Tim Muldoon - The Ignatian Workout for Lent: 40 Days of Prayer, Reflection, and Action

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2013 Timothy P. Muldoon

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Scripture quotations are taken from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

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eBook ISBN: 978-0-8294-4040-9

Based on the print edition: 978-0-8294-4039-3

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013950593

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In several places, St. Paul uses the metaphor of athletics to draw an analogy to the spiritual life of the followers of Christ. In his letter to the church in the Macedonian city of Philippi, for example, he writes the following:

I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Beloved, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.

Philippians 3:1014

I have been struck by this image of pressing on toward the goal for many yearsever since I found it emblazoned on a poster that someone gave me at the height of my athletic training in college. Immediately I drew a connection that, decades later, has stayed with me: life in Christ demands the same kind of vigilance, preparation, and training that a person undertakes as an athlete.

Elsewhere, in a letter he wrote to some Christians in the Greek city of Corinth, Paul suggests an image for how to think about the way to live in the hope of heaven:

Do you not know that in a race the runners all compete, but only one receives the prize? Run in such a way that you may win it. Athletes exercise self-control in all things; they do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable one. So I do not run aimlessly, nor do I box as though beating the air; but I punish my body and enslave it, so that after proclaiming to others I myself should not be disqualified.

1 Corinthians 9:2427

Pauls suggestion that discipleship is like training for a running race or a boxing match calls to mind several points. First, he suggests that it is necessary to maintain focus on a goal rather than be distracted by whatever passing pleasures, rest, or pointless wastes of time get in the way. Second, he reminds the Christ followers that their goal is infinitely greater than the prizes that athletes of his time receiveda laurel crown (the perishable wreath). Third, he suggests that Christians are in a kind of competition with others. Today, we might consider that in academia, in the blogosphere, and in popular media such as television, film, and journalism, there is a constant competition for market share, and that it is a challenge for anyone who would seek to get a message across to outwork and outdistance others who similarly devote themselves to proclaiming their truths.

By the second century, a tradition of spiritual athletes began to develop in the church, especially among Syriac Christians in the lands of modern-day Turkey and Iraq. Figures such as Ephrem, Isaac of Nineveh, and Simeon the Stylite lived the most sparse lifestyles in order to show the kind of focus St. Paul called for. Their spiritual exercises, not unlike those of pre-Christian philosophers such as the Stoics and Epicureans (not to mention Buddhists, followers of the Tao, and many others), were ordered toward a higher good, analogous to the goods that Olympic athletes pursued. What the spiritual athletes sought to tame were the desires of the fleshgluttony, drunkenness, lust, and the likethat hindered them from their pursuit of glory.

It is not surprising that the key figure in the development of (Western) Catholic theology in the early church, St. Augustine, similarly relied on the wisdom of St. Paul. This rhetorician and philosopher experienced a process of conversion that emerged through a slow recognition of his own dissipation and the recognition that his spiritual life lacked a center and a goal. His long, slow growth toward Christ involved coming to see how stuck he was in meaningless desires, especially lust. In todays language, he realized he had an addiction, and he sought freedom from it. His final experience of falling in love with Christ brought that freedom, one that allowed him to let go of his addiction and embrace a call to love, to leadership, and to the service of the faithful through his voluminous writings.

Centuries later, another young man found himself in a position similar to that of Augustine, realizing that he, too, had been captive to pointless desires, in restless conformity to the zeitgeist. Only a painful process of convalescence after a war injury gave the young igo Loiolakoa (later Ignatius of Loyola) a wider-lens view: that beneath the desires the world told him he should have were quieter, yet more lasting and beautiful, desires planted as seeds by a God who loved him. Eventually igo would pen the Spiritual Exercises, which offered others an experience of careful attention to God that Ignatius had found so transformative. Describing the exercises, he suggests that they are to help us know the difference between true and false desire: to overcome oneself, and to order ones life, without reaching a decision through some disordered affection [afeccin desordenada]. Put most simply, igo wanted to help people see through false desires to the true ones that most purely revealed Gods love for us. For him, spiritual exercises were not about earning Gods love; they were about removing the detours that distract us from knowing it intimately.

Ignatius lived a life that enabled him to understand this basic pattern. Like all of us, he spent his youth glancing around nervously at everyone else. He imitated what he saw and became good at these things, these vanities, as he later called them. What changed everything was a catastrophe: a horrible injury that left him broken and bereft, forced to turn inside to ask what sort of life he would live. The answer emerged slowly and painfully: he learned to see the massive difference between the flash points of temporary highs and the slow but lasting peace of authentic desires rooted in God. He spent the rest of his life marinating in those authentic desires, sharing his exercises with those who would similarly live a meaning-saturated life.

The exercises in this book are indebted to this charismatic Spaniard who taught us how to discern true desire from false. Rooted in the ancient practices of imitation of Christ and the saints, the exercises invite us to drink deeply from the wells of our imagination, that portal through which Gods voice echoes with images and poetry that elude rational calculation. Ignatius discovered God more as a beloved than as a theorem, and so invited others to encounter the same God not through cleverness or study but through simple attentiveness to the reality of their own lives. To slow down, as it were, long enough to take a long, loving look at the real.

This book takes as its point of departure a view of the spiritual life that sees various forms of prayer as exercises that help us see the world the way God does. This view is both ancient and new: it reaches back to the earliest days of the church, when Christians would gather to remember the words of Jesus using prayers he had taught them. Yet it is also contemporary, reflecting the practice of so many millions of Christians who set aside time, especially during the penitential period of Lent, to refocus their energies on kindling into flame the embers of their relationship with God.