The goal of this kind of reflection is not intellectual knowledge or insight, but “felt knowledge” that burns itself into the heart like a red-hot iron, forging a deep personal bond. Ignatian prayer is like sitting wordlessly before a sunset, savoring what we notice about its presence, and applying it to ourselves in conversation with God; it’s not like thinking about the sunset and talking to ourselves about it. It invites us to encounter the living presence of Jesus Christ in prayer, not to remain trapped in our own thoughts. Can I sit with an image of God from Scripture and notice where it stirs me? Can I talk to God about what’s really going on inside of me without presenting only my “good” or idealized side to him?
Many ordinary people have valued the Ignatian focus on discerning God’s presence in our religious experiences rather than in the clouds of theological abstraction. Despite the reputation of Jesuits for being over-educated, St. Ignatius was a practical mystic whose approach to the spiritual life was based on encountering God in our everyday experiences, not on fleeing from them into intellectual fortresses built on the sand of our mental constructs. Ignatius invites us to bring whatever is happening in our lives to prayer, ask God for what we want, and listen to how the Lord responds.
Following his conversion, St. Ignatius embraced Jesus Christ’s call to hate the world, but not in the sense that he rejected God’s creation as inherently evil, splitting earth and heaven into two unrelated realities. For St. Ignatius, the Christian who “hates his life in this world” (Jn 12:25) turns away from selfishness, but not from the messiness of life. So “the world” in this negative sense refers to God’s creation as we’ve corrupted it through our selfish ways rather than to God’s creation in and of itself. If Ignatius knew anything from his own experiences, it was the difference between human selfishness and self-giving love.
Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J. (1881–1955), the French Jesuit geologist and mystic, expresses with particular clarity the Ignatian invitation to embrace God’s creation as good:
In so doing, [the disciple] does not believe he is transgressing the Gospel precept to hate and contemn the world. He does, indeed, despise the world and trample it under foot — but the world that is cultivated for its own sake, the world closed in on itself, the world of pleasure, the damned portion of the world that falls back and worships itself.
(“Mastery of the World and the Kingdom of God” in Writings in Time of War, 83–91)
To live in the world without sensing God in it damns us. While St. Ignatius rejected this sinful sense of worldliness in his own life, he was a practical mystic who nevertheless loved all that is good and beautiful in human experience. He rejected “the world” as corrupted by human sin, but he also loved “the world” as God creates, sustains, and calls it — including all of us — to be.
The need to discern prayerfully between creation’s goodness as redeemed by the Trinity’s saving action (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit working together in collaboration with us for our good) and its distortion by sin continues to inform the spiritual vocabulary of Jesuits today. Pope Francis, the most prominent Jesuit of our time, evokes this Ignatian view of “the world” whenever he preaches about the either-or choice between God and mammon, service and consumerism. He described “the world” in its negative sense in his speech to the poor at Assisi, Italy, lamenting the deaths of more than 360 refugees in a shipwreck:
Of what must the Church divest herself? Today she must strip herself of a very grave danger, which threatens every person in the Church, everyone: the danger of worldliness. The Christian cannot coexist with the spirit of the world, with the worldliness that leads us to vanity, to arrogance, to pride. And this is an idol; it is not God. It is an idol! And idolatry is the gravest of sins!
(Speech in the Room of Renunciation in the Archbishop’s Residence, October 4, 2013)
If the pope calls us to reject worldliness, he also calls us to embrace the spirit of God that lies at the heart of Ignatian spirituality. We find that spirit rooted in the virtue of humility, the good habit of seeing ourselves and the realities around us through Christ’s eyes rather than through the lens of self-centered distortions. Later in this same speech on the feast of St. Francis of Assisi, the Holy Father distinguished this Christlike humility that forms the hinge of all saintly virtues from the worldly self-interest that makes us oblivious to the suffering of others:
And Jesus made himself a servant for our sake, and the spirit of the world has nothing to do with this. Today I am here with you. Many of you have been stripped by this callous world that offers no work, no help. To this world it doesn’t matter that there are children dying of hunger; it doesn’t matter if many families have nothing to eat, do not have the dignity of bringing bread home; it doesn’t matter that many people are forced to flee slavery, hunger, and flee in search of freedom. With how much pain, how often don’t we see that they meet death, as in Lampedusa; today is a day of tears! The spirit of the world causes these things.
It is unthinkable that a Christian — a true Christian — be it a priest, a sister, a bishop, a cardinal, or a pope, would want to go down this path of worldliness, which is a homicidal attitude. Spiritual worldliness kills! It kills the soul! It kills the person! It kills the Church!
This radical invitation to shift our focus from self-centered to Christ-centered living has not only marked the spirituality of St. Ignatius and Pope Francis, but has influenced many centuries of Christian believers down to the present. Thanks to the publicity of the global media, it has become particularly visible in the papacy of Francis. Yet over the past five centuries, we can see the characteristic humility of this spirituality at work in countless Jesuit saints and others throughout the world, from the famous to the forgotten.
St. Ignatius and Pope Francis
In a homily on the feast of St. Ignatius Loyola at the Gesu, the Jesuit mother church in Rome, Pope Francis emphasized three hallmarks of Ignatian humility: putting Christ and the Catholic Church at the center; letting ourselves be won over by him in order to serve; and feeling ashamed of our shortcomings and sins so as to be humble in God’s eyes and in those of our brothers and sisters.
To help visualize what it means to de-center ourselves and put Jesus Christ at the center of our lives, Francis prayerfully contemplated in his homily the image of the “IHS” seal of the Society of Jesus. This monogram — typically surrounded by a sunburst and featuring the three nails from Christ’s crucifixion beneath it — adorns his own papal coat of arms:
Our Jesuit coat of arms is a monogram bearing the acronym of “Iesus Hominum Salvator” (IHS). Each one of you could say to me: we know that very well! But this coat of arms constantly reminds us of a reality we must never forget: the centrality of Christ, for each one of us and for the whole Society which St. Ignatius wanted to call, precisely, “of Jesus” to indicate its point of reference. Moreover, at the beginning of the Spiritual Exercises we also place ourselves before Our Lord Jesus Christ, our Creator and Savior (cf. EE, 6).
(Homily on the Feast of St. Ignatius of Loyola, Church of the Gesù, Rome, July 31, 2013)
All the great Jesuit saints, following Ignatius, strove to make Jesus Christ the commander-in-chief of their lives. The Holy Father, recognizing that true humility sees Jesus rather than ourselves at the center of our existence, wants all of us to do the same. Regarding his second point about surrendering oneself to Christ’s loving invitation, Francis noted how this humbling dynamic plays out in the conversion experiences of both St. Ignatius and St. Paul:
Let us look at the experience of St. Paul which was also the experience of St. Ignatius. In the Second Reading which we have just heard, the Apostle wrote: I press on toward the perfection of Christ, because “Christ Jesus has made me his
