The Jesuit Guide To (Almost) Everything - James Martin [135]
It also implicitly highlights the image of aJesus who fully understands what human suffering is, and this image can help us feel less alone when faced with pain.
Jesus’ suffering, by the way, does not simply mean his Passion. During his life in Nazareth, he would have fallen ill like any person of his time, endured poverty, and felt sorrow over the death of friends and family—particularly Joseph, his foster father, who most likely died before Jesus’ crucifixion. During his ministry, he endured physical hardships as he traveled around the countryside, encountered rejection from religious authorities, and probably felt a loneliness about a mission that, after all, no one else could fathom. Jesus understood the human condition. These are new insights that one gains by imaginatively meditating on his life.
Later in the Second Week, Ignatius presents the Two Standards, which we mentioned in Chapter Eight, in our discussion of “riches to honors to pride.” Here are two sides of a titanic battle between good and evil arrayed against each other. “The supreme commander of the good people is Christ our Lord . . . the leader of the enemy is Lucifer.” In the Ignatian worldview, there is a battle raging within ourselves between the attractions to do good and to do evil. But Ignatius trusts in the Christian belief that the forces of good will ultimately overpower those of evil.
Moreover, the Two Standards reminds you that while the life-giving choice is clear—choosing Christ—it will involve some suffering, specifically “poverty,” “reproaches,” and “contempt.” Ignatius says that if you want to emulate Christ, you will want to be more like him and will therefore choose a more difficult path.
The notion of choosing a harder path appears several times in the Exercises. The logic goes like this: If I want to followJesus, then I will choose to become like him. And if becoming like Jesus means accepting hardships, then I will seek those things, assuming that this is not against God’s will.
Like the rest of the Exercises, none of this makes sense without understanding the goal of following God. The person who hopes to emulate Christ in his suffering (remember the Third Degree of Humility) does so not because he desires suffering for its own sake or because suffering is a good or because he wishes to punish himself, but rather to be more like his hero, Jesus, who chose to accept the suffering that was placed before him.
This may be the hardest part of Ignatian spirituality to understand—choosing the more difficult route. But for many believers it is freeing, for in doing so, they can emulate their leader and follow him along the same road he trod and experience freedom and joy: the freedom that comes with being detached from excessive self-interest and the joy that comes with following your hero.
Where Ignatius helps us to understand suffering in a unique way lies in his invitation to imagine the suffering of Christ through imaginative prayer. This constitutes the bulk of the meditations for the Third Week of the Spiritual Exercises. Suffering is a mystery to be pondered within the context of a relationship between God and you, and some of this can be done in prayer, especially by meditating on the experiences of Jesus of Nazareth.
In the Third Week the retreatants imagine themselves following Jesus of Nazareth through the Last Supper, to his trials in the garden of Gethsemane, his arrest and beating, the rejection by Peter, his crucifixion, his suffering on the cross, and his death. “Consider what Christ our Lord suffers,“ Ignatius writes, ”or desires to suffer, according to the passage being contemplated.”
The retreatant tries to accept the invitation to be with Christ in these meditations. We ask for empathy with the suffering Christ. At one point Ignatius asks us to pray for “sorrow with Christ in sorrow; a broken spirit with Christ so broken; tears; and interior suffering.” We are to be present with Jesus as he suffers, something that is difficult for most of us who find it difficult to face suffering that we cannot fix or take away.