by the local ordinary, Bishop Joseph Werth of Novosibirsk—
himself a Jesuit, formed in secret during the Soviet era—in 2014: a nod
to both the Jesuits’ historic role as educators and the bicentennial of the

25
Donald Modras, ‘The Spiritual Humanism of the Jesuits’, in An Ignatian Spirituality Reader:
Contemporary Writings on St Ignatius of Loyola, the Spiritual Exercises, Discernment, and More, edited by
George Traub (Chicago: Loyola, 2008), 11, 10.
26
Modras, ‘Spiritual Humanism of the Jesuits’, 10.
27
Simisky, personal interview, January 2022.
60 Eric A. Clayton

Society’s global restoration.28 The school itself was started by laypeople—

a desire on behalf of the community ‘that children could experience the
Christian life’—in 1993, two years after the parish was reconsecrated as a
Catholic church.29 During the Soviet years, the parish campus was put to
a variety of non-religious uses, including as a vegetable store, planetarium
and club.30 When the church was returned to the community at Easter,
1990, in need of repairs, Tomsk Catholics considered their prayers
answered.
Though the school began as an outgrowing of the local parish, the
student body—at least before the war in Ukraine—was only 20 per
cent Catholic. That was a trend that was celebrated, and teachers of
all faiths were also made welcome. In this simple act echo the words
of the Thirty-Fourth General Congregation of the Society of Jesus—
and those words are worth noting again: ‘to be religious today is to be
interreligious in the sense that a positive relationship with believers of
other faiths is a requirement in a world of religious pluralism’. Taken
in tandem with an Ignatian humanistic approach, it is clear ‘that
non-Catholics, non-Christians, even nonbelievers, conceptual agnostics

Parish church of the Intercession of the Holy Mother of God, Tomsk

28
Michael Desjardins SJ, personal interview, February 2022.
29
History of the gymnasium, at https://catholic-tomsk.ru/gymnasium (in Russian), accessed 21 February
2022.
30
History of Tomsk parish.
A Prayer of Lamentation 61

and atheists can be living in the divine presence and serving as

instruments of grace’ simply by the very nature of their humanity.31
This approach is a far cry from the ill-advised attempt to convert
all of Russia through an impostor ruler and the building up of a network
of Russian Jesuit schools. It also shifts the emphasis from an increase in
educational institutions to an increase in individuals affirmed in their
God-given humanity. This is a faith embraced as a result of a personal
experience of the divine, not from royal decree. ‘If you’re a human
being, this is for you’, Fr Simisky said. ‘You’re in. You don’t even have to
be Christian.’ 32 And yet, the Christian story animates all that the Jesuits
do, as it did for St Ignatius in his life and his writing of the Spiritual
Exercises. ‘My new motto has become, “Preach the Exercises always; when
necessary, use words”’, Fr Simisky wrote in a February 2022 article
published in America days before the invasion. He was riffing on the
oft-quoted, ‘Preach the gospel always; when necessary, use words’.33
Simisky, while in his role as executive director of Tomsk Catholic
School, recognised that after an absence of nearly 200 years, the Ignatian
tradition was almost nonexistent. Students and teachers alike were
unfamiliar with Ignatian terminology: the Examen, finding God in all
things, being women and men for others, and more. This made for an
interesting challenge in a school that claimed an Ignatian mission and
identity. ‘One easy entry that makes sense to all is cura personalis—care
for the whole person’, Fr Simisky wrote. ‘The State was god and the
center of communist creation. Ignatian humanism, indeed all of Catholic
social teaching, prioritizes the dignity of the human person, created in
God’s image.’ 34 This, he believed, was a necessary step in healing those
seventy years of deep, spiritual woundedness—and foundational to the
Jesuit mission of education.
What did it mean to ‘preach’ the Exercises in Russia? Fr Simisky
put it like this:

To be able to walk with people through this lens of the four Weeks
of the Exercises, to go from gratitude to service while recognising all
along the importance of the [human] person. And for us, certainly

31
Modras, ‘Spiritual Humanism of the Jesuits’, 15.
32
Simisky, personal interview, January 2022.
33
Thomas Simisky, ‘The Jesuits Run Russia’s Only Catholic Secondary School, Where Love Is Shown
More in Deeds than in Words’, America (17 February 2022).
34
Simisky, ‘Jesuits Run Russia’s Only Catholic Secondary School’.
62 Eric A. Clayton

as Christians, the person is Jesus. To be able to recognise that we

are with Christ through whom we have been created, through whom
we are redeemed, and to be able to help others to be able to see
35
that, that redeeming love that is present with us now.

This was the foundation for the school’s Ignatian identity.

The Athens of Siberia

Tomsk, Fr Simisky said, had a well-known nickname: the Athens of
Siberia. It is a university town, home to Siberia’s first university—Tomsk
State—as well as five others. ‘People [came] from all over; there’s a
certain openness to it. There’s a certain cultural and intellectual life.’ 36
One might draw parallels with St Ignatius’ own background and studies,
his meeting of the early companions at the University of Paris, their
immersion in culture and academia.
Because of their Renaissance culture and upbringing, Ignatius and
the early Jesuits believed in the power of education …. It had been
commonplace assumption of the humanists that good literature led
37
to virtue.

As a result of Tomsk’s international appeal, Fr Simisky found

himself ministering to students from all over the world: Ghana, Nigeria,
India, Colombia, Ecuador, Germany and more. ‘So many of them were
struggling with Russian. They kept asking me if I’d celebrate Mass in
English.’ And so, despite his intention to do everything in Russian so
as to master the language, Fr Simisky committed to celebrating an
English Mass at the Tomsk parish. ‘It’s tough to be far from home. A
Catholic Mass is a place where you can come and feel at home if
you’re Catholic. Hopefully, even non-Catholics can feel at home.’ 38
Nearly 500 years later, the echoes of St Ignatius and his early
companions could be heard in the ministries of the Jesuits at Tomsk.
They continued ‘laboring with Catholics for their “progress in Christian
life and doctrine”’. They found themselves performing two foundational
roles of the Jesuit life: missionary and educator. They existed at the
heart of interreligious dialogue, free to listen, learn and share, while

35
Simisky, personal interview, January 2022.
36
Simisky, personal interview, January 2022.
37
Modras, ‘The Spiritual Humanism of the Jesuits’, 13.
38
Simisky, personal interview, January 2022.
A Prayer of Lamentation 63

embodying the founding charism of the Society: the Spiritual Exercises.

And they worked for reconciliation—the restoration of relationship
between humanity, creation and God—in a spiritual landscape marred
by decades of dehumanisation. At least, they did so for as long as they
could.
The development of the Ignatian humanistic tradition not only
guided the Jesuits of Tomsk but guides the global Society of Jesus. This
Ignatian humanism, as seen in the mission at Tomsk, is captured in
these words of Fr Sosa about the call to share in the life and mission of
Jesus Christ:

At the heart of this call is the love of the One and Triune God who
is not paralyzed in the face of the world’s situation but who sends
Jesus to take on our humanity and give his life in order to open the
39
gates to divine life and love for all human beings.

Now, in the wake of war, death, trauma and so much loss, what the
Jesuits tried to do at Tomsk, who they tried to be and why, is more
important than ever. With the future uncertain, we hold the people of
Russia and Ukraine in prayer, lament all that has been lost—lives,
futures, hope—and we cry out in the words of the Psalmist:

How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you
hide your face from me? How long must I bear pain in my soul, and
have sorrow in my heart all day long? (Psalm 13:2–3)

Eric A. Clayton SJ is the award-winning author of Cannonball Moments: Telling

Your Story, Deepening Your Faith (2022), a meditation on the intersection of personal
storytelling and Ignatian spirituality. He is the deputy director for communications
at the Jesuit Conference of Canada and the United States, where he co-hosts the
weekly podcast AMDG: A Jesuit Podcast and writes the weekly reflection series,
Now Discern This. Learn more about his work at ericclaytonwrites.com.

39
Arturo Sosa, letter to the whole society, n.8.
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 AUTHENTIC SELFHOOD
FROM SILENCE
Francis de Sales’s Dextrous Invitation
into Contemplation

Brett McLaughlin

Authenticity means being true to oneself as an ultimate ideal, rather than

1
(like sincerity) as a condition of being true to others.

U PON ENTRANCE TO A UNIVERSITY, students are expected to

compose essays that manifest their distinctiveness. The proper
expression of one’s authenticity is indeed an essential qualification—
alongside high marks. The sociologist Joseph E. Davis notes that
adolescents now emerge as astute craftspeople in constructing their
own narrative and image—from witnessing others on social media.
What becomes imperative is that young people have a supreme
authenticity, raising them above their peers.2 The pursuer of authenticity
seeks the quintessence of his or her personhood; it is widely considered
the centrepiece of moral diligence, the only means to personal truth.
Because society has often developed unthinkingly and conformed, the
seeker of authenticity readily embraces alienation from the social
order; all social and cultural structures are prone to be discarded.
Arriving at one’s own personhood before God summons the
subject to a far less predictable path. The approach to meeting God in
silent prayer and authentic selfhood cannot be conducted independently
or arbitrarily, according to many spiritual writers. The Augustinian
Martin Laird posits that no individual can discover inner solitude, nor
guide the perfection of his or her own virtues alone. He admits it is a
paradox that the interior journey must be facilitated by a spiritual guide

1
Peter Tomlinson, review of Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, in Essays in Criticism, 24/4
(1974), 417–422, here 417.
2
Joseph E. Davis, ‘How to Be Yourself: The Studied Art of the College Application Essay’, The
Hedgehog Review, 23/3 (2021), 76–77.

The W ay, 62/2 (A pril 2023), 65– 75

66 Brett McLaughlin

or text.3 Laird cites David Foster Wallace’s famous 2005 commencement

address: most persons only know their own ‘default setting’, their method
of making decisions and virtues by which they negotiate the world.4
The Trappist Thomas Merton characterizes this dynamic in terms
of the false self; human beings are predisposed to play with ‘masks’.
Each person is called to collaborate with God in the construction of
the authentic self, ‘the only true joy on earth’, entering in union with
God out of love. The true self incorporates both the ‘glory of God’ and
‘the missions that are God’s supreme gift to His sons’.5 The necessity,
therefore, for fulfilment is external spiritual guidance as well as
receptivity to God’s loving shaping of the subject.
I would like to examine here how Francis de Sales’s Introduction to
a Devout Life and other writings offer particularly effective such
guidance, gently orientating readers to contemplative silence before
God. A distinctive quality of Salesian spiritual writing is its frequent
use of illustrations from scripture and nature, which enables it to be
readily accessible to all. The recurrent references to humans as bees
and God as the beekeeper allow the believer to envision how God
cares for the human subject. And de Sales makes use of many Old
Testament situations and predicaments to explain the forms of prayer
and how to refine it. The result is a text that is both erudite for learned
Christians and rapidly grasped by those of less education.
De Sales leads the Christian into a silence before eternity, free from
anxieties and humdrum concerns. With his view of the soul, he guides
the one who prays through the love God has for him or her, away from
useless thoughts. He sets forth specified meditations for the Christian,
yet does not abandon the task of easing him or her into silence. Perhaps
uniquely among contemplative theologians, de Sales also presses the
person praying to incorporate contemplation into the active life. The
resolutions from prayer are to be diligently applied, and meditation
should fill the will: ‘Meditation produces pious motions in the will, or
affective part of our soul …. In these affections our hearts should open
themselves and expand as much as possible.’ 6 Meeting with God is

3
Martin Laird, Into the Silent Land: A Guide to the Christian Practice of Contemplation (New York:
OUP, 2006), 5.
4
Martin Laird, An Ocean of Light: Contemplation, Transformation, and Liberation (New York: OUP,
2019), 7.
5
Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (New York: New Directions, 2007), 32, 34.
6
Francis de Sales, Introduction to Devout Life, translated and edited by John K. Ryan (New York:
Harper, 1952), 46–47.
Authentic Selfhood from Silence 67

thus the formation of selfhood by way of God’s presence. Moreover,

devotion is to be shared and repeated; the solitude of the heart may be
perennially recalled. De Sales commends the Christian contemplative
who steadfastly returns to silent presence with God, the true conduit
to authenticity.

The Invitation to Silence before Eternity

Perceiving the average Christian’s ambivalent relationship with quiet,
Francis de Sales deftly guides individuals into the invitation to silence.
The bishop of Geneva is utterly certain of the universal call to solitary
communion with God. He proposes a series of contemplations in
which those who pray consider their own soul and the love God has for
them. Much like a contemporary spirituality writer, de Sales also addresses
the issues of distracting thoughts, as well as overcoming anxiety.
De Sales’s firm conviction of the universal call to devotion forms a
crucial background to his spiritual writings. For him, no particular
occupation or time of life orientates the person to devotion. The
theologian Andre Ravier notes
that the interior call of each
individual to receive and respond
to the love of God arises from a
central tenet of the Hebrew
tradition and gospel: ‘You shall
love the Lord your God with all
your heart, and with all your
soul, and with all your mind’.7
Devotion is the ideal way of
acting on the love for God and
neighbour. Ravier explains that,
for de Sales, devotion is the
opposite of devotions. Devotion
demands the attentiveness of
charity; it opens the Christian
to adherence to the entirety
of the commandments; it is Francis de Sales, artist unknown, seventeenth
charity aflame. Whereas it may century

7
Matthew 22: 37, and see Deuteronomy 6: 5.
68 Brett McLaughlin

be practised in a different way by individuals in different walks of life,

devotion persists as a potentiality available for all.8
The Excellence of the Soul
The initial movement or consideration of devotion is that of the value
and excellence of the individual’s own soul. De Sales holds that the
soul has the capacity to know both the temporal world and the realm
of eternity, including heaven, angels and the ‘most high sovereign and
ineffable God’. The soul ‘knows the means of living well in this visible
world, that it may one day be associated with the angels of heaven and
enjoy God for all eternity’. De Sales asks his reader rhetorically why
the soul should fixate on anything other than God.9 Even a brief
reflection on the soul indicates to the subject his or her sense of the
heavens and eternity.
De Sales next gestures those who pray towards an evaluation of
their generous, yet sometimes wayward, hearts. He states unequivocally
that the heart cannot hate God; it ‘has a most noble will’. De Sales
here concurs with Augustine, that the heart lingers on various objects
of the visible world, but may only rest in God alone.10 He presents the
subject with the obvious question: do its various affections for different
objects not simply end in anxiety? De Sales sketches how the heart
often follows its desires and seeks a host of creatures to satisfy them.
But God is immeasurably patient. ‘Like the dove which went out of
Noah’s ark, that it may return to Himself from whom it proceeded’, we
are destined to find ultimate rest in God. De Sales gives the analogy of
the Prodigal Son’s meals among the farm animals; why should this son
linger over such food when a feast is prepared at his father’s house?11
The human person is orientated towards eternity, whereas the visible
world remains transitory. De Sales charges Christians to recall how
their souls are meant for eternity, and to take courage.12
The Love of Christ
De Sales prods the individual to consider the depth of love that Christ
holds for each person, employing the image of the nursery.

8
Andre Ravier, Francis de Sales: Sage and Saint, translated by Joseph D. Bowler (San Francisco:
Ignatius, 1988), 176–177.
9
De Sales, Introduction to Devout Life, 222.
10
Augustine, Confessions, translated by Sarah Ruden (New York: Modern Library, 2017), 1:1.
11
Luke 15: 16–32.
12
De Sales, Introduction to Devout Life, 222–223.
Authentic Selfhood from Silence 69

An expectant mother prepares the cradle, the linen, the swaddling

clothes, and even a nurse for the child that she hopes to bring
forth …. So also our Lord … since He designs to bring you forth
to salvation and to make you His child, prepared all that was
necessary for you upon the tree of the Cross.

