The Jesuit Guide To (Almost) Everything - James Martin [66]
David realized something else too. “For all of my training, she probably had a deeper relationship with God than I had!”
David used to tell that story to remind me that there is no right way to pray. But there may be a particular method of prayer that fits you more comfortably.
So let’s talk about some ways of prayer that are most often considered part of the Ignatian tradition. At the end of the chapter I’ll speak more broadly about other ways, but the following methods are those most closely associated with Ignatian spirituality.
As you read along, notice which ones you feel most drawn to. Perhaps God is calling you, through this attraction, to try one out. Perhaps in one of these practices, as David’s mother would say, God could look at you, and you could look at God.
IGNATIAN CONTEMPLATION
Remember those five hypothetical Jesuits I mentioned in the first chapter? The ones who gave us four definitions of Ignatian spirituality? Well, if you asked those same five to describe the Ignatian tradition of prayer, chances are that they would first mention “Ignatian contemplation.”
All prayer is contemplative. But here I’m using the term to describe a certain type of prayer, which also goes by the names “contemplation,” “contemplative prayer,” and “imaginative prayer.” Though Ignatius didn’t invent this kind of prayer, he popularized it by giving it center stage in his Spiritual Exercises, where he called it “composition of place.”
In Ignatian contemplation you “compose the place” by imagining yourself in a scene from the Bible, or in God’s presence, and then taking part in it. It’s a way of allowing God to speak to you through your imagination.
This was one of Ignatius’s favorite ways to help people enter into a relationship with God. And it flowed from his own experience in prayer. As David Fleming writes, while Ignatius was an excellent analytical thinker (even if he probably would not have thought of himself as an intellectual), the “mental quality of thought that drove his spiritual life was his remarkable imagination.”
When I first heard about this method in the novitiate, I thought it sounded ridiculous. Using your imagination? Making things up in your head? Was everything you imagined supposed to be God speaking to you? Isn’t that what crazy people think?
In one of my first conversations with David, I confessed my doubts, even disappointment, about “Ignatian contemplation.” As he listened, he began to smile. I can still see him sitting in his easy chair with his cup of coffee at the ready. “Let me ask you a question,” he said. “Do you think that God can speak to you through your relationships with other people?”
“Of course,” I said.
“Through reading Scripture and through the sacraments?” Yes and yes.
“Through your daily experiences, and through your desires and emotions?” Yes, yes, and yes.
“Do you think God can communicate through what you see every day and hear and feel and even smell?” Of course.
“Then why couldn’t God speak to you through your imagination?”
That made sense. Think seriously about your imagination, David said. Wasn’t it a gift from God, like your intellect or your memory? And if it was a gift, why couldn’t it be used to experience God?
This made sense, too. Using my imagination wasn’t so much making things up, as it was trusting that my imagination could help to lead me to the one who created it: God. That didn’t mean that everything I imagined during prayer was coming from God. But it did mean that from time to time God could use my imagination as one way of communicating with me.
So, how do you “do” Ignatian contemplation? Well, here’s where we turn directly to the Spiritual Exercises for some help.
The Composition, by Imagining the Place
First,