Ignatian Spirituality

In 1521, Iñigo de Loyola, a courtier from a family of minor nobility in the Basque region of Spain, received a critical wound at the battle of Pamplona, resulting in multiple surgeries and a limp that would never fully be healed. More significant than the wound, however, was the conversion that came to young soldier during his days of convalescence. Turning his whole heart to God, he at first sought to imitate the great saints of history, only to find himself desperate and depressed, contemplating suicide. It was then—while sitting at the River Cardoner—that this failed knight came to a shocking realization: God did not want him to be another Francis or another Dominic; he wanted him to be fully himself. From this first realization of God’s love, comes the development of what would later be called the Spiritual Exercises, a series of prayers, in various forms, aimed at opening the heart to the living God, the God of experience, who is so unfathomably in love with each one of us. These Exercises, begun as a simple prayer journal, become, in time, the source document of the Society of Jesus and of all Ignatian spirituality.

Rather than proposing an abstract or absolute Good, the Spiritual Exercises maintain that the good of each person is dynamic—emerging from the recognition and response to God’s loving action. Ignatian spirituality invites each person to encounter directly—through sensation and reflection, action and contemplation—the working of God in their own life. God, who reveals a personal love of human beings through the creation of the world and the redemptive act of Jesus, enters into relationship with each of us by the promptings of the Spirit. God chooses us and speaks to us through our experience and our prayer, through the gift of revelation and the movements of our hearts. God chooses us and speaks to us as a free and gracious act of love, inviting  us to respond by seeking God in all things.

Ignatius teaches that to seek and respond to God appropriately it is necessary to learn to discern the spirits by which the human heart is moved, and that fundamental to this discernment is true humility and “Ignatian indifference.” To Ignatius humility is a realistic awareness of the disordered affections—e.g., addictions, habits, fears, etc.—that can misshape one’s ability to make a free choice. And by "indifference" he means a posture of not letting those disordered affections obscure one’s sense of the true spirit at work. To respond to God’s love, in other words, one must intentionally seek to turn off the noise by which ego, ideology, fear, or addiction can deafen one’s heart—at least insofar as one can. 

At the heart of Ignatian spirituality is an unwavering hopefulness and positivity, built on the conviction that God loves us, not generically or abstractly, but personally and continually. God is the loving source and sustaining presence in all creation, both as Creator of the universe and as the deepest truth and desire of every person. Each person can come to recognize God’s action through the cultivation of humility and through the practice of discernment. This is the essence of Ignatian spirituality.