Welcome to the Loved Called Gifted Podcast.

This is your place to come for musings about spirituality, identity and purpose.

I'm your host, Catherine Cowell.

Catherine:
This episode is just me.

And we are looking at Ignatian spirituality, where it comes from, why it might be useful to explore further, and perhaps a few ideas that you might find helpful in your own spiritual life.

So what on earth do we mean by Ignatian spirituality?

Well what we're looking at is a particular spiritual approach to life that was developed by somebody called Ignatius of Loyola.

who was actually the founder of the Jesuits.

So what we're talking about is really the kind of stuff which underpins the Jesuit movement, should that be of interest to you.

So let me tell you a bit about Ignatius.

He was born in fourteen ninety one in the castle at Loyola, in the cottage of the blacksmith's wife, and he was a soldier until the age of twenty-six.

He was a very enthusiastic soldier, quite a successful soldier, and then in May fifteen twenty one his soldiering career came to a rather an abrupt end.

Welcome to the Loved Called Gifted Podcast.

This is your place to come for musings about spirituality, identity and purpose.

I'm your host, Catherine Cowell.

Catherine:
This episode is just me.

And we are looking at Ignatian spirituality, where it comes from, why it might be useful to explore further, and perhaps a few ideas that you might find helpful in your own spiritual life.

So what on earth do we mean by Ignatian spirituality?

Well what we're looking at is a particular spiritual approach to life that was developed by somebody called Ignatius of Loyola.

who was actually the founder of the Jesuits.

So what we're talking about is really the kind of stuff which underpins the Jesuit movement, should that be of interest to you.

So let me tell you a bit about Ignatius.

He was born in fourteen ninety one in the castle at Loyola, in the cottage of the blacksmith's wife, and he was a soldier until the age of twenty-six.

He was a very enthusiastic soldier, quite a successful soldier, and then in May fifteen twenty one his soldiering career came to a rather an abrupt end.

However, unfortunately for Ignatius, the hospital library was sadly limited.

There was no James Bond or Tom Clancy.

In fact, the only two books that he could get hold of were A Life of Christ and the Life of the Saints

So there he was, with absolutely nothing to do, no internet to distract him, and he would do two things.

Sometimes he would daydream about chivalrous adventures that he had to make up himself, 'cause he didn't have any fiction to read

And sometimes, having read The Life of the Saints and the Life of Christ, he would imagine living like the saint.

And what he noticed in his time there

was that some thoughts and imaginings brought joy and satisfaction, and some didn't, and were empty and meaningless.

So when he imagined chivalrous adventures and being a hero and winning the gals

There would be from that kind of a quick hit of pleasure, but he then realized that that satisfaction was not long-lasting, it wasn't deep, and it began to feel empty and meaningless.

He realized increasingly that he felt drawn towards the life of a saint, and he realized that in his deepest heart that was what he truly wanted.

So that was his turning point.

And that time in hospital shaped not only what he would end up doing, but also how he would end up doing it, and his philosophy really behind it.

And that sense that

There were different spirits moving within him, and he could discern that some of them were good and wholesome, and some of them weren't.

As he described it, some were coming from the Spirit of God, and some were coming from an evil spirit

He was in the fifteen hundreds, that was the kind of language that he used, became for him quite formative in his spirituality, as we will discover

Anyway, he leaves hospital determined that he is going to be a saint, determined that he is going to rather heroically be a marvellous saint

So he goes on a pilgrimage to somewhere called Montserrat, he leaves his sword and his dagger in the sanctuary by the altar, he swaps his clothes with a poor man.

To be frank, he goes a bit extreme.

As a reaction to his vanity, he neglects his appearance, he didn't cut his hair or his nails, he begged for food, barely had anything to eat

And as he did that, he realized that there was a voice within him saying, You're not gonna be able to keep this up for the next seventy years.

And that started him towards a realization that actually God's love and forgiveness was free.

He didn't need to torment himself.

He didn't need to do lots of penances to earn it.

So that was leading him towards a more wholesome and healthy spirituality.

His next adventure was that he decided he was going to be a pilgrim to Jerusalem and convert all the Muslims.

That didn't entirely go to plan.

What happened actually was that he was taken in by some monks who realized that if he wasn't careful he was going to get himself killed.

So they took him in, and he changed his perspective on what he wanted to do with his life.

