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David Fleming writes that it is as if Jesus is saying to us, “Let me tell you what it was like, what I saw, and what I felt. . . . Just stay with me and listen.”

A Willing Acceptance

Because of their intense desire to follow and identify with Christ, while some Jesuit saints did not actively seek out martyrdom for its own sake, they welcomed it when it was inevitable. They saw it as the ultimate offering of themselves to God, their ultimate obedience. While this spirituality may be difficult to understand, it was the chief way that the martyrs approached the dangers they faced. In the seventeenth century, St. Isaac Jogues and his companions were martyred by the Iroquois during their work among them. This notion of acceptance appears again and again in many of their letters written home. Here is Isaac recounting the last day of René Goupil, who was a lay companion of the Jesuit.

Upon the road he was always occupied with God. His words and the discourses that he held were all expressive of submission to the commands of Divine Providence, and showed a willing acceptance of the death which God was sending him. He gave himself as a sacrifice, to be reduced to ashes by the fires of the Iroquois. . . . He sought the means to please [God] in all things, and everywhere.

Before his death in 1642 René Goupil took vows as a Jesuit. A few days later he was killed, gruesomely. His body was hidden by the Iroquois in a deep ravine, and Isaac was only able to locate his skull and a few bones. Jogues himself was martyred four years later. At the National Shrine of the North American Martyrs in Auriesville, New York, the ravine is untouched, overgrown with grass, St. René’s body still lost.

Christ is the example par excellence of the one who “surrendered to the future” that God had in store, as Sister Janice said; who accepted the “reality of the situation,” as Walter Ciszek said; who was “obedient to the point of death,” as St. Paul said. By meditating imaginatively on his life, we can gain insights into what it means to “accept” and what happens when we do and how God can bring new life out of even the darkest situations.

Moreover, by entering into the scene, you often gain a highly personal perspective on suffering, one that even the greatest theologians cannot offer. As David Fleming notes in What Is Ignatian Spirituality? this kind of prayer “makes the Jesus of the Gospel our Jesus.” It helps us to understand better Jesus’ sufferings and our own.

Here is Fleming on what people may learn during these meditations:

Our third week meditations also teach us how difficult acceptance is. When we cannot change a situation, we are tempted to walk away from it. We might literally walk away; we are too busy to sit with a suffering friend. Or we walk away emotionally; we harden ourselves and maintain an emotional distance. We might react to the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ passion and death this way. They describe something terrible and horribly painful, yet we might shield ourselves from the pain. We know the story of the Passion. Ignatius wants us to experience it as something fresh and immediate. We learn to suffer with Jesus, and thus learn to suffer with the people in our lives.

In the end, we learn that Ignatian compassion is essentially our loving presence. There is nothing we can do. There is little we can say. But we can be there.

And remember the simple technique of the “colloquy,” in which you speak to God in prayer “as one friend speaks to another”? When meditating on the Passion, retreatants often feel moved to speak with Jesus about their own suffering. “Seeing” Jesus’ suffering is a reminder that, for the Christian, we are accompanied by a God who, even if he does not—for whatever mysterious reason—take away our pain, understands it, since he lived as a human being. During the times of the worst anguish in my life it has been this prayer that has most consoled me: speaking with the Jesus who knows suffering.

Let me give you a brief example from my own experiences with the Exercises, as a way of illustrating our discussion,