What Do You Really Want? St. Ignatius Loyola and the Art of Discernment. Jim Manney
But these cases are the exceptions—presented as miracles—to God’s intervention in the usual course of events. Far more common is uncertainty, even wandering in the darkness for a while. If discernment means finding the one right answer to every question, why is it so rare?
In fact, many things are good. The good is plural. God is abundant, not limiting. Most of our choices are among good, better, and best—not right and wrong.
What is God Like?
Our notions of what “God’s will” means is rooted in what we think God is like. The totality of God is beyond our knowing. What we have are images of God—pictures in our minds that capture part of God’s essence. These images are powerful, and they influence the way we think about choices. Growing up, most of us learned a simple image of God as the Boss who is in charge of everything (except when, mysteriously, he seemed not to be). There are variations on the Boss. Some bosses are stern judges enforcing the rules with punishments. Some are hard taskmasters, demanding much and upholding high standards. Some are benevolent, tolerating just about everything with a kindly smile.
As we go on in life other images of God usually appear, but the image of God-as-Boss is a powerful one, and some features of it can persist. We can continue to see God as somewhat separate from creation—overseeing the world from the corner office or the penthouse. We can see him as primarily the solver of problems. This causes us to see discernment as essentially a matter of solving a puzzle, with the lingering fear of making a mistake.
Ignatius’s image of God was very different, and it shaped his whole understanding of the process of discerning God’s “will.” He developed this image in some detail at the end of the Spiritual Exercises in a series of meditations known as the Contemplation to Obtain the Love of God. It’s actually several images of God.
Here’s the first image:
This is to reflect how God dwells in creatures: in the elements giving them existence, in the plants giving them life, in the animals conferring upon them sensation, in man bestowing understanding. So He dwells in me and gives me being, life, sensation, intelligence; and makes a temple of me, since I am created in the likeness and image of the Divine Majesty.
If you’re looking for the heart of Ignatian spirituality, here it is. “God dwells in creatures,” and “creatures” has the widest possible definition. God is present in all things. This is Paul’s image of God: “For from him and through him and to him are all things” (Rom 11:36). Ignatius said that his friends “should practice the seeking of God’s presence in all things, in their conversations, their walks, in all that they see, taste, hear, understand, in all their actions, since His Divine Majesty is truly in all things.” The Jesuit theologian St. Robert Bellarmine went even further. “What various powers lie hidden in plants! What strange powers are found in stones,” he said.
Some Christians are acutely sensitive to God’s absence from the world. Ignatian spirituality emphasizes his presence. This brings God down to earth; “Christ is found in ten thousand places,” said the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. It elevates earth to God; Hopkins also wrote, “the world is charged with the grandeur of God.” “Nothing human is merely human,” writes the theologian Ronald Modras. “No common labor is merely common. Classrooms, hospitals, and artists’ studios are sacred spaces. No secular pursuit of science is merely secular.” Everything that deepens our humanity deepens our knowledge of God.
The Ignatian God doesn’t dwell in lonely splendor in the highest heavens. He doesn’t even sit in the corner office. He’s here.
The Contemplation continues:
Consider how God works and labors for me in all creatures upon the face of the earth, that is, He conducts Himself as one who labors. Thus, in the heavens, the elements, the plants, the fruits, the cattle, etc., He gives being, conserves them, confers life and sensation.
Here Ignatius sees God as the worker—“one who labors.” God the king, the judge, the merciful forgiver, the gift-giver, the unfathomable Other is also the creative power sustaining, healing, and perfecting the world. In the Ignatian view, something is always happening.
The creator God of Genesis is a worker. He doesn’t create out of nothing; he brings order to chaos. Before he set to work, “the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep” (Gn 1:2). Out of this unpromising raw material came the sun, the moon, and the stars; day and night; the land teeming with plants and animals; and, eventually, us. This is Ignatius’s God—a God who never stops creating. He’s at work now bringing order out of the chaos of our world. The Holy Spirit of God moves through this seething mass of passion, energy, conflict, and desire giving us culture, religion, art, science, and all the other elements of our familiar world.
This is why discernment is important. We have a role to play in this creative work. Most of it isn’t glamorous work. “Smiting on an anvil, sawing a beam, whitewashing a wall, driving horses, sweeping, scouring, everything gives God some glory,” writes Gerard Manley Hopkins. “To lift up the hands in prayer gives God glory, but a man with a dung fork in his hand, a woman with a slop pail, gives him glory too.”
The Contemplation ends with a final vision of God as the infinitely generous, inexhaustible giver of gifts:
To see how all that is good and every gift descends from on high. Thus, my limited power descends from the supreme and infinite power above—and similarly with justice, goodness, pity, mercy, etc.—as rays descend from the sun and waters from a fountain.
God dwells in all things; he works in all things; he makes us a gift of all things. He’s like the sun, and his gifts are like the sunshine. The sun is sunshine. God is gift, and the sun always shines.
“What does it matter, all is grace,” are the dying words of the lonely, forgotten, anonymous priest in the novel The Diary of a Country Priest. They echo the last words of St. Thérèse of Lisieux: “Grace is everywhere.” The Spiritual Exercises end on this note—with a numinous vision of light and water, with all as grace, with gifts coming to us endlessly from God, who is Love itself.
A Personal God
Ignatius emphasized one other aspect of God’s character that’s important for discernment. God is personal. He is very close to us. Ignatius imagines God looking on the world in all its splendor and suffering: “the happy and the sad, so many people aimless, despairing, hateful, and killing, so many undernourished, sick and dying, so many struggling with life and blind to any meaning. With God I can hear people laughing and cursing, some shouting and screaming, some praying, others cursing.” God’s answer to this spectacle is to say, “Let us work the redemption of the whole human race.” The remedy is Jesus, who enters into it all. God enters into our suffering by sharing it. Jesus comes to heal and redeem. Jesus “does all this for me,” Ignatius writes.
Friendship is a term often used in the Ignatian tradition to describe our relationship with God. Ignatius frequently urges us to speak to God intimately, “as one friend to another, making known his affairs to him, and seeking advice in them.” Pope Francis often talks about Christ as our friend. “He is close to each one of you as a companion,” the pope said. He is “a friend who knows how to help and understand you, who encourages you in difficult times and never abandons you. In prayer, in conversation with him, and in reading the Bible, you will discover that he is truly close. You will also learn to read God’s signs in your life. He always speaks to us, also through the events of our time and our daily life.”
The Jesuit spiritual director William A. Barry says that friendship is the purpose of creation. “God desires humans into existence for the sake of friendship,” he writes. He says that developing a relationship with God is “analogous to the kind of friendship that develops over a long time between two people.” He draws out the contrast between this friendship and conventional images of God. God our friend is not God the majestic, all-powerful, and distant ruler. It’s not God as lawgiver and judge. As Father Barry’s Irish mother put it, “God is better than he’s made out to be.”
A God who wants friendship with us, who’s present in