His great desire became to help others to see God working in the ordinary events of their own lives.

He went back away from Jerusalem, back to Europe, and he studied theology and philosophy and he became a priest.

And it was from there that he really wanted to help others to connect with the divine, to meet God.

in the ordinary events of their everyday lives.

And both his study and his experiences led him to develop some very particular approaches to spirituality, which can be really, really helpful.

And he founded a community because he didn't want to do all of this alone.

And that community is what became the Jesuit.

His spirituality was really revolutionary.

And it

challenged the approach of the church, which was very institutional, which put between people and God, it put priests basically.

So it was difficult for people to get to God.

in the context of following the spirituality of the church.

There were all sorts of things in the way.

And if we go back to the life of Jesus, that was a lot of what Christ was challenging.

The religious institutions that got between people and God.

This, I think, was an idea that had its time.

He was a contemporary of Martin Luther.

He was eight years younger than Luther, who was born in fourteen eighty three, and who became a priest in fifteen oh seven.

It was 1517, whilst Loyola was still a soldier, that Luther was debating his 95 Theses, and then in 1520 Luther gets excommunicated from the church.

And if you think about what Luther's core themes were, there are some real parallels.

So what Loyola was discovering in Spain, Luther was coming to conclusions about in Germany at around about the same time.

So if you think that Loyola began his spiritual journey in fifteen twenty-one, that was only one year after Luther had nailed his theses to the door of the church in Gutenberg.

theoretically, some people don't think he did really, but anyway.

Luther was saying that forgiveness is the free gift of God, which is exactly what Loyola had discovered in his own journey, that you don't need to earn it or buy it or do penances

You don't need a priest to stand between you and God.

You can do it yourself.

And Luther's view was that the Bible was the only source of divinely revealed knowledge and wisdom.

That you can read it for yourself.

You can discover God for yourself.

And interestingly, at one point Ignatius also was investigated and imprisoned by the Inquisition, largely because the actions of Luther and his

So, in a sense, the journey of Luther and Ignatius of Loyola was sort of running in parallel, but in different ways.

Whereas Luther was challenging the church from the top

and arguing with the church authorities, Ignatius of Loyola hadn't even really noticed that the church authorities were there.

He was encountering God at a very grassroots level, and developing his spirituality from there

So in a sense, out of the fifteen twenties, fifteen thirties, we get these two revolutionary movements, the Jesuits and the Protestants, who have some similar ideas.

There are some similar little spiritual ideas going on.

So I suppose

Loyola was doing a bottom up, accidental revolution, but with less beer and less insults.

Just a little aside, I don't know if you knew this, but the Protestant Reformation was actually responsible not only for the Protestant Church

but also for lager.

There was a complete reformation of beer, and Luther was incredibly fond of beer.

And what was happening was that the production of beer was very much limited by the church.

because there was a particular mix of herbs and spices that were used for flavouring beer, and that was controlled and taxed by the church.

So if you wanted your beer ingredients, you had to get that from the Catholic Church.

As improbable as that sounds now

However, there was a weed called hops that was available everywhere, that the Catholic Church didn't think it was a great thing, partly because Hildegard of Bingen quite rightly had noticed that it had a sort of a soporific effect and would send people to sleep.

Anyway, as part of their protest against the Catholic Church, the Protestant reformers made their own beer, and Catherina Luther

wife of Martin Luther not only was bringing up their six children but she also formed a brewery in her house and got particularly good at brewing beer from hops

and knew how to make beer that Martin Luther, who was a bit of a beer connoisseur, really liked.

So the fellowship groups at the Luther House was full of discussions and beer.

And insults.

So the other thing that you might not know about Luther is that he was famously rude to people.

And if you would like to sample some of the rudeness of Luther, you can have a look at

um a website which is called the Lutheran Insulter, on which you can get a Lutheran insulter today if you like.

But I warn you it's a little bit addictive once you find it.

When I was preparing for this podcast I had a bit of a look

And the insult of the day was we despise your whorish impudence.

And if the insult of the day is not enough for you, there is a button which says insult me again.

Yes, a bit of an aside, but anyway.

I'm really fascinated that there are two people challenging the dominant theology of the church in the West at the same time in fundamentally similar but also different ways.

that bottom-up movement that Loyola is developing out of the desire simply for people to discover God in their everyday lives.

