From Company Man: My Jesuit Life, 1950-1968:
Break day done, we embarked on the second week, meditating on Jesus as itinerant preacher and miracle-worker. This was our introduction to the Ignatian imagination. We were put to picturing or contemplating Gospel events, as opposed to great and noble thoughts. In episode after episode, we imagined ourselves there with Jesus, almost without attention to the meaning of it for ourselves but rather to get familiar with him. This was a far cry from the moralizing Sunday sermon we had grown up on, staples of our upbringing: The boy Jesus found in the temple? Honor thy father and mother. The wedding feast at Cana? A word for the sacrament of matrimony.
Multiplying the loaves and fishes? Consider the boy with the two loaves and how our little becomes a lot thanks to Jesus. We had prayed to get things or win things or improve ourselves, as with “Jesus meek and humble of heart, make my heart like unto thine,” a standard “aspiration,” or short prayer, of our Catholic-schooled youth. This time we pretty much just looked at Jesus and the people in his life. Lessons were obvious enough, supplied by context, but they weren’t the main thing. That was the scene itself. We practiced “application of the senses” in prayer, much as writing students learning how to see what others missed. A few years later I did a paper on the poetry of Robert Southwell, one of the English Jesuits who was caught by Elizabethan priest-hunters and executed. Southwell’s “Burning Babe” and other poems reflected his Spiritual Exercises experience, according to critics I consulted. I wrote to demonstrate that. Here we were more or less monks in a monastery, meditating the hours away to get closer to Jesus, and all the while imbibing a whole poetic vision or style. It was no simple thing being a Jesuit.
This second week, covering seven or eight more of the 30 days, was a breeze compared to that hell and death stuff. The shades stayed up, the sun came in, Father Master got light-hearted and tried humor at times. His points (for meditation, remember) were not aimed narrowly at inculcating a position on anything but rather at infusing a habit. We were gearing up for a life of prayer. But there was more.
CHANGING LIVES We were also gearing up for a life-changing decision. Here in this second week, we ran into the element of the Exercises that one could argue is most peculiarly Ignatian. Ignatius had done a one-eighty, going from glory-seeking in the macho-chivalric mode of hair-trigger touchiness to ascetical stoicism mixed with tough-minded resolve. In the process he became a specialist in the life-changing decision. He had stumbled on it while recuperating and had gone to Manresa after deciding to change his life. So with us. We entered the novitiate after deciding to change ours. He took ten months to rub his nose in that decision. We had two years to do it, with emphasis on this 30 days. (Actually, we took our ten months in the 15th year of training, after theology, what was called tertianship, about which more later.) So in this second week, we heard about Ignatius’ three kinds of men, his exercise in being honest with yourself. The one kind, faced with the hard, noble thing to do, never quite decides. The second decides in a way that pleases him and deceives him at the same time. The third bites the bullet. We were to be the third kind of man: whatever we decided we should do, we would do, without ifs, ands, or buts. It’s what real men did. That said, the Second Week was a fooler. Relaxed we might be picturing Jesus touring Israel, doing miracles and preaching. But there were these Three Kinds of Men and before that, at week’s start, the call to arms of “the earthly king,” a what-if situation quickly converted to the call of the heavenly king, Christ. This was the sort of call that moved Ignatius and his fellows. Oh to have a king to whom one could pledge undying loyalty and unstinting service! Nay, there was such a king, and his name was Jesus Christ! The king part didn’t do much for us, but we did have service in mind or we wouldn’t have been there. We meditated with a view to how it should affect our lives. In the midst of these travels with Jesus, we were asked what side we were on. Whose flag or standard would we follow, his or the devil’s? In the Meditation on Two Standards, “the one of Christ, our Commander-in-chief and Lord; the other of Lucifer, mortal enemy of our human nature,” it was Jesus or Satan. Life on earth was a warfare. This was boot training. We were to embrace “spiritual,” even actual poverty, “contumely and contempt,” and what was to result from accepting it, humility. For us it was to be poverty not wealth, contempt not worldly acclaim, humility not pride. From this we were to proceed to “all the other virtues.” We were not just to put up with trouble when it showed on our doorstep, we were to go looking for it.
BITING BULLETS The Three Kinds of Men had to decide whether to keep a bundle of money—10,000 ducats, not stolen! The first and second kind of man wouldn’t or couldn’t give it up. The third got himself to the point where he didn’t care. He was detached, ready to do justice to the important thing—to follow the king, ignoring the consequences. Once you got to this point and as long as you stayed there, you were ready for trouble. There were moments of peace in this Second Week, the sort that comes when you relax and say let the chips fall, etc. But the pressure was building. There we were as young as seventeen, as old as the mid-30s, 50 of us, getting up at 5 a.m. in a Spartan dormitory and hitting our kneelers at 5:30 for a soul-searching session in the presence of God, pledging to do hard things. God and Christ wanted a few good men. Did we qualify? A few months short of 19 myself, about as raw as I could be, I overflowed with resolve. I was ready to storm the bastions, I told myself and whoever else was listening, in this case God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost and all the saints and angels—plus the novice master when the occasion offered. There was a third motivational meditation, or ploy, from the Ignatian playbook, about the three “modes” or degrees of humility, actually dedication. The first was readiness to do what’s needed to be saved, “namely, that I so lower and so humble myself, as much as is possible to me, that in everything I obey the law of God.” No Faustian bargains: “Even if they made me lord of all the created things in this world . . . for my own temporal life, I would not be in deliberation about breaking a Commandment, whether Divine or human, which binds me under mortal sin.” I wouldn’t even think about it. Pledging the second degree, I wouldn’t even think about a venial sin, “not for all creation, nor because they would take away my life.” I was to care not about money or honor or how long I lived, as long as God was served and my soul was saved.
— more more on the long retreat as life-changing experience —
Blithe Spirit 