For de Sales these are the graces by which Christ strives to attract the
soul and bring it to perfection. His love is to be imbibed and imprinted
on the memory; God has conceived of ‘a thousand means of salvation,
even as many as if there had been no other souls in the world to
think of’. De Sales cites the example of St Paul for this same singular
consideration: ‘I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and
gave himself for me’ (Galatians 2:20). Christ lived and died on behalf
of the one who prays: ‘He thinks of each as though He did not think of
all the rest’.13 The bishop of Geneva thus sets forth the attractions by
which God entices the creature into silent presence.
Given the Lord’s disposition towards each Christian, de Sales offers
his own tender encouragement of the individual into mental prayer.
He calls it a ‘prayer of the heart’, taking the life and passion of Jesus as
its focus. De Sales anticipates that the one praying will absorb some
of Christ’s own spirit and receive replenishment, growing in imitation of
Christ. He also deploys a series of earthly metaphors to great effect.

He is ‘the light of the world’. It is, therefore, in Him and by Him and
for Him that we must be instructed and enlightened. He is the tree
of desire, in whose shade we must refresh ourselves. He is the living
fountain of Jacob, in which we may wash away all our stains. In
fine, little children, by hearing their mothers talk, lisp at first and
learn at length to speak their language. So also by keeping close to
our Savior, by meditation and by observing His words, actions, and
affections, by the help of His grace, we shall learn to speak, to
14
act, and to will like Him.

Prayer orientates our understanding to the light of God, motivating our

will via God’s love.
Distraction and Anxiety
De Sales labels the discursive mind and its distractions simple thought.
Simple thought is spawned by deliberation over an array of different

13
De Sales, Introduction to Devout Life, 225.
14
De Sales, Introduction to Devout Life, 87.
70 Brett McLaughlin

things. He compares our scattered thoughts to flies stopping and resting

upon flowers.
So it is with our understanding, passing from one thought to another.
Even if these thoughts be of God, if they have no aim, far from
being profitable, they are useless and detrimental and are a great
15
obstacle to prayer.

Study is similarly a hindrance to prayer, in so far as the subject seeks

only to ‘speak accurately’ about a topic. For de Sales, this is like beetles
feasting upon beautiful roses.16 He thus addresses mental activities that
may disrupt prayer, later suggesting techniques to manage them.
In his Letters of Spiritual Direction, de Sales carefully escorts the
person praying away from those preoccupations that lead to anxiety.
He acknowledges that this anxiety only wearies the mind and dulls the
soul; rather than exciting the Christian towards prayer or works, anxiety
actually withholds zeal. He advises Christians to remain especially on
their guard for this situation:
And to help you be vigilant in this, remind yourself that the graces
and benefits of prayer are not like water welling up from the earth,
but more like water falling from heaven …. We must keep our
17
hearts open and wait for the heavenly dew to fall.

Although the person ought to enter into prayer to give praise, a

secondary reason is just to remain present before God. De Sales writes,
‘Ordinarily, we take great delight in doing this because it is very
beneficial for us to speak to such a great Lord; and when He answers
us, He pours out much balm and precious ointment’. The Lord may
just ‘take us by the hand’; one should not be too concerned about what
to say or how to listen. De Sales proposes, ‘just stay there, let yourself
be seen, and don’t try to be too hard to do anything else’; there is no
need to become anxious as to how to act.18 De Sales regularly encourages
silent contemplation, preserving the one praying from worry about
proper dialogue.

15
Francis de Sales, ‘Sermon for the Third Sunday of Lent’, in The Sermons of St Francis de Sales on
Prayer, edited by Lewis S. Fiorelli (Rockford: Tan, 1985), 2.
16
De Sales, ‘Sermon for the Third Sunday of Lent’, 2.
17
Francis de Sales to Mademoiselle de Soulfour, c.1605–1608, in Jeanne-Françoise de Chantal and
Francis de Sales, Letters of Spiritual Direction, translated by Peronne Marie Thibert (New York: Paulist,
1988), 100–101.
18
De Sales to Mademoiselle de Soulfour, 100–101.
Authentic Selfhood from Silence 71

The mystic also steers the subject away from frustrating distractions,
which he names useless thoughts. The prudent selection of the proper
length of prayer is a vital tool to counter distractions. He declares that
‘you must, first of all, so regulate your prayer exercises that their length
does not weary you nor irritate those with whom you live’. A series of
short prayers offered over the course of the day may effectively unite
the believer’s heart with God. The person can conduct abbreviated
prayers, that last no longer than a half-hour grace before meals, and
the examination of conscience is incorporated into the sequence. De
Sales especially exhorts his reader to dismiss ‘sad, gloomy thoughts’
that wear down the soul.19 Thus the discursive mind may be tamed and
allow the subject to sit in silence.

Exploring Contemplation in Salesian Spirituality

Levels of Prayer
De Sales details four levels of the soul that correspond to different
levels of mental prayer. Ever the ingenious illustrator, here he brings
up the vision of Solomon’s Temple. The first level of the soul matches
the court of the Gentiles; it gives us knowledge from the senses, such as
vision. The second, the court of the Jews, allows knowledge by reasoning;
while the third level, the court of the priests, is knowledge attained
through faith. ‘The fourth, the Sancta Sanctorum, is the highest point
of our soul, which we call spirit, and so long as this highest point is
always fixed on God, we need not be troubled in the least’.20 In mental
prayer there is a first level of meditation and a second of contemplation.
The third level is ejaculations, ‘short but fervent aspirations’, while the
final is modest attention to the presence of God. Much like his tone in
spiritual accompaniment, de Sales delivers a straightforward discourse
on interior depth and equivalent styles of prayer.21
Inspirations
In Salesian spirituality, the Christian receives divine movements in
inspirations, that lead the person to virtue, love and ‘everything that
may help us on our way to eternal happiness’. Recalling the Song of

19
Francis de Sales to Madame Villesavin, July–August 1619, in Letters of Spiritual Direction, 178.
20
Francis de Sales, ‘Sermon for Palm Sunday’, in Sermons of St Francis de Sales on Prayer, 23–24.
21
De Sales, ‘Sermon for Palm Sunday’, 24.
72 Brett McLaughlin

Songs, de Sales deploys the language of betrothal and marriage. God

first presents an encouragement to greater charity by way of inspiration.
Human beings next respond with pleasure or ambivalence. Only after
these first two steps do they fully consent to the divine movement. De
Sales remarks that this sequence is a mirror image of the fall into sin
via temptation, consent and the practice of vice.
Overall, we are supposed to take pleasure in inspirations. Delight is a
positive sign, according to de Sales. The consent and the delight combine
to indicate gratitude for divine favour. The bishop of Geneva urges
Christians: ‘Attend calmly to His proposals, think of the love with which
you are inspired, and cherish the holy inspiration. Consent to the holy
inspiration with an entire, a loving, and a permanent consent.’ 22
Recollection
A personal review of one’s emotions towards God is important from
time to time. De Sales inquires, ‘Does your heart delight in the
remembrance of God? Does this remembrance leave an agreeable
sweetness behind it?’ 23 The attractiveness of such emotions is important.
De Sales wonders whether the Christian is drawn into love of God
when divine thoughts arise in everyday concerns. He hopes that such
love for God might seize the heart. Drawing on the metaphor of the
spouse returning from a voyage, de Sales expects that the wife’s heart
will be absorbed in her husband’s return.

It is the same with souls that love God well; let them be ever so busy,
when the remembrance of God comes near them, they lose almost
the thought of all other things, so joyful are they that this dear
24
remembrance is returned.

De Sales regularly returns to the love of God as a focal point, in his

own experience and spiritual direction.
Similarly, Christians should ponder Christ’s love, through which
he accepted suffering, as being the love he has for every human being.
Jesus went to the Mount of Olives and Calvary for the sake of humanity.
De Sales writes, ‘It is certain that the Heart of Jesus beheld your heart
from the tree of the Cross, and by the love which He bore towards it,

22
De Sales, Introduction to Devout Life, 66.
23
De Sales, Introduction to Devout Life, 217.
24
De Sales, Introduction to Devout Life, 217.
Authentic Selfhood from Silence 73

obtained for it all the good you shall ever have’. He points to Jeremiah
1:5: God has known each person and called him or her into life. He
spurs Christians to imprint this love of God into their recollection; we
must recall all those moments that God has drawn us to Godself.25 The
reciprocity of divine love remains essential.
Union
Harvey Egan sums up Salesian spirituality as always returning to loving
union with God. De Sales has a host of images to convey this to the
Christian. Those persons in love with God will allow themselves to sink
wholly into God like an enormous rock in a pasture, which, ‘though
not forced down’, will ‘so work itself, sink down, and press itself, into
the earth where it lies that at length it is found buried, by reason of the
effect of its weight’.26
According to Egan, the apex of union with God for de Sales is
inhesion or adhesion, so called ‘because by it the soul is caught up, fastened,
glued and affixed to the divine majesty, so that she cannot easily loose
or draw herself back again’.27 The one who prays becomes so united to
God that only a heart-rending power might disconnect them. Adhesion
delivers the Christian to moments of brief transport or extended rapture.
Egan underlines that Francis de Sales remains steeped in the kataphatic
mystical tradition. Divine love requires knowledge; contemplation
cannot proceed without some representations or conceptions, and de
Sales continues to propose visible mysteries to ponder.28

Taking Contemplation into Active Life

Throughout de Sales’s discussions of prayer and devotion, loving actions
permeate the text. Introduction to the Devout Life spurs the reader from
contemplation to resolution for action. De Sales is clear that meditation
should permeate the will, leading to imitation of Christ, repentance,
love of neighbour and a host of other virtues. But the Christian cannot
merely rest in these affections or feelings generated. De Sales commands:

25
De Sales, Introduction to Devout Life, 225.
26
Francis de Sales, Treatise on the Love of God, translated by Henry Benedict Mackey (Westminster,
Md: Newman, 1945), 283–284.
27
De Sales, Treatise on the Love of God, 291.
28
See Harvey Egan, Soundings in the Christian Mystical Tradition (Collegeville: Liturgical, 2010), 271,
273–274.
 74 Brett McLaughlin

‘turn them into special resolutions for your individual correction and
amendment … desire is worth little unless you proceed to some
practical resolution’.29 The Christian is to rectify his or her
Solitary own shortcomings, as well as be animated by love of neighbour.
devotion Salesian devotion must necessarily carry energy forward into
alone is not
decision-making and the performance of Christian acts. In
sufficient
no way does Salesian spirituality permit quietism; solitary
devotion alone is not sufficient for justification. The effective and devout
Christian is prompted to continual practice of charitable deeds.
Sharing Devotion
Devotion must be transmitted to and encouraged in others in a most
loving manner. De Sales appreciates that individuals must have
enjoyment of their devotion to God, and the devotion in itself should
be appealing and agreeable to others.

The sick will love your devotion if they receive care and comfort
from it; your family will love it if they see you more attentive to their
well-being, more gentle in handling affairs, more kind in correcting,
and so on; your husband will love it if he sees that as your devotion
increases you become more warm and affectionate toward him;
your relatives and friends will love it if they see you more free,
supportive of others, and yielding to them in matters that are not
30
contrary to God’s will.

For de Sales, the life of prayer must be rendered enticing to others,

primarily through charitable acts.
Humility
Humility should be cultivated, and is a pivotal Salesian virtue. Wendy
M. Wright observes,

Especially, he emphasises inward humility that he carefully distinguishes

from a feigned self-abasement meant to attract praise or sympathy.
And he counsels that life itself and the particular conditions of one’s
‘state in life’ will no doubt supply all the humbling experiences one
31
could ever invent for oneself.

29
De Sales, Introduction to Devout Life, 46.
30
De Sales to Madame Brûlart, in Letters of Spiritual Direction, 104.
31
Wendy M. Wright, Heart Speaks to Heart: The Salesian Tradition (New York: Orbis, 2004), 79.
Authentic Selfhood from Silence 75

Humility enables the gentleness towards one’s neighbour, and the

requisite acts of love.32
Freedom and Indifference
The properly devout Christian maintains a spirit of freedom amidst the
transformations of daily life. Although they delight in consolations, de
Sales expects that free-hearted Christians should be able to receive
hardships with peacefulness. Joy is an essential attribute of the free
individual.
The effects of this freedom are a great inner serenity, a great
gentleness and willingness to yield in everything that isn’t sin or an
occasion of sin; it’s a flexible disposition, able gracefully to do the
33
virtuous or charitable thing.

Harvey Egan calls Francis de Sales ‘the teacher of holy indifference’, by

which one is to seek God’s will and distances oneself from self-will.
This involves profound trust and surrender. ‘Central to Francis’s vision
is that “God’s will is God’s love”, and that one must love God for God’s
sake, not for one’s own … the will must rest in God and not in its own
contentment.’ 34
Francis de Sales maintained a fervent vocation to summon persons
of all occupations, into silent companionship and authentic personhood
before God. Throughout his directions, De Sales’s focus stayed with
the unification of the individual’s heart to God. Staying with God is
persistent exhortation, illustrated through many ingenious examples.
But de Sales always remained aware that devotion necessarily included
both stillness and loving, generous acts. True devotion must end in
swift, prudent performance of the good. The silent encounter with
God remains paramount, yet it must be matched by selfless actions.

Brett McLaughlin SJ is a US Northeast province Jesuit, studying in the doctoral

programme in systematic theology at Boston College. His book reviews of
contemporary christology have been published in Theological Studies͘

32
See de Sales, Introduction to Devout Life, 97–98.
33
De Sales to Madame Brûlart, in Letters of Spiritual Direction, 138.
34
Egan, Soundings in the Christian Mystical Tradition, 273.
 THE SPIRITUAL EXERCISES AND
PSYCHOLOGICAL CAPITAL
Mukti Clarence

I T HAD BEEN NINE YEARS since I was ordained priest, in the province
of Jamshedpur, India. I spent three years in rural parish ministry, four
years doing doctoral studies in psychology and one year teaching after
my ordination. I landed in Lebanon for my Jesuit tertianship in October
2021, with the feeling that my prolonged adolescence in the Society of
Jesus was coming to an end and a new mature period of responsibility
and accountability could begin.1 In my doctoral studies I had explored
the concept of psychological capital, and the experience of my thirty-day
retreat was a kind of déjà vu. The wide-ranging emotions I encountered
on retreat felt very close to the characteristics of psychological capital,
and I found in the Spiritual Exercises many shared aims.

Psychological Capital
Psychological capital is an important construct in positive psychology,
coined by Fred Luthans, professor emeritus of management at the
University of Nebraska, Lincoln, USA.2 It characterizes an individual’s
inner strength, goodness, perspective and dynamism.

[Psychological capital] is an individual’s positive psychological state

of development and is characterized by: (1) having confidence
(self-efficacy) to take on and put in the necessary effort to succeed at
challenging tasks; (2) making a positive attribution (optimism) about
succeeding now and in the future; (3) persevering toward goals
and, when necessary, redirecting paths to goals (hope) in order to

1
In Jesuit formation tertianship is a year of spiritual training at the end of the period of academic studies.
I am thankful to Fr Dany Younes, tertian instructor, Fr Nawras Sammour, superior of the tertianship
community, and my eight companions who accompanied and supported me in my long retreat to have
the spiritual experience of a lifetime.
2
Positive psychology is a discipline of psychology which focus on the importance of positive experience,
emotions and human strengths such as happiness, gratitude, forgiveness and character strength and
their positive impact on human flourishing. See Phyllis Zagano and Kevin Gillespie, ‘Ignatian Spirituality
and Positive Psychology’, The Way, 45/4 (October, 2006), 41–58.

The W ay, 62/2 (A pril 2023), 77– 87

78 Mukti Clarence

succeed; and (4) when beset by problems and adversity, sustaining

3
and bouncing back and even beyond (resiliency) to attain success.

