Brian O’Leary SJ points out that in his “Autobiography” St Ignatius of Loyola shows us how God guided him from the beginning of his conversion. So in our lives we can work out for ourselves how God may be guiding us.
Ignatius Loyola died 450 years ago, in 1556. He was canonised on 12 March 1622, along with his friend, Francis Xavier, and two other well-known saints, Philip Neri and Teresa of Avila. These four outstanding Christians witnessed to the vibrancy of renewal in the Church of the sixteenth century. They gave expression to the Church’s holiness in different and creative ways.
Three of the four were born in what is now modern Spain. All lived in a century of great change. The Renaissance was fostering developments in art and culture, and was transforming the approach to education throughout Europe. The Protestant Reformations – there was more than one – introduced new ideas into theology and spirituality, and challenged the authority of the Roman Church.
The voyages of discovery led to a vast expanding of people’s imaginative horizons, brought immense wealth back to Europe from the recently conquered lands, and opened a new era of missionary work for the Church.
Man of his time
We have learned to pay more attention to the historical context of saints’ lives than we may have done in the past. The turbulence of the sixteenth century affected Ignatius’s thinking, his choices, his spirituality and, therefore, his holiness. He would have been a different person, a different saint, if he had lived in the ninth or nineteenth century.
Under God’s providence, he walked this earth at a particular time (not any time), in a specific historical era (not some other era), meeting certain people (and not others). It was in these concrete circumstances that he sought and found God, that he grew in holiness.
We cannot turn Ignatius into a twenty-first century person. We cannot simply imitate him in every aspect of his life. Likewise, knowing historical facts about Ignatius will not of itself contribute much to our own growth. If we want to be helped, we need to get inside his experience, so far as that is possible. We need to discover how God dealt with him.
Ways of God
This need was expressed very clearly by one of Ignatius’s friends in 1551. This man, Jerome Nadal, was one of a number of Jesuits who wanted Ignatius to tell the story of his life. But he wanted it told in a particular way.
This is how he reports on his approach to Ignatius: ‘I begged the Father to be kind enough to tell us how the Lord had guided him from the beginning of his conversion’. He was not asking for an autobiography in the ordinary meaning of that word. In such an autobiography the focus is on the person who tells the story, what he or she did, said, saw, achieved, suffered, and so forth.
Ignatius was being asked to recount what God did in him, how God taught, led, guided, challenged, loved him since his conversion in Loyola in 1521. The focus was to be on God. Readers of this account would learn about the ways of God more than the ways of Ignatius Loyola. This was to be its importance.
Inside the experience
Ignatius was curiously hesitant about telling this story, and kept putting off the effort. This was partly due to ill health, partly to the pressure of urgent business, and partly to a lingering fear of vainglory. But perhaps most of all it was an example of a reticence, typical of him, about speaking of his inner experiences of God.
However, he eventually dictated an account to another Jesuit, Gonzalves da Camara, and this relatively short work gives us a precious insight into God’s ways of dealing with him. In spite of its not being strictly an autobiography, it is most frequently referred to in English as The Autobiography, as I will continue to do.
Other titles also in use are perhaps more accurate, such as A Pilgrim’s Journey, Original Testament, or simply Reminiscences. But whatever this account is called, it is one of our main sources for getting inside the experience of Ignatius and learning from it.
Third person narrative
It can surprise readers who come across this work for the first time that Ignatius narrates his story in the third person. Is this another instance of his reticence? Using the third person allows him to create a certain distance from the experiences of God that he is describing. There is also less danger of falling into vainglory if he is not referring to ‘I’ and ‘me’ on every page!
More importantly, he gives this third person a name, ‘the pilgrim’. In doing this he is offering his readers a key to unlock and enter the narrative. His story will be about movement, about journeys. God will be seen to lead him along many paths.
Some of these paths are quite literally the roads of Europe that bring him to Montserrat, Manresa, Barcelona, Alcala, Salamanca, Paris, Venice and Rome. But sometimes the paths are metaphorical, referring to an inner journey that over years will have Ignatius change, develop and grow into a person totally in love with God.
Journey
Neither the starting point of the outer or the inner journey gives any clue as to where it will end. Convalescing in his family’s castle in Loyola, Ignatius had no idea that the final years of his life would be spent in Rome.
The same can be said about his inner journey. It begins with the opening sentence of the Autobiography: ‘Until the age of twenty-six he was a man given up to the vanities of the world, and his chief delight used to be in the exercise of arms, with a great and vain desire to gain honour’. It ends at the time of narrating his story when he can say: ‘He was always growing in devotion, that is, in facility in finding God, and now more than ever in his whole life. And every time and hour he wanted to find God, he found him’.
The Autobiography is mainly the story of that inner journey, of how God led him from being an ambitious, boisterous knight, filled with dreams of chivalry, to becoming a person whose only desire was ‘to praise, reverence and serve God our Lord’.
Trust
All Christians are pilgrims. We are on a journey like Abraham who ‘set out, not knowing where he was going’ (Heb 11:8). Abraham is praised for his faith, which in this context is synonymous with trust. He trusted the one who had called him. He did not need to know the destination. It was enough that God was with him.
So, too, with Ignatius. He trusted that God would not desert him, abandon him, or allow him to go too far astray. Both Ignatius’s story and that of Abraham invite us to a similar trust. Life will always bring changes, gains and losses, joys and sorrows, clarity and confusion. Through it all we are invited and encouraged to leave ourselves in the hands of God, to allow him to write our personal history.
