Note the difference between the way most people normally discern and this radical way that Ignatius is proposing. Most lead with the wrong foot: they allow the tools of the false spirit to drive the bus: fear and anxiety…ambition…pride…jealousy…But for now I allow my great desires to drive the bus. I imagine the greatest potentialities – the best-case scenarios – for each option. For now, I dream of glorious possibilities.
Mark Thibodeaux, God’s Voice Within
I write it down, there in my journal. It’s a helpful insight into discernment. So true. And I wonder how I can internalise it. Set it into my heart so that it is one of the resources upon which I can draw as spiritual director, as educator. Helpful and, yes, so true.
Until, with crystal clarity that comes only from Holy Spirit, I realise that it is not only true for them.
It is true for me.
I have been letting the tools of the false spirit drive the bus for far too long. Fear, in particular. Even despair. I have spent so many years enmired in darkness and seeming absence that I have forgotten how to hope.
And I have known this. I have prayed over it repeatedly in recent years as fog has begun to thin, morning light dissipating gloom in shafts. As he has restored to me that which was lost – peace and prophetic gifts, occasional flashes of joy that break through the overhanging sadness – I have prayed, again and again, Lord, restore to me the hope of your goodness.
It is shorthand. Hope of heaven. Hope in this life.
It is allusion. Intimating both emptying of memory of which John of the Cross speaks, collapsing of image and language for the conception of God, and memory’s filling by that which is beyond conception and thus given, not humanly constructed. True hope. That which no eye has seen and no ear has heard.
Lord, restore to me the hope of your goodness. This, my prayer, over and over. But I have not known how to participate with him. How to partner prayer with action. I have prayed for hope and I have seen nothing change nor has he given me instruction. And, so, when I have discerned his onward call, I have seen only its cost and despaired even as I girded my heart to continue.
I have seen call’s cost because I have paid so dearly for it already. The Yes that I said again and again has not been without its devastations. And now I limp. In the direction of fear as to what else he might take from me. It has skewed my capacity to see. Given steering wheel too much to false spirit, too little to the Holy Spirit whose power brings overflowing hope.
Yes, I limp. Or, as Thibodeaux puts it, ‘desolation…allow[s] the false spirit to nightmare in me’.
But Ignatius invites me to let ‘God dream in me’. I could ‘allow my great desires to drive the bus…imagine the greatest potentialities – the best-case scenarios – for each option…dream of glorious possibilities’. And I have begun to wonder: what if my participation with hope were to look like dreaming?
What if, faced with this calling deeper into him, I were not to nightmare over the cost but, instead, intentionally and systematically – even as new form of spiritual discipline – to begin dreaming its greatest potentialities, best-case scenarios, and glorious possibilities?
Could this be how despair will become hope – for me and perhaps also for you?
The Art of Steering 