The construct of psychological capital is personal,

universal, theory-based, state-like (that is, more
susceptible to change than deep-seated
‘trait-like’ characteristics are), measurable
and open to development.4 I will explain
a little more about the meaning and the
implications of hope, efficacy, resilience
and optimism (for which Luthans often
uses the acronym HERO)5 from the point
of view of psychology and about the
way they are defined as components of
psychological capital, before exploring how
they interact with the Spiritual Exercises
from my own experience.
Hope
Hope is one’s capacity to determine one’s goal and explore strategies to
achieve it. It encompasses goals, paths and power or agency: ‘reaching
specific goal-related outcomes through the use of agency and pathways
thought’.6 Hopeful people proactively explore other alternatives to meet
the goals when the primary way does not work. ‘Hope is a cognitive
state that helps individuals become more realistic about their desired
goals through self-determination, perception and energy.’ 7
Efficacy
Efficacy (confidence) entails the belief that one has the ability, skill
and knowledge to marshal all the resources available—cognitive,
conative or affective—to complete a given task. Those with a high

3
Fred Luthans, Carolyn M. Youssef and Bruce J. Avolio, Psychological Capital: Developing the Human
Competitive Edge (New York: OUP, 2007), 3.
4
Carolyn M. Youssef-Morgan and Fred Luthans, ‘Psychological Capital and Well-Being’, Stress Health,
31/3 (2015),180–188, at 186. And see Fred Luthans and Carolyn M. Youssef-Morgan, ‘Psychological
Capital: An Evidence-Based Positive Approach’, The Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and
Organizational Behaviour, 4 (2017), 339–366.
5
Fred Luthans, ‘Psychological Capital: Implications for HRD, Retrospective Analysis, and Future
Directions’, Human Resource Development Quarterly, 23/1 (Spring 2012), 2.
6
The Encyclopedia of Positive Psychology, edited by Shane J. Lopez (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 488.
7
Bharat Chandra Sahoo and others, ‘Psychological Capital and Work Attitude: A Conceptual
Analysis’, Journal of Organisation and Human Behaviour, 4/2–3 (April and July 2015), 18–28, here 19.
The Spiritual Exercises and Psychological Capital 79

level of efficacy set ambitious goals for themselves, do well in difficult

situations, are motivated, make efforts to reach their goals and persist
when they are challenged before giving up. Six traits are closely associated
with efficacy: confidence, command, adaptability, personal effectiveness,
positive attitudes and individuality.8
Resilience
Resilience involves the ability to bounce back or recover from setbacks.
It is the positive energy of individuals which fights against adverse
events to recover from failure. It works through the three dimensions
of control, coherence and connectedness.9 A person who is resilient
possesses the characteristics of objectivity, conviction, adaptation and
evaluation. Resilience also involves the process of positive adaptation
to different adversities and risks.
Optimism
Optimism refers to having a positive but realistic perspective. Optimistic
people have internal stability and believe that they can control their
situation. Optimism places emphasis on cognitive skills, reflecting a
reasoned judgment that good will predominate over evil. It is a kind of
explanatory or attributional style: while encountering positive events or
experiences, people with an optimistic mindset adopt internal, stable
and global attributions, and while engaging adverse events, they use
external and specific attribution.10

Research has shown that in the workplace individuals with greater
psychological capital tend to do better in job performance, job satisfaction,
organizational commitment and well-being.11 Psychological capital is also

8
See Sanjyot Pethe, Sushama Choudhari and Upinder Dhar, ‘Occupational Self-Efficacy: Constituent
Factors’, Management and Labour Studies, 25/2 (April 2000), 92–98.
9
See John W. Reich, ‘Three Psychological Principles of Resilience in Natural Disasters’, Disaster
Prevention and Management, 15/5 (2006), 793–798.
10
The concept of ‘attributional style’ and its internal–external, stable–unstable and global–specific
dimensions were originally developed by Lyn Y. Abramson, Martin E. P. Seligman and John D. Teasdale.
‘The internal–external dimension refers to the extent to which an individual feels a specific event is
caused entirely by one’s self versus entirely by others. The stable–unstable dimension refers to the extent
to which an individual believes that the cause of an event will never again be present versus always being
present. The global–specific dimension refers to the extent to which an individual believes an event is
caused by something that only influences the particular situation versus influencing all situations in one’s
life.’ (The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, edited by George Ritzer [Oxford: Blackwell, 2007], 2568)
11
See Fred Luthans and others, ‘Positive Psychological Capital: Measurement and Relationship with
Performance and Satisfaction’, Personnel Psychology, 60 (2007), 541–572.
80 Mukti Clarence

associated with finding more meaning in life and enhanced ethical and
moral behaviour, academic performance, teamwork and problem-solving;
counter-productive behaviours such as cynicism, intention to quit and
absenteeism are reduced.12 Developing psychological capital is an
evidence-based, tested and tried technique to transform a person into
a more productive and committed individual. Psychological capital is
thus both desirable and achievable. Many training programmes and
interventions are conducted to increase the psychological capital of
individuals in different walks of life for the good of their professional
and personal development. The results have been very encouraging.
It might be argued that promoting psychological capital does not
pay heed to the will of God but only to human fulfilment. But there is
established research showing that people with greater psychological
capital are also more ethical and spiritual. The Spiritual Exercises foster
the same qualities of hope, efficacy, resilience and optimism. They also
remain a fount of personal resources promoting positivity (consolations)
and combating less positive emotions (desolations).

My Tertianship Retreat
One of the essential aspects of Jesuit tertianship is to make the thirty-day
Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius. I entered into my long spiritual
journey with fear and unease about whether I would succeed in completing
the retreat. It was true that I had made my first long retreat when I was
in my novitiate and just nineteen years old. Nonetheless, the experience
of that long retreat had become dimmed and fuzzy over the years.
In my tertianship retreat, I realised the reflective nature of the
Spiritual Exercises. I discovered the efficacy of different methods of
prayer and ways to experience God in meditation, contemplation,
examination of conscience, discernment, election, silence, daily eucharist
and adoration, with the guidance of my spiritual director. I understood
clearly that no one could enter into the retreat without generosity or a
deep desire to experience God’s presence in his or her life.
The Spiritual Exercises offered me a time to discern God’s will and
a modus to live a life of holiness and committed discipleship. My
experiences showed me how the Exercises awaken the conscience of the

12
See David Vilariño del Castillo and Esther Lopez-Zafra, ‘Antecedents of Psychological Capital at
Work: A Systematic Review of Moderator–Mediator Effects and a New Integrative Proposal’, European
Management Review, 19/1 (2022), 154–169.
The Spiritual Exercises and Psychological Capital 81

retreatant to seek the greater good, hear God’s word, grow in freedom and
live a value-driven life. The Spiritual Exercises helped me to experience
a movement both forward and deeper towards the conversion and
commitment of my life. Walking through the pages of the Bible during
contemplation and meditation enhanced my dialogue with the Lord. I
affirmed three particular effects that the Spiritual Exercises had on me.
First, I experienced the Exercises as a tool to remove obstacles in
my life which I recognised and knew when I entered the light of God:
disordered attachments, sins, misconceptions about God, self-centredness,
lack of generosity. The secret of the Exercises here is the grace for
which we ask and the colloquy that gives us the freedom to speak with
God. Second, I had personal experience of the motives of different
spirits. I could easily relate this concept to mindfulness, awareness, the
power of now and examination of conscience exercises. During all
these practices, I recognised the inner movements of the spirit and got
in touch with my affectivity. This required a lot of focus and, for that
reason, silence was very important. Third, I appropriated the teaching
of the Church (of the truth of faith) personally: I do not believe that
Jesus is the Saviour of the World because of the ‘word of the
Samaritan woman’ (John 4) but because I saw it myself (Exx 57).

Psychological Capital in the Spiritual Exercises

Every thoughtful retreatant desires to live a meaningful and integrated
life. Many retreatants claim that the Spiritual Exercises give them the
opportunity to grow in familiarity with God, recognise their vocation and
purpose in life, and equip themselves to respond to their vocation in
the best possible manner by embracing the sensus Christi (the way of
Christ).13 There is consensus among scholars of Ignatian spirituality
that the Spiritual Exercises serve as an instrument to help retreatants
become what God wants them to be as happy, moral, efficient Christians.
Consequently, a claim can be made that the Spiritual Exercises and
psychological capital function in the same way. Both prepare people to
live their lives optimally. Moreover the characteristics of psychological
capital—hope, efficacy, resilience and optimism—may themselves be
attained through the Spiritual Exercises.

13
See George T. Tade, ‘The Spiritual Exercises: A Method of Self-Persuasion’, Quarterly Journal of
Speech, 43 (1957), 383–389.
82 Mukti Clarence

Hope
According to both the Spiritual Exercises and the wider Christian
tradition, the meaning of hope includes having faith in Christ’s resurrection
and moving forward with trust in Him.14 It is both metaphysical and
practical. To acquire hope, one must be faithful to the Lord and his
message of establishing his Kingdom on earth (Luke 4:18–19). The
ministry of Jesus (healing, teaching, table-fellowship) illustrates how he was
hopeful: Jesus knew his aims in life and did everything to achieve them.
Similarly, the Spiritual Exercises focus on the Principle and
Foundation (Exx 23), which presents the aim of life to every retreatant:
‘Human beings are created to praise, reverence, and serve God our
Lord, and by means of doing this to save their souls’. The Exercises offer
consolations that increase hope; retreatants who experience increased
hope discern how to live a life of holiness and choose what God wants
them to be. Consequently, the Spiritual Exercises unfold both goals in
life and strategies to achieve them, and this is the meaning of hope.
Efficacy
An important objective of the Spiritual Exercises is to instil confidence
in retreatants through seeking and finding their desire in life. This
confidence is rooted in the discovery that God wants to give them
more. The director’s role involves building confidence among retreatants
(see Exx 7–10). The Exercises focusing on election, such as the Two
Standards, Three Classes of Persons and Three Kinds of Humility, fill
retreatants with energy and efficacy because they encounter their
newer selves with purpose, which in turn makes them confident in life.
The general confession, the colloquy, contemplations and the examination
of consciousness likewise help them to recognise the grace of God and
give them the confidence to live a life worthy of their calling. Experiencing
their relationship with God more confidently enables retreatants to
become more confident in their professional and personal lives as well.
Resilience
The Spiritual Exercises help retreatants recover from negative experiences
and events in manifold ways. One of these is the general confession,
which heals them and helps them bounce back to normality. It enables
them to experience God and God’s blessings in their lives. Spiritual

14
Dermot A. Lane, Keeping Hope Alive: Stirrings in Christian Theology (New York: Paulist, 1996), 4.
The Spiritual Exercises and Psychological Capital 83

directors hear, suggest and evaluate progress, showing retreatants the

right path gently with their experience and expertise; their being present
is very valuable in itself. The discernment of spirits (Exx 313–336) teaches
retreatants how to achieve success and respond to challenges that come
in hidden forms. It encompasses awareness, self-scrutiny and introspection,
which are pathways to resilience. The complete contemplations and
meditation of the Third Week bring special blessings of strength to
face the trials of life and persistence in accomplishing its goals.
Optimism
The exercises of the Fourth Week, in particular, including the
Contemplation to Attain Love, are meant to foster optimism among
retreatants. They focus on Gods’ love. Experiencing God’s active presence
in this world and the invitation to collaborate in God’s mission touch
retreatants’ hearts with optimism. In the First Week, while
The grace of
meditating on sin, St Ignatius wants us to seek the grace of
tears because
tears because of God’s love, and gratitude rather than guilt
for the sins themselves; this perspective justifies optimism. There of God’s love
is a direct relationship between optimism and the experience of consolation
because optimism increases the attitude of faith, love and charity. For
Ignatius, consolation is to experience centredness on God, and this
experience fosters joy, peace and reconciliation, as optimism does.
***
In my own retreat experience, I found that each week of the Spiritual
Exercises increased one specific dimension of psychological capital: the
First Week enhanced hope, the Second Week efficacy, the Third
Week resilience and the Fourth Week optimism.
The First Week
Week One of the Spiritual Exercises helped me to increase my hope in
three ways. First, through meditation on God’s love and care I came to
know the unconditional love of God, which has saved me despite my
fragility and waywardness. If God had to judge me, I would not be
alive. I realised that I needed to live my life more justly. After my general
confession I experienced divine energy within and a sense of change
towards my proper relationship with God, humans and nature. I promised
to live a purposeful life with hope.
Second, I became more aware of myself as a forgiven sinner. I
reflected on my brokenness and sinfulness. I acknowledged that my sin
has caused disorder in creation and disfigured humanity. Also, my sin has
84 Mukti Clarence

kept me away from my responsibilities and influenced me to act on

hatred. However, I experienced that the God of mercy beckons me to
grant me healing. God is like the Father of the prodigal son, waiting for
me in order to forgive my sin. I had no words but to tell God to accept me
as a servant (Luke 15:18–19). During this week, I pondered on returning
from my sinful state. I sought freedom from the shackles of sins and
shortcomings. I remained steeped in God’s care and love all through
the week. The repeated meditations on gospel passages helped me to
feel God’s love and forgiveness. I felt that I could rise above my smaller
selves and experience the power of hope with grace. 
Third, I meditated on the Principle and Foundation (Exx 23). This
gave me a sense of ultimate direction and purpose. I recognised that I
have a goal in life and now what is required of me is to strain every
nerve to achieve that goal. Experience of this truth opened my eyes to
faith and gave me hope by suggesting the reason for my being and call. I
understood that whatever diverts me from the Principle and Foundation
is a distraction and an obstacle. Likewise, I learnt that looking ahead,
having faith in God who promises me life everlasting and forgives all
my sins can determine the course of my life.
The Second Week
The dynamic of the Second Week offers exercitants the self-confidence
and capacity to say, Yes: I can fulfil the Principle and Foundation, pay the
cost of discipleship and remain loyal to the Lord’s friendship. The exercises
of the Second Week include the contemplations on the Call of the
King, the Two Standards, Three Classes of Persons, the Three Kinds of
Humility and the public life of Jesus, as well as the Election. Everything
comes down to shifting our emotional centre (heart) into the right
place in the Second Week.
The exercises on Jesus’ apostolic life uncover his love, values, freedom
and dreams. I experienced a very intimate relationship with Jesus, which
strengthened me to have courage and endurance in my life. I felt Jesus
more closely than ever before (Exx 104), which resulted in the grace of
generosity, reinforcing my sense of efficacy. Meditations such as the
Two Standards, the Three Classes of Persons and the Three Kinds of
Humility aroused in my heart the conviction and firmness to follow Jesus
at all costs. The triple colloquy presents honouring the trinitarian God
and Mother Mary as the fount of grace and the blessings of persistence.
Contemplating the Election or discernment so as to live a life of holiness
brings about consolation, which entails a feeling of peace, surrender and
The Spiritual Exercises and Psychological Capital 85

love helping the retreatant to go the extra mile for the Lord. I found that
the rules for the discernment of spirits of the Second Week are very
beneficial. They nurtured me and showed me the correct path. Following
the rules, I experienced confidence internally (efficacy) to continue my
spiritual journey with consolation and understating my desolation.
The Third Week
Exercitants during the Third Week receive the strength of resilience
from the passion of Christ while seeking the grace of sorrow and confusion
(Exx 193). Contemplating the passion of the Lord, I experienced His
deep love towards me. The Third Week focuses on remaining with
Christ’s sacrificial love and His suffering as His close friends, which
promotes an attitude of resilience in facing the challenges of the world
and personal suffering steadfastly. On the one hand, I went through
emotions of sorrow myself. On the other hand, I experienced, perceived,
loved, wanted, encouraged and belonged to the Lord, making me feel
healthier in my mind and soul and energized to return to my life with
more vigour and commitment. In this week of my retreat there were
rigorous prayer sessions and guidelines for meals. They were helpful for
me to go deeper into interior anguish and intimate love of my Lord.
The realisation that the Lord has suffered for me personally and saved
me from my sins through his blood stirred me morally and spiritually,
enhancing my goodwill and commitment to my ultimate goal.
Throughout the Third Week, the thought of the Lord’s passion
enabled me to express my commitment and fidelity towards His love
firmly. Jesus dies to teach me a lesson about faith. And to experience
this faith, conversion is imperative for me to realise that I am His child.
It is my responsibility to rise up with resilience to struggle against my
personal demons and the demons of the world in the name of God,
since I am a child of God. It is expected that I give witness that evil can
be defeated by good through love, sacrifice, fidelity and even death.
Jesus, with his death on the cross and dedication to his mission,
defeated forces of sin and human self-centredness through his redemptive
love. What does Jesus want from me in the end? He wants me to
become more like him and learn to be merciful, compassionate and
humble, and to overcome the fear of suffering and death day by day.
The Fourth Week
The Fourth Week enabled me to grow in optimism through the grace
of this week: a union with Christ as Christ is in union with me. I
86 Mukti Clarence

experienced the everlasting relationship with Christ in his resurrected

spirit with triumphant joy and optimism. The meditations on the risen
Lord and His apparitions focus on themes of victory, delight, dispelling
fear, good news, and the belief that Christ and his Spirit are with me,
and He is my Saviour. Therefore, I am safe in following my Lord.
There is no place of fear in the world-view of Jesus. I experienced inner
peace, cheerfulness, confidence. There was a strong feeling within me
that I should remain victorious over the frailty of my human nature
and sinful conduct with the Lord’s assistance. I felt assured that I, too,
shall rise from the dead; I should not fear death, but I must understand
what it means. It refers to a path leading to eternal life. If I wish to
experience continuing optimism and the company of my Lord in this
world and after my death, I will have to respond to His call and remain
His disciple and ready to take up my cross. There is no resurrection
without the cross. My Lord appeared to His disciples alone because He
wanted to increase their faith, joy and optimism; therefore, He did
not appear to those who persecuted Him. Through his resurrection
appearances, Jesus consoled his disciples, restored their faith and united
them with strength and courage.
I am his disciple too. I have personally experienced, seen and heard
him during my retreat. My mission is now to be his witness in loyal
companionship with him and love towards my neighbours. Since the
goal of the Society of Jesus is to help our souls and the souls of our
neighbours ‘in attaining the ultimate end for which they were created’
(Constitutions, Preamble IV.1[307]), my life must be undividedly apostolic
and religious. This intimate connection between the religious and
apostolic aspects of the Society ought to animate my whole way of living
as a Jesuit, praying and working, and impress on it an apostolic character.
The Contemplation to Attain Love (Exx 230–237) elicited my
gratitude and love to my Lord, which led to an experience of optimism
and joy, and dedication to living a life of discipleship, committing
myself to work for Him on this earth (Exx 23) with the assurance that
He is with me till the end of the age (Matthew 28:20). I experienced
what God gives me through the gifts that I share in God’s creation.
Every good gift is a reflection and extension of God’s self. All good
things come from God. I come from God and I am united with God.
Apart from God, I have no existence. I experience a union and oneness
with God in such a way that I am related to God like the sun’s rays to
the sun and like water to a fountain.
The Spiritual Exercises and Psychological Capital 87

