Praying for confusion

One of the more puzzling turns of phrase in the Spiritual Exercises comes early in the First Week when St. Ignatius directs the person making the Exercises to ask God for “shame and confusion” for one’s sins (48). Shame I get; we ought to feel ashamed for our sins. If we say someone has no sense of shame, it means his conscience isn’t working. But confusion?

Confusion seems to cut against the whole thrust of the Spiritual Exercises and, indeed, Ignatian discernment in general. Isn’t the whole point of doing the Exercises to see the world more clearly, to cut through the illusions thrown up by the Evil Spirit in order to make good decisions and then stick to those decisions with confidence? Confusion is what we feel when we’re lost.

Reflecting on my confusion about confusion led me to consider the Biblical notion of evil. Philosophers sometimes talk about evil as the mere absence of good, but that seems a tad weak for me. True, a vacuum can be an awfully powerful and destructive force, but in the Bible the opposition to God is portrayed more like chaos than emptiness. In Genesis, God creates by bringing order to the cosmos. Disorder–chaos–is the force he overcomes. Disorder is not quite the same thing as absence.

In this Biblical way of looking at things, sin is confusion. This does not mean, of course, that in praying for confusion, we’re praying for sin. Even though sin really is chaos, it doesn’t always feel that way. On a surface level, sometimes sin feels pretty good, at least for a while. That illusory comfort doesn’t always last, so we have to come up with all sorts of ways to hide what sin really is from ourselves. We can be pretty good at this. We can create whole worldviews in which what is really sinful comes to seem quite normal, not disordered at all. We can surround ourselves with people who parrot what we want to hear, even find therapeutic preachers to reassure us, “It’s not so bad, don’t worry!” We can fill dictionaries with our euphemisms. Our illusions hide the reality of sin as confusion.

The Spiritual Exercises aim to break us out of our illusions, so that we see the truth of the world. If we are hurtling into the abyss but with our earbuds firmly inserted in our ears and our eyes glued to the screen in front of us, we might barely notice. Ignatius’s prayer for confusion is a prayer to strip away the blinders, to feel sin as what it really is without euphemism or excuse. In the Spiritual Exercises, we aim to get our feelings, our understanding, our intellect, and our will in line with reality. This means being ashamed of what is shameful and loving what is good. And it means experiencing sin not through the lens of euphemism and self-deception, but as the chaos that it is.

Stripped of our illusions, what is objectively confusing will confuse us. Sin really does not make sense. It prevents us from becoming who we are meant to be and impedes our ultimate happiness. Recognizing that is the first step to thinking straight once more. It’s worth the momentary discomfort–the shame and confusion that comes with setting our conscience right–because with our vision made clear we can also start to see the light of God in all its dazzling glory.