So Ignatius was simply going around finding people who would like to follow his example in finding a way of connecting to God.

He was very much of the view that everybody should find their own way.

One of his famous quotes is It is dangerous to make everybody go forward by the same road, and worse, to measure others by oneself.

So what he realized was that everybody's spiritual life is individual and everybody needs to find their own way to God.

And so what he developed were a number of tools to help people to do that.

He developed what is the equivalent of an evangelistic course, which he called the spiritual exercises, and it is still used.

It has endured a long time.

And I have to say, if you've ever done an alpha course, a commitment to the spiritual exercises makes the alpha course look particularly lightweight.

It's not a few evenings and a Saturday

or a weekend.

Rather, the spiritual exercises are something which are designed to do over either thirty days of silent retreat.

And these days sometimes people do that in three sets of ten days of silent retreat.

Or the way that myself and my husband did it recently was we did it alongside daily life over the course of about eighteen months.

Ignatius' vision was that this was a way of helping people to connect with the divine really for the first time.

These days it's often and usually I think people who already have a faith who use this as an opportunity to deepen that faith and to explore in a different way.

And people often find it very profound and certainly Stephen and I did when we did it.

Anyway, I'm not going to tell you about the spiritual exercises, but if that's something that you're interested in, it's definitely worth looking into

but rather to have a look at the kind of spirituality that underpins Ignatius' approach to helping people to discover God in their everyday lives.

Just as Luther said that people didn't need anybody to stand between them and God, one of Ignatius's famous quotes

Is that one needs to leave the creator to work directly with the creature.

That's his slightly old-fashioned language for God and us.

And the creature with their creator and Lord.

So really what he's saying is that everybody has access, but everybody gets there differently.

And his purpose in his development of spirituality was to help people to find ways of doing that.

So the first thing that Ignatius asserts, and this is what he wanted people to discover, is that God can be found in every area of life

Everything, therefore, happiness, suffering, work, play, relationships, what you're having for tea tonight, it's all part of the spiritual life.

Nothing is outside of the spiritual life, and therefore everything

is potentially a way of connecting with the divine, connecting with God.

And one of the ways that he helped people to connect

with that God in everything is a means of prayer called the examine.

And I I did a whole podcast on this with somebody called Olga Malaki.

So if you'd like to explore the examen in more detail, we have a whole episode that invites you to have a look at that with Olga.

So the examen really is simply a way

of spiritually with God, looking back over the past day or sometimes people do it over a year or a month and just spotting where God has been present, noticing where God has been present.

And also noticing where there's been a sense that the divine has not been present.

And bringing those parts of the day

back into the presence of the divine.

And sometimes if there's things that there are regrets for, leaving those with God.

And I suppose that really goes back to Ignatius's experience lying in that hospital bed, of noticing

that sometimes some things were stirring within him that sense of connection with the divine

Another way of putting that is that connection with the spiritual or the transcendent.

And then there were some things that were leading him away from that.

So some were wholesome and some were not.

Which brings us to two words that Ignatius uses quite a lot, which is the concept of consolation, that sense of what we're experiencing or what we're engaging with and what's going on within us.

is coming from that what he would have called a good spirit and desolation or that stuff that's coming from what he would have described as an evil spirit or just not from a good place.

And we can bring all of those things into God's presence and into conversation with God about what's going on for us.

Which brings us back to one of the key things which is absolutely central in Ignatius's spirituality.

He has this idea that everybody will find their own path forwards and therefore that when we look at what's happening within us, that

helps us to connect with the divine and also helps us to to discern what is good for us, what we desire, what we don't desire.

So one of the contrasts I think that I discovered in encountering Ignatian spirituality to some of the spirituality I'd encountered before.

Is this notion that we can safely and rightly look within and see what is happening, that we can encounter God in that journey inwards?

And I have been in the past in circles where the absolute opposite was asserted, that actually one can't trust.

what's going on inside, and that you need an external source of wisdom.

And often that's described as being the Bible, in a slightly unhelpful way, I would say.

I've heard the phrase that the heart is deceitful above all things

that we shouldn't listen to what's going on in the heart, that that is dangerous to do.

That is not what Ignatius tells us, and I think very wisely actually, that actually we can listen to what's going on within.

But he's not inviting people to do that without discernment.

He's inviting people to learn the difference between light and darkness, the difference between consolation and desolation.