A Life of Conviction
I always wanted to live my life with conviction,
belief in gospel values and a Jesuit ideal,
knowing in the end that these are the only
source of my lasting peace and joy as a
Catholic priest. I have often talked to my
spiritual guide about how to attain this grace
and taken this intention in my daily prayer.
During my retreat I experienced tangibly how
to live a life of conviction. I felt the wisdom
of St Ignatius when he said that the success of
the Spiritual Exercises depended on how far
we get rid of our inordinate attachments and
learn to seek to do God’s will (Exx 169). The
retreat opened my eyes to the inordinate
attachments in my life. God’s will for me became the constant content
of my prayer, meditation and contemplation. The method that the
Spiritual Exercises gave me to find answers with undivided attention
in solitude was astonishing. It was a kind of soul-searching exercise in
introspection that culminated with an aha! moment.
I experienced my thirty-day retreat as an intervention or training
programme in which I was formed to live a flourishing and abundant
life. I could correlate some of my retreat experiences with my positive
psychology training and study of psychological capital. I am confident
that the Spiritual Exercises have helped me develop my hope, efficacy,
resilience and optimism as well as faith, hope and charity. However, as
a Catholic priest, I recognise the limitations of psychological capital
with respect to grace and redemption. Psychological capital fails to see
that God, in God’s goodness, can choose to bestow grace gratuitously
on anyone. God does not have to look at the merit of any individual.
And psychological capital has no divine authority to grant redemption,
whereas the Spiritual Exercises have the potential to give us both grace
and redemption irrespective of our worth. Too much reliance on
people’s own efforts can prevent us from seeing the way of God. At
times God’s ways are not our ways.

Mukti Clarence is a Jesuit priest of Jamshedpur Province in India. He teaches at

XITE College and holds a PhD in psychology.
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 Our Common Home

LAUDATO SI’ AND THE

SPIRITUAL EXERCISES
REVISITED
Iain Radvan

A FEW YEARS AGO, Dr Peter Saunders wrote an article for The Way
on Laudato si’ and the Spiritual Exercises, explaining how it was
possible to integrate the Pope’s message of ecological conversion in
Laudato si’ into a giving of the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius.
I believe that the presence of God in nature was something that
Ignatius took for granted in the Spiritual Exercises. In his time nature
was something of which ordinary people were more aware in their
1
daily lives than they are today.

Just as the Exercises have been given a broader scope of application in

relation to social justice, beyond what St Ignatius probably foresaw, so
the Exercises can be an instrument for exercitants to experience a new
loving relationship with Earth.
The question I have in giving the Spiritual Exercises now is: if an
exercitant completes the Exercises without an increased awareness
of the need to care for the earth and the poor, has the process been
effective in today’s world? I do not think so any more. Ignatian
spirituality is about being ‘contemplatives in action’ and ‘finding God
2
in all things’. Caring for our planet is part of a Christian’s journey.

Saunders outlined how the themes and texts of Laudato si’ could be
incorporated into the material over which the exercitant prayers in each
Week of the Exercises. While the adaptations he suggested would be
significant, Saunders envisages a more radical adaptation: by developing
a retreat ‘in which [the participants] spend part or all of the retreat

1
‘Laudato si’ and the Spiritual Exercises’, The Way, 54/4 (October 2015), 118–128, here 120.
2
Saunders, ‘Laudato si’ and the Spiritual Exercises’, 122.

The W ay, 62/2 (A pril 2023), 89– 96

90 Iain Radvan

walking in the wilderness’.3 He suggested, in practical terms, that part

of a thirty-day live-in retreat could be spent in nature.
This proposal was put to the test with the design and presentation
of the International Ignatian Ecospiritual Conference in May 2022.
This was not to be a new version of the Twentieth Annotation;
instead, Saunders created a short retreat ‘in nature’ based on the full
Exercises. Following on from the earlier success of online retreats for
ecological conversion, Peter, Helen Lucas and myself, with the help of
others in the organizing team, created a five-day conference based on
the dynamics of the Spiritual Exercises.
As Saunders recognises,
The Spiritual Exercises are not a theological course; they are a
journey into the heart of the person and of God in that person. If
we are going to help people to appreciate God’s presence in nature
4
then we have to invite them to experience it.

This conference was built on the theological understanding that God is

to be found in nature; that God is intrinsic to every created thing; that
God reveals Godself to humans through nature as well as through the
history of God’s chosen people recorded in the scriptures. Towards
the end of the Spiritual Exercises, in the Contemplatio, Ignatius invites the
one making the Exercises to experience the world in a new way, ‘to
look how God dwells in creatures; in the elements, giving them being;
in the plants, giving them life; in the animals giving them feeling; in
people giving them understanding’ (Exx 235). As Teilhard de Chardin
explains, ‘Christ has a cosmic Body that extends throughout the universe’.5
Earth is the Body of the Cosmic Christ.
While this event was billed as a conference, what we had in mind
from the start was a programme much more like a (preached) retreat.
Each day would begin with prayer, then the key speaker would present
for about half an hour, then the participants would share their responses
to what they had heard (online or live as they were able) in small groups,
‘hubs’, led by a hub facilitator. After this they would be given a spiritual
exercise to take with them into a local natural area (a garden, park, beach
or bushland). The day would end with spiritual conversation, sharing in

3
Saunders, ‘Laudato si’ and the Spiritual Exercises’, 123.
4
Saunders, ‘Laudato si’ and the Spiritual Exercises’, 125.
5
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Cosmic Life, in Writings in Time of War, translated by René Hague
(London: Collins, 1968), 13–71, here 58.
Laudato si’ and the Spiritual Exercises Revisited 91

© Leo Li at Flickr
their ‘hub’ how they had felt moved while in nature. As the participants
met in the same ‘hub’ each time over the five days they would build up
trust and confidence in each other, allowing for deeper sharing.
So how was this retreat-like conference structured in relation to
the Spiritual Exercises? Each day’s theme took up one or more aspects
of the Exercises. The opening, which occurred in the late afternoon
before Day One, functioned as preparation for the whole experience.
Various authoritative speakers orientated the participants towards an
ecological conversion: Fr Arturo Sosa, the general of the Society of
Jesus, Fr Quyen Vu, the provincial of the Australian Province (which
sponsored us very generously), and Fr Xavier Jeyaraj, secretary for Social
Justice and Ecology for the Society of Jesus in the world.
This is an opportunity to explore our deep interconnectedness with
all creation through mindful encounters with nature, reflection, sacred
listening and prayer … this ecological conversion is an invitation
to experience Christ present in all Creation. [Arturo Sosa]
As Christians committed to following the Call of the King [Exx
91–98], discerned in the Spiritual Exercises, we are draw into [Jesus’]
mission to hear and respond to the Cry of the Earth. [Quyen Vu]
When we are truly aware, we are privileged to see, listen, touch and
feel the sacred presence of God in creation, and if attentive, we can
hear the deeper cry of nature for healing and the cry of the poor for
justice … this is a sacred moment for us to see creation with the
eyes of God who created, sees, and cares for every bit of creation.
6
[Xavier Reyaraj]

6
Quoted in part in ‘Australian Province Hosts International Ignatian Ecospiritual Conference’, Jesuit
Conference of Asia Pacific (12 May 2022), at ‘https://jcapsj.org/blog/2022/05/12/australian-province-
92 Iain Radvan

In the presentation of the first full day, the focus on Pope Francis’s
Laudato si’ functioned as an adaptation of the Principle and Foundation:
Saunders provided the theological groundwork for the ideal relationship
humans should have with Earth. With his personal stories and images
he also aroused wonder and awe for the marvel of creation, and a sense
of gratitude for Earth’s care for humans.

Everything is related, and we human beings are united as brothers

and sisters on a wonderful pilgrimage, woven together by the love
God has for each of his creatures and which also unites us in fond
affection with brother sun, sister moon, brother river and mother
earth. (Laudato si’, n.92)

The second day’s talk functioned as a First Week reality check: Dr

Leslie Hughes pulled no punches in acknowledging how critical climate
change has become and naming human actions as responsible for it.
Hughes described it as a ‘climate emergency’. She pointed out the
repercussions of climate change on the most vulnerable in our global
community. Her talk also served to draw the participants into a Third
Week experience, challenging them to feel with Earth in its helpless
suffering. ‘This sister now cries out to us because of the harm we have
inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods with
which God has endowed her.’ (Laudato si’, n.2)
For human beings … to destroy the biological diversity of God’s
creation, to degrade the integrity of Earth by causing changes in
the climate, by stripping Earth of its natural forests or destroying
its wetlands, to contaminate Earth’s waters, its land or its air
and its life—these are sins …. To commit a crime against the natural
7
world is a sin against ourselves and against God.

The following three days’ presentations and prayer experiences

invited the participants into a school of discipleship with Earth (a Second
Week experience). Sherry Balcombe, an Australian First Nations elder,
introduced them to indigenous spirituality, and in particular, to the
practice of dadirri, deep listening to Earth.

hosts-international-ignatian-ecospiritual-conference/. Video available at https://godinnature.org.au/god-

in-nature/keynote-speakers.
7
Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, address in Santa Barbara, California (8 November 1997), in
On Earth as in Heaven: Ecological Vision and Initiatives of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, edited by
John Chryssavgis (New York: Fordham U, 2012), 95–100, here 99, quoted in Laudato si’, n. 8.
Laudato si’ and the Spiritual Exercises Revisited 93

It is essential to show special care for indigenous communities and

their cultural traditions… For them, land is not a commodity but
rather a gift from God and from their ancestors there, a sacred space.
(Laudato si’, n.146)

Tony Rinaudo, who spent many years working in Africa for World
Vision, told of the story of his years of fruitless efforts at regenerating
desertificated land until he discovered, in response to desperate prayer,
how Earth itself showed him the way. With the local people in Africa
he helped develop the Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration project
which transformed the landscape.
Each organism, as a creature of God, is good and admirable in itself;
the same is true of the harmonious ensemble of organisms existing
in a defined space and functioning as a system. Although we are often
not aware of it, we depend on these larger systems for our own
existence. We need only recall how ecosystems interact in dispersing
carbon dioxide, purifying water, controlling illnesses and epidemics,
forming soil … breaking down waste. (Laudato si’, n.140)

Pedro Walpole, global coordinator of Ecojesuit, a worldwide Ignatian

advocacy network, introduced the participants to the Laudato si’ Action
Platform, which is a model of action for communities to follow in
companionship with other Ignatian and Jesuit groups.8 In his keynote
talk Walpole outlined six actions we can be taking as individuals and
communities:
• seeking political accountability;
• a just transition to clean energy;
• adapting to agroecology and food security systems;
• transparency for climate finance and accountability for loss
and damages;
• supporting Indigenous peoples and biodiversity;
• protecting oceans and small island states.
We organisers would not have been content with this intellectual
content alone, important as it was. This informative input provided a
challenging perspective which the participants then took into their

8
For the Action Platform see https://laudatosiactionplatform.org/.
 94 Iain Radvan

contemplation in nature each afternoon. Wherever each participant was,

whether alone or in a group, all were invited to spend up to two hours
in contemplation in nature. They took with them a specific spiritual
exercise we provided that helped them to engage with nature.
In creating an ‘Ignatian’ programme for this conference, the intention
was that the participants would have a personal sensory experience of
nature (which would at the same time put them in touch with God).
We wanted them to experience intimacy with Earth in a concrete way.
Ignatius instructs in the Exercises that for contemplation one should
see, hear, smell, taste and touch (Exx 106–7, 115, 121–5); in
A new
our case this was to occur not through the ‘inner senses’, but
respectful
the outer ones. In this way we hoped the participants would
relationship
experience the loving presence of God in and through the
with God’s
beauty of their natural surroundings, and discover a new
gift of Earth
respectful relationship with God’s gift of Earth. The participant
would be relating to Earth and to God directly, not through a speaker
or text only. ‘It is more appropriate and far better … for the Creator to
deal directly with the creature, and the creature directly with his/her
Creator.’ (Exx 15) Each day then ended with the participants meeting
in their local hubs to share their experience.
By the last day the participants had been thoroughly immersed in
nature, they had shared their sorrows, desires and discoveries in their small
groups, and they had been inspired to believe that change was possible. On
the afternoon of this day, as an exercitant can experience in the Fourth
Week, they were feeling hopeful and energized. They met specifically
to voice their intentions for action, either in their own behaviour or in
joining a body that acted for Earth. They were responding to the
unspoken question of Ignatius, what will you do now for the Body of
Christ, for Earth who is suffering and wounded? (compare Exx 53)
Besides the content and flow of the conference, another way in
which it was Ignatian and retreat-like was how it invited the participants
into a listening mode through their interaction in the hubs. These groups
were not for discussion—to find solutions, for instance—but offered
opportunities for each person to listen to his or her own heart and
speak from the heart without concern for judgment from the others. This
enabled them to become vulnerable to themselves and to others, sharing
their experience in nature and their response to the input. These were
listening groups, as spiritual direction can be, which allowed them to
hear the wisdom of the Spirit through each other. The hub facilitator
Laudato si’ and the Spiritual Exercises Revisited 95

had the vital role of guiding the group sharing so that people would feel
safe, and not become sidetracked into talking only from the head.
Overall, we organizers felt that the conference succeeded as we had
intended it to. The morning prayers set the right disposition, the speakers
had been heard in the heart, and the hub groups were indeed spaces
for deep listening and processing. The participants reported back in
ways that indicated an ecological conversion, a change of heart in their
relationship with Earth, a new found sense of having a place within a
community of like-minded people, and an increased determination and
passion to care for God’s gift of Earth.
Of the 170 registered participants, around 40 responded to a survey we
sent out after the conference, and their responses were most encouraging:
The contemplative process was powerful—enabled space for shared
reflections to be digested and touch one’s own experiences and longings.
I wanted to be educated and moved. Each successive day deepened my
understanding and clarity of how I can move forward practically.
The Hub experience is what brought it all together for me. Sharing/hearing
opinions, actions and reactions, was both encouraging and affirming. Just
brilliant!
[I now have] an informed mind and a converted heart on ecology saturated
with Ignatian spirituality to be and to do something significant.
[I have received] renewed enthusiasm and direction for action. A deepening
spiritual openness to the gift of God in creation.
[I intend] to add more actions to my home/personal regime, e.g. using a
soap saver; more thoughtfully collecting/reusing water; more rigorously
avoiding plastics, etc. I also would like to use some of the conference
materials, when they become available, to share with my local parish.
It was a conference that was like a retreat for me. I feel very grateful for
the experience.
I think the most valuable thing I will take away is a sense of hope—we
have an environment in crisis but we have a God who has not forsaken
us and passionate people here and around the world who are prepared to
learn how to live differently, to work towards solutions for change and
healing towards others, especially those on the margins most affected by
climate change and to our damaged earth!
96 Iain Radvan

The Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius are a remarkable tool for

transformation. Through them people have found healing and renewed
sense of identity and purpose in life in greater harmony with God. In
this model of the Exercises Peter Saunders has adapted the original
dynamic to draw participants into a process of conversion to Earth.
Drawn by God’s Spirit, the participants orientated themselves towards
Earth in love, Earth that is the Body of Christ. ‘The director should
give serious consideration to how he or she will adapt the Exercises in a
way that invites the exercitant to contemplate in the context of caring
for the earth.’ 9
A new website was set up after the conference providing access to
the full conference sessions, to the prayer sessions, the keynote speakers,
reflections, the spiritual exercises in nature, plus additional resources.
It can be accessed at: https://godinnature.org.au/. The organisers
acknowledge the tremendous professional work of Anthony Costa who
was our digital manager https://ministrydigitalmedia.com.au/. We also
acknowledge the elders of the First Peoples of Australia, past, present
and emerging, who for some 60,000 years have cared for the sacred
land and waters where this conference was hosted.

