The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything

by James Martin

  But silence is part of any relationship. Think about times when spouses or lovers are separated from each other by physical distance. Or, more positively, think about taking a long car trip with a friend. Does your friend have to talk every minute? Think about two lovers walking side by side down the beach, without saying a word. Sometimes silence can be painful and confusing between friends, but sometimes a companionable silence is consoling.

  Sister Maddy, my friend at the retreat house in Gloucester, noted another similarity between silence in prayer and silence in friendship. “Sometimes I don’t hear from friends for a time,” she said. “But whether I hear from them or not, I know they’re still my friends. It’s the same in prayer. Whether or not I feel God’s presence, I know God’s there.”

  When I was a novice, silence in my prayer drove me crazy. One day I told David Donovan, “This is ridiculous! Nothing’s happening in my prayer. It’s a waste of time.”

  David said, “What do you mean?”

  “Well,” I said. “I sit down to pray, and not a thing happens. I just sit with God for an hour. It’s a waste of time.”

  David laughed. “Being with God is a waste of time?”

  Despite myself, I had to laugh. It’s never a waste of time to be in the presence of God—even if it doesn’t feel like much is happening.

  You can delight in someone’s company wordlessly. As Margaret Silf recently wrote in a letter to me, you can be silent together, trusting that silence does not mean that God has left you. Or you may simply enjoy being in God’s presence.

  Another way of looking at this comes from Aristotle, who believed that we become like the object of our contemplation. Have you ever met an elderly couple who seem to have taken on each other’s attributes? They share the same interests, they finish each other’s sentences, they sometimes even look alike. Likewise with God: the more time you spend with God, even in complete silence, when it feels that nothing is happening, the more you will grow, because being in the divine presence is always transformative. Think of Moses coming off Mount Sinai with his face shining. “Wasting time with God,” one of David’s favorite descriptions of prayer, even during silent moments, turns out not to be a waste of time at all.

  But there is another reason we may have trouble with silence in prayer: we no longer value silence at all.

  Electronic gadgets—iPods, BlackBerrys, cell phones, laptops— have created a world of constant stimulation. Most of this is good, efficient, and even fun. Why not have all your favorite tunes ready for when you’re stuck in a traffic jam? Why not have the television, radio, and Internet to keep up to date on the world around us? Those are the fruits of the digital age.

  Yet are we growing addicted to these gadgets? The amount of media we consume each day continues to grow, and our ability to be detached from digital devices diminishes.

  Just the other day, a film executive called me from her cell phone in the car to ask about a particular music selection she was hoping to use in a new movie about the Catholic Church. What would be the most appropriate Catholic hymn to use? she asked. When I started making a few suggestions, she said, “Wait, I have to text this to someone as we’re talking.” Amazed, I said, “You’re driving the car, talking to me on the phone, and texting someone all at once?”

  We are gradually losing the art of silence. Of walking down the street lost in our own thoughts. Of closing the door to our rooms and being quiet. Of sitting on a park bench and just thinking. We may fear silence because we fear what we might hear from the deepest parts of ourselves. We may be afraid to hear that “still small” voice. What might it say?

  Might it ask us to change?

  You may have to disconnect in order to connect—disconnect with the world of noise to connect with silence, where God speaks to you in a different way. You cannot change our noisy world, but you can disconnect from time to time, to give yourself the gift of silence.

  Being silent is one of the best ways to listen to God, not because God is not speaking to you during your noisy day, but because silence makes it easier to listen to your heart. To use the friendship analogy, sometimes you need to be silent and listen very carefully when your friend is trying to make a point. As my sister sometimes tells her children, “You have two ears and one mouth for a reason: listening is more important than talking.”

  If your environment (inside and outside) is too noisy, it might be hard to hear what God, your friend, is trying to say.

  THE NEW WAYS GOD HAS READY

  While friendship is a terrific analogy for a relationship with God, it is not perfect. As I mentioned, none of our friends created the universe. And God, unlike any other friend, always remains constant. As Richard Leonard writes in his book Preaching to the Converted, “If you feel distant from God, guess who’s moved away from whom!”

  Nonetheless, using Father Barry’s rich insight—thinking about prayer in terms of a personal relationship—can help to clarify your relationship with God. If you’re dissatisfied with your relationship with God, think about it in terms of a friendship, and consider ways that you might be neglecting that friendship and how you can nourish it.

  That model can also make the spiritual life less daunting. It helps to make a relationship with God more understandable, something that you can incorporate into your life, rather than something designed only for saints and mystics.

  Even the progress of the spiritual life mirrors that of a relationship. At the beginning of many relationships, as I mentioned, there’s often a period of infatuation. All you want is to spend time with the other. But the relationship has to move beyond that superficial level and into something deeper and more complex. It will also move into places that you couldn’t have imagined when you first fell in love. It will have its ups and downs, its times of silence, its times of frustration. Just like any friendship will.

