The Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola are a retreat manual and not a dogmatic treatise. They have been compared to a libretto or a cooking book. It is by entering into the experience they propose (be it through the whole course of the thirty days retreat or through a shorter formula) that one can acquire a real taste of the experience they propose. Moreover, as it is the case with a recipe, the final result will be pretty much different from one person to another. Elaborated by Saint Ignatius of Loyola in the context of the European 16rth century, grounded upon the personal spiritual experience of its author, the book has shown a surprising flexibility and has helped an innumerable number of people, throughout ages and culture, to enter into a process of spiritual growth.

The ES are based upon the premises that a direct communication between God and the retreatant is possible. Though the word “holiness” does not belong to the lexicon of the ES, they obviously propose to enter into the experience of the Holiness of God in order for men ad women to participate in God’s very holiness. However, during the course of the Exercises our primitive concept of holiness will most probably be challenged, deconstructed and finally renewed. The God discovered throughout the course of the ES is the Holy One insofar as He is utterly different from the image of Him we had in our mind. It is this process of rediscovery of God and of His Holiness that I aim at describing here.

The Principle and Foundation and the First Week

The ES are divided into four “weeks”, though each week can be of a different length. These weeks correspond to the four articulations of the ES and, taken together, constitute their dynamic process. It has to be stressed form the start that the old notion of spiritual life identified with the purgative, illuminative and unitive stages does not correspond to the process drawn throughout the ES, which have a more existential and dynamic outlook. The ES aim at making the retreatant enter into a process of human and spiritual growth. As we shall see, this process and the discovery of God’s holiness and one’s participation in it are one and the same endeavor.

The aim of the First Week of the ES has been described by David Fleming as “to learn to be fired by great visions and ideals.” Ignatius presents a God who is identified as a “giver” while all created things are identified as gifts. Ignatius draws our attention to the way we receive, respect and use these gifts. To discover one’s sin, one’s lack of holiness, is to discover our lack of purposefulness in the way we respect and use all the things that are given to us. Holiness, in this perspective, is first discovered as deriving from the gift-character of all things created, a character that reflects the pure intention of the Giver, the Holy One. Conversely, a lack of holiness is a lack of vision and clarity, a failure to identify what we hold as Holy and to recognize that created things are holy because of their origin and their purpose –their purpose being to help us to enter into the Holiness of the Giver himself. In this perspective, discovering one’s sin and discovering one’s ideal, one’s desire to enter into the holiness of the Lord are one and the same movement of growth.

The Second Week

Our vision and ideals are met and answered through our encounter with Jesus. The second Week is about this encounter. At the beginning of the second week Ignatius gives us another “vision piece”, as was the case with the Principle and Foundation. The title of the piece is “The Call of the King.” “Being with me”, Jesus says, “means that you live the way I live.” Here again, Ignatius wants to fire our generosity, our ideal. Ideal comes first, even before repentance, conversion or penance. The contrary of holiness, one can say, is not lack of purity, rather it is lack of ideal, of fervor, of vision. Holiness is not about Law. It is about Spirit. This is congruent with the way the Gospels present to us the call of Jesus to his disciples.

In the ES, we learn to desire “to be with Jesus.” “To be with” might be the more basic experience described by the ES. Here again, this might change the way we generally conceive holiness. Holiness is not about loneliness, isolation in one’s purity. Holiness is about relationship. The Holy One is at the same time the Holy Trine, and his Holiness is ultimately manifested in the way He reveals himself to humankind and calls mean and women to become companions of His Son.

This understanding of what Holiness is about is deepened in”The Two Standards.” In this piece, Ignatius describes the way mean are enslaved through the “riches’ and the honor they get from them. Jesus chooses opposite values to focus on our true human identity. Choose poverty, then humiliation results, and humility becomes our gift. Holiness is discovered through a process of impoverishment and humiliation. Holiness is not discovered as fullness, it is discovered through want and humiliation. Changing our image of God through the meditation on the life of Jesus and discovering God’s holiness are indeed one and the same process.

The Third Week

The third Week is a deepening of the perspective offered by ‘The Two Standards.” It is based on a prolonged meditation of Christ’s passion and death. In the course of the contemplations of this week, we continue our process of growth: we learn that to be a companion, a disciple means to learn the way to suffer with the One we follow. Ignatius wants us to pray for the grace to be with Jesus in his feeling of anguish and abandonment. At this time, we can do nothing, and learning to do nothing might be the greatest labor of all. Learning to be a disciple is learning how to suffer with Jesus, suffer with ourselves, with others, with our world.

Ignatius asks us to consider how, in the course of the Passion, “the divinity hides itself” (ES, 196), and it might be at this point that the deconstruction of Holiness reaches its climax. The Passion meditations are all about humiliation, suffering, loss of face, the triumph of violence, obscurity, and it is in this setting that the retreatant is supposed to become the companion of the Son of the Holy God, not by flying away from what offers itself to his memory and imagination but by diving even deeper into it.

