Sep 2005 Christian Spirituality By George A Lane SJ

Continue from ...... IGNATIAN PRAYER: FINDING GOD IN ALL THINGS According to this kind of prayer, it is sufficient to seek to discover God's will and then to carry it out vigorously with full attention on the work to be done with no concomitant vision or contemplation. "In activity and in study, ... when we direct everything to the service of God, everything is prayer." We can see here that Ignatius had an enriched and broader notion of prayer. For him "the word prayer means now a disinterested prayer which is established in the solitude of the heart and then the spiritual attitude which causes us to 'find God' in the midst of activity, even the most absorbing. On the one hand, prayer is considered as a particular and definite 'exercise' and, on the other, the continuous union with God in activity." It is because a union of will in action is his primary approach to union with God that Ignatius puts so much stress on obedience and a right intention in all things. The Discernment of Spirits is one way to discover the will of God. This union of will with God must not be thought of as mechanical or military. For Ignatius the motive force and the essence of this union was always a personal love of God. While reserving a place for formal prayer, Ignatius always preferred the prayer of action, collaboration with God in the great deeds which He does in the world. This makes for an action-oriented spirituality which provides a theoretical support for apostolic work, and it explains how one who engages himself fully in the work is no farther from God than the contemplative at his prie-dieu. He may be closer. In the writings of St Ignatius the formula "finding God in all things" is used in still another sense to describe a certain perceptual awareness of the presence of God in the world which he experienced daily and which in some analogous form he recommended to his followers. Jerome Nadal wrote to Ignatius that "in all things, actions, conversations, he felt and contemplated the presence of God and the attraction of spiritual things. He was a contemplative in action, something he expressed habitually in the words: we must find God in all things." This peculiar prayer was the result of mystical graces of a very high order. Ignatius is ranked with the greatest mystics in the history of the Church. Despite the gratuity of Ignatius' own gifts, we find that he used the same formula to 'to find God in all things' to recommend a form of prayer for Jesuit scholastics who had not been in the Society for a long time and certainly were not expected to have had the mystical graces which he had. They were advised to seek God in all things.

- To Be Continued - © Copyright Shalom 2005. All rights reserved.