I do some of my best thinking and praying while running or biking.  This morning I considered how biking hills is not a bad analogy to the discernment of consolation and desolation in the spiritual life.  Here’s the idea.

Coming to the beginning of a long upward climb can be a daunting experience.  You see it looming, and you see that it will be a hard and tiring.  There is a temptation to quit or turn around.  This is like desolation: it is a period in life when just moving through days can be difficult.

Conversely, the descent downhill can be exhilarating.  The wind is rushing past you as you are moving fast without effort.  That is like consolation.

Much of the ride is the ordinary work of pedaling, one crank after another.  You settle into a rhythm.  It can be more or less difficult based on how you’re feeling and the conditions outside and on the road.

I think the only way to think about life is as a long ride.  There will be flats and hills.  Ignatius’s counsel is very important: don’t just look for consolation, don’t despair in desolation–just keep pedaling (as it were).  Prepare for uphill climbs by building momentum and speed before them, and they won’t crush you.  Keep the focus on the destination, but enjoy the ride.

Fat Man's Misery, Purgatory Chasm, Sutton MA

I took my girls to a place called Purgatory Chasm and had a metaphor experience.  Metaphor experiences are of course those things you do which, once they are accomplished, emerge as perfect metaphors for life.  And I tend to encounter them frequently because I look for them, and that, according to my wife, makes me unusual.

Entering the place I had visions of Dante running through my mind (purgatory and all that, though the place looks much more like the entrance to Dante’s inferno).  But I’ll cut to the chase: a place called Fat Man’s Misery–a cleft in a massive wall of granite which some people can slide through sideways.  So here’s the story: of course I wanted to do it, and so I lowered myself down into the cleft.  A man high above the rock indicated that there was another way down and out of the cleft, a way which was not visible from where I was standing.  I trusted him, and went further down and into the cleft, lowering myself again to another level before emerging out the distant side.

Now on one level this is not a bad metaphor for the spiritual life: we trust those that have gone before, those who tell us that the path may be difficult but that it gets us where we’re going.  Trusting people is part of the spiritual life, and a certain amount of courage is necessary.  So far, so good.

But here’s where it gets interesting: my two girls wanted to go through the cleft as well, and so now the trusting of the other had an altogether different import.  I was responsible not only for myself, but also for my girls.  I could not make a reckless decision which I as a younger man might have made just for fun.  When I emerged out the other side, I had to proceed up and out of the chasm in order to judge whether the way was safe for them; otherwise we would have had to retrace our steps through Fat Man’s Misery.

Here’s my point: faith takes on new dimensions of meaning when one acts upon it mindful of how it will affect those he loves.  (I think of someone like Thomas More, whose martyrdom left five children without a father.)  As I left the chasm, I considered how fatherhood has affected my own faith, and what is most clear is that it gives shape to the kind of decisions I make about how to be a disciple of Christ.  Whatever I do, I do as a husband and as a father, not as an individual.  And in my experience, those relationships add depth and meaning to faith.  At the end of the day, I can return to a basic question: how have I loved my wife and daughters?  (A good question to include in an examen.)  As I look back over seventeen years of marriage and ten years of parenting, I think that above all else, the vocation to family life is about beginning a pilgrimage of learning to love, and that pilgrimage constitutes the life of faith.  It is not always easy or fun; sometimes the way is difficult and unclear.  Sometimes I need people like the guy up above the rock to tell me what the path is like.  But always I am traveling with my family, and when I finally meet Jesus face to face he will ask me how we managed to stick together through it all.

Over the past two weeks I’ve had the remarkable experience of being a nearly full-time Dad.  My wife has started a new job and has undergone an orientation process that’s taken her away from home for some time, so we’ve found ourselves switching roles.

It’s been a profound process of discovery for me.  This is by no means my first time as primary caregiver–we’ve shared that role over the years as time and demands permit.  Early after our first adoption, for example, I took two days home every work week to be with an infant who needed constant physical contact.  Parenting has stretched me unlike any other life experience.

But these past two weeks have still been a period of growth.  Primarily, this has been an experience of slowing down and really paying attention to my girls as I have not done often enough.  I am certainly guilty of a tendency toward workaholism, even though I have in theory been trying to maintain a healthy work-life balance.  The truth is that I often leave the emotional work of parenting to Sue, in large part because she is just plain better at it.

