Posted on Monday 25 January 2010
Print This PostWelcome back to the Film Series, now in its sixth year. The series is based on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. The first year introduced the concept of spiritual literacy –how God speaks to each of us, through what holds our attention – and the next four years of the series carried us through the four stages of spiritual intimacy laid out in the Exercises. This year we can do a repetition of the four stages so we can gather up the way in which God was present to us in the spiritual journey through the Exercises.
What have we done through the Exercises of St. Ignatius? We have gone on a journey where we have allowed ourselves to be found by God. We have entered into a union with God that manifests itself in our mutual labouring to transform creation into community.The Exercises offer us a way of looking critically and lovingly at ourselves, and offer us choices of how we wish to be present to our world. The illusions we accept to be ourselves are taken away in the First Stage. We find our true life in the Second Stage. In the Third Stage this life stands the test of death. In the Fourth Stage we are liberated from the power of death for the service of the Divine Mystery. Our journey calls us always to be moving beyond ourselves and ever deeper into the love of God. In order to do this we are constantly drawn from the worlds we have imagined and into the world as imagined by the mystery of the God we describe as Compassionate Mercy.
This journey never ends. As we journey through the Fourth Stage, we discover that we are not carried to a mythic paradise. We find ourselves once again in First Stage, where we have to discover even more deeply how we are loved. There is no end to Godʼs love, and no end to our journeying ever deeper into that love and into the community created by that love.
• The Importance of Reflection
For St. Ignatius, the most important thing in a personʼs life is to find God. Everything else is secondary. Finding God is more than having encounters with God. It is more than recognizing that we have had those encounters. It is discovering what those experiences mean and what direction they have given to our lives. That direction shows itself in what we
do with our lives, in the friends we choose, and in the values we hold. For Ignatius, then, reflecting on what we do, or have done, is essential; it is the only way of keeping hold of the gift of our lives.
In spiritual direction there is some confusion about this way of proceeding. Some people want the reflection to have the same sense of drama and involvement as the prayer experience. When this does not happen, the reflection process is dismissed or overlooked.
In Ignatian prayer there are basically three parts. First, there is the preparation for the prayer. Here we chose a suitable place and time for the prayer. We read over or consider what we will pray about. We askfor the grace we are seeking, and we ask for the Spirit to enable our prayer. All of this disposes ourselves to the state of praying. The second stage is the experience of the encounter with God. Anything can happen here. The third stage is the reflection on the experience. Was the grace prayed for given? How was it given? What were the moments of consolation and desolation
in the experience? Why are those moments significant?
In this book each exercise is divided up in this way. The first part disposes us to the prayer. The second part gives us the material of the prayer, while the third part is a series of questions to help appropriate the prayer. These three stages are all part of Ignatian prayer, but each has its own style and mode of operating. Each builds on the previous stage, and the final stage completes the prayer experience. Avoiding that stage causes Godʼs communication with us to be incomplete.
In this conclusion we take the opportunity to get an overview of the communication that God has been having with us through these spiritual Exercises. It deliberately uses a style and voice different from the rest of the earlier series in order to create the necessary distance that will allow us to see where we have gone and where we are going. We are panning back and out from the close-ups of the individual Exercises and from the medium shots of the reviews of individual Stages to an overview of what we have experienced since the moment we committed ourselves to this spiritual journey. This overview is a necessary part of the prayer experience, our encounter and communication with God.
If we abandon this stage or try to make it similar to the contemplative moment of prayer we lose the fruit of that contemplative moment. The result is not knowing what the prayer means, or where God is in our lives,
or what direction our lives are taking. We fall back into uncertainty and sometimes even question the validity of
what we experienced, especially when we encounter hard or painful passages.
We are not doomed to live our lives in uncertainty. The journey we havebeen on shows us that we are rooted in love and are loved even when we may doubt ourselves or others or the path we walk. That love is present and communicates with us in our daily lives. When we reflect on what we have been and are given, we discover how God communicates with us. This is individual personal, and intimate. No one else can teach us that language. It is the language of lovers. It is one thing to love, but it is something else to know we are loved, and how we are loved. For some, that is more than enough. Still, there is always that excess, which is loveʼs nature, to give more and still more of
itself. Now it invites us to examine how we have journeyed into that love, and to see the way we experienced each stage of that love as it manifested itself in our lives. The Ignatian tradition breaks this down into the experience of each Stage. Now it seeks to show how that gift of intimacy was allowed to develop through the overall structure of the Exercises.
We look back to discover what happened to us and how God speaks to us now, taking unto ourselves more passionately and intimately the experience of the Exercises. Sometimes it is only years later that we come to understand what happened to us in a particular prayer period. It was only in the process of living and reflecting that we come to some understanding of what had been given.
Basic to the Exercises is the compassionate mercy of God. It runs through every stage, and everystage develops a deeper and more comprehensive awareness of how intimately that compassionate mercy is woven into our very lives on a unique and personal level. That mercy comes to us in the First Stage, when we are trapped in sin, to liberate us.
That mercy, in human form, invites us to walk a very human journey with him in the Second Stage as we both return to the mystery he calls “Abba.” That mercy enters into death to conquer the forces of death in the Third Stage, and we are asked to endure with him. Finally, that mercy shares with us the Spirit of the resurrection and union in the Father in the
Fourth Stage. This mercy manifests itself in the gift of intimacy. Each prayer period carries us deeper and deeper into a spiritual intimacy. Spiritual intimacy does not take us away from the world. It allows us to be in the world as a sacred space where the world can encounter the mercy of God.
