The Jesuit Guide To (Almost) Everything - James Martin [9]
The Second Week is a series of meditations taken directly from the New Testament, focusing on the birth, young adult life, and eventual ministry of Jesus of Nazareth. Here you follow Jesus in his preaching, healings, and nature miracles, which bring you in contact, in an imaginative way, with Jesus in his earthly ministry.
The Third Week focuses on the Passion: Jesus’ final entry into Jerusalem, the Last Supper, his trial, crucifixion, suffering on the cross, and death.
The Fourth Week is based on the Gospel accounts of the Resurrection and, once again, God’s love for you.
Along the way, like mileposts, Ignatius includes specific meditations on ideas like humility, decision making, and choosing between good and evil.
Some classic works of spirituality are meant to be read contemplatively. The Spiritual Exercises are different. They are meant to be experienced, not read. Frankly, they read more like a tedious instruction manual than a moving treatise on prayer. For example: “After the preparatory prayer and the three preludes, it is profitable to use the imagination and to apply the five senses to the first and second contemplations, in the following manner.” Snooze.
In a sense, the Exercises are like a dance. If you want to learn how to dance, you can’t simply read a book on dancing; you have to dance! Or at least have someone help you to dance. What I’ll try to do in this book is offer some insights from the Exercises, that is, tell you a little about what happens in that dance. And encourage you to start dancing yourself.
When Jesuits think about the Exercises, they often think of a particular style of prayer that Ignatius often recommends: using your imagination as an aid to prayer, as a way of picturing yourself within specific stories from Scripture. So the Exercises are not only a program of prayer; they also embody a way of prayer. And a certain worldview. (More about all that later.)
Overall, the Spiritual Exercises are one of the main repositories for understanding the way of Ignatius: what leads to God, what elicits greater freedom, and what helps you live a purposeful life.
The Constitutions
During his years in Rome, Ignatius spent much of his time writing the Jesuit Constitutions, the series of guidelines that governs Jesuit life—in the communities, in the various works we do, in the way that we relate to one another—almost every aspect of our lives. Ignatius worked on the Constitutions until his death and, as with the Spiritual Exercises, was always tinkering with it. It is another resource for understanding his distinctive spirituality.
Every religious order has something similar to the Constitutions. Usually it’s called a “rule,” as in the Rule of St. Benedict, which governs life in the Benedictine order. Each rule is a window into the underlying spirituality, or “charism,” of the religious order. You can learn a great deal about the Benedictines by reading their Rule. And you can learn a lot about Ignatian spirituality by reading the Constitutions. (Technically our “rule” also includes the original papal documents, issued by Pope Paul III and Pope Julius III, establishing the Jesuits.)
For the Jesuit, if the Exercises are about how to live your own life, the Constitutions are about how to live your life with others. The Exercises are about you and God; the Constitutions, at least for Jesuits, are about you, God, and your brother Jesuits.
Into the Constitutions Ignatius poured his ideas for the way that Jesuits should be trained, how they should live with one another, how they should work best together, what works they should undertake, how superiors should behave, how the sick should be cared for, and which men should be admitted to the order—in