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EXPANDING CREATION
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Way, Contents Ecology and the Spiritual Exercises How creation awareness enhances the experience of the Spiritual Exercises; and how the Exercises offer spiritual wisdom to the ecological community. Download this article in
RTF format by clicking here, Dialoguing with the Dance of Creation New insights into Ignatius’ Principle and Foundation from astronomy, ecology, and trinitarian theology. Ignatius Loyola and God's Unconditional Love An exploration of the idea of God’s love in the Spiritual Exercises, and the questions it raises. Why is Ignatius’ language initially so dry? How can a transcendent being love us? Can we love a God when faith in God’s very existence is difficult? What of sin and evil? From the Ignatian Tradition: A striking, even if not fully developed, example example of creation theology from Ignatius’ lifetime, exploring even then how the Exercises might nourish people thought to be outside the Church. Spirituality in Adulthood: Development and Fruition A study of how old age can be serene, fruitful, and life-giving, drawing both on traditional spiritual resources and on Erikson’s developmental psychology. The Spiritual Exercises and a Spirituality for the Later Years We make the Spiritual Exercises in different ways at different stages of our lives. Later in life our experience of the Exercises reflects quite specifically the changes we have gone through, and the call to generosity and surrender takes on new forms. Crisis and Transformation: Turning Over the Compost Heap The changes that take place in a compost heap are a powerful image of God’s leading us through death to life, as witnessed by a historical figure such as Teresa, or in the contemporary call to global transformation. Seeking God in All Things: Ignatian Spirituality as Action Research How the Ignatian ideal of ‘contemplation in action’ converges strikingly with new methods of learning and research being developed in the social sciences. Theological Trends: It is often thought that Christianity transformed a Judaism that believed strictly in one God only. Recent research suggests a more complex picture. Jesus and the early Christians were drawing on ideas of God as Father with a Second God who was his Son that go back to the Temple rituals before the Exile. Recent Books
on an important new study of St John of the Cross
on Jacques Dupuis and interreligious dialogue on two British books about Christianity and culture on Andrew Moore, faith and reason on the unimportance of the Gospel of Thomas on a study of the Augustinian tradition of spirituality on ‘ordinary theology’ as done spontaneously on the street on Fintan Creaven, the Celtic tradition, and Ignatius on the enigma of Ignatius on the work of the late George Schner on some continental spirituality books and on Church authority on ethics and GM food
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Way, From the Foreword IGNATIUS BEGINS THE SPIRITUAL EXERCISES proper with a famous statement: Humanity is created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord, and by this means to save its soul. And the other things on the face of the earth are created for humanity, that they may help it in pursuing the end for which it is created. (Exx 23.2-3) It follows that we have to deal with these creatures ‘rightly’: to use them as much as they help us attain our end, and to rid ourselves of them in so far as they hinder us.Commentators ancient and modern have been struck by the plainness of this statement: it does not mention Jesus Christ; it seems oddly cerebral. It might well help explain why people have often thought Ignatian spirituality irredeemably prosy, functional, even manipulative; and in the light of modern ecological sensitivities, the language of ‘use’ at least appears unfortunate. ‘Sometimes’, we read in an early Directory, ‘from just the consideration of the Foundation alone a whole soul is amended and reformed as it recollects itself and sticks at speculation on its end’. That comment can be read as confirming the critics’ worst suspicions; it can also be taken as a pointer towards something richer hidden in Ignatius’ text. The articles in this issue of The Way draw on various resources to expand our understanding of God’s creative presence. Thus Trileigh Tucker eloquently draws our attention to how Ignatian spirituality can take up ecological concerns, while John English sets the Ignatian text within the discoveries of modern science and more recent Trinitarian theology. Antony Campbell suggests that Ignatius’ reticence is deliberate, and must be understood in the light of what comes later, notably in what Campbell calls the Contemplation for Recognising Love. Meanwhile this issue’s piece ‘from the Ignatian tradition’ shows how Jerónimo Nadal, even in Ignatius’ lifetime, had a sense of God as creator of all things that was strong enough for him at least to be able to begin imagining how the Exercises could be given to ‘infidels’ and ‘heretics’. It is often claimed that classical Christian statements about creation are too static—creation is a process, and God acts dynamically. The three articles which follow—by Peter Feldmeier, Gerald M. Fagin and Vilma Seelaus—in different ways explore how our relationship with the creating and sustaining God changes over our lifetime. David Coghlan, for his part, shows how Ignatian ideas dovetail very well with ‘action research’, with new developments in social science centred not on abstract theory or generalisation, but on the practical wisdom we can draw from our ongoing busyness and activity. Finally, in ‘Theological Trends’, Margaret Barker calls seriously into question the idea that the early Christians had to complicate or change a Judaism that worshipped one creator God. She suggests, rather, that the Temple rituals of early Judaism centred on a God who had a son present among us as priest and king, and that both Jesus and the early Church were drawing on these traditions as they developed what we know as Christianity. If she is correct, then we Christians must approach dialogue with Jews and Muslims in a new way, and rethink radically our understanding of our own origins. And even if her theories turn out not to be right, this kind of new idea is itself one of the ways in which our sense of creation is expanded and deepened. Philip Endean SJ
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