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from Love: the rhythms of the interior world
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 February 2010
The Spanish mystic Íñigo de Loyola wrote in a letter of 1551 to a Student: ‘You should practise looking for the presence of our Lord in all things, in walking, seeing, hearing, tasting, thinking.’ This is familiar ground to us: to seek out, as it were, divine love present in the world, and to absorb it through our senses. Now the same author includes in his famous Spiritual Exercises a meditation entitled ‘in order to obtain love’. There one should meditate ‘how God works and acts for my sake in all created things on the face of the earth’. A curious phrase in Latin is added: ‘that means how he acts as if he is working ’. The whole exercise concludes with a prayer: ‘that I may love and serve in everything his divine majesty’.
This now introduces a theme which has not been encountered so far. The divine presence is not just something to be experienced in all its beauty or accepted in all its gruesomeness, sung about and danced to in states of ecstasy, but demands specific action. Indeed, there is a common link between Íñigo and our Indian material: no positivistic Law is spelled out. The individual has to search for his particular call, and his particular mode of reacting to it. In the previous chapter I pointed out how the Indian monotheistic material we looked at possesses such an ‘anarchic’ quality.
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