The grace we are asking of God: a deeply felt awareness of how God in all of history and most powerfully in the Word made flesh draws us into the unfolding of the mystery of his love which always is extravagant and which is ever seeking to save us. We desire that in doing this we enter into a process of healing and conversion that we might love Jesus and follow him more intentionally, completely, and wholeheartedly.

Horizons of the Heart is inspired by the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius and my own notes from my thirty-day Ignatian retreat in 2022. See an index for the whole series.

Prayer is often characterized as a conversation. A dialogue. A meeting of hearts. I believe that Ignatius, however, is hoping that as we experience the contemplative power of the Spiritual Exercises we will come to know—with a deeply felt, an affective understanding, a deep experience—how we are drawn into the unfolding of the mystery of God’s love in Christ.

A conversation or dialogue or encounter or meeting…. These are important and helpful images so that we remember that prayer is two-sided. Through them we learn that in our relationship with God we must speak and we must listen. We must give and we must receive. We must bring our lives to the table with God, so to speak, and allow him to have his way with our life. We don’t run the meeting or set the terms for the encounter. We are brought into something surprising. We discover the love we have tried to “think” ourselves into understanding when God gets into the driver seat of our relationship.

Experiencing within myself how Jesus is sensing and feeling during a situation recorded in the Gospels, shows me a new way of feeling.

Ignatius also has an image for the prayer he is hoping that we grow into as we make the Spiritual Exercises. It is called Application of the Senses. So far we have encountered this in one respect. We enter into the meditations using our five senses: we see ourselves in the mystery we are contemplating. We hear what is happening. We taste and savor the mystery that is unfolding before us. We touch and are touched.

The goal for Ignatius is not that we pray with this method, or any method, correctly. The purpose of our encounter with God in contemplation is that the text we are meditating touches us deeply, comes alive, and affects us personally so that we will choose to love and serve God more. In prayer we are transformed by God in the deepest point of our being into a more clear and perfect reflection of his own Son, the Word made Flesh, Jesus. Antonio Guillen describes it this way:

One has to bear in mind that any ‘contemplation’ already has an element of feeling that is much more prominent than in a ‘meditation.’ Whenever we take to ourselves a gospel text in such a way that we feel ourselves to be present at an event that is occurring before our eyes, ‘seeing the persons, hearing what they say and watching what they are doing’ (e.g. Exx 194), then the text becomes alive, so much so that we hear a word and see a gesture as if it affected us personally. It is through our senses that we feel the ‘touch’ within the heart (Exx 335), and then the heart expands in feelings of happiness, peace and serenity, and in a renewal of spiritual strength, along with desires to ‘move forward’ (Exx 315, 329). (Imitating Christ our Lord with the Senses: Sensing and Feeling in the Exercises: Antonio Guillen (The Way, 47/1-2 (Jan/April 2008), 225-241).

This clearly opens up for us a new dimension to what we desire in Gospel contemplation. “The Exercises are grounded in what Ignatius calls ‘sensing and tasting things interiorly.’” This tasting of spiritual things renews our strength and shows us more deeply how to imitate Christ our Lord.

“In week two of the Exercises especially, the senses are seen as an instrument of prayer and discernment. Being present to Jesus as he acts through his own bodily senses we come to share more deeply in his human experience and self-understanding.”

I have begun to see Gospel contemplation as a time when my senses and feelings are being mentored by the Word of God. Interacting with Jesus and Mary, Joseph, Peter, Paul, experiencing within myself how they are sensing and feeling during a situation recorded in the Gospels, shows me a new way of feeling, one different from the feeling informed by my egoism or selfishness. I gradually take on Jesus’ way of feeling, Mary’s way of sensing, or Joseph’s way of experiencing challenging situations.

Image Credit: The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, Caravaggio (1571-1610), public domain