One of the most important characteristics of Ignatian prayer is the use of imagination. Ignatius recommends practices of meditation, consideration, and contemplation as ways for humans to open themselves to the work of God’s Spirit, who prays within the bodied spirit of the human person. Each of these practices requires the person of prayer to both remember past experiences and to mentally or emotionally “try on” some experience that is suggested by a story—written or told orally—a painting, a dance or play, a landscape or cloudscape, or any number of other opportunities to think about and feel within oneself something that is not an ordinary part of one’s life moment. Imagination is necessarily formed by education, attitude, and knowledge granted through all kinds of studies and forms of understanding. To think of imagination as formless is to accept a non-human perception that lacks the rational capacity of humanity. Emotion alone does not form imagination, nor does rationality alone. Rather, the gift of human imagination is a complex blending of all the forms—intellectual, memory-based, and sensate by which we discover the other, the world, and ourselves. At its best, imagination is an informed human knowing that leads into the discovery of God and God’s desires for us, which become the ground for true discernment about what makes us joy-filled and fully human. In other words, the right use of creativity and imagination enable us to receive God’s will (which Jesus describes as his daily bread—that which keeps him alive) and to act upon it meaningfully.
Ignatius’s early studies in Paris focused on arts and letters, the subject fields of literature, history, the arts, and rhetoric, prior to his more advanced studies in philosophy and theology. In these studies, he apparently felt confirmed in the importance of both imagination and human creativity for more perfectly grasping the truth about his inner life, the existence and creativity of God, and the importance of understanding how people of diverse ages, genders, races, cultures, and religious traditions grew more fully human through engagement with truth, beauty, and goodness.
Ignatian spirituality, ordered toward relationship, is shaped by the right use of creative talent toward service of the physical world and all the life within it. Those who stand on the margins of acceptance in various cultures are often deprived of the truth, beauty, and goodness; thus their poverty is often so much more than financial. It is a poverty of spirituality that brings despair and lack of joy or peace.
—Excerpted from “Part VII Introduction” by Eileen Burke-Sullivan in An Ignatian Spirituality Reader, Volume II
