Ignatian Key Notes Howard
Gray SJ JSEA
Conference JCU
What does a keynote do? It should strike a chord to shape a communal mind set. A keynote reminds us of the traditions that have formed us and now challenge us to translate their meaning in new contexts for new generations.
The Spiritual Exercises offer a set of keynotes, which integrate a Christian tradition with the enduring demand that successive generations of believers can only become disciples by choosing to follow Christ. For example, the Principle and Foundation keynotes the radical meaning of a beloved creature, one who is loved within the reality of limitations but loved also with the divine dream of eternal companionship with God. The Kingdom contemplation, which inaugurates the Second Week of the Exercises and presents the tableaux of Christ’s mission, keynotes the same dual reality: to labor in the earthly campaign to renew creation as a place of peace, of justice, and of love but to keep ever alive the promise of the Crucified and Risen Lord that our destiny is to be his sisters and brothers in the everlasting reign of his God who is now our God and his Father who is now our Father [Jn. 20:17]. In the transition from the contemplations of the infancy and childhood of Jesus to the active ministry of Jesus [i.e., II Standards, III Classes, and III Modes], Ignatius keynotes the strategy of authentic discipleship: to stand where Christ stands with the poor, the despised, and the socially, economically, and culturally marginated. These three keynotes are focuses of Ignatian apostolic commitment, hallmarks of what every Jesuit-sponsored work must be.
To be involved in this tradition means we stand where Christ stands today—where forgiveness and reconciliation become not personal sanctuaries of private well-being but energy to share the good news one has herself or himself experienced. The tradition is not escape but engagement with the world and contemporary culture, which will be the ground of choice and work for the young people we teach and guide and care for.
Cura apostolica must begin here—in the care we bring to identify our integral mission as educators with the mission of Christ. We have to have a corporate—a communal—care for a tradition both attacked and abused. I want to say a word about each.
In
last Saturday’s New York Times [
“Don’t be fooled by those lofty commencement speeches. Not everyone thinks that a college education should have any thing to do with inculcating moral values.”
Steinfels went on to quote the dean
of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the
Steinfels does not leave the field to Dr. Fish. Steinfels cites a contrary view that fights to introduce students to the ethical and even deeply spiritual values of life. But his essential point is that in an increasingly pluralistic society the clash about the role of values and beliefs in higher education is a way of life, an environment we have to engage.
On the other hand, the answer cannot be a retreat away from asking, inviting, and expecting hard questions about faith, about ethical behavior, about the Church, about sexuality, about ultimate authority, about the gospels. Whatever conspiracy theories Dan Brown has parlayed into top bucks, The Da Vinci Code proves that religious art and gospel texts do engage the minds and hearts of people. If the secular mind challenges an Ignatian education, the fundamentalist mind is hardly a friend.
The apostolic care you exercise in college preparatory education has to continue to found itself on two Ignatian principles: the Kingdom preached and taught and lived by Jesus retains ultimate authority; but it has to be realized in the discerning, patient asceticism of working in a world of compromise, violence, fear, betrayal—but in a world God and the friends of God never cease loving.
Apostolic care, then, is an Ignatian regard for the inculcation of Christ’s values and priorities in a world that both needs these and resists these. Or, even more succinctly, apostolic care is a resolve to make the gospel work. It was the original vision of Ignatius and his companions; it continues to identify any operation, including high schools, which claim their heritage.
Within this frame, i.e., to make the gospel work in our education, I want to cite three areas of creative response in your work as secondary school educators:
[1] The world of the Ignatian educator
[2] The world of the adolescent learner
[3] The world of conflicting expectations
1. The world of the Ignatian educator.
Let me start with the kind of spasm of concern you and I hear often. “There
will not be enough Jesuits to staff, to administer, to lead this school in the
next [____] years.” No question about it, the diminishment of Jesuit manpower raises
everyone’s anxiety. From 1955-1958 I taught at
Ignatius Prep in
In point of fact the distinguishing characteristic of the early Jesuit educators was neither their numbers nor their theory, but their presence, a care for individual students that generated understanding and promoted a desire to serve. The early Jesuit educators were mentors, fulfilling what Ignatius in the Jesuit Constitutions would characterize as sound learning, the ability to communicate that knowledge, and the example of one’s life. This example did not mean moral posturing but an integrity between professed values and daily performance, a harmony of humane goodness. Moreover, it is clear from the emphasis early Jesuit educators placed on practice—theatre, opera, ballet, public disputations—that “doing” what one learned was a way of confirming that the knowledge had become integrated into what we might term a habit of being.
This it seems to me is what we must consider: personal, intellectual, and professional contact between student and adult educators. The recent renewal of interest in undergraduate seminars, the refocusing on vocation discernment occasioned by the Lilly Endowment Study, the growth of service opportunities on the collegiate level, also say something about the adolescent years. Anecdotal evidence, but evidence based on patterns of experience with Jesuit high school graduates, has convinced me that the personal engagement between a dedicated and competent adult educator and a student is one of the most important elements of good Jesuit-sponsored education.
