Ignatian Spirituality as a Basis for Contemplative Life

Extract

The following ideas are thrown out in the hope that they may be useful to those who are attracted to the contemplative life, and who are looking for some kind of groundwork or training for it, either ‘in’ or ‘out’ of religious life.

Ideas of apprenticeship—beginning at the beginning to master the first principles of a subject—are foreign to modern thought, but are nevertheless indispensable to the life of the spirit.

Throughout the centuries, solitude and corporal austerities have always gone hand in hand with the contemplative life. Physical solitude is, however, an impossibility for many, and is, in any case, only a means to acquire the necessary solitude of heart—the precursor of contemplation, while corporal austerities do not cover the whole field of asceticism, and may leave untouched the riot of confusion and disorder within the soul itself. Something more inclusive and positive in the way of preparation and training would seem to be needed to counteract the modern indiscipline of emotion and thought with its curious disdain of the ‘grammar’ of spirituality.