• Our Personal Worlds
That mercy not only enters our human world, it enters each of our unique and personal worlds. We each live in a world that is shaped by our personal experiences, and no two peopleʼs experiences are alike. This is not to say that each of us is trapped in our own little world, though sometimes it may feel like that. We can communicate with one another, in
spite of the many differences of culture, gender, race, age and temperament, because we share at a most basic level the same human spirit. But the world each of us is intimate with is a unique world of feeling and value. That world is personal and real for us. That world is a construct of our imagination. We live in imagined worlds, and the imagined is real. We may share a communal imagination, but each of us has a private imagination that is a unique composite of the diverse elements of the communal world. The way that composite is structured and maintained is individual. From this unique perspective we read ourselves, others, what passes for the world, and God.
To say that we live in these imagined worlds is not to say that we live in imaginary worlds. It is just that the imagined is the real. What we imagine is maintained by the stories we live out of. The imagined is a constructed world of texts. These are narratives that range from the genetic codes that name us through individual and family stories, to the cultural histories that situate us in the bigger world. Our understandings of ourselves are encoded by these texts. When we engage in an Ignatian retreat, the conversions we experience move us from one way of reading ourselves, others, God, and the world, to another way.
This occurs through yet another text that we call the Spiritual Exercises. The Exercises enable us to examine the stories we tell ourselves and others to hold onto our imagined worlds, but they also help us see the liesand deceptions these stories embody. This is not to leave us without any stories. We need stories to live. We are never without stories, or ever outside of a story. The Exercises offer us a way of restoring our lives in such a way that the new story we find frees us and our imaginations. That new story is one told by the Father through the Word-made-flesh. It is a story still being written. But we are not just puppets in this drama. Good authors tell us that when they are writing the characters come alive and take on a life of their own. They also shape the text. It is the same with us and God. Our lives are co-creations. They are constructed out of the found materials
of our experience.
These constructed worlds we live in are real to us. They affect how our energies are manifested or repressed, are known or unknown. We accept as normal, first, the ways our families have formed us and, next, the ways of life our societies and cultures offer us. The way we understand our very being has been informed by these stories, and while these texts allow some expression of who we are, they repress or ignore, subvert or displace those other expressions that could contribute how we see ourselves.
When this happens, the “I” I feel myself to be, and act out of, is not really my identity. Who I think and feel and say I am is not who I really am. In fact we do not know ourselves. Other people know us. God knows us. It is these who in-form us about ourselves. What the Ex- ercises offer us is a way of seeing, knowing and loving ourselves the way God sees, knows and oves us. Too often for each of us that is not the case. Instead our selfunderstanding comes from others.
So how we read ourselves, the world and others, including God, is a constructed text that, being distorted, distorts our reading. We might consider that text to be real, but “realism” is not “reality.” Furthermore, this “realism” contains theologies. We create a God and believe it to be truly God. Often these theologies are not written from a rootedness in God. Rather these theologies emerge from an unredeemed world. Then how we see God and ourselves is quite different from the way God sees Godʼs own self and us. God sees us as lovable and capable of even the most self-sacrificing love. This is the story given to us in the sacred texts of human history. The one Ignatius uses is the Bible.
In the dynamics of the Spiritual Exercises, these two stories meet. In the plot of the Exercises, the story changes as we journey through the Stages. The lies that we have accepted as real and that have shaped our lives are uncovered and their abusive power is broken. Now we can enter a new story in which we journey with Christ through his birth, life, death, resurrection and return to the Father. In that journey we discover that our story is a contemporary manifestation of the Gospel. Our personal story becomes symbolic of the larger story of salvation. To appreciate fully that almost unbelievable gift of salvation, we have to see what has happened to us in our spiritual journey. We will do this by looking at the experience, the dynamics, and the way the graces we prayed for came to us during the Four Stages of the Exercises.
The Films in 2010
Stage One: Trapped by Sin; LIberated By Love- Trapped by Sin: Paradise Now — a look at how social structures shape how we look at ourselves and others, and the effects of how we live in them.
- Liberated By Love: As It Is In Heaven – how love liberates us.
Stage Two: Finding a Saviour; Following A Path with Life
- Finding A Saviour: Unmistaken Child –God gives Godʼs very self to us so that we can know what it is to be human.
- Following a Path with LIfe: Padre Padrone: Becoming fully human
Stage Three: Facing Death; Walking through Death to Life
- Facing Death: Gomorrah: The forces of destruction touch our very lives
- Beyond Death: Under The Same Moon: LIfe is Stronger than Death, and transforms death.
Stage Four: Sharing a New Life; A New Story
- Sharing a New Life: !Up: The Adventure continues
- A New Story: Invictus: Resurrection is a movement into a new story, and ever into newer and newer stories.
After we have watched these films, individually, in their stages, and as a whole, we can ask ourselves what moved us, one way or another. We can sit with those movements which have touched something we value, and ask what it is we value that has come to our attention in this way. Spending time with this feeling will bring up images and memories, and these reveal to us where we are at the moment on our spiritual journey.
We all journey to God. The moments that have touched us in the films, individually or as a whole, are places of revelation where God speaks to us, and invites us into a sharing of life.