What the Jesuit mass numbers of the past provided was an esprit de corps, a lifestyle that centered on the institution, a common vocabulary and shared symbols. Their way of proceeding dramatized a union of minds and hearts that were focused on the student.
At
the 1995 34th General Congregation the worldwide assembly of Jesuit
representatives passed a remarkable document, “Cooperation with the Laity in
The Society of Jesus places itself at the service of this mission of the laity by offering what we have and what we have received: our spiritual and apostolic inheritance, our educational resources, and our friendship. We offer Ignatian spirituality as a specific gift to animate the ministry of the laity [#337].
How can we work together to form something that represents the Ignatian mission of the laity in secondary education? There is no question that much of this has already been accomplished by the JSEA. But the formation, organizational identity, and self-reflection that go into a distinct apostolic body need to be worked out. The lay apostolate in Ignatian secondary education needs to accept a new mission to develop its own esprit de corps, a lifestyle that supports the mentoring vocation of an Ignatian lay educator, and a way of speaking of its spirituality and mission that reflects lay identity.
2. The world of the adolescent learner. The Ignatian educators, those men or women who accept the vocation of being mentors, have been meeting and will continue to meet an increasing expectation from young people that they are there to help them “bring it together.” Bringing it together can mean mending the wounds from a divided or dysfunctional family; bringing it together can mean helping a young person accept the reality that he or she will probably not get into the college that her or his parents programmed them to attend; bringing it together can mean telling someone that you know what it’s like to love someone more than that person loves you; bringing it together can mean just being there with an understanding heart as some kid opens up about her or his sexual identity and letting her or him know that he or she is neither judged nor condemned but simply heard and loved; or bringing it together can mean assuring a struggling student that he or she really did earn that A. What is the “it” that is being brought together? A poem by Billie Collins can help me unpack this mystery.
Introduction to Poetry
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to water-ski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
Somewhere along the educational track someone convinced the world that supports education that performance is more important than appropriation. If you have had any experience, you know the difference between performance and appropriation. In performance you please your audience—your parents, your teachers, your coach, the anonymous Admissions Office personnel who decide whether you can come to their school. In appropriation you accept the revelation of truth or love or loss or joy—the deeper parts of our human life. How important is this habit of appropriation in Ignatian pedagogy? It is crucial, a way of coming to know that is contemplative and active, personal and social, aesthetic and scientific, religious and secular. Let me trace the significance of the habit of appropriation in Ignatian pedagogy.
In that section of
the Jesuit Constitutions, which treats the formation of young Jesuits,
there is a remarkable passage that lays out a radical and pervasive educational
principle. In effect it says that young Jesuits should be taught how to observe
one another, reverence what they discover about the individual reality of one
another, and then they will uncover “devotion,” a term that for Ignatius meant
the way God dwells within a reality. These three operations are what Ignatius
also means by gospel contemplation; these three operations also constitute the
apostolic reflection that made possible someone like the Jesuit missionary
Mateo Ricci and the great work he undertook in
To observe is to pay attention to—to allow the reality of another [a person, a text, an experiment, a foreign culture, a pastoral problem, a social injustice] to enter into our consciousness, our imagination, and our heart. To reverence what you discover when you take the time to be attentive is to accept what is there not to intrude or distort or judge but first to esteem that revelation, no matter how painful, how different, how challenging, how initially repugnant. Then, if you are attentive and reverent before reality, you will begin to see how God dwells even in what seems initially so alienating from God.
Attention, reverence, and devotion are what Billie Collins is talking about. Before meaning there is revelation, the surrender to insight or to beauty or to pain or to the deepest mystery of the discipline or to the deepest mystery of the human mind and heart. Whenever I have presented this Ignatian triad of attention, reverence, and devotion, someone suggests that we cannot reverence sin or cruelty or injustice or lust—take your pick from the catalogue. We have to listen to this hesitation.
Of course, you
cannot accept what destroys the lives of people. However, as one of the
characters from Fugitive Pieces puts it “You listen not like a priest
who listens for sin but like a sinner who listens for his own redemption.” In
other words, attention and reverence lead to solidarity in the likeness of
Christ who became sin, “so that in him we might become the righteousness of
God” [2 Cor.
Ignatian pedagogy does offer a transcendent principle that can operate within any discipline and within any formational experience, from extracurricular activities to sports to service immersion programs. In our desire to integrate the education that our students receive, to help them come to recognize the inherent unity in the life of the mind, the life of the heart, and the life of the spirit, we need to renew our understanding of the pedagogy that informs the Spiritual Exercises, the Constitutions, and the schools. As John O’Malley has shown, these three are reservoirs for what is distinctive in the Ignatian/Jesuit apostolic style.