But with Sue away so much, I’ve stepped more deeply into the world my girls inhabit.  And what I am realizing is that our worlds move at different speeds, with different imaginative objects that help structure our respective worlds.  I live in an academic world and move freely between millenia; what captures my imagination are eternal truths I seek to understand and live by.  It sounds grand, but in extremes it’s an unreal world.  My girls live much more in the here and now; they live in imaginative worlds populated by figures from stories and TV and music.  What’s important, though, is that I have set aside my imaginative world for a while in order to move more freely about in theirs.  And I have discovered dimensions of who they are in the process, and I fall in love.

I am convinced that we become who we imagine ourselves to be.  Too often I imagine myself in ways related to my work.  The experience of the past two weeks has reminded me of my fundamental vocation in the world.  It’s not about my work, though that does express an important dimension of how God has gifted me.  It’s about my marriage and my fathering, that sacramental context which, by definition, is oriented toward eternity.  I have been reminded to slow down, to be part of the world of my children, to walk with them and discover who they are and who they are becoming.  It is a wonder.

I recently took my girls to the drive-in to see the remake of a film I enjoyed when I was younger–The Karate Kid.  Now, several days removed from seeing it, I find myself struck by how much it resonates with a key Ignatian theme.

First, a note for parents: there are some hard scenes for younger children, notably bullying and fighting.  I brought my seven year-old, but I don’t think I’d bring younger children.

The story is about a child whose widowed mother is moved by her company to Beijing.  The young man, Dre, finds himself completely out of his element and the target of racist-inspired bullying.  Through a series of developments he seeks out Mr. Han to teach him karate.  He slowly learns, and must ultimately face the bullies at a karate tournament.

Now, the Ignatian part.  Dre’s experience of disequilibrium is rooted in the difference between how he imagines himself (a kid from Detroit) and the reality of his new life in Beijing.  I think of Ignatian spirituality as an invitation to a new way of imagining oneself, specifically as a child of God called and gifted to draw deeply from God’s gifts to create beauty in the world.  What holds Dre back early in the film–and what holds us back–is a weak imagination of ourselves.  We’re only this or only that.  The first week of the Spiritual Exercises is about dropping our limited self-imagination and coming to see ourselves as God sees us, beautiful creations of a loving creator even though limited by our sin.  For Ignatius himself, the experience of convalescence gave him time to slowly let go of his limited self-imagination in order to develop new ways of imagining himself: as another Saint Francis or Saint Dominic.  The desires that this new imagination incited in him led him to the new chapter in his life, even with mistakes along the way.

For Dre, the opening of imagination to see himself as capable of learning karate was difficult, and yet in time it gave him the motivation to seek out a teacher.  This too is very Ignatian: the spiritual director is the person who helps steer our self-imagination toward the greater good that God wants to unfold through us.  Initially, Dre has to undertake a series of incredibly tedious and boring exercises.  He sees no connection between these exercises and the imagination he has set for himself.  Ignatius, too, described his early days learning Latin with schoolboys as a kind of tedium, even though in his later years he knew that these exercises were important.  The moment of insight for Dre comes when Mr. Han shows him how those boring exercises have already prepared his body for the discipline of karate.  In that moment, Dre’s self-consciousness is transformed.  He is no longer a kid just doing what his teacher tells him; he is a student of karate whose potential is without limit.  And the rest of his training becomes focused, disciplined, and oriented toward the great good that he now imagines: beating the bullies.

We could talk long about what kinds of goals shape our imaginations, how our teachers challenge us or pose obstacles; the relationship between spiritual exercises and simply resting in God’s love; and so on.  What I am simply observing about this movie (however formulaic it may be) is that it is based on some basic observations about human nature that strike me as very consonant with the dynamics of Ignatian spirituality.  In particular, I am struck by the way it suggests something about how we imagine ourselves, and how the way we imagine ourselves shapes what we do with our lives.  That dynamic was at the heart of Ignatius’ own experience of conversion.  In my experience, that same dynamic is at the heart of many stories of conversion.  The whisper of God may be the often hidden idea that God is calling me to be something else, something greater, something more beautiful.

Today is the last day you can download your free copy of the new book What’s Your Decision? How to Make Choices with Confidence and Clarity.  Here it is.

We’ll continue to offer special discounts on printed copies of the book through August 15. Go here for details.

You might also want to take a look at a new blog on men’s spirituality called Men on the Journey (MOJO for short).  The bloggers are Tom McGrath and Joe Durepos, two friends of mine who have been thinking long and deeply about the particular challenges men face on their spiritual journey.  They are inspired by the work of Fr. Richard Rohr.  Be sure you look at the lively comments about their posts.

