Magis is one of the more mysterious Ignatian terms. It’s a Latin word meaning “the greater, the excellent, the best.” It’s associated with restless striving to always do better, to undertake a greater project, to set more ambitious goals. Sometimes I find the notion of magis inspiring. Often I find it intimidating. The idea of the magis comes from the Call of the King meditation in the Spiritual Exercises. Ignatius has us imagine Christ as a King calling […]
I’ve been thinking about Ignatius’s Presupposition lately. This is a ground rule for the Spiritual Exercises that he puts right at the beginning of the book. It’s about the relationship between the spiritual director and the person making the retreat. To assure better cooperation between the one who is giving the Exercises and the exercitant, and more beneficial results for both, it is necessary to suppose that every good Christian is more ready to put a good interpretation […]
Ignatius often ended his letters to Jesuits going to the missions with the expression ite, inflammate omnia—“go, set the world on fire.” What did he mean by that? Maybe it was just a rah-rah expression, the kind of thing a football coach says when he tells the team to go out on the field and “kick butt.” But I don’t think so. I don’t think Ignatius had a cheerleader’s personality. He was a serious man who used words […]
What does God’s voice sound like? In my experience, like nothing I was expecting. A while ago I was having some very bad days. I had too much work to do. My wife and I had a stack of unpaid bills. Problems kept cropping up, and my solutions weren’t working. I felt helpless, and I hated feeling that way. I was angry, then depressed; boastful, then self-pitying. In the middle of all this mental turmoil […]
The other day I came across a passage in a novel that brought me up short. The book is Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. The writer describes the thoughts of a nine-year-old boy: “His father always talked to him—so he felt—as if he were addressing some imaginary boy, one of those that exist in books, but quite unlike him. And he always tried, when he was with his father, to pretend he was that book […]
Advent begins on December 3, 2017. Years ago, I gave up on Advent. It was hard to maintain the Advent frame of mind (quiet longing for the coming of Christ) in the midst of the Christmas tumult, which seems to get started around Columbus Day. I remember listening to a priest one Sunday urging us to take Advent seriously by waiting until Christmas Eve to put up the tree and other decorations. You don’t live […]
A friend of mine was stuck in traffic in New York City late on a summer Friday afternoon. He was really stuck—sitting in his car on a narrow east-west cross street in Manhattan, going nowhere. He grew impatient, then angry. After a while, he started to think about how pitiful his life was. His friends were smarter, wealthier, happier than he was. He hadn’t accomplished anything significant. He was stuck in life, just as he was stuck in traffic. […]
There’s something thoroughly Ignatian about finding God in music. St. Ignatius’s spiritual approach mostly bypasses the concepts and ideas stuffed into our heads and strives to touch the heart directly. That’s what music does too. Music is literally beyond words. There’s a scene in the movie The Mission that shows what I’m talking about. A Jesuit, loosely based on the missionary and martyr St. Roque Gonzalez, comes into the jungle to make contact with the […]
In celebration of our fifth anniversary, we’ve invited our dotMagis bloggers to reflect on the individual lines of St. Ignatius’s Prayer for Generosity. This is the reward for all that labor—the knowledge that we’ve done God’s will. Can we really know that? St. Ignatius thought that we can, not with 100% certainty perhaps; God is always greater than anything we can say or think about him. But Ignatius thought that most of the time, in […]
In celebration of the release of Pope Francis’s book, The Church of Mercy, several of our dotMagis bloggers will be sharing reflections this month based on the words of Pope Francis. Pope Francis is a Jesuit, formed in the spirituality of the Spiritual Exercises. So it’s not surprising that he zeroed in on one of the central ideas of Ignatian spirituality when he found himself in front of a group of students from Jesuit high […]
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