IGNATIUS: PRAYER AS A SPIRITUAL EXERCISE

How much time should we spent in prayer?

Saint Ignatius had some important insights:

  

When one Jesuit insisted that eight hours of prayer daily was insufficient and that prayer of less than two hours was ‘no prayer’ at all, Ignatius called that bad spirituality and wrote: A truly mortified man unites with God more easily in fifteen minutes than an unmortified man does in two hours’ (p.48)

Harvey D. Egan SJ is a leading expert on Christian mysticism and the thought of Karl Rahner. He is professor emeritus of systematic and mystical theology at Boston College, where he taught for 35 years

In this article in the Way, April 2021, 47-58, Egan views Ignatius as an apostolic mystic in whom mystical and apostolic gifts were two sides of the same coin.  This model of integrating the love of God and love of neighbor may be very useful to Christians whose lives of service in family and work environments leave little time for formal prayer.

 Ignatius, Prayer and the Spiritual Exercises

What does Ignatius mean by "a truly modified man?" Egan replies that mortification was not simply a matter of penance. Ignatius had learned much from his own experiences.  

Because his own excessive physical penances had injured Ignatius’ health, however, he later emphasized interior penances, such as divesting oneself of self-love, self-will and self-interest. He expected prompt obedience of Jesuits, not physical penances. (p.48)

For Ignatius, true love of God consisted not simply in religious thoughts, emotions, and practices separate from life but in uniting ourselves with God's will, with Divine Love as discovered in both our lives and the lives of others.

It is striking that Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises concluded with the Contemplation to Attain Love (Exx 230–237), rather than with an attempt to attain the heavenly life, as meditation books in his day often did. In this exercise one asks for the grace to be a contemplative in action, to be able to find God in all things, as Ignatius was and did.  Ignatius would have exercitants ask for an intimate knowledge of the many blessings they have received from creation and redemption, to perceive how God dwells in all things, how God works for them in all things, how God dwells in them—so that filled with gratitude for all, they might in all things love and serve the Divine Majesty.

Thomas Merton expresses similar views in Seeds of Contemplation:

EVERY MOMENT AND EVERY EVENT of every man's life on earth plants something in his soul...the stream of time brings with it germs of spiritual vitality that come to rest imperceptibly in the minds and wills of men.  Most of these are unnumbered seeds perish and are lost because men are not prepared to receive them: for such seeds spring up anywhere except in the good soil of liberty and desire... If I were looking for God, every event and every moment would sow in my will, grains of His life, that would spring up one day in a tremendous harvest ...  If they would take root in my liberty, and if His will would grow in my freedom, I would become the love that He is, and my harvest would be His glory and my own joy And I would grow together with thousands and millions of other freedoms in the gold of one huge field praising God... (p.17-18)

 

Ignatius was very skeptical of a false piety that glories in its own spiritual practices to the detriment of service to others.

Thus, although Ignatius expected his men to be united with God, he did not consider formal prayer and contemplation as the only ways to attain this. In fact, this highly circumspect and prudent Basque even maintained that ‘of a hundred men given to long hours of prayer, the majority of them ordinarily come to grave consequences.’ Ignatius was referring to the pride, obstinacy and illusions that often arise in such circumstances (p.49)

Pope Francis has called this "spiritual worldliness," including apostolic works as well as prayer. As Thomas Merton describes this disease as "spiritual pride."

 

I am thinking of the peculiar reality that gets into the hearts of saints and eats their sanctity away before it is mature…They tend to destroy their virtues by claiming them for themselves and clothing their own private illusion of themselves with values that belong to God.  Who can do good things without seeking to taste in them some sweet distinction from the common run of sinners in this world? (p. 39-40)

What is prayer? 

If we are contemplatives in action, finding God in all things, what then do we label as prayer? 

By the terms Spiritual Exercises, we mean every method of examination of conscience, meditation, contemplation, vocal or mental prayer, and other spiritual activities, such as will be mentioned later. For, just as taking a walk, traveling on foot, and running are physical exercises, so is the name of spiritual exercises given to any means of preparing and disposing our soul to rid itself of all its disordered affections and then, after their removal, of seeking and finding God’s will and the ordering of our life for the salvation of our soul. (Exx 1)

 Any spiritual exercise, or practice consists of something that becomes a catalyst for seeking and find God's will and ordering our whole life to the love of God and neighbor.  I agree with Egan that we should not limit spiritual practices to those which Ignatius treats extensively in the Spiritual Exercises but should use Ignatius's many insights to guide whatever forms of spiritual practices we employ in our lives.

The Hours as a Spiritual Practice