So if you think about his experiences back when he was lying in the hospital bed, one of the things that he noticed was that sometimes he would get

A bit of what we would notice as a dopamine hit from his rather shallow fantasies about going out and being a hero as a soldier.

But the deeper satisfaction came when he connected with that deeper God

centered desire to emulate the life of the saint to follow Christ.

So he was learning how to what he refers to as discern the spirit

And that was what he was teaching people to do.

So the exercises, his spiritual exercises, his introduction to the faith was all about helping people to be wise about that.

He also encourages people to make their big life decisions with God, which is about this discerning of the Spirit, and also about noticing what our deepest and truest desires are.

the difference between the kind of dopamine hits that you might get from Doom Scrolling and the deep satisfaction about those things which are good and wholesome and more fulfilling

So he encourages people to look at their desires, to discover what their true desires are, their true godly, most wholesome, those desires which have the most integrity about them.

He's encouraging people to find those.

And in fact, one of the things that he encourages people to do at the beginning of any time of prayer is to work out what is it that I really want.

And again, sometimes we're told that our desires are dangerous.

And Ignatius is saying, No, no, no, they're not.

But we do need to be wise about our desires and what's going on within us.

And that feels in many ways actually very modern, that encouragement to notice our feelings, to notice our emotions, our desires, what's happening, and to use those wisely as a guide

And actually that is where quite a lot of our healing comes from.

You know, if really difficult things have happened, you can't get away with just squashing things down and pretending that they're not there.

Eventually we need to examine what's going on in order to deal with it, in order that it

comes out in the form of healthy spiritual growth and not in the form of destructive patterns of behavior and interaction with others.

So that's consolation and desolation and the examen and the place of desires and decision making in our lives.

And there is a whole

section of Jesuit Ignation Spirituality and Practice which is all about discernment and decision making.

And you can Google that and find that.

There are lots of really good Jesuit websites you can have a look at if you'd like to.

And it really taps into, I think, Paul's call to us, which he expresses in Galatians, to live not by the law but by the Spirit

And I think Ignatian spirituality is really good at giving us tools to work out how we might do that

And then there is scripture.

And Ignatius, just as Luther was saying, you know, you can connect with and understand scripture yourself.

You don't need somebody else to explain it to you.

Ignatius too encourages people to engage with scripture and he encourages them to do that in two ways.

The first is the concept of Lectio Divina, which you may well have heard of.

And Lectio Divina is the idea of reading with the heart.

So again, we're looking at what is it that the Spirit is doing within us.

So what he encouraged people to do was to take a passage of scripture, often a fairly short passage of scripture, and to read it and to read it again, not particularly with the mind, but noticing, again noticing the movements within.

Noticing what is it in this passage of scripture, what is it in this thing that I'm reading that is speaking to my heart at the moment?

And the idea is you would read, you would read again, you would listen.

I'm not sure actually whether this was first done by Ignatius or whether this is a practice that he had adopted from somewhere else, but it's certainly very much part of

the spirituality that he was promoting.

So yes, Lectura Divina is the practice of reading and rereading, reading with the heart, finding the thing that you want to focus on.

the thing which is speaking to you in the thing that you've read.

And scripture is not the only text that you might do this with.

And in fact

The Celts talk about not only God speaking to us through the Bible, but also speaking to us through nature.

And I did a podcast a few months back with somebody called Sue.

And it's called Natura Divina.

And she has she's doing some research and she's developed a spiritual practice which is about using this principle of reading scripture in this meditative

heart lid way and using that to help us to spend time in nature and connect with God that way.

So if that's of interest to you again you might want to go back and have a look at that

And having found something, if you take your passage of scripture, having found something that you want to meditate on, then Ignatius would say that you take that.

and see what it's speaking to you and see how that is shaping your heart and your life in the day to come.

And that you would talk to God about that

So that's Lectio Divina, his other means of engaging with Scripture, which is particularly Ignatian.

And again, here Ignatius is inviting his followers to engage in Scripture for themselves.

alongside the Spirit of God.

And this was the practice of imaginative contemplation.

And in imaginative contemplation, what Ignatius

encourages people to do is to take a story from scripture, very often an incident from the life of Christ, but it it could be any story.

It might be a parable, it might be a story that particularly speaks to you from the Old Testament.

And the idea is that you would read the story maybe two or three times and get a sense of what's happening in the story.

