Ignatius Calmed Me

I'm awake unusually early and have decided to get ready to leave for work.  Yesterday was quite uneventful.  Experienced losing my center entirely and just let myself drown in the abyss of all thoughts.  Scrambled my way back by focusing on St. Ignatius rules on spiritual discernment.


St. Ignatius of Loyola

The feelings stirred up by good and evil spirits are called “consolation” and “desolation” in the language of Ignatian spirituality. 
Spiritual consolation is an experience of being so on fire with God’s love that we feel impelled to praise, love, and serve God and help others as best as we can. Spiritual consolation encourages and facilitates a deep sense of gratitude for God’s faithfulness, mercy, and companionship in our life. In consolation, we feel more alive and connected to others. 
Spiritual desolation, in contrast, is an experience of the soul in heavy darkness or turmoil. We are assaulted by all sorts of doubts, bombarded by temptations, and mired in self-preoccupations. We are excessively restless and anxious and feel cut off from others. Such feelings, in Ignatius’s words, “move one toward lack of faith and leave one without hope and without love.” 
The key question in interpreting consolation and desolation is: where is the movement coming from and where is it leading me? Spiritual consolation does not always mean happiness. Spiritual desolation does not always mean sadness. Sometimes an experience of sadness is a moment of conversion and intimacy with God. Times of human suffering can be moments of great grace. Similarly, peace or happiness can be illusory if these feelings are helping us avoid changes we need to make.

I am not sure why reading this has given me a sense of calm.  As if he just explained what I felt was going on inside me.   As a student of Psychology in college, I know this to be the movements of certain emotions resulting from a lack of understanding, a lack of processing, a lack of counseling so on and so forth.  And perhaps integrating what little I know of psychology and the spiritual journey can help me understand the ebbs and flows of what I am going through now.  

May I pay close attention.  May I have an open heart.  May I be receptive.  May I be transformed.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Art and Business

Letting myself unwind for the past couple of hours after an intense dialogue with executives on business strategy and leadership philosophies.  I ran into this video.  Aside from faith, what motivates me is my passion for art or any related artistic experience.  Finding a relationship between deepening my faith and learning about how artistic experiences can help this deepening process has been an ongoing pursuit for me since I graduated from business school.   I've realized how art can help me become more grounded and reflective in anything I do which translates to almost a prayerful experience.  This helps me understand why faith is needed in pursuing any experience and in understanding the aspects that strengthen faith, I am able to keep up with my perseverance of pursuing any experience.  An elective I took up in business school called "Self-Mastery and the Arts" has convinced me how important the impact of art is in one's life.  In that study, I also learned ho
Read more

Lectio Divina | A Reflection on Yehuda Amichai's "The Amen Stone"

Image
It took me a week to finally choose a poem I resonated with among the six poems I was assigned to reflect on through the ancient practice of sacred reading called  lectio divina .  The experience of being in a writing course (albeit online) has given me the liberation to explore the power of words and unearth the gift I know I've long locked within.  The gift of realizing I have the same power as well. My writing process was a painful unraveling.  I could not write immediately.  I could not catch the thought and pin it down on paper.  I tried reading other books that would get the flow of creativity going and to no avail the anxiety caught on and forced me to take a break.  So I did.  And went back on it again this weekend.  I had to recalibrate my mind for 2 hours.  Removing the residue of the business mind that forces me to constrict my definitions of life in a less human sounding voice.  I began my  meditatio  of  Yehuda Amichai's  "The Amen Stone".  
Read more

Anxious No More

Image
There are many interesting things that have been happening to me these past 3 weeks. It's been a journey out of and into another chapter of my life.  And this chapter is the chapter that makes me face that thing I want to do the most.   Write.   The stories on this page have been slow because I've been trying to discover what it is that I want to really write about and when I ask myself this question, I begin to ask myself the most important question: what am I really about?  It doesn't feel so difficult to ask now compared to before.  I'd squirm and I'd let my gaze wander off into a blank wall or I'd stiffen up and change the subject because I don't really want to dig in too deep and ask myself that because I fear the answer to that question.  I fear having to say it out loud.  I fear having to type it out here.   What am I really about?  I don't really know.   I don't really have it all figured out just yet.  It's been a while
Read more