  Your relationship with God will change over your lifetime: sometimes it will happen naturally, almost easily, and feel rich and consoling; at other times it will seem difficult, almost a chore, yielding little in the way of “results.” But the important thing—as in any friendship—is to keep at it and, ultimately, come to know and love the Other more deeply. And to let the Other come to know and love you more deeply.

  Chapter Seven

  God Meets You Where You Are

  Ignatian Traditions of Prayer

  IN THE LAST THREE chapters we looked at how a prayer like the examen can help us find God in our lives, and how we can “listen” to God in prayer and in daily life. But there are many other traditions of prayer besides the examen. So among those, what’s the best way to pray?

  GOD LOOKS AT ME, AND I LOOK AT GOD

  The answer is: whatever you are comfortable with. “God meets you where you are,” as David said. No form of prayer is any better than another, any more than one way of being with a friend is better than another. What’s better is what’s best for you.

  Here’s a story David liked to tell on himself, about labeling different forms of prayer as “better” or “worse.”

  One weekend after he had returned from a post as a spiritual director at the prestigious Josephinum seminary in Ohio, David visited his mother, an elderly Irish-Catholic woman, at her home outside of Boston. He noticed that she was praying her Rosary, one of the oldest Catholic spiritual traditions. The Rosary is a set of beads of varying sizes, arranged in five groups of ten. The small beads remind you to pray a Hail Mary. (“Hail Mary, full of grace. The Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women. And blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.”) The large ones, the Our Father. There are also different events from the lives of Jesus and Mary to think about while you are praying each “decade,” or set of ten.

  The origins of the Rosary lie deep in the Middle Ages: lay men and women used the Rosary as a way of praying along with the nearby monastic communities, who themselves would move through the 150 psalms during the year.
(Three times around the Rosary would mean 150 Hail Marys.) As Sally Cunneen writes in a book of essays called Awake My Soul, “When most Christians were illiterate and when books, including Bibles, were unavailable except in monasteries, a string of beads or seeds provided a simple means for the faithful to re-create their attachment to the events of the Gospel as they prayed the prayer that Jesus taught and, also, repeated the words of Gabriel and Elizabeth to Mary,” that is, the Hail Mary.

  After his experience as a spiritual director, David felt that this “simple means” of prayer that his mother enjoyed was, well, too simple. So he decided to teach his mother something about “real prayer,” as he said.

  “Why do you pray the Rosary?” he asked her.

  “David, I’ve always prayed the Rosary,” she said.

  “But why?”

  “Well, I enjoy it,” she said.

  Sensing that he was making little progress, David decided he would probe his mother’s limited experience in prayer and teach her a “better” way to pray.

  So he asked, “What happens when you pray the Rosary?”

  “Well, I quiet myself down,” she said. “And then I look at God, and God looks at me.”

  “That stopped me in my tracks!” David said with a laugh when he recounted that story. He saw that he had been wrong to prejudge his mother’s spiritual experiences. Who knows what is going on inside of another person? He recognized the danger of privileging one way of relating to God over another. As St. Ignatius wrote, “It is dangerous to make everyone go forward by the same road.”

  David realized something else too. “For all of my training, she probably had a deeper relationship with God than I had!”

  David used to tell that story to remind me that there is no right way to pray. But there may be a particular method of prayer that fits you more comfortably.

  So let’s talk about some ways of prayer that are most often considered part of the Ignatian tradition. At the end of the chapter I’ll speak more broadly about other ways, but the following methods are those most closely associated with Ignatian spirituality.

  As you read along, notice which ones you feel most drawn to. Perhaps God is calling you, through this attraction, to try one out. Perhaps in one of these practices, as David’s mother would say, God could look at you, and you could look at God.

  IGNATIAN CONTEMPLATION

  Remember those five hypothetical Jesuits I mentioned in the first chapter? The ones who gave us four definitions of Ignatian spirituality? Well, if you asked those same five to describe the Ignatian tradition of prayer, chances are that they would first mention “Ignatian contemplation.”

  All prayer is contemplative. But here I’m using the term to describe a certain type of prayer, which also goes by the names “contemplation,” “contemplative prayer,” and “imaginative prayer.” Though Ignatius didn’t invent this kind of prayer, he popularized it by giving it center stage in his Spiritual Exercises, where he called it “composition of place.”

  In Ignatian contemplation you “compose the place” by imagining yourself in a scene from the Bible, or in God’s presence, and then taking part in it. It’s a way of allowing God to speak to you through your imagination.

  This was one of Ignatius’s favorite ways to help people enter into a relationship with God. And it flowed from his own experience in prayer. As David Fleming writes, while Ignatius was an excellent analytical thinker (even if he probably would not have thought of himself as an intellectual), the “mental quality of thought that drove his spiritual life was his remarkable imagination.”

  When I first heard about this method in the novitiate, I thought it sounded ridiculous. Using your imagination? Making things up in your head? Was everything you imagined supposed to be God speaking to you? Isn’t that what crazy people think?

