End of first "week" with sin, death, hell, and a little bit of heaven tossed in at the end.

Now for watching Jesus at work . . . and listening . . . with a view to imitating him in His public life . . .

On morning of the 10th day, one of us “burst out almost hysterically” to read on the bulletin board that we finally had a day off . . .

No wonder.  We had pictured ourselves on our death beds, kneeling with shades drawn and lights dimmed.  The sun still shone outside or didn’t, I can’t remember.  But I remember the meditation and recalled it years later, when I told a psychiatrist about it.  He wasn’t treating me.  My wife and I were at dinner with others of his profession prior to a talk by the famous death-and-dying expert Elizabeth Kubler Ross.  When talk with the professionals came to imagining oneself dying, it came to me: I had done that, in the First Week.

Into such a week, put your more than usually pious, relatively sensitive 18-year-old.  Put him in a dark room and have him meditate on his death as if it were then and there, and you have the potential of a soul-searing experience—Billy Graham, who had his own life-changing episode, and John Wesley, founder of Methodism, would recognize it.  I shrink from too dramatic a designation, but I do know that tossing hell into the mix in another of the first nine days—before or after, I do not recall—gives a young man pause. 

It was certainly geared to help a back-sliding novice think twice about leaving the novitiate, “checking out,” as we put it, or just “checking.”  Neither fear of ostracism on leaving—for most of us, there would have been none—nor sudden ending of a chosen career (we were young enough to start over, so what?) nor a dipping of one’s personal flag with accompanying sense of failure (again, so what at this stage?) did the job on the dark days of the 22 novitiate months yet to come.  It was the fear of hell that hung in the minds and hearts of some of the weary and disconsolate. So much for hell. 

The first week had heaven too.  We pictured torment and loss in meditating the one and joy without end in the other.  Even death had its light moments.  Demonstrating how we know neither the day nor the hour, Father Master listed Jesuits he knew who had cashed in without a moment’s notice.  As he did so, Charley O., Marine vet and highly motivated spirituality practitioner, got a giggly fit, he said later.  He kept it bottled in at the time, and many men together could not have spied it, I’m sure.  It was the image of those Jesuits dropping like flies, he said later.  Which goes to show, you can find a laugh in just about anything if you just let the spirit move you.

TRAVELING WITH JESUS

Break day done, we embarked on the second week, meditating on Jesus as itinerant preacher and miracle-worker.  This was our introduction to the Ignatian imagination.  We were put to picturing or contemplating Gospel events, as opposed to great and noble thoughts.  In episode after episode, we imagined ourselves there with Jesus, almost without attention to the meaning of it for ourselves but rather to get familiar with him. 

This was a far cry from the moralizing Sunday sermon we had grown up on, staples of our upbringing: The boy Jesus found in the temple?  Honor thy father and mother.  The wedding feast at Cana?  A word for the sacrament of matrimony.  Multiplying the loaves and fishes?  Consider the boy with the two loaves and how our little becomes a lot thanks to Jesus.

We had prayed to get things or win things or improve ourselves, as with “Jesus meek and humble of heart, make my heart like unto thine,” a standard “aspiration,” or short prayer, of our Catholic-schooled youth.  This time we pretty much just looked at Jesus and the people in his life.  Lessons were obvious enough, supplied by context, but they weren’t the main thing.  That was the scene itself.  We practiced “application of the senses” in prayer, much as writing students learning how to see what others missed.

A few years later I did a paper on the poetry of Robert Southwell, one of the English Jesuits who was caught by Elizabethan priest-hunters and executed.  Southwell’s “Burning Babe” and other poems reflected his Spiritual Exercises experience, according to critics I consulted.  I wrote to demonstrate that.  Here we were more or less monks in a monastery, meditating the hours away to get closer to Jesus, and all the while imbibing a whole poetic vision or style.  It was no simple thing being a Jesuit.

This second week, covering seven or eight more of the 30 days, was a breeze compared to that hell and death stuff.  The shades stayed up, the sun came in, Father Master got light-hearted and tried humor at times.  His points (for meditation, remember) were not aimed narrowly at inculcating a position on anything but rather at infusing a habit.  We were gearing up for a life of prayer.  But there was more.

Coming up: We were also gearing up for a life-changing decision.  Here in this second week, we ran into the element of the Exercises that one could argue is most peculiarly Ignatian. . . .