Iain Radvan SJ was ordained a Jesuit priest in 1994 and spent twenty years as a
chaplain and teacher. More recently he has moved into the ministry of spirituality,
facilitating retreats and giving spiritual direction and supervision. He gives the
Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius; his doctorate was on their transformative nature
for Jesuits. He is at present working at the Jesuit retreat centre in rural South
Australia (Sevenhill) and as the ecclesial assistant to the Christian Life Community
in Australia. His hobbies include gardening, bushwalking and cycling.

9
Saunders, ‘Laudato i’ and the Spiritual Exercises’, 128.
 The Spirit in Contemporary Culture

SYNODALITY AT WORK
Gerry O'Neill

If we want to speak of a synodal Church, we cannot remain satisfied with

appearances alone; we need content, means and structures that can facilitate
1
dialogue and interaction within the People of God ….

T HE GROWING DESIRE for the Church to be more synodal as it

journeys together as a sacrament of the Kingdom of God is a
wonderful opportunity for the Church to be energized and guided by
the wisdom of the magisterium and of the sensus fidei. In such a journey
together the Church lives in the creative tension generated by the
interface of conventional and subversive wisdom as it moves forward
in ways that remain faithful to our tradition while, at the same time,
finding creative ways to express the essence of that tradition; as the
evangelist puts it, ‘No one puts new wine into old wineskins; otherwise,
the wine will burst the skins, and the wine is lost, and so are the skins’
(Mark 2:22).
The concept of synodality comes from a Greek word—synodos
meaning to ‘journey together’. It is a somewhat cryptic term that is
associated only with Christianity. For this reason it is important that
those using the term are familiar with its meaning and its application
to the self-understanding and practice of the Church today. In the
mind of Pope Francis it is the way forward for the Church, and he
cautions the faithful that without its application the Church will, like a
fish, rot from the inside out.
Francis initially planted the seed of synodality in 2014 when he
told the Argentinian paper La Nación, ‘I was rapporteur of the 2001
Synod and there was a cardinal who told us what should be discussed
and what should not. That will not happen now.’ 2 The word synodality

1
Pope Francis, address for the opening of the Synod on Synodality (9 October 2021).
2
Joaquín Morales Solá, ‘Poder, política y reforma: a solas con Francisco’, La Nación (5 October 2014).

The W ay, 62/2 (A pril 2023), 97– 104

98 Gerry O'Neill

was not mentioned as such, but the path towards a more synodal
Church had been opened.
I would suggest that synodality is more poetic language for what is
termed collaboration or synergy in the secular world. The journeying
together that it depicts is a powerful metaphor for a pilgrim Church
and a community that is able to name challenges and opportunities, and
manage respectful, robust and creative dialogue around these matters.
It is a concept capturing the understanding that, in a fast moving and
complex world, communities need to exercise the talents of all people
to act creatively and with agility in order to respond most intelligently to
the demands of that world and the imperatives of their deepest
identities. Recalling the road to Emmaus story in Luke’s Gospel
(24:13–32), journeying together always includes the presence of God,
even though that presence is not always recognised. It is the brooding
presence of the Holy Spirit with us as we walk the path of true
discipleship which makes synodality a distinctively Christian concept.
I would like to offer here a simple framework to examine how we
might embrace greater synodality in different organizations, especially
Synodality at Work 99

workplaces, that espouse a Christian vision of reality and reach out to the
world as they continue the healing mission of Jesus in pursuit of that
vision. The framework offers an insight into how to develop a more
synodal approach within organizational cultures. The horizontal axis
refers to the level of psychological safety that people experience in their
workplace and the vertical axis refers to their level of engagement in
their work together.3 The journey towards greater synodality, in this
framework, is premised upon having more individuals who inhabit
quadrant three of the framework. It is the space of creative engagement
where new life and greater productivity will emerge. From a structural
point of view this would require that the horizontal axis moves
downwards and the vertical axis moves left so that more and more
people inhabit a space of safety, engagement and high creativity.

The Quadrants
It may be useful to view the four quadrants independently first, to see
where people are in the framework currently and to explore how greater
movement to quadrant three might best occur in an intentional and
planned fashion. It is important to note that it is unrealistic to think
that they will always remain in quadrant three. There needs to be some
movement between quadrants to ensure that everyone has opportunities
to contribute creatively to the organization and to build sustainability
into the work culture.
Quadrant One—Disengagement
Here people are experiencing both a lack of psychological safety and
low levels of engagement within the workplace. If this situation is not
addressed they may well leave the organization, or stay but remain a
drag on its success and their own well-being. Finding ways to encourage
engagement is really important. It may mean that, in the first instance,
work needs to be done on employee self-esteem. Most conflict in the
workplace emanates from poor self-esteem.4 Time spent on formation
and professional development activities may be particularly helpful for

3
On psychological safety see Amy C. Edmondson, The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological
Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth (Hoboken: John Wiley, 2019), xv: ‘In a
psychologically safe workplace, people are not hindered by interpersonal fear. They feel willing and
able to take the inherent interpersonal risks of candor.’
4
Loughlan Sofield and Carroll Juliano, Collaborative Ministry: Skills and Guidelines (Notre Dame: Ave
Maria, 1987), 109.
100 Gerry O'Neill

those in this quadrant. Such activities might include: a gift discernment

process; revisiting the organizational vision and building greater
understanding of and commitment to it; providing mentors who are
able to walk with them as they grow in confidence and competence in
more collaborative engagement. There is, of course, no guarantee that
everyone will move into the creative space but it is more likely to
occur if the organization helps make itself a more hospitable and valued
place for all.
Quadrant Two—Burnout
Employees in quadrant two represent a real challenge for any organization.
They experience low levels of trust and yet are highly engaged. In this
scenario their engagement is likely to be disruptive, serving neither
their own best interest nor the goals of the organization. Indeed, as the
level of safety declines for such staff it is likely that their dysfunctional
engagement will increase. This can lead to a vicious circle leading to
burnout. In this instance the pattern of engagement needs to be
influenced so that it becomes less negative for the individual and the
organization. The invitation to enter a more creative space will fall on
deaf ears if they do not feel safe. If their engagement can be transformed
into more constructive activities it may offer them a glimpse and
experience of belonging. This is a high energy group but its energy needs
to be aligned with both the vision and mission of the organization. The
key is to identify anyone who has entered quadrant two early so that
the goal of transformation remains realistic. If and when this happens,
it provides all colleagues with the assurance that their community is a
place of forgiveness and healing.
Leaders need to be alert to the role of the prophetic voice within a
Church organization. It is easy to label dissenting voices as negative
influences and characterize their input as quadrant-two behaviour, but
synodality needs its prophetic dimension which may emerge as robust
internal critique. Careful discernment is needed to distinguish between
negativity and loyal dissent, which has the capacity to speak honestly of
failings and yet offer the hope of new beginnings. It is the prospect
of hope and new life that distinguishes between true prophecy and a
false prophet who can only tear things down.
Quadrant Three—Creative Engagement
The main mistake made with quadrant three people is to take them for
granted. Employees who are creatively engaged with each other and their
Synodality at Work 101

organization need to be affirmed and valued for who they are and what
they do. Highly engaged, creative people will make mistakes. They are
better able to learn from their mistakes if their strengths and contribution
to the organization are recognised on a regular basis. This requires a
culture and leadership stance that routinely reinforces excellence.
If the number of employees in quadrant three falls too low it
presents a pressing problem. Too few staff are carrying the burden of
creativity and this becomes self-defeating if it continues for too long.
In this case, the organization may lose its most creative people or, even
more likely, they will unconsciously move into quadrants one or four in
an act of self-preservation. One way to plan against this happening is
to encourage quadrant three people to identify and mentor staff who
are ready to step into the creative quadrant.
Quadrant Four—Self-Interested Engagement
In some sense this is the most difficult quadrant to turn around. It is the
lowest-energy group and one of its main characteristics is self-absorption.
The little energy people do have is often focused inwards and not on
the vision or goals of the organization. It can lead to an organizational
orientation of maintenance over mission. When this situation takes hold
it may be recognised by a sense of entitlement, low energy levels, recurrent
conflicts and little capacity for generativity.
The leadership consultant Steven Covey tells the story of the
goose and the golden eggs to describe such circumstances. The goose
(organization) grows fat and unhealthy as it continues to feed itself at
the expense of its golden eggs—mission.5 Pope Francis makes
Goals are
a similar observation in his first publication as Pope: ‘I prefer a
achieved in an
Church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has
ongoing and
been out on the streets, rather than a Church which is
sustainable
unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own
security’.6 A truly effective organization will balance mission
fashion
ad intra with mission ad extra so that organizational goals are achieved
in an ongoing and sustainable fashion. More than this, the spirit of the
organization is echoed and finds expression in its apostolic activity
when outreach is motivated and sustained by a community that is
immersed in its own spiritual depth.

5
Steven Covey, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People: Restoring the Character Ethic (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1989), 52–54.
6
Pope Francis, Evangelii gaudium, n. 49.
 102 Gerry O'Neill

© pch vector

Attitudes, Knowledge and Skills

A key attitude in synodality is that all people count and have something
to contribute to the success of an organization. This understanding of
the human person’s need for agency is consistent with Christian
anthropology and the core value of subsidiarity. It is easy to agree with
this as a noble sentiment, but it is much harder to give it practical effect
in a busy work environment. The exclusion of many from important
conversations is often not an intentional decision but a lack of
understanding of the talents that reside among employees.
One way to overcome this organizational bias is to conduct regular
audits of staff profiles and of the different talents they bring to the
organization. In a mission setting this could take the form of a gift
discernment process based on a reading of 1 Corinthians 12:4–11 on
the variety and unity of gifts. Not only is this likely to unearth hidden
talents and affirm employees, but it carries the added bonus of enabling
leaders to invite participation in important conversations or projects
on the basis of talent rather than role or availability.
Self-knowledge is most important in the capacity to work maturely
and interdependently with others. If we are unaware of our own
limitations and prejudices it may be that we see those traits and
challenge them in others. In a more reflective culture there is much
more scope for greater self-awareness and consequently more capacity
for working collaboratively with others.
A deep knowledge of and commitment to the inner logic of the
organization is essential to move towards synodality. The response to
external opportunities and threats must be framed within the identity
of the organization itself so that authenticity is not trumped by
relevance. It is seductive to become a child of the times and, in so
doing, lose touch with one’s essential meaning. In the turbulence of
Synodality at Work 103

rapid change our tradition, founding stories and aspirational documents

anchor our stability and ground our growth. It is clear that sound
organizational formation is an important component in a community
that values both continuity and change.
Every form of social engagement demands discipline and specific
skills. Here are some of the skills required to support successful synodal
engagement. It is not an exhaustive list and other skills will emerge as
a community journeys together towards more creative engagement:
• empathic listening—an ability and willingness to listen to the
other with ears, eyes and heart, especially when views are being
put forward that are alien to one’s current thinking;
• speaking with boldness and a sense of humility—it is important
to speak with passion about important issues but also in the
realisation that a personal view is always limited and may be
enriched by different views;
• summarising—it is good to pause from time to time and
summarise what has been said; this provides an opportunity for
clarification, affirmation and capturing key points already made;
• synergizing—taking the time to see connections, patterns and
emerging innovation;
• direction—gauging the mood in the group and bringing it to
the surface; discerning the presence of God in what is being
said and proposed;
• revisiting the flame—integrating our ideas and decisions with
our deepest identity.

Letting Go
Letting go of old attitudes, knowledge and skills that may have served
us well for a long time is also a critical element in developing new ways
of being in the world. It is not easy. Scripture itself teaches us that
letting go of our image of messiahship and even our image of God are
important steps on our journey to a more mature, inclusive and intelligent
faith. Ironically, it is often in the letting go, when we feel most vulnerable,
that our faith deepens and matures. When Peter denies Jesus, saying, ‘I
do not know the man’, he is speaking a truth (Matthew 26:72–73). He
cannot know Jesus truly until after he has had time to reflect upon the
104 Gerry O'Neill

cross and resurrection. Only then is he able to lead the Church. Similarly,
it is very easy to deny synodality before one has fully experienced it or
come to understand its real power for problem-solving and creativity.
It may be useful to outline some things that need to be let go so
that synodality can flourish in our organizations. Again this is not an
exhaustive list but it may serve to whet the appetite for this important
conversation to take place.
• A leadership style that is grounded in control, not creativity: it
is important for designated leaders to share their vulnerability
and not knowing so that greater responsibility falls on the group.
• The comfort of certainty for the adventure of ambiguity: it is
more likely that creativity will emerge from active engagement
with tension rather than avoiding it for the comfort of the group.
• The belief that conflict is bad: it needs to be reframed as the
genesis of new life when it is confronted and managed well. Its
joint resolution also serves to build greater group cohesion.
• Agendas that place the most important questions under Any
Other Business: recognising and prioritising them is crucial.
• A sense of security in being right needs to be replaced with
security based in the confidence that together we can do this.
There is an old saying—a rut is a shallow grave. However, a rut can also
be a very comfortable place. Inertia sets in and the comfort of staying
put often overrides the motivation to get out of it. In the Roman
Catholic Church today the desire for change is becoming more powerful
than the comfort of staying put. We may have just reached a tipping
point. If we refuse the promptings of the Spirit for change at this time
and remain in the comfort of business as usual we may just be digging
our own grave.

