Letting God Come Close

I think it came up in an earlier post that in my religious life (such as it is :) I have put a lot of emphasis on what I've learned about and experienced in that Creighton University spiritual exercises style retreat. Maybe if I keep posting about Ignatian spirituality, or at least my take on it, the 'why' will become more understandable. I've been reading again a book by spiritual director William A Barry SJ, Letting God Come Close: An Approach to the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises. Here's a bit from the beginning of it (with major snipping) .....

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[...] I assume that the Exercises will be profitable for people in proportion to the depth of their desires .... desires to develop and deepen their relationship with God. Such desires, if they are real, are based on strong positive experiences of God, experiences that I have come to call the affective Principle and Foundation .... Before I agree to direct someone in the full Exercises, I try to ascertain whether he or she has had sufficient positive experiences of God ... experiences of being desired into existence and kept in existence by a loving Creator who has a dream for that person .... some people begin them [the Exercises] without a deep trust in God. In such cases, the time spent on the affective Principle and Foundation can take a number of days ....

Such felt knowledge [the affective Principle and Foundation] leads to the First Week of the Spiritual Exercises, in which the desire is to know both how they and the world have fallen short of what God intends. At the same time, they want to know that God has not given up on them or on the world. One can put the desire this way: "I want God to reveal to me how God sees me and my world." .....

During the Second Week, I begin with ... the contemplation of the Incarnation, with its reference to the Trinity looking down upon the world .... I usually suggest a day spent on the first ten chapters of Mark's Gospel ... for most retreatants, these days lead to the question of whether or not they want to ask to be chosen, as the Twelve were chosen, to be companions of Jesus ..... The question before them is how Jesus wants them to live out their lives as disciples .... In other words, retreatants face the question, Does God want me to live out my life as a disciple of the poor Jesus? If the answer is yes, the concrete details of how to live out this choice can only be worked out after the conclusion of the Exercises .....

The Third Week is ushered in by the aroused desire in the person making the Exercises to have Jesus reveal what his passion and death were like .... The desire is for compassion for Jesus. Even those who have this desire may be surprised, however, at how difficult it is to stay with Jesus in contemplation of the passion. But it could hardly be otherwise. All of us shy away from pain, suffering, and death. If we find it very difficult to face our own suffering and eventual death, we often find it even more difficult to face the suffering and death of those we love .....

The Fourth Week arrives with the desire to have Jesus reveal the joy of his resurrected life. Here too, it may not be easy for the person to stay with the contemplation of the risen Jesus. I believe that one source of resistance here is the hidden hope that with the Resurrection, the cross and death of Jesus will be seen as only a bad dream. But the risen Jesus carries the marks of his passion on him. The past is not undone. The wisdom of Jesus is hard to accept: namely, that he could only be the risen One he now is through the actual life he led and the death he suffered .....

Ignatius discovered in his own experience that both God and he could deal directly with each other and that these dealings had an ordered progression. Perhaps because of my training as a psychologist, I tend to see this ordered progression in terms of an ever-deepening relationship analogous to the development of an intimate human relationship. Any developing intimate relationship between two humans begins with an initial attraction (the affective Principle and Foundation). As the relationship develops, it will gradually erode the egocentric concerns of both of the parties and shift both to a concern and care for the other instead of the self (First Week). Moreover, if such a developing relationship continues to unfold authentically, it will lead the two people to larger concerns than just their own (Second Week). Finally, people in an intimate relationship must come to grips with suffering and death (Third Week) in order to fully enjoy life itself (Fourth Week). The human analogy, however, pales before the reality of what happens when the Creator deals directly with the creature and the creature with his or her Creator.

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Me again. I didn't go into that Creighton retreat with a belief that God was good and loved me and had a dream for me (the Principle and Foundation). I felt challenged at every step of the way and I probably was not the kind of person who should have continued after the second week, when people are to ask Jesus if he wants them to be a disciple. But even with my limitations, I did think I felt "the Creator dealing directly with the creature" and though I'm not living out the results very well, it's still probably the best thing I've ever done.