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| (c) https://www.ignatianspirituality.com/ignatian-voices/st-ignatius-loyola/ |
The Pilgrim's Story.
Reprinted from https://stignatiussf.org/news/the-pilgrims-story
-The Autobiography of St. Ignatius
Nearly every year since I first entered the Society of Jesus, I spend part of the month of July re-reading the Autobiography of St. Ignatius, in preparation for his feast day on 31 July. It is, for me, one of the foundational books of my Jesuit life; the story that reminds me, both in its form and substance, of what my vocation to the Jesuits entails, while challenging me to avoid settling for anything less. At times touched with self-deprecating humor and alive with a mature humility, this story of his years of pilgrimage and discovery—of the ways the young Iñigo was gradually and lovingly led to surrender all he was to God—consoles me in the twists and turns of my own journey. I can appreciate the false starts and the failed attempts of the Pilgrim whom Ignatius describes. And though, as a young man, I was stunned (like many modern readers) by the excessive acts of mortification and penance in which Iñigo engages, yet I recognize today the desire of youth, and I am moved by the journey he makes from mere external penances to the deeper mortification that comes from mission. The older I get—and I am older now than Ignatius was when he dictated the text—the more I see the pattern in the story, a pattern that incarnates the Spiritual Exercises in the life of the Pilgrim, and that ends just as the Pilgrim becomes a part of something greater than himself, just as the Lord takes and receives all he is and puts it at the service of the Church. For Ignatius, the Exercises as prayed or studied was only the beginning: it was the Exercises as lived which mattered—that journey from narcissism to humility, from vainglory to surrender, from the illusional happiness of self-determination to the real joy of love and the giving of oneself to others.
Ignatius never intended to write an autobiography, believing that he was merely the agent of God’s grace and that Jesus was the true founder of the Society. Yet, urged on by Nadal and other Companions—and after asking them to offer three Masses each in prayer about the matter—he reluctantly agreed, and in 1551—ten years after the founding of the Society of Jesus—Ignatius agreed to narrate his story, choosing Luis Gonçalves da Camara as his scribe. Though it would take him another five years to finish the relatively short narrative (his full-time job of running the young Society often kept him from the work) he declares it complete at the establishment of the Society and the beginning of its ministries in Rome. His last words on the subject to da Camara—“Master Nadal can tell the rest” (99)—reveal his sense that, with the start of the Jesuits, his personal story, i.e., the story of the Pilgrim, is completed. He was now part of the Company of Jesus, a worker in the presence of Christ.
Yet, if the end of the Autobiography seems brusque—as it did to da Camara—the story that precedes it demonstrates why Ignatius might end it so; for his entire life, as he reflected upon it, was a journey out of self-centeredness and into Christ. Thus, he begins as Iñigo de Loyola, the youngest son of a minor noble in the Basque region of Spain in 