Gerry O’Neill is formation manager for the St John of God Sisters in Perth,
Western Australia.
 Thinking Faith

IGNATIUS OF LOYOLA
Theology as a Way of Living
James Hanvey

T HERE HAVE BEEN MANY BOOKS written about Ignatius of Loyola

and many more about his Spiritual Exercises. Few have been written
about his theological vision. Hugo Rahner begins to open up this
dimension on Ignatius for contemporary students in the 1950s, yet Hans
Urs von Balthasar’s observation that Ignatius as a theologian has still to be
appreciated continues to be true. This is understandable, because Ignatius
is not a formal theologian. The Spiritual Exercises is a sort of practical,
experiential theology that leads to a converted and consecrated freedom
in action, not a treatise on Christology, ecclesiology, grace and nature. The
same is true for the Constitutions of the Society; and we can see how much
this theology is his life in Ignatius’ letters and Spiritual Diary. Everything
in these writings reveals an immanent living theology which is applied to
the realities of persons, places and circumstances. Hence, the danger
in trying to extract a formal theology lies in forgetting that it is a lived
theology first. However, the other danger is that we forget that Ignatius
has an objective vision which is tested within the tradition of the Church.
Neither the Spiritual Exercises nor his other writings sanction a pure
subjectivism, which is the danger in the contemporary vogue for
therapeutic spirituality. Here, strongly influenced by psychoanalytic
and person-centred practice, the subject’s self-referential experience is
the dominant hermeneutic. The risk in so much of the contemporary
‘spirituality industry’ is that it becomes secularised anthropology, whereas
Ignatius always offers an uncompromising ‘theology’. Understanding
this is important for correcting another misinterpretation of Ignatius,
namely, voluntarism. Where this has been part of Jesuit spirituality and
culture it has owed more to the prevailing rationalism and suspicion of
strongly affective and mystical dimensions of Ignatian spirituality than
it has to an authentic appropriation of the sources.
The Exercises and, indeed, the whole example of Ignatius’ life,
certainly expect the subject to spare nothing in the service of God and

The W ay, 62/2 (A pril 2023), 105–114

106 James Hanvey

God’s Kingdom, but this flows from an inexhaustible gratitude for what
one has received from the Divine Majesty at such cost. The determined
ordering of all one’s energies in the service of Christ, and the desire to
participate as completely as possible in the work of salvation, require a
disciplined asceticism of love for God and for neighbour, but this
‘freedom’ is far from the indifference of a stoic self-mastery, though it
may teeter on the brink of this distortion.
The subject’s life, the interior drama of desires and freedom, and
the struggle and the discipline of realities that both circumscribe us
and offer new possibilities are all present, but Ignatius sees them in
relation to God, who is actively present at their centre. The whole
work of the Exercises is to give us a new point from which to see the
world in all its astonishing diversity and, especially, to see the way in
which the Son is present in its midst, ‘labouring and working’ for its
healing. That work is to bring all things under the sovereignty of the
Divine Majesty so that all created things, and especially the glory of
God’s creation, the human person, can enjoy the plenitude of life.

God as the Source of Our Freedom to Be and to Act

In this sense, the world for Ignatius is radically theocentric. But it is
precisely because we are so completely and radically grounded in God,
‘Our Creator and Lord’ that, far from restricting or losing our freedom,
we come to possess it. In contrast with the many forms of freedom that
are offered to us, it is a freedom which allows us to be ‘disposed’ in the
redemptive work of Christ and the building of the Kingdom. Such
freedom comes through our search and desire for it, but it is always a
gift. It is not the freedom of the autonomous, self-made and self-making
individual of contemporary culture. It is not the liberation of the
Enlightenment or modernity or even postmodernity.
Rather, it is a freedom which can only be discovered in relationship
of ‘handing over’, of precisely not belonging to self but living in and
through the other who is Christ and the ‘other’ that we discover in the
form of a world that needs to be healed—this incarnate, redemptively
active Christ who is ‘in’ our world.1 It is signalled at the very beginning

1
See Galatians 5: 1, 13–24 which is critical for understanding the freedom sought in the Spiritual
Exercises. It is a freedom which comes as a ‘grace’ and is the work of the Spirit signifying the new life
of Christ. It is a creative, generative freedom, ordered to the works of love, especially the service of
neighbour. Notice, too, how for Paul it becomes the touchstone for discernment. The Pauline criteria also
help us to correct what might be a tendency to see the effects of consolation and desolation largely in terms
Ignatius of Loyola 107

of the Spiritual Exercises in the notes or annotations, where the idea of

a ‘retreat’—a withdrawal and seclusion—is the material expression of our
desire to gain favour in the sight of the Divine Majesty, that we may be
more disposed to service of our Creator, and be united with Him (Exx 20).2
In the Principle and Foundation, the grace of this relational freedom
is also described as an active grace which encompasses every aspect
and circumstance of our life (Exx 23). It becomes an unchanging prayer
which orientates every prayer of the Spiritual Exercises: the exercitant
prays that all his or her ‘intentions, actions and operations may be
purely ordered to the praise and reverence of His Divine Majesty’ (Exx
46). It is a stunningly simple but profound prayer. It is the prayer of our
whole life, placing us under the sovereignty of God and His Kingdom.
None of this excludes the rich insights into the dynamics of the human
psyche and our relationships which are illuminated in the contemporary
human sciences. It does mean, however, that we come to understand
ourselves and our world—social and material—through God, not apart
from God. Implicitly, therefore, Ignatius will always challenge our latent
or implicit secularisation. This is why, though the Ignatian vision and
practice has an extraordinary freedom to engage with the whole of human
reality, it needs always to be vigilant and rooted—in affect, intellect and
acts—in God (Exx 237). Without this groundedness, even the gift of
freedom becomes the occasion of a conversion to the secular, that is,
the world in which I am the centre, that I endeavour to create either
without reference to God or where I use God to legitimate my creation.3
I think Ignatius learnt this in his experience at Loyola during his
convalescence, when he began to understand the captivity and allure
of worldly dreams. It would have been easy to ‘baptize’ them but not
fundamentally change them in a neat transference from the earthly to
the heavenly King. Alert to this danger, he discovered the evangelical
tools of service in the rules for discernment, especially of the Second
Week of the Exercises, and the profound, searching examination and
call of the third mode of humility, which should surely be the interior

of the interior life of the individual. Paul makes it clear that the ‘fruits’ of desolation and consolation
often go beyond our own individual inner life to have consequences on the community and the life-giving
potential of our relationships. There is also recognition of the problem of ‘freedom’ and especially of
its works within the Exercises. This has to do with disputes with Protestantism (compare Exx 369).
2
Note the progressive deepening of the movement described. This threefold pattern of the grace desired,
which is ultimately the grace of being with Christ in his redemptive work, is repeated in several different
forms in the course of the Exercises: Exx 95–98, 104, 135 following and especially 147 and 165 following.
3
Compare the Parable of the Three Classes of Men, Exx 149 following.
 108 James Hanvey

norm of every member of the Society and the touchstone of the daily
Examen (Exx 136–148, 165–168). These exercises embody a deep and
constant inscription of the way of Christ that shapes our actions as
well as our desires. In them, the meaning and the form of power is
transformed. They describe the strange new world of God’s activity,
not ours; each day they teach us about the apocalyptic struggle for the
Kingdom and the true nature of Christ’s Lordship.
Ignatius gives us the means of living in a world in which God
‘labours and works’ for our salvation, upholding it and working for its
good.4 The source of our action is not a naive, humanistic optimism
but a profound, Christian realism. What these tools give us is
A theology that not a scholastic or academic theology; it is not a theory, but
is lived and a theology that is lived and experienced. In this sense, too,
experienced our theology becomes a daily action, shaping and making our
lives. The ‘lived theology’ of Ignatius is our living the reality of the
Incarnate and Resurrected life in our history.
In this sense it is, of course, the active life of the Holy Spirit. Indeed, the
dynamic and open horizon of Ignatius’ vision of the world and the desire
to be sent into it is a profound experience of the Spirit and its mission to
reconcile all things in Christ (Colossians 1:13–20). In this way, Ignatius’
lived theology is the grace of entering into the dynamic salvific economy
of the Triune God; our learning to live in and express the Amor Amans—
the Love Loving—that is God’s self. This is the heart of the apostolic life.

Prosaic Language and the Mysticism of Experience

The writings of Ignatius betray little poetry or rhetoric. They do not have
the intellectual fluency of a speculative theologian, the engaging personal
élan of a Teresa, or the ‘lámparas de fuego’ (lamps of fire) that one catches
even in John of the Cross’s theological commentary on his poetry. For
Ignatius, language itself is not the experience; it is merely an instrument to
communicate reality. Ignatius does not offer us a literary mysticism. There is
no esoteric vocabulary which only the initiated can decipher and interpret.

4
Exx 237. This is a description of the activity of the salvific economy by which God’s providence is
understood as the outpouring of his Love—a Love which is now seen to have the form of Christ. The
attributes of God—justice, goodness, mercy—are understood as real acts in creation, and therefore
manifestations of the Kingdom. Through the grace of the union of service and companionship we are
also enabled to participate in these attributes and make them our actions. It is part of the ‘realised
eschatology’ that belongs to the Exercises and allows us to see that Jerónimo Nadal’s gloss on Jesuits
as ‘contemplatives in action’ might be better understood within this scriptural category rather than as
an attempt to reconcile the active and contemplative forms of religious life.
Ignatius of Loyola 109

Ignatius is not a fluent writer but it is not only this: he knows

words can excite and draw us into their own world. They have a
special resonance and weight but only because they are firmly rooted
in a vivid and normative experience. So we find an oddly limited and
repetitive vocabulary that is worth attending to in two ways: first, it is
ostensive, in the sense that it points to an experience; it names the
theological-spiritual landscape that Ignatius knew and mapped. It strives
after a minimalist accuracy, partly out of respect for the reality, and
party not to draw attention to itself.
Second, it is always concrete and grounded. It names, locates and
orientates us whenever we encounter it. In its own way, it is the language
of sincerity and directness—there is no rhetorical dissimulation—and,
paradoxically, its combination of minimalism and concreteness, precisely
because it disciplines speculation and description, produces a sense of
dynamism and encounter. It is essentially a language of living relations
and processes, a language of the heart’s deepest desires and the intellect’s
ordering of them into expressive, incarnated truth. In the sparest way, it
expresses the engagement of the whole person situated in the external
and interior worlds.
Its restraint also serves another purpose: it creates space for us. It
allows us to make these words our own through the experiences and
relationships they direct us to and allow us to have. It is not that
Ignatius is only ‘a tongue-tied mystic’; he uses language to point us to
the concrete reality of encounter from which language should not distract
and with which it should not create its own relationship. His words are
not the words of a narcissistic author which direct us back to the authorial
centre and control. They are governed by an apostolic pedagogy. Ignatius
gives us our freedom; his words do not take us over and they always
open up the experience, they allow us to re-encounter it, they never
substitute for it. The words are always a means, never an end.
I think a clue is given in instruction to the director in the Spiritual
Exercises. His or her task is to test the truth and facilitate it but not
get in the way, not draw attention to him- or herself (Exx 15). This
creates a new style in which the speaker is only a facilitator. From it we
learn how to make language itself an apostolic instrument rather than a
rhetorical display. This may help us understand why reading Ignatius is
an odd experience. The imagery is spare, direct, clear, concentrated
and strong. It is rarely abstract and always personal. The habitual ways
in which Ignatius speaks of God—‘The Divine Majesty’, ‘The Creator
110 James Hanvey

and Lord’, ‘The Eternal King’, ‘The Divine Goodness’—are not primarily
metaphysical titles or abstract categories. They are the linguistic sites
of a personal relationship, the fountains of an ever-present, experiential
encounter. Such spare language and imagery remain remarkably
consistent in all his writings and we can glimpse its glowing affective
intensity in texts such as Ignatius’ Spiritual Diary. We find it again in the
Constitutions, where we stumble over language which is so familiar from
the Spiritual Exercises but well embedded into their baroque structure.
We could easily dismiss this as some sort of automatic linguistic
piety or genuflection. It is not, however, a naïve language but one that
is personal and self-aware; it is performative. When we come across
those titles of ‘The Creator and Lord’, the ‘Divine Majesty’ etc., or we
are invited to consider things before this God whom we have come to
know in such names, the language serves to locate us in an experience.
We are reminded and relocated within the fundamental orientations of
our life of service. The primary relationship from which we live is
invoked. We are called to integrity of decision and action by being made
accountable to the God we meet in the relationship of redemption and
salvation. In other words, it is a language of accountability before the
King in whose service we are enlisted.
Such a complex text as the Constitutions is dynamic and experiential.
It lives out in its structure the preparatory prayer of the Exercises; it is
always orientating itself to God. Having mapped out the place where
we should be—in discernment with our superiors, in our studies, building
up the unity of the Body and so on—it invites us ‘to keep always before
us, first, God’.5 What it discloses is a way of seeing the world and God’s
action in it that is at first curious until we understand what it is
attempting to do. We can stumble over images which clearly come out
of a pious, religious, medieval imagination, but we are not on some
quaint, historical tour. Rather, we find ourselves in a dynamic world of
creative process and drama; the words and the structures are all struggling
to do justice to the God who is salvifically active in all things; who has
summoned us into his world, the energy and kairos of the gospel. In
this sense, we inhabit a landscape that is both old and completely
modern in its breadth and conceptuality. In other words, as we have
already observed but now grasp in his characteristic voice, Ignatius is
alive to the luminous energy of the Divine economy.

5
Formula of the Institute, n.1.
Ignatius of Loyola 111

Some Key Themes

There are many aspects of Ignatius’ vision and practice that merit close
study. His understanding of the Trinity or the Incarnation, the struggle
of the Kingdom of the Enemy and the Kingdom of Christ, or the Rules
for Thinking with the Church, have in various ways received attention.
It would require much greater scope than this limited essay affords to
treat these themes and others as they deserve.
There is one aspect, though, which has not received much attention,
yet in part it may account for the modernity of Ignatius’s thought. It is
the extraordinary relational way of thinking and seeing that marks the
Ignatian vision; the refusal to distort these into some logical form or
process and the determination to try to comprehend the vitality of our
interconnectedness. It is a wisdom but it is not detached. Rather it is an
‘active wisdom’ that is alive both to the unity and the creative diversity of
our relational realities. This relational way of seeing things is undoubtedly
grounded in his own mystical experience of a Trinitarian God: a God who
chooses to be intimately related to the world as both Creator and Lord.
The relational structure of Ignatius’ theology is immediately apparent in
the Spiritual Exercises, the Spiritual Diary, the letters and the Constitutions,
even when parts may have been written by his secretary, Polanco.
The human person is never considered except in and through a nexus
of relationships. We are never allowed to stand outside these relationships
on our own; there is no sovereign self, exercising a contemplative grasp of
the whole from some vantage point outside the material, historical and
existential process of life. Indeed, it is part of the illusion of sin to think
that we can exercise such independence. In fact, Ignatius understands that
sin is itself a web in which we are caught whether it be in the primal
© freepik
112 James Hanvey

history of the fall of the angels or in the active malignity of evil that
seeks to delude and ensnare us, ‘so that no province, no place, no state
of life, no individual is overlooked’ (Exx 50, 141).
This is not just a colourful medieval mystery play in which we are
given a part. It is an engagement with the mysterium inquitatis that cannot
be reduced to a projection of our own subjective woundedness. We can
only begin to understand the extent of our entrapment—epistemological
as well as psychological and existential—when we allow ourselves to stand
in our relationship to Christ. Christ suddenly casts a light that exposes
the way in which evil spins its own relational reality; it has a history, it
creates its own determining structures from which we cannot break by our
own strength or intelligence. In this, Ignatius takes us into the apocalyptic
understanding of the gospel, but he never allows us to stand lost outside
the saving relationship with Jesus, our Saviour and Lord. It is a mark of
our healing when we come to appreciate the truth of our dependence, our
connectedness. But this connectedness is a living experience of being
sustained and cared for, of being upheld and carried even when I want to
deny or break away from this truth. Our ‘conversion’ is one of mind and will
when we come to understand all creation—natural and supernatural—
‘interceding … for me’ (Exx 60). That action of intercession is not a
trivial act—it is the movement of life itself, of being which expresses its
goodness in this act of life-giving generosity even when I wound it.
What Ignatius opens up for us is the unity between the act of creation
and redemption and the gift or grace of participation. He invites us to
understand our connectedness as gift and through that to express our
own restored connectedness in gratitude—which is a loving reverence
and self-gift. That work of intercession belongs to all created things in
their goodness but it also discloses that it is a profoundly relational
mark of being itself. Even more than this, it participates in the salvific
economy of the Triune Life. It locates me in a community: it is the
community of creation and also of the Church—the concrete community
in which I live in history, but the community that also intercedes
and carries me—the ecclesia of the heavenly court that also ‘labours and
works’ for my salvation and the restoration of creation. There is an
intimate and profound communio here between the Church and creation
which is discovered in their salvific mission and being.6

6
Added to the Exercises are the Rules for Thinking with the Church, and their controversial test
(Exx 365), ‘What seems to me white, I will believe black if the hierarchical Church so defines ….’
Ignatius of Loyola 113

When I begin to understand and sense that this grace lives in all
things, then I am ordered in a joyous self-emptying of loving service to
the world. Already, I have begun to see that at the heart of all these
relations is Christ. To follow Him is not to leave the world, but to enter
more completely and intensely into its life, its woundedness, its struggle
against emptiness, falsehood and death. To step into this new world of
relationship and commit myself to it is not to restrict my freedom but to
discover it. But it is only discovered in and through the Person of Christ.
Again, this is no abstract or theoretical relationship or possibility,
but one that is real, concrete, personal and immediate. The relationship
that I am called to is that of ‘companion’; it is one of love that ‘labours
and works’ with Him to restore all the broken relationships which prevent
life. It is not an exaggeration to say that the whole of what Ignatius
(and the Society of Jesus) understands by mission—notwithstanding
the ocean of words that has been expended upon the theme—is
contained in the Gospel of John:
For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that
everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal
life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn
the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.
(John 3:16–17)

It is because we live that experience of Love and are drawn into it

through our relationship with the Son that we become the bearers of
the message of life to the world in the words and deeds given us by the
Spirit, who is the Lord and Giver of Life. Indeed, for Ignatius our
whole life is to be sent, to participate in this mission of the Spirit. It is
the Spirit that is at the heart of all our relationships and orders them in
this dynamic of reciprocity—the response we make to God’s self-gift
in our ‘take and receive all’ (Exx 234).