  In one of my first conversations with David, I confessed my doubts, even disappointment, about “Ignatian contemplation.” As he listened, he began to smile. I can still see him sitting in his easy chair with his cup of coffee at the ready. “Let me ask you a question,” he said. “Do you think that God can speak to you through your relationships with other people?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Through reading Scripture and through the sacraments?” Yes and yes.

  “Through your daily experiences, and through your desires and emotions?” Yes, yes, and yes.

  “Do you think God can communicate through what you see every day and hear and feel and even smell?” Of course.

  “Then why couldn’t God speak to you through your imagination?”

  That made sense. Think seriously about your imagination, David said. Wasn’t it a gift from God, like your intellect or your memory? And if it was a gift, why couldn’t it be used to experience God?

  This made sense, too. Using my imagination wasn’t so much making things up, as it was trusting that my imagination could help to lead me to the one who created it: God. That didn’t mean that everything I imagined during prayer was coming from God. But it did mean that from time to time God could use my imagination as one way of communicating with me.

  So, how do you “do” Ignatian contemplation? Well, here’s where we turn directly to the Spiritual Exercises for some help.

  The Composition, by Imagining the Place

  First, take a passage from Scripture that you enjoy. For those making their way through the Spiritual Exercises, it’s the passage that is assigned for the day. For example, in the Second Week of the Exercises, you follow Jesus through his ministry: preaching, traveling, healing the sick, forgiving sinners, welcoming the outcasts, and so on.

  One of my favorite stories from the Second Week is the storm at sea, which is contained in several Gospels. It’s often helpful for people who are struggling with big problems in their lives—i.e., everyone.

  In the version of the story in Luke’s Gospel (8:22–25), the disciples are in a boat with Jesus, when a sudden squall comes up. (On the Sea of Galilee, this happens even today.) “The boat was filling with water, and they were in danger,” writes Luke. Terror stricken, they ask Jesus, who is asleep, why he doesn’t help them. “Master, Master, we are perishing!” they shout. Jesus awakes and “rebukes” the wind and the rain, stilling the storm with his word. Then he turns to them and asks, “Where is your faith?”

  The disciples are stunned. “Who then is this,” they say, “that he commands even the winds and the water, and they obey him?”

  Ignatius invites you to enter into the scene by “composing the place” by imagining yourself in the story with as much detail as you can muster.

  Your starting points are the five senses.

  The first step, after asking for God’s help in the prayer, is to ask yourself: What do you see? Assuming that you’re imagining yourself on the boat (instead of imagining the scene from a distance, which is another option), you might picture yourself with some of the disciples around you, all of you huddled together on the little wooden boat.

  There’s plenty to imagine when it comes to your “imaginative sight.” What might the boat look like? You might have seen photos of the “Jesus Boat,” a fishing vessel from the time of Jesus that was recovered from the Sea of Galilee in 1986. It is a long wooden boat with slats set up for uncomfortable-looking seats. As you picture this, you might realize that it’s crowded for the disciples on board, something you have never thought about before. By the way, you don’t have to be an expert in ancient cultures, or an archaeologist, to do this kind of prayer. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know exactly what Palestinian boats looked like in the first century. “Your” boat could be a modern version.

  What does the scene outside the boat look like? Part of the fear of sailing in the dark is not knowing what will happen next, whether a lightning strike will hit the mast, a wave will crash over the side, or an unexpected swell will capsize the craft. And at night it’s hard to see the waves except when they are lit up by flashes of lightning. With only one of your imaginative sens
es—sight—you can begin to experience some of the fear that the disciples must have felt.

  Then imagine seeing Jesus asleep in the boat. Even something as simple as noticing him sleeping might make you ask new questions about Jesus. For instance, you might realize that his being asleep shows not so much lack of care for his friends, or even ignorance of the possible danger, but simple fatigue after a long day. Jesus led an active life, you may realize, with people always clamoring for his attention and care. How could he not have been tired?

  Your understanding of the fear of the disciples is now coupled with compassion for the humanity of Jesus, who, after all, had a physical body that tired.

  It’s one thing to read a Gospel story and simply hear the words “Jesus was asleep.” It’s quite another to imagine it, to see it in your mind’s eye. You may gain new insight into the humanity of Jesus in a way not possible from reading it in a book, or hearing it in a homily, because it’s your insight.

  Next ask yourself: What do you hear? You might imagine not only the howling wind and the booming thunder, but also the sound of huge waves crashing over the side of the boat. Maybe you imagine the sloshing of water over the floorboards, and the fishing gear and nets clattering noisily on the deck as the boat lurches from side to side. Perhaps you hear the disciples’ protests. Are they growing resentful of Jesus’ indifference? Over the sound of the wind and the waves you hear some grumbling. Do their complaints grow louder as the storm intensifies? Do they shout over the thunder? Our own protests to God do the same in the face of violent storms in our lives.

  From the Spiritual Exercises

  Here is St. Ignatius using “composition of place,” by imagining the Nativity scene. Notice the questions that he asks, and notice that he doesn’t tell you exactly what to imagine but leaves it up to your imagination, where Ignatius trusted that God would be at work on a very personal level.