The Fourth Week and The Contemplation to Gain Love

Based on the contemplation of Christ’s resurrection, the Fourth Week aims at introducing us to the sharing of joy and consolation. Sometimes, it is even harder to enter into someone’s else joy than into his or her suffering. The basic experience to be done during this week is that the Risen Lord stays with us. Christ reveals himself as Son of the Holy One not because of a distance he would create but because of the proximity between He and us that He restores. Here again, our instinctive concept of Holiness is subverted. The revelation of Holiness comes through proximity, not through distance.

Love is attained when one contemplates the way God never ceases to give to me and to empower me. And my free answer to a freely giving God will be to give and labor back.

Rediscovering the Holiness of God

As I say in the introduction, “holiness” does not belong to the lexicon of the ES. Other attributes of God are mentioned: “wisdom, omnipotence, justice, goodness” (ES, 59), “supreme and infinite power, justice, goodness, pity, mercy…”(ES 237) However, stating that the ES are a pathway to deconstruct false conceptions of Holiness and truly discover God’s holiness aptly sums up the spirit of the ES. The vision of God that emerges from the ES, and especially from the Contemplation to Gain Love, is a God whose freedom and gratuitousness, manifested in His unceasing way to give to us and to gift us, are the main attributes. God’s freedom and gratuitousness can be truly called the essence of His Holiness to the extent that those are the attributes that, for Ignatius, should fill us with awe, reverence and love. The mystery of God’s holiness is nothing else than the mystery of absolute freedom and gratuitousness manifested in the life, death and resurrection of Christ. There is no other place where God’s Holiness could be found and celebrated.

Such discovery implies to deconstruct our false images of God and Holiness. These images are so numerous, and so peculiar to each retreatant, that it would be impossible to summarize them. In any case, for Ignatius, the process of listening to the Word of God, ruminating, meditating, contemplating, is akin to a deconstruction process. Through the use of imagination and memory, through reminiscences and divine inspiration, we realize at times that we were living on an idea of God based on fear or another human passion. We also deconstruct the false images that we had of ourselves, starting from our images of sainthood. We first have to accept ourselves as sinners, as long as we accept at the same time that we are sinners already forgiven and called to follow Christ – to follow him out of an act of freedom and gratuitousness that makes us enter into the holiness of God himself. For the only way to become saint and holy for us is to exercise our freedom and gratuitousness. Holiness is less about virtue than about inner truth and freedom. I know one man formed by the ES and who said one day: “when I was a child, I was dreaming to become a Saint. Now, my sole ambition is to become a free man.” Sure, the ES have much to tell us about the paradox of inner freedom. Inner freedom is grounded on indifference, and indifference leads us to accept servitude, suffering, death – as it leads us also to accept life and joy, which is a thing that religious men and women are sometimes prone to overlook. Indifference leads to holiness and teaches us that holiness is not static, that holiness actually is manifested in the movement of life, a movement that goes indeed across suffering and death but that stops nowhere, even at this stage.

Saying the same thing differently, full and active gratitude is the way men and women enter into holiness, and ingratitude is the other name that can be given to un-holiness. “It seems to me, in the light of the Divine Goodness, that ingratitude is the most abominable of sins and that it should be detested in the sight of our Creator and Lord by all of his creatures who are capable of enjoying his divine and everlasting glory. For it is a forgetting of the graces, benefits and blessings received. As such it is the cause, beginning and origin of all sins and misfortunes” wrote Ignatius…

Conclusion

Holiness, as seen through the practice of the ES, is less an attribute than a process. It is the exercise of freedom and gratuitousness by which God unceasingly communicates His life to Himself, in the circulation of love among the Divine Persons, and, in the same act, communicates His life to humankind. This very communication of life enables humankind to respond through a similar act of freedom and gratuitousness, and this answer makes it able to participate in the holiness of its creator. Human words and images on the Sacred and the Holy can sometimes help us to enter into such experience. At other times, words and images constitute an obstacle. Ultimately, the ES lead us towards a deeper understanding of what remains for us mysterious and paradoxical: Holiness does not abode on unattainable skies, Holiness dwells in our midst, and manifests itself through the most humble and daily acts of free love and service. The Jesus that we find the ES and in the Gospel is this person who, knowing that he comes form the Holy One and returns to Him, takes a towel and washes the feet of his disciples.


References
- «Texte Autographe des Exercices Spirituels », Paris, DDB, coll. Christus n.60, 1986.
- « Exercitia Spiritualia », MHSI, vol.100, Roma, 1960.
- Letters of St Ignatius of Loyola, translated by William J. Young, Chicago, Loyola University Press, 1959
- Michel de CERTEAU，"L’Espace du Désir", Christus, January 1973，pp.118-128.
- Maurice GIULIANI, "Respect de Dieu et Indifférence", Christus, October 1960.
- David FLEMING, Draw Me Into Your Friednship, The Spirtual Exercises, A Literal Translation and a Contemporary Reading, Saint Louis, The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1996
- David FLEMING, edit., Ignatian Exercises: Contemporary Annotations, Review for Religious, The Best of the Review 4, Saint Louis, 1996.

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