Spiritual Exercises – Tony Lusvardi, S.J.

The Anointing at Bethany and Holy Week’s unsettling beginning

Going through some old files, I came across this homily for the Monday of Holy Week, written, in my younger and more vulnerable years, when I was a novice in St. Paul, Minnesota.

St. Mary Magdalene penitent, Guercino 1622

During the Third Week of the Spiritual Exercises, St. Ignatius asks us to contemplate the suffering and death of Our Lord. This week, Holy Week, the Church, liturgically, asks us to do the same. The Third Week is one of the times in the Exercises when we ask for strange graces—shame, sorrow, confusion.

The Church’s liturgy also evokes these troubling graces, and it does so by, among other things, confronting us with today’s passage from John, the Anointing at Bethany. The shock this passage should provoke in us is perhaps diminished by its familiarity, but if we really deeply consider what is happening here, then we should be confused. We should be confused because part of us is tempted to side with Judas.

Three hundred days wages! Put in contemporary terms this must amount to something like $30,000, $40,000, $50,000—enough for college scholarships for one or several years, or private high school scholarships for several students; in some Third World countries that much money could build a school. And instead it is being spent on a jar of ointment. An expensive perfume. An ostentatious toiletry.

Homily for the Feast of St. Ignatius

The feast of St. Ignatius was back in July, of course, but I thought the reflections on discernment in my homily might be helpful in any season. Last year, I was asked for some thoughts on the process of communal discernment used by the Synod on Synodality. These reflections build on those observations.

Inigo the Pilgrim (2017), Church of St. Ignatius, Norwood, South Australia

You might have had the experience of the warning light on your dashboard coming on while you’re driving, signaling that you are low on gas, near the minimum. Here in South Dakota especially–where outside of the city gas stations can be few and far between–you don’t want to fall below that minimum. You might end up out in the cold or in this merciless heat—both dangerous circumstances—and in need of a good Samaritan to rescue you.

If you keep your tank filled, however, and don’t fall below the minimum, you can drive wherever you like. You just plug the destination into the GPS and go.

The warning light and the GPS are both helpful, but they serve different functions—the warning light tells us not to drop below the minimum and the GPS gives us directions. The readings for today’s feast of St. Ignatius, I think, point to a way of living the Christian faith that goes beyond the minimum.

If we think about the commandments, they are very useful for giving us the minimal rules of the road necessary to avoid an accident or a breakdown by the roadside. Because of this function, most of the commandments are written in a negative form—“Thou shall not…” Even those that aren’t prohibitions—“Keep holy the Sabbath” and “Honor thy father and mother”—set a minimum of necessary behaviors. Sunday Mass is the minimum necessary worship if we are to do justice to God, and fulfilling our family duties is the minimum necessary social obligation if we’re to maintain a functional social harmony.

But just doing the minimum isn’t enough to live a fulfilling life or to live a life of discipleship. If I put on my to-do list for tomorrow, “Don’t kill anyone, don’t commit adultery, don’t steal,” I’ll end up rather bored. The minimum tells us what to avoid, but not much of what to do.

Popular piety and tradition in Sardinia

I was fortunate this year to have spent Holy Week and Easter in Maracalagonis, Sardinia, a small town about a 20 minute drive from the center of Cagliari. It was a good break from the classroom and a wonderful taste of parish life.

Chiesa della Santa Vergine degli Angeli, Maracalagonis, Sardinia

The religious atmosphere I experienced was both warm and traditional. Masses were full; I heard confessions all week long; I met deeply committed Catholic families. I was especially impressed by the enthusiasm for traditional popular devotions. Teams of parishioners take responsibility for organizing different devotions throughout the year. Of particular note during Holy Week were the su Scravamentu, in which the nails are removed from the Lord’s hands and feet and he is taken down from the Cross after the Good Friday liturgy, and the many processions through the town streets–Stations of the Cross, Palm Sunday, Holy Thursday, the Sorrows of Mary on Good Friday, and then the S’Incontru on Easter morning.

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.

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.