And then

Prayerfully, you imagine yourself in the scene.

You might imagine yourself as an onlooker, you might imagine yourself as one of the characters, and then you

go through the story, the scene, placing yourself in it.

And then seeing where that leads.

And it might be that you stick fairly closely to the story, or it might be

that it goes off in a different direction.

Perhaps if you were reflecting on the story of Jesus meeting the disciples, it might be that you follow Jesus somewhere where the story does go in scripture, or it might be that you and Jesus

disappear off and have a walk somewhere else.

So he's encouraging people to engage with scripture in a really rich imaginative way and see what comes from that

And our imaginations are a really powerful way of connecting with ourselves and with the divine.

And you can actually have some really quite deep spiritual encounters.

in the course of engaging in imaginative contemplation.

So there is both that similarity and difference between what Luther was encouraging people to do, which was to study scripture for themselves.

And what Ignatius is encouraging people to do, which is to engage with scripture for themselves.

And I have found this practice of imaginative contemplation really, really helpful on a number of occasions.

Quite often the act of imagining myself

within the story helps me to see things that I otherwise wouldn't have done.

And you can imagine yourself in the story as you imagine it would have been then.

Or it might be that you imagine it as a modern-day version, as I say, things can go in all sorts of directions, but it's a really, really helpful way of engaging differently, of seeing things differently.

And of engaging our whole being, you know, the whole of your imagination into something.

These are not the only ways of engaging with God, evidently, but the things that we've mentioned, the prayer of examen

the discerning of spirits, the looking at our desires, imaginative contemplation, lectio divina, these are all sorts of things that Ignatius

used as tools to help people to encounter God for themselves in their own way, on their own path, to help people to engage with God, not through an institution.

but in their own hearts for themselves.

And the final thing that he would encourage people to do, he referred to as colloquy, the prayer of colloquy, which basically means having a really honest conversation with the divine, with whichever

person of the divine connects with you best.

And sometimes he would encourage people in a particular part of the spiritual exercises.

He encourages people to have a conversation with each member of the Trinity and with Mary, remembering that he's coming from a Catholic background.

And particularly people coming at Ignatian spirituality from a Catholic perspective, sometimes they will have conversations with the saints.

But that conversing with God honestly was a key part of what he was encouraging people to do.

And then the final thing that I have found really, really helpful is that

He encourages people to review their prayer time and to go back to things.

So if you are somebody, for example, who

Sometimes in your prayer you see pictures or you imagine pictures.

If you've seen a picture or you've imagined something that is particularly helpful to you, then Ignatius would say, Well go back to it

So maybe you've imagined yourself sitting with God having a conversation on a particular bench on a particular imaginary hillside, if that's been really helpful to you.

Well then go back there.

If there's been a part of your prayer or a part of your imagination within a particular story that you've been imagining that has been helpful to you, or you feel there's more to explore in that, then go back to it.

If there's a particular passage that has been meaningful to you, then continue to go back to it and meditate on it again and talk with God about that again.

So there is just a little bit of a brief overview of some of the concepts and some of the history of Ignatian spirituality

And I'm hoping that some of that might be helpful to you, or if not helpful, at least interesting.

If you want to look into this stuff more, I would say that there are some there are some good websites.

If you look up the

Jesuits and Jesuit spirituality.

I think probably my favourite author who has an Ignatian approach to things is Margaret Silf and a number of her books I found really, really helpful

She has a particular book called Landmarks, which will take you on an Ignation journey if you would like to do that.

So hopefully

There is plenty in there to go at.

Some people decide to do the the spiritual exercises and as I say it can be particularly helpful over a period of time they take you through

the life of Christ.

So Christ's childhood and ministry and death and resurrection.

It kind of comes in four or five chunks and that can be very, very profound.

That is something that you would need to do with a spiritual director.

And as I say, that was kind of Ignatius's version of an alpha course.

So I hope that there is something of interest for you within all of that.

And I will put in the show notes some links to a couple of books and resources, and I hope it's been helpful.

Hope you enjoyed this episode of the Loved Called Gifted podcast.

If you'd like to get in touch, you can email lovedcalledgifted at gmail.

com.

You can find a transcript of this podcast at lovedcalledgifted.

com and that's also the place to go if you're interested in the Loved Called Gifted course or if you'd like to find out about spiritual direction or coaching.

Thank you for listening.