Jesuits – Tony Lusvardi, S.J.

The Spiritual Exercises in South Australia

Our Lady of the Vines, Sevenhill, Australia

It is hard to know what to say to those who ask about one’s experience of the 30-day Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola. The experience is profound, intense, and deeply personal. It is also experience, not knowledge or information that can be transferred to another. To be sure, the retreat does have objective content–the life of Christ, God’s creation of the world, the moral law. It is not just a process for personal growth; it is an encounter with the Son of God who revealed himself in first century Palestine, who we know through the accounts that his followers handed on to the Church. Fundamentally, the content of the retreat is simply Christianity, nothing more and nothing less.

That said, the experience of encountering that content varies from person to person. We can either look at Jesus from a distance or approach him, talk to him, get to know him. The Spiritual Exercises are a way of getting to know him–spending time with God with other distractions removed, recognizing God’s work in our lives up to this point, discovering his hopes for us. Like meeting your future spouse or holding a newborn child for the first time, you can describe what happened, but the experience itself can never be fully captured in words. Spending thirty days getting to know Jesus more deeply in prayer is a similarly ineffable experience.

Of course, some aspects of the retreat can be more easily shared, and I thought I’d start with one that might seem secondary but isn’t–the location. Christianity is an embodied, incarnational religion that acknowledges the influence of where we are on who we are. During the Spiritual Exercises St. Ignatius frequently invites us to begin by imagining the places where Jesus lived, “the synagogues, villages, and towns” where he preached or the hills and valleys between Nazareth and Bethlehem. Even on an interior journey, location matters.

First principle for Lent… and for life

Tomb of St. Ignatius, Church of the Gesù, Rome

Ash Wednesday is once again upon us. This year my Lent will be mostly taken up with doing, for the second time in my life, the 30-day Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola. So I’ll be off-line and in silence until Holy Week.

As a consideration for the beginning of Lent, then, I thought I’d offer the principle St. Ignatius places at the beginning of the Spiritual Exercises, what he calls the “First Principle and Foundation”. It’s his way of expressing the truth of the First Commandment: nothing else is as important as right relationship with God, and we should never allow anything else to take God’s place. The value of all the other goods we encounter in this life is entirely relative to whether they help us grow closer to God. In fact, if anything damages or gets in the way of our relationship with God, it is no longer good.

That’s all straightforward enough in theory, but Ignatius gives the consideration a specificity that bites. Giving concreteness to this principle is where the hard work of putting our lives in the right order begins. And that, I suppose, is what Lent is about–giving God his rightful place at the center of our lives.

Here is how Ignatius puts it, and the words I’ll leave you with until Easter… In the meantime, please pray for me as I make my retreat!

FIRST PRINCIPLE AND FOUNDATION

Man is created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord, and by this means to save his soul.

The other things on the face of the earth are created for man to help him in attaining the end for which he is created.

Hence, man is to make use of them in as far as they help him in the attainment of his end, and he must rid himself of them in as far as they prove a hindrance to him.

Therefore, we must make ourselves indifferent to all created things, as far as we are allowed free choice and are not under any prohibition. Consequently, as far as we are concerned, we should not prefer health to sickness, riches to poverty, honor to dishonor, a long life to a short life. The same holds for all other things.

Our one desire and choice should be what is more conducive to the end for which we are created.

Back to school

It’s back to school time in Rome. Yes, the Roman academic calendar starts and ends about a month later than the American schedule–which is a good thing since the first couple of weeks of September were too hot to think, let alone study.

And this year, for the first time since starting Kindergarten 1985, my student days are behind me. I’ll be on the other side of the classroom this year, teaching full time at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. Since I have to get to class, I thought this week I’d post an interview with my new boss, the Gregorian’s new Rector, Fr. Mark Lewis, S.J. You’ll see why I’m excited to be teaching at the Greg and to be working for Fr. Lewis. His words on the perspective history provides are particularly valuable.

Catholic self-help

My friend and Jesuit classmate Fr. Michael Rossmann has just published a book, which upon its release held the status of Amazon’s #1 book in “self-help for Catholics”. Actually, I didn’t know there was such a category (and neither did Fr. Rossmann).

Inside the snappy cover, Fr. Rossmann makes a point I think is very important today — really saying yes to something or someone means saying no to other things. Never committing in order to keep one’s options open means refusing to choose the things that matter most.

The book is called The Freedom of Missing Out and continues the long Jesuit tradition of practical help for good decision-making that goes back to St. Ignatius’s rules for discernment. In fact, the influence of Ignatius is not far below the surface, though the book is illustrated with examples from all walks of life and lots of contemporary research. While Rossmann draws on the best of the Catholic tradition, his words about commitment and freedom will ring true to people of any religion.

Interview on Sacramental Theology

Last month I had an interesting discussion with Jesuit scholastic David Inczauskis about the sacraments–what they are, why we have them, how they and the theology surrounding them developed through time, what are the challenges for sacramental theology today. David produces an in-depth podcast on liberation theology, so my general introduction to sacramental theology was the lead-in to some of his reflections on liberation theology and the sacraments, which are also included in the podcast. Here’s the Apple version of the episode:

Episode 22: Liturgy and Sacraments, the Liberation Theology Podcast. I’m told it can be found on other podcast venues as well.