DISCERNING SPIRITUAL THINGS
SAINT IGNATIUS LOYOLA, PRIEST
Jer 26:1-9; Ps
69:5,8-10,14; Mt 13:54-58
Making Meaning of God’s Interventions
The path to the spiritual
realm lies within, not without. We must learn to walk the inner path to move
freely in the spirit and understand spiritual things in the physical world. We
walk blindly, as it were, when we rely only on the evidence of the senses. What
makes us Christians is our ability to walk in faith and not by the senses
alone. The spiritual life gained through faith and interior meditation, and
contemplation of mysteries of our faith, is the fruition of our baptismal
consecration to God in Jesus Christ. Hence, we have emphasised prayer as the
respiration of a Christian. This foundational prayer is our hearts’ yearning
for God, as a deer yearns for a stream of running water, or a drowning man for
air. The intensity of our yearning for God indicates our spiritual health. When
our yearning is only for visible or material goods, it is an indicator that we
are spiritually dead or nearly so. It is the duty of pastors of souls to keep
this spiritual yearning for God in the hearts of the faithful by sustained
proclamation of the word of God to them. The word of God has power to quicken
our spiritual life and raise the spiritually dead also to life. It is our
vocation to live the word of God and proclaim it to others by our lives.
The life of Jeremiah the
prophet offers us ample examples of the meaning of our vocation as prophets.
The words God addressed to Jeremiah first knocked down illegal or sinful
structures within him before using him as a channel to address the people and their
sinful lives. Having made Jeremiah’s worship of God interior through the woes
and inner afflictions he went through, he was sent to address the people in the
Temple of Jerusalem on the need to interiorise their worship of God. “The Lord
says this: ‘If you will not listen to me by following my Law which I put
before you, by paying attention to the words of my servants the prophets whom I
send so persistently to you, without your ever listening to them, I will treat
this Temple as I treated Shiloh, and make this city a curse for all the nations
of the earth.’” Jeremiah, who had suffered terror in the hands of God,
understood the divine threats and their implications. He uttered the words
given to him without alteration. The priests, prophets, and people who live and
worship by their senses and sensible things did not understand him. They
considered him a nuisance because he disturbed their comfort in sin.
The word of God is the
source of all created realities. So, we must look to him to gain a clear
understanding of things and the events of life. The people did not accept
Jesus’ teachings in his hometown because they knew his family. Instead of
attending to the word he spoke to them as the word of God, they let the visible
qualities blind their judgment. “Where did the man get this wisdom and these
miraculous powers? This is the carpenter’s son, surely? Is not his mother the
woman called Mary, and his brothers James and Joseph, Simon and Jude? His
sisters, too, are they not all here with us? So where did the man get it all?
And they would not accept him.” Judging without the light from the word of God
will always leave us blind and ignorant. Those who misjudge the important role
of the Blessed Virgin Mary in our salvation make the same mistake of failing to
understand her in the light of the Eternal Word of God.
Saint Ignatius was
acquainted with the spiritual or interior path during his recovery from his
injuries as a soldier, and grew steadily in it. He was born in Loyola in the
Spanish Basque Country. He was a soldier, but was wounded in the battle of
Pamplona at the age of 30. He read a life of Christ and a collection of lives
of the saints. He discovered that his true vocation was to devote his life
wholly to God. He set about it as a soldier, systematically reordered his life
on the interior light and path. He spent a year on a retreat, in a Dominican
friary, made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and started learning Latin. In 1534, he
and six companions bound themselves to become missionaries to the Muslims in
Palestine. They could not go because of an ongoing war, which caused them to
offer their service to the Pope in any capacity he might choose. They were
ordained and assigned to various tasks. They organised themselves into a
regular religious order by 1540 as the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits. Ignatius
was the first Superior General, a position he held until death in 1556. He had
a special insight into spiritual life, which led him to write his Spiritual
Exercises, a systematic step-by-step retreat that anyone can use to make
progress in spiritual life. May his prayers help us to walk interiorly in the
company of Jesus Christ.
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