Clearly these ‘rules’ arise out of the controversies of the time, especially around Protestantism. In
emphasizing the Hierarchical Church as the ultimate arbiter of truth the Exercises intend us to
understand our relational indebtedness within the economy of grace. It is important to see that these
rules are about maintaining an undivided Kingdom and an undivided Church. The obedience is not
just to a hierarchy but to ‘Christ our Lord’ and ‘the one Spirit’ who hold sway ‘for the salvation of
souls’. But one should not simply read the Spiritual Exercises within this historical context alone.
Within the text, there is clearly an integrated sense of the communio of being—part of the restoration
which Christ brings about as Head of Creation. An Ignatian understanding of the Church has also to
see it with the communio of being, integral to the mediation of the redeemed and sanctified life. In this
sense, Christ as head of His Church and of Creation is also the active Truth which informs the whole
economy. Christ has epistemological importance and our companionship with Him has epistemological
significance for us, which is not only worked out in terms of the created world and ecclesiology.
114 James Hanvey

The final great active moment in which Ignatius asks us to find

ourselves is the Contemplation to Attain Love at the end of the Exercises
(Exx 230 following). It is not contemplation in the sense of an intellectual
exercise; it is a performative act of loving self-gift. Only in that offering,
in which we are both giving and being given being—the graced indwelling
kenosis of the Spirit of Love (John 14:21, 15:8–17)—can we really
experience the life that is God’s life, the life that is the life of all life.
Yet the Contemplation to Attain Love is not only the end to which
all our Exercises have been leading, it is also the daily reality in
which we live. There is a sense in Ignatius, something we have learnt
through the Exercises, that to live in this God, to be taken in God’s
mission to the world, is also to go on growing. Indeed, there is a
relationship between our practice of the ministry and works of God’s
love in the world and the deepening of our capacity to receive this life
in ourselves. Here, living this grace increases our capacity and aptitude
for it and there is no limit to this growth. With this comes a growth in our
ability to judge or discern things correctly because we come to see them
more and more in relation to God and God’s salvific plan. Our mind
and heart become healed and our will becomes strengthened and attuned
to do what is right—what generates that new life of the Kingdom.
Love ‘sets things in order’; in loving we come to develop a ‘compassio’
with the things of God.7 This is the source and shape of our mission and
the gift of discernment. We have already indicated the relational nature
of wisdom in Ignatius, but now we can recognise that it comes as gift of
the Spirit active in our lives: not just understanding but of knowing
how to love. It is the Spirit, the astonishing grace-filled generosity of
God, that continues to pour into our hearts (Romans 5:5).
So, Ignatius understands that theology is this: not a speculative
endeavour of the intellect but a life that lives in Christ; a love that
comes to be—in deeds and not words—for the life of the world.


James Hanvey SJ has been head of the theology department at Heythrop College
and director of the Heythrop Institute for Religion, Ethics and Public Life. He
was master of Campion Hall, Oxford, from 2013 to 2018. He is now the Secretary
for the Service of Faith and also visiting professor at the Gregorian University.

7
Ignatius’ sense of this finds more formal theological expression in St Thomas Aquinas, who says
from the habit of charity the spiritual man will have a sense of what is a right judgement, what is in
accordance with God’s salvific purpose. See Summa theologiae 2. 2 q. 60. 1. a. 2; also, 2. 2, q. 45, a. 2c.
 BULLETIN

Bishop Rolando Álvarez: Prophetic Voice of Latin America Today

On 10 February this year, Monsignor Rolando José Álvarez Lagos, bishop
of the diocese of Matagalpa and apostolic administrator of the diocese of
Estelí, was condemned to a 26-year, 4-month prison sentence in
Nicaragua. He has been a prophetic voice against the regime of President
Daniel Ortega, who has governed the country for more than two
decades. The sentence against the bishop was rejected by the bishops
of Latin America and the European Parliament. In the same way, Pope
Francis and the president of the Episcopal Conferences of the European
Community, Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich, expressed pain and concern
for the situation in the country.
What is happening in Nicaragua? From 2018, the government has
kept 206 people in prison, victims of cruel and inhuman torture; this is
recognised as a political crime by the European Parliament. Among them
was Bishop Rolando Álvarez, who was detained on 19 August 2022
under house arrest, which impeded him from leaving his residence. The
bishop was accused by the national police of propagating fake news
and organizing violent groups to destabilise the state of Nicaragua.
This was a false accusation without evidence. For this reason, since 9
September 2022, the parliament has condemned the detention of members
of the Roman Catholic Church in Nicaragua and has demanded his
immediate liberation. The European Parliament demanded full respect
for freedom of expression, religion and belief and denounced the arbitrary
detention of Bishop Rolando Álvarez. In spite of this the judicial
process against the bishop continued.
The detention of Bishop Rolando Álvarez took place in the context
of the repression of the defenders of human rights, journalists, farmers
and students who had expressed disagreement with the government of
President Daniel Ortega. At the same time, the Nicaraguan government
has used the judicial system to repress and limit respect for the democratic
spaces of the country. Among other actions, the government expelled
the apostolic nuncio, Monsignor Waldemar Stanisław Sommertag, on 6
March 2022 along with eighteen religious of the order of the Missionaries
of Charity founded by Mother Theresa of Calcutta. Additionally, the
Nicaraguan authorities closed new Catholic Radio stations, withdrew
116
 Bulletin

Catholic subscription news channels, and prevented processions and

pilgrimages. The detention of Bishop Rolando Álvarez, victim of an
anti-democratic government, brings to light the hundreds of victims
who, like him, suffer persecution in the defence of the life and liberty of
all the sons and daughters of God. This sentence puts the Latin American
Church once again on the side of those persecuted for wanting to
construct a better country and a better society.1
Luis Orlando Pérez Jiménez SJ
© Ramirez 22 nic at Wikimedia Commons

Monsignor Rolando José Álvarez Lagos

1
Sources: ‘Nicaragua. Monseñor Rolando Álvarez enviado a juicio’, Vatican News (10 January 2023);
‘Nicaragua. Obispo Rolando Álvarez condenado a 26 años de prisión’, Vatican News (11 February
2023); ‘Moseñor Rolando Álvarez’, ADN Celam, at https://adn.celam.org/tag/monsenor-rolando-alvarez/;
‘Nicaragua: el Parlamento Europeo reclama la liberación inmediata del obispo Rolando Álvarez’, Noticias
Parlamento Europeo (15 September 2022).
 RECENT BOOKS

Robert R. Marsh, Imagination, Discernment and Spiritual Direction

(Oxford: Way Books, 2023). 978 0 9047 1752 6, pp.114, £10.

Rob Marsh has been a leading light in the

Ignatian spirituality movement in the United
Kingdom over the past decades. His work has
been a hidden labour of love. Through this
collection that labour will bear lasting fruit. It will
be of interest to spiritual directors, those who
have made the Spiritual Exercises or anyone
who seeks to deepen his or her understanding
of discernment. If one were to describe the
overall intention of Rob’s work it would be to
recover our awareness of the personhood of
God in human experience. Such an awareness
has been obstructed by the emphasis of
modernity upon individualism, scepticism, the supremacy of human action
and the faithless split between public and private spheres.
It was at the origins of modernity that St Ignatius sought to rectify this
distortion through an approach to discernment that, rather than cultivating
introspection and self-reliance, placed the human being face to face with
God. His insight is recorded succinctly in the 75th Annotation of the Spiritual
Exercises, which is the touchstone of this collection of essays. St Ignatius
invites the one making the Exercises to consider how God is looking at
him or her. We begin prayer, discernment and spiritual direction by letting
God look upon us face to face and allowing ourselves to be moved by God’s
personhood.
While some describe discernment as an art and others as a science, Rob
would undoubtedly call it both. His nuanced, relational approach encourages
the director and directee to discover the seams of human experience in
which God’s dynamic personhood is most active. It can be summed up by his
well-proven maxim: ‘Stay with the movement, avoid the counter-movement’
(20). Just as the structure of the Ignatian hour of prayer enfolds an encounter
with the Lord, so too does the hour of accompaniment foster the same
encounter. Its effectiveness depends on the faith of the director. As Rob
comments on the formation of spiritual directors: ‘Our first goal in teaching
118 Recent Books

is, then, to get our trainees to believe that God is real’ (79). With this
disposition, and an appropriate framework, and focus the time of spiritual
conversation can become a living encounter with the Lord.
The selection of essays provides the reader with a rich panorama of the
spiritual life. In one Rob uses the film American Beauty to illustrate Ignatius’
trust that God could be relied upon to transform even the messiness of
human desire: ‘Ignatius learned to trust attraction enough to let it be the
place where God continued to create him’(12). In another he offers a parody
of C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters, in which the eponymous anti-hero—a
devil with an administrative position in Hell—instructs his nephew how to
incite pride in the spiritual dryness that characterizes Lent instead of delight
in God’s mercy: ‘It will let her feel she is following in the Enemy’s own
peculiar footsteps but with a little care she won’t spend much time thinking
about Him at all’ (55). The eloquent range of Rob’s cultural reference is
not mere coincidence, for he detects in the background noise of our culture
a yearning for the presence of God he seeks to incorporate in our awareness.
Imagination is the theme that brings together the essays. Actively it
creates a bridge between ourselves and God’s personhood in our human
experience, passively what has been imagined comes to move and affect us:
‘Our participation in imagined reality influences who we are and how we
choose to create and chose to act’ (94). It is one of the sites where the
movements that we receive as a consequence of God’s personhood can be
experienced. Although Rob does not look towards the future, he has
commented elsewhere that, rather than an ideological project or a social
vision, the pathway to salvation is discernment. The imagination is surely
the place where that God’s plan for us will be realised, if only we are able to
trust what God is evoking and dispose ourselves to receiving and being
transformed by what we discover.
The final essay brings together the themes of virtual reality, ecology and
angels. It narrates an experience in which Rob visited a battleground in
Montana, where an indigenous tribe surrendered to their pursuers after a
long flight from their homeland. Before knowing this history he attends to
the spirit of the place. He invites us to become reverent before such
experiences, since the movements created by that spirit are evoked by the
personhood of God, and in spite of modernity’s discouragement:

How do I place my feet upon this prairie? How can we know what to do? How
can we have the will to do it? Only by listening slowly to the heart; only by
waiting on the whispers of angels; only by standing still and vulnerable, long
enough to be touched by the spirit of the place. (98)
Recent Books 119

This is a sentiment echoed by his friend and colleague Paul Nicholson

in the foreword when he says that the essays in the collection invite us ‘to
stand still, and vulnerable, in that place where the work of the Spirit of
God can be recognised and a response given’ (xx). In helping us to recover
the personhood of God, this hidden labour of love will bear fruit not just
for each one of us but for the Church and the world.
Philip Harrison SJ

Imagination, Discernment and Spiritual Direction may be purchased from the Way Ignatian Book
Service. Please go to https://www.theway.org.uk/bookservice, or contact the editorial office.

José Maria R. Olaizola, Dancing with Loneliness (Dublin: Messenger,

2023). 987 1 7881 2624 3, pp.160, £11.95.

The author of this perceptive and at times

moving book, José Maria R. Olaizola, is head of
institutional communications for the Society
of Jesus in Spain. He is a prolific writer; a
recent listing of his publications catalogues 23
titles to his name—all in his native Spanish.
Now, written with equal fluency, comes his first
book in English. (There is no suggestion that a
translator has been at work.) Many of us are
conditioned by texts reflecting a dominant
Anglo-American culture and for us this fresh
voice from the Hispanic world will be wholly
welcome. That said, some of the appeals made
in these pages to assumptions widely held in Spain will escape readers
elsewhere. ‘Not every Asturian is affable’, writes Olaizola opaquely (97).
The book, with its upbeat title, characteristically begins in song. The
Spanish singer Joaquín Sabina invokes ‘that untimely lover called the loneliness’
(13). There is, it seems, something unwelcome yet yearned for in the
experience of loneliness, a condition that is universal, yet each is lonely in
his or her own way. Olaizola does not underestimate the magnitude and
complexity of the task he has taken on in setting out to capture the essence
of such a paradoxical dimension of our humanity.
Much has been written about loneliness—if more memorably in poetry
than in prose—and we wonder whether this book will have anything new
to say to us. It does. Olaizola uses the hallowed image of the dance as a
metaphor for our human interaction. Equally effective is his frequent reference
120 Recent Books

to scenes from films to make his point. Olaizola is a sociologist who well
understands the social determinants that shape our experience of loneliness
in all its guises.
Four parts provide a loose framework for Olaizola’s reflections. In a text
that, so to speak, plays tunes, this structure is best seen as a symphony in
four movements. Part one maps ‘The Human Archipelago’—the chain of
islands, separate but interconnected, that makes us who we are. An early
chapter entitled ‘Anything for a Cuddle’ engages head-on with the perception
that no life is lonelier than that of the celibate. To which common assertion
Olaizola’s response is a robust ‘complete nonsense’ (19). Here is a writer
who does not duck the difficult.
In part two Olaizola probes the reasons for our loneliness. In doing so
he acknowledges his debt to the prophetic figure of Zygmunt Bauman, who
has taught us to see how today we all live in a ‘liquid society’. Lost in
cyberspace, we must ask whether the addictive power of social media relieves
or exacerbates our loneliness. Many in our time have learned that instant
communication forbids rather than fosters deep and lasting relationships.
Not least for children, Olaizola suggests, smartphones are less of a blessing
than a bane.
Part three of this study, entitled ‘Tango for One’, invites the reader to
see how the Gospels touch on different types of loneliness and to recognise—
and experience—the transformative nature of the meetings with Jesus
recorded by the gospel writers. Olaizola is steeped in the Ignatian tradition
and, drawing on that deep well, his comments on the narrative of the
Prodigal Son—a lonely lad if ever there was one—are very powerful.
The fourth and final part of Dancing with Loneliness invites us to seek
for the manner of relationships by which we may be led from loneliness
‘into a graceful dance’ (127). Five elements are seen as essential to that
transformation: gratuitousness, generosity, acceptance, freedom and perspective.
Each of these elements Olaizola discusses in turn, though he recognises
that teasing them apart is an artificial exercise; for they are all one, all
aspects of love, ‘which is what we’re really talking about’ (117).
Reading a book on your own is necessarily a solitary experience. A book
about loneliness, even a book with as many nuggets of wisdom as this one,
is no cure for loneliness if read all by yourself. Dancing with Loneliness comes
over as a text best read together—a good choice perhaps for a parish reading
group. Such a group might reflect on a question that surprisingly goes
unasked in a book published very recently. What are we to say about the
COVID-19 pandemic and the consequent scourge of loneliness that befell us?
John Pridmore
Recent Books 121

Social Justice and the Sacred: Exploring the Thought of St Alberto Hurtado SJ,
edited by Scott FitzGibbon, John Gavin and Fernanda Soza (Philadelphia:
St Joseph's U, 2021). 978 0 9161 0109 1, pp.212, $35.00.

