The Jesuit Guide to Almost Everything: A Spirituality for Real Life

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2010

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-4

Chapters 5-7

Chapters 8-11

Chapters 12-14

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Themes

Discernment and Desire

Discernment is the process of figuring out exactly what a person wants deep within their soul. Because all humans ultimately long for God, even if they do not know it yet, discerning God’s wishes for oneself and discerning one’s true desires will overlap. The goal of Ignatian spirituality is to cultivate one’s closeness to God through prayer and other methods so that one can realize one’s vocation in life—God’s calling—and make all daily decisions in accordance with God’s wishes. Martin writes, “One of the themes of this book has been the Ignatian model of ‘discernment,’ in which your desires help to reveal God’s desires for you. We look for signs of those desires in our lives” (279). Because the practitioner discovers his or her own desires to be the method that reveals God’s wishes, in the end he or she will not find the discipline of the Spiritual Exercises to be onerous. Instead, the practice will result in the experience of one’s true freedom and joy.

Early in the book, Martin gives the example of Jesus and Bartimaeus the blind beggar on the road. The beggar hears a commotion as Jesus is approaching with a crowd of followers. The beggar says, “Son of David, have mercy on me!” Jesus hears him, and approaches. He asks Bartimaeus what he wants; Bartimaeus replies that he wants his sight, and Jesus restores him. Martin describes how the passage always bothered him: “Why would Jesus ask Bartimaeus what he wanted? Jesus could see that the guy was blind.” Martin writes that he eventually understood that Jesus asks the question not for his own sake but for the sake of Bartimaeus. “Jesus was helping the man identify his desire, and to be clear about it” (57-58). In naming his desire, Bartimaeus draws himself closer to God, and so Jesus heals him. Likewise, discernment helps people to consider their longings and to move both towards their desires and towards God.

In this process, what Martin calls the Two Standards can help us. One decision might lead to consolation, the feeling of joy and fulfillment that pulls one closer to God. Another might lead to desolation, which does the opposite, pushing a person farther from God. Discernment will help us identify what belongs in each of these categories and will show which desires bring us closer to God and to our vocation.

Discernment is a journey in which we seek the place where our desires meet God’s desires for us. When we arrive there, “things feel in synch because they are in synch” (316). This is a journey of faith that leads to the discovery and realization of one’s true goals.

Ignatian Spirituality for Everyone

From the start, Martin is clear that his goal is to open the world of Ignatian spirituality, sometimes in the past kept rather closed, to as many people as possible. This has two aspects: First, Martin claims that Ignatian spirituality is accessible to people of all faiths, or of no faith. Second, to hammer this point home, Martin goes out of his way to use as examples people from many walks of life and different stages of spiritual development.

Martin writes that, “Ignatian spirituality is a resource for a wide variety of people, not just Jesuits, not just Catholics, and not just Christians.” In making this claim about Ignatian prayer, Martin is following in the footsteps of modern Buddhists who have presented meditation as a technique separable from the Buddhist religion and open to anyone to practice for their benefit. He writes, “Just as there are insights from Zen Buddhism that are useful to me as a Christian, so there are practices and techniques from Ignatian spirituality that can help the Zen Buddhist” (393). An important example is Martin’s adaptation of the examen for agnostics and atheists in Chapter 4, which he calls the “prayer of awareness.” The fourth step of the modified version is to consider whether one needs to seek forgiveness from those one may have hurt. In the original examen, one seeks forgiveness from God.

A more complicated area for such an adaptation is the traditional and explicitly theological framework that Martin relies on for linking individual desire and the Divine end for which all desire was created and that all desire ultimately seeks, according to Christianity. Martin elaborates on the universality of feelings of incompletion, longing, awe, exaltation, and vulnerability to argue that wherever these exist, an intuition of the Divine exists, whether one names it that, calls it something else, or doesn’t call it anything at all.

Martin’s goal is not to denature Ignatian spirituality, however, and he states explicitly at the outset that “I’ll also be clear about the centrality of God in the Ignatian worldview, and in my own, too” (28). Indeed, much of the book is taken up with spiritual practice that relies on “revealed religion,” the story of Jesus in the New Testament, and the cultivation of a personal relationship with Jesus. Whether Martin succeeds in making Ignatian spirituality relevant to an agnostic or a non-theist will have to be decided by the reader.

Martin gives frequent examples drawn from a variety of lifestyles and stages, ranging from someone fresh out of college to someone with adult children, and he uses these examples to further his point that anyone can benefit from Ignatian spirituality at any time in their life. Writing about the examen, for example, he notes that the first step is to express gratitude for that which has gone well in one’s day. Some of these include the “less-obvious things: the surprising sight of sunlight on the pavement in the middle of a bleak midwinter’s day, the taste of a ham-and-cheese sandwiches you had for lunch, satisfaction at the end of a tiring day spent caring for your children” (88). The sheer range suggested here is meant to illustrate that anyone can benefit from engaging with Ignatian spirituality.

Spirituality in the Modern World

Martin wants to show that the Ignatian tradition, founded in the 16th century with roots in the ancient and medieval worlds, is a relevant model for spirituality in the contemporary world. The book’s subtitle makes this clear: “A Spirituality for Real Life.” He works to achieve this in several ways.

First, Martin gives us the example of Ignatius himself. A wealthy man of the world and a warrior, Ignatius turned away from those things to lead a simple life, becoming a devout Catholic. Ignatius was a man of modernity who decided to draw himself closer to God and wrote many texts and guides to help others do the same. Additionally, Martin notes several times when Ignatius’s Constitutions, the principles and rules for the Society of Jesus, demonstrate Ignatius’s own concern for the difficulty of turning to spiritual practice. For example, in discussing how finding time for solitude is a challenge that many face in balancing their faith with the constant busyness of the workday, he writes how “Ignatius cautions against doing too much.” People in the 16th century and in the 21st century have, on some level at least, the same problems (357). Martin makes these bridges on multiple occasions, encouraging readers to think about this spirituality as something they can practice in their lives right now.

Second, Martin emphasizes that Ignatius developed these practices for people leading active lives. They are not for monks and nuns, people with extraordinary access to seclusion and quiet. Martin says that the practices allow an active person in the “real world” to develop their spiritual life so much that they will be able to see the busy world itself as their “monastery” (8). He describes the spirituality of Ignatius as “incarnational,” meaning embodied (8). The word is a reference to the incarnation of Christ, and it has become popular in modern theology because it points to the spiritual operating fully within the material world. This matters because the primacy of the material world is so closely connected to ideas about modernity, technology, and modern science—or what Martin calls the “real world.” Another way of putting this is to say that the goal of Ignatian spirituality is becoming a “contemplative in action” (10).

Third, Martin works to explain Catholic theological concepts in ways that emphasize their relation to what people sometimes call “natural religion” as opposed to “revealed religion.” In this way, Martin tries to establish conversation with agnostics and even atheists by reference to common experiences that the theological tradition interprets as types of natural awareness pointing to the presence of God. A good case in point is Martin’s discussion of the intimations of God, or some Divine presence, afforded by profound mental experiences available to all people, such as awe or wonder. Martin emphasizes that an agnostic or an atheist can use the methods of Ignatian spirituality if it is adapted for them without destroying the essence of it. A major adaptation of this kind appears in Martin’s modification of the examen, the prayer of self-examination, for non-theists. For them, Martin replaces the final element—asking God for forgiveness—with asking those around us whom we have harmed for their forgiveness.