Tim Muldoon argues that Ignatian spirituality speaks to the postmodern sensibility because it prizes imagination and experience rather than doctrine and analysis:

It is based on a personal, imaginative exploration of the gospel, and it invites people to choose freely to deepen their intimacy with God through a deepened understanding of who they themselves are. The invitation to come to know God in this way is radically different from the approach which has become familiar to so many: that of learning the doctrines and moral teachings of the Church in religious education, and developing the critical thinking that sometimes leads us to question whether any doctrine can be judged true. Ignatian spirituality is not primarily doctrinal, because it is not primarily an exercise of reason. It is instead a practice of imagination, with all the affective dimensions that unfold in imagination, often without the explicit consent of the intellect.

Read the whole thing.

Paul Campbell, SJ, talks about his personal prayer practices. (“The most important thing I do is to see a spiritual director.”)

Jim Martin, SJ, on sexual abuse and the Sacred Heart.

How the St. Louis Jesuits changed liturgical music. (“One person credits them with wrecking the liturgy and the next person credits them with saving it.”)

Jim McDermott, SJ, on why movie sequels often flop.

The Jesuit theologian Walter Burghardt once described contemplation as “a long, loving look at the real.”  As I understand him, he meant that to the extent that we behold the world as God has made it, come to see its contours designed lovingly by a loving creator, we become aware of the presence of the God who is in all things.

Here are two very disparate and yet similarly attentive ways of contemplating the world as it really is.

1. Pedro Walpole, SJ, reflecting on why some Jesuits are scientists.  Historically, the Jesuits have been astronomers (with many craters on the moon named after Jesuits), physicists, botanists, archaeologists, and so on.  Science has a happy home in the Ignatian tradition.

2. Meditations centered around the World Cup by one of my favorite groups, the British Jesuits who produce pray-as-you-go.org.

For the one who has fallen in love with God, God is to be found everywhere, from the farthest stretches of the cosmos to the crowds gathered round the football pitch (that’s “soccer field” for my fellow Americans who missed the UK-US game a few days ago).  As Hopkins wrote: “these things were here, and but the beholder/Wanting.”  Our prayer might be that we become more attentive in seeing the really real, and thereby to more clearly see God.

Do you know anyone with doubts about God?  Point them to three recent articles by Fr. Jim Martin, SJ, in the Huffington Post. Martin says that God can be found in a feelings of incompletion, common longings and connections, and unusual “mystical” experiences.

These are expressions of desire: our desire for God and God’s desire for us. The trick is to recognize them as such. Martin tells a story:

One friend, a self-described workaholic who hadn’t been to church for a long time, went to a baptism of a friend’s child. Suddenly she was overtaken by powerful feelings — mainly the desire to live a more peaceful and centered existence. She began to cry, though she didn’t know why. She told me that she felt an intense feeling of peace as she stood in church and watched the priest pour water over the baby’s head.

To me, it seemed clear what was happening: she was experiencing, in this moment, when her defenses were down, God’s desires for her. And it makes sense that a religious experience would happen in the context of a religious ceremony. But she laughed and dismissed it. “Oh,” she said, “I guess I was just being emotional.” And that was that.

It’s a natural reaction: much in Western culture tries to tamp down or even deny these naturally spiritual experiences and explain them away in purely rational terms. It’s always something other than God.

Martin says, “Religious experiences are often dismissed — not out of doubt that they aren’t real, but out of fear that they are real after all.”

A psychologist named William van Ornum will be writing regularly on America Magazine’s “In All Things” blog about the intersection of Christian faith and psychology.  In his initial post he writes that one common denominator is Ignatius’s exhortation to gratitude: “I will call back into my memory the gifts I have received–my creation, redemption, and other gifts particular to myself. I will ponder with deep affection how much Our Lord God has done for me, and how much he has given of me of what he possesses.”  Van Ornum comments:

The Saint travelled from near suicidal despondency to reach this happier way of thinking, and countless Jesuits over centuries have brought the Lord to those who undertake the exercises. Finally in this 21st century, many in the profession of psychology have finally caught up with Ignatius, offering “positive therapy” or “cognitive psychology” in which we learn how to change our feelings by changing our thoughts.

He asks readers to suggest topics to write about.  Read the whole post and the fascinating suggestions from readers in the comments.