In the English-speaking world, the Chilean Jesuit

saint Alberto Hurtado is perhaps best known
for founding Hogar de Cristo, that ‘Home of
Christ’ which has become an extensive network
of social services for the poor in Latin America.
However, that work was but one of his many
creative pastoral responses to acute social
problems in Chilean society in the first part of the
twentieth century. This new collection of essays
from St Joseph’s University Press sheds light
on the range of bold apostolic ventures realised
by Hurtado. It also demonstrates, as its title
felicitously indicates, the deep experience of God
that guided Hurtado in everything he did. Indeed, the sacred and the work
for social justice were not two distinct realities for this Jesuit, but one
harmonious and dynamic movement that compelled him to work tirelessly
for the gospel.
This collection situates the reader with a biographical summary of
Hurtado’s life and a fine collection of photographs of him. Each of the
chapters, written by scholars familiar with the vast collection of his extant
writings, presents fascinating studies of the man from many different
perspectives. In addition, much-needed historical context is provided to
understand the particular situation of Chilean society in the first half of the
twentieth century.
Taken as a whole, the book offers a clear portrait of Hurtado’s years of
Jesuit formation, his doctoral study in education and his lifelong concern for
workers, youth and the poor. Across these essays, a common theme emerges.
Each author seems to have been impressed by the sheer volume of the work
accomplished by Hurtado in a life that was cut short at the age of 51 by
pancreatic cancer: eleven books published in sixteen years, the founding of
the journal Mensaje, the organization of a labour movement (ASICH) that
would introduce Catholic principles on issues of labour and, of course, the
social work for the poor, Hogar de Cristo. All of this was in addition to his
teaching, retreat work and ministry as a priest.
On that last topic, one of the most central to Hurtado’s identity, it is
fascinating to discover that the Chilean Jesuit understood the priesthood as
a ministry of concern. For Hurtado, the priest engages in ministry because
122 Recent Books

he finds himself gripped by a holy discontent. Indeed, Hurtado appears in

these pages as a prophetic figure compelled, even tormented, by God to
work tirelessly for the poor. And this came at no small cost to him. As the
prophets were before him, the reader will discover that in his own home—
his Jesuit home—he was often ridiculed for how he lived his Jesuit life.
In some ways, Hurtado seems to have been ahead of his time, and many of
the essays in this collection seek to comprehend in what way he may have
been a forerunner of the social justice movement and the preferential option
for the poor, the two central concerns that characterized the Latin American
Church after the Second Vatican Council. In one such study, his thought
is analyzed to see in what ways he himself moved from a rather individualistic
conception of charity into a wider, more expansive understanding of the work
for social justice.
Another intriguing perspective, all the while recognising that Hurtado was
formed as a Jesuit at the very crossroads of theological developments, is
that he exemplifies an ‘integrated Christianity’. Such a perspective seems
to allow the fullness of the man to emerge since his life was marked by his
reception of the sacraments, his faithfulness to his religious vows, his deep
personal prayer, his priesthood and the work for social justice. Perhaps an
even stronger perspective is offered by Hurtado himself. For the Chilean
Jesuit, the great apostle is not the activist, but the one who knows Christ
intimately, knows the gospel, and knows the men and women to whom
Christ’s message will go.
The pages of these essays trace that intimate knowledge of Christ and
of Chilean society that guided Hurtado, and perhaps it is this point that
they leave the reader to consider all that there is yet to know and understand
about this great Jesuit saint. For example, these fine essays invite further
study of his theology of work, his understanding of issues of labour, and
his profound reflection on poverty. In addition, further exploration of his
understanding and praxis of the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius of Loyola
would be most welcome since that great Ignatian text, though surprisingly
never mentioned in these essays, hovers in the background of all of them.
Such a study would further the scholarship on Hurtado and help all of us
integrate—as he did—the work for social justice with a felt sense of God’s
presence.
Christopher Stabb SJ
Recent Books 123

Christopher Jamison, Finding the Language of Grace: Rediscovering

Transcendence (London: Bloomsbury, 2022). 978 1 3994 0271 2, pp.160,
£14.99.

BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week began this year

with a programme on ‘awe’. There was some
surprise that people have an experience of awe,
of ‘being amazed at things outside yourself’
two or three times per week.1 That said, this
surprise wasn’t taken any further in considering
the source or meaning of these experiences,
noting only their effects: a greater ‘oneness
with others’, a lessening of the ego and a sense
of mystery in the face of the universe. The
discussion revealed something of the challenge
that Christopher Jamison’s book tries to
address:
Public language today has a focus that is almost exclusively commercial and
practical: used to sell us something or to persuade us of something or to increase
our technical understanding. This transactional language can engulf us so
completely that many people find it difficult to speak publicly about the ultimate
but mysterious dimensions of life …. The challenge is to revitalize the language
of transcendence for our present time. (2)

Jamison suggests that the original language of grace is the language of trust,
whereas the original language of sin is the language of mistrust. He writes:
It is all too easy to foster mistrust as the answer to contemporary problems.
Mistrust of what is alien: foreigners; other religions; refugees. Mistrust of what is
familiar: politicians; business leaders; the media. Mistrust of the past and of the
future. (141)

He suggests, by contrast, that it is the language of singers and poets (referring

to Stormzy as well as St Teresa of Ávila and Gerard Manley Hopkins), of
silence, of reading and writing, and of listening and speaking, which are
‘the creators of the language of grace [which] offer an alternative path. It is
the much more demanding path of trust building’ (141).
The Roman Catholic Church is currently walking the synodal pathway,
towards a two-step gathering of synods in 2024 and 2025. This process of
listening and speaking, of silence, and of reading and writing has, for some,
fostered a deeper path of trust—while for others it has increased a sense of
1
Dacher Keltner, Awe: The Transformative Power of Everyday Wonder (New York: Penguin, 2023), 26.
124 Recent Books

mistrust. The challenge for the Church is one which was well expressed in
1994 at the 34th General Congregation of the Society of Jesus: ‘Does our prayer
remain a secret except to ourselves or do we talk about our experience of
God, including its difficulties, with others …. Do our communities remain
2
mysterious to all … or are they open and welcoming to those who seek us?’
The Church, and our world, need to find ways of enabling this experience
of trust, expressed in the language of grace, to be rediscovered. In the
world of prison, where I celebrate Mass on a Sunday morning, the struggle
between trust and mistrust is critical—where silence is rare, and where reading
and writing are precious extras. There is one hymn sung heartily, even by
those who cannot read and write, which both expresses and in its expression
reveals the transcendent presence of God:
Amazing grace, how sweet the sound
that saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found;
was blind, but now I see.

This experience of grace, both personal and communal, expressed in word

and song, does, indeed, foster a greater trust, a deeper ‘oneness with others’,
a lessening of the ego and a sense of mystery in the face of God’s presence.
It is an awesome experience.
Simon Bishop SJ

Rik Van Nieuwenhove, Thomas Aquinas and Contemplation (Oxford:

OUP, 2021). 978 0 1928 9529 5, pp.240, £72.00.

This book reminds us how far our understanding

of contemplation today has diverged from the
high medieval view of Thomas Aquinas. Rik Van
Nieuwenhove, associate professor of medieval
thought at Durham University, expounds that
view with admirable clarity. For Aquinas,
contemplation is ‘consideration of truth’, which
includes the philosophical sciences as much as
theology. Though it can be contemplation of
God, it need not be. For humans, as opposed to
angels, it involves the process of reasoning,
because our knowing works from created things,
not by direct access to the divine: it does not

2
GC 34, decree 10, n. 295.
Recent Books 125

bypass or supplant the use of reason. In fact, it is primarily intellectual,

associated with the crowning act of the rational process, which is a simple
intellective insight into truth (intuitus simplex). This is not a feeling, and
involves the feelings only secondarily. Perhaps most remarkably in the
context of spirituality, it is not prayer. It is a speculative type of knowing
as opposed to a practical one, and Aquinas regards prayer as practical, not
speculative.
One might wonder if Aquinas is really interested in contemplation as
an activity of faith, or merely seeks to make it part of the human process
of knowing. Where does he situate the contemplative prayer of the desert
and monastic tradition, for instance? Van Nieuwenhove rejects Adrienne
von Speyr’s criticism that Aquinas ‘contemplates, as it were, with pen in
hand’, merely intellectualising, arguing that he has the spiritual life of the
Christian very much at heart. But he has other concerns as well which, in
typically Thomist fashion, he seeks to reconcile in one ‘architectonic’ structure.
Most pressingly, Aquinas wants to justify the position of the Dominicans
in the University of Paris, against those contemporaries who argued that
they should be secluded in monasteries and getting on with prayer. He regards
this as reductive: contemplation has God as its final goal, and prayer is the
most important activity of the Christian life, but it is charity which brings us to
God (charity seeks the love of God for God’s sake) not contemplation
itself. Contemplation belongs in the non-theological study of metaphysics as
much as in theology, nor does it require the disciplines of monastic prayer.
Aquinas draws a clear distinction between the realm of faith, which has
its source in revelation, and the pursuit of truth through natural reason. All
things in creation come from God and are made for God, but they can be
meaningfully understood without reference to God. Faith shows how things
relate to God in a unified teleological order. Faith enlarges and extends our
understanding of the reality that we see, but it does not show us a different
reality. There is both continuity and distinction. Thus, contemplation is not
essentially different within and outside faith, yet faith enlarges its perspective
and brings it to its fulfilment in relation to God.
Van Nieuwenhove is critical of those who read Aquinas in too exclusively
Christian terms. He rejects the ‘charismatic’ reading, where contemplation
requires the gifts of the Holy Spirit; the ‘illuminist’ reading, which requires
direct grace from God (against Aquinas’s contemporary Bonaventure);
and the ‘sapiential’ reading, which interprets contemplation in affective
terms, as a kind of knowledge accompanied by the savour of God. In each
case, he argues that these ignore the careful distinctions that Aquinas draws
between what we know by natural reason and what we know by faith.
Much of this book is aimed at Thomist scholars and debates, but for
anyone who thinks that contemplation is valuable, van Nieuwenhove
126 Recent Books

convincingly raises the question of how contemplation is to be understood

as more than a narrowly religious activity. Aquinas encourages us not to
consign contemplation to the religious ghetto. Contemplation is for
everybody, and not in the sense that is reducible to the activity of
‘contemplative prayer’. Everyone already contemplates, in the ordinary process
of knowing. Faith draws out the moment of insight in ordinary knowing
and raises it to the contemplation of God. The gifts of the Holy Spirit
make contemplation a participation in the life of the Trinity, which
engages the whole person, intellectually and affectively. Contemplation is
not an alternative kind of knowing, but the crowning act of all kinds of
knowing.
Edward Howells

Michael Marder, Green Mass: The Ecological Theology of St Hildegard of

Bingen (Stanford: Stanford U, 2021). 978 1 5036 2884 7, pp.184, $24.00.

This is an extraordinary work of ecotheology.

Not only is it a book, it is also a meditation at
the meeting point of materiality and spirituality,
a resonance chamber of Peter Schuback’s musical
compositions, and an invitation to encounter
the present world through medieval mindsets.
Marder explains,
The book … deviates from the usual structure of academic
works. The experimental method I have done my best to
follow in these pages is thinking with Hildegard, without
the demand to reconstruct anything like her authentic
and authoritative thought (149).

The cellist and composer Peter Schuback,

similarly, writes,
Working on, interpreting, or creating music with Hildegard of Bingen both
poses demands and charts a path to freedom …. In this work of mine it became
crucial to keep, in some way, Hildegard’s voice as an extension of time, given
that time is always a sort of extension …. In no way have I tried to interpret
Hildegard’s work, but have made my own music based on the enormous and
important material she still gives to the world. (153–154)

Recordings of his compositions are available for streaming and download at

the Stanford University Press website: www.sup.org/greenmass.
Recent Books 127

Michael Marder is Ikerbasque Research Professor in philosophy at the

University of the Basque Country, Vitoria-Gasteiz. His work spans the fields
of environmental philosophy and ecological thought, political theory and
phenomenology, with books including The Philosopher’s Plant (2014), Dust
(2016), Heidegger: Phenomenology, Ecology, Politics (2018), and Pyropolitics in
the World Ablaze (2020); he is a pre-eminent writer whose publications should
be read and reflected upon.
Green Mass is a meditation on viriditas—greenness, plantness, vegetality—
about which Augustine, Gregory the Great and Abelard’s Heloise all knew,
but which for Hildegard, in her own individual and creative way, took on
‘a unique ontological and metaphysical resonance’ (ix), a type of phytophonia
(plant sound) in our ever-increasing desertification of a world. It is an invitation
to listen to the desert, ‘to the growth of the desert beyond boundaries’ as
Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback writes in her foreword. ‘How a vagabond
little flower grows within and despite the reinforced concrete that today
arms the world against the life within itself’ (x).
The work, in which we become aware of the way in which thoughts grow
like living plants, opens with a ‘Prelude’ (‘serving as an invitation to a space
which is to be a gathering and a gathered listening’ [1]) and is divided into
‘Verges’ (including ‘choices about branching roads and where they lead’ [9]);
‘Analogies’ (beginning with individual voices trying to find their own space;
the second and larger part is like an individual turning that ‘seeks an eternity
in its diminishing listening’ [29]); ‘Resonances’ (which form ‘a dreamlike
state of uncertainty’ [51]), ‘Missives’ (the central chapter in which completely
different individuals seek contact but do not actually achieve it); ‘Ardencies’
(the longest chapter, and my favourite because it is the most challenging,
on contradictions seeking mediation and ending with a possibility); ‘Anarchies’
(by stark contrast with ‘Ardencies’ one of the shortest chapters, presenting
different fragments set against each other, circulating freely in a space that
has neither limits nor directions); and ‘Kisses’ (in which the desire for
understanding can lead to points of contact, for example between theology
and ecology). It ends with a ‘Postlude’ (where memory is central but ultimately
dreamlike and questions remain unanswered), and each chapter is introduced
by different styles of music.
As a work of philosophy, Green Mass addresses an area which has been
under-studied: that of plant life and plant-thinking. It is free of footnotes
or endnotes. There is no bibliography apart from a brief list of Hildegard’s
works in English translation but there is, thankfully, a comprehensive index.
Luke Penkett CJN
128 Recent Books

Nicholas Fogg, Forgotten Englishman: Thomas Stephens and the Mission to

the East (Leominster: Gracewing, 2021). 978 0 8524 4852 6, pp.362,
£15.99.

Thomas Stephens SJ (1549–1619) is a rare

example of a sixteenth-century English Jesuit (a
contemporary of Henry Garnet, Robert Southwell
and so on), whose mission did not bring him
back to England but rather took him to India.
Between his arrival in Goa in 1579 and his
death forty years later, Stephens mastered the
Konkani and Marathi languages of the western
coast in India, compiling the first Konkani
grammar and composing the Christu Purana,
an epic poem narrating the life of Jesus Christ
in the style of Indian epics.
Fogg’s book seeks to build a vivid picture of
the worlds that Stephens inhabited and travelled through: the recusants
of Elizabethan England and the seminaries of Europe; the Portuguese ships
that opened up the Age of Exploration; the first European colonies in India;
as well as the wider world of Jesuit missions to the East: the towering figure
of Francis Xavier; the Jesuit mission to the Mughal court; the Jesuits in Japan
and so on. While it is not easy to keep track of Stephens’s own movements
amid the rich detail and primary accounts Fogg quotes, one can nevertheless
sense the complexity of the Church’s experience of inculturation in the
early modern period.
Kensy Joseph SJ