Cura apostolica, the care for the institutional life of the schools, links us to a care for the spiritual heritage represented in the Exercises and for the pastoral and apostolic strategies represented in the Constitutions. If the adult educators within the Jesuit system band themselves as mentors, then they also can band themselves as educators within a distinctive system that offers academic excellence and first-class psycho-religious formation. If we have the will to revisit the sources of the Ignatian heritage not merely as ascetical practice or spiritual enrichments but as profound ways to challenge our cultures, then we will offer our students an alternate culture. A school must be a school. It has to be a place where the students learn and develop in order to live successfully in their cultures. But an Ignatian school is also a place where values and beliefs become not a private support system but a summons to change whatever in that culture enfeebles the gospel call to be men and women for others.
3. The world of conflicting expectations. Surrounding the schools there is a culture that cries out for the compassion and direction of the gospels and yet erodes their authority and enfeebles their demands. To try to get at the concreteness of this challenge let me simply lay out, side-by-side, the way of the gospel and the way of the contemporary world.
Contemplative learning according to the model of attention, reverence, and devotion |
VS. |
Technological mastery, an emphasis on mastering and performing well |
|
A developing sense of personal vocation, finding out where my greatest joy meets the world’s greatest need |
VS. |
Performing well, getting into the right college, and then making those career choices that pay well |
|
Service of others, being men and women for others |
VS. |
Getting the competitive edge, being a winner, socializing with the right people |
|
Forgiveness, reconciliation, compassion |
VS. |
Violence, litigious action, adversarial language, symbols, and entertainment |
|
Truth |
VS. |
Expediency, presenting the best image, lying to protect a deal and to outbid the competition |
The tension between gospel and contemporary culture is real. It is a tension that we have to transform into an energy for apostolic action so that the gospel learns from the culture and transforms that culture. There is a fourth Ignatian key note that addresses this tension. It is the Contemplation to Attain Divine Love, a prayer experience, which is the climax of the Spiritual Exercises. As a distinct prayer form it represents four actions of God in our world: God who is the gift giver; God who dwells within each gift; God who labors to bring each gift to its own growth and richness; and God who holds all in an embrace of beginning and end. Within the context of the Exercises Ignatius offers two interpretative principles to clarify what characterizes love: (1) Love is a mutual communication and (2) love is shown in deeds more than in words. Let me unpack these a bit. To love is to believe that you will find love. If you approach this secular, skeptical, self-absorbed world and culture as one who wants to love it—if you are a person of attention, reverence, and devotion—,then you will find that God loved this world long before you and will never abandon this world. And the God you find is a God of good gifts—gifts of creative ingenuity and complexity but also gifts of simple, almost fragile loneliness like an infant wrapped in swaddling clothes or a despised public nuisance doomed to die on the outskirts of a city. Ignatius gathers all the themes and movements of the four weeks of the Exercises into four dynamics of love: all is a gift, all is holy, all is striving for its own perfection, and all is held in divine embrace. Love is communication and the Ignatian educator sees the culture that challenges God in so many ways as concomitantly crying in mourning and heartfelt anger for that same God.
This
belief that love never stops sharing, that God’s love is in our world,
saves us as educators from two extremes:
Either God is absent and belief and goodness have no place or God is
present only in the orthodoxy and moral righteousness of those creeds and rules
of conduct that remove the true believers from the contagion of our times. The
Ignatian imperative is that love proves its presence by loving—every thing God
touches, dwells with, works to complete, and holds in embrace. Ignatian
spirituality neither surrenders to the world nor flees the world. But that
second interpretative principle reminds us that love is shown more in deeds
than in words. Confidence in God’s accompaniment does not dispense us from
joining the Spirit in her continued ministry: “We know that in everything God
works for good with those who love him” [Rom
How to love and how to labor—this, finally, is cura apostolica: To make our schools communities that engage their cultures so that, transformed by love, they may become places of peace, of justice, of love.
Conclusion.
Let
me take you to a great Christian novel, The Brothers Karamazov. Recall
how Alyosha, the sweet-tempered novice-monk has lost his holy mentor, the older
monk Zosima. In death Zosima’s body begins a premature decay, giving credence
to his enemies who misinterpret this decay as a sign of his hypocrisy.
Devastated, confused, and alone, Alyosha flees; but then as night draws near,
he returns to the monastery, goes to his old master’s cell where his coffin
rests, and kneels in a corner to pray. Only the monk Paisy is there reading
from John’s gospel. Alyosha hears Paisy read the narrative from John of the
miracle of
When he wakes, Alyosha knows a new call. He rushes into the night, weeping for love of the stars, the night, the world so blessed by Christ’s presence, a presence of joy. Alyosha falls to the earth and passionately kisses the ground, filled with forgiveness and love.
“He fell to the ground a weak adolescent, but when he rose to his feet he was a hardened warrior for life, and he felt and recognized this in a flash of ecstasy. And never, never in his whole life would Alyosha be able to forget this moment. ‘Someone visited my soul on that occasion.’”
You, too, are mentors, privileged to care for an apostolate that visits the souls of young women and men, teaching them to embrace creation as Christ did and to work for the fulfillment Christ promises. Whatever we call this, cura apostolica is finally a vocation, a call to care for all that helps to bring to our poor struggling world ever new generations of young people ready to be men and women for others. It is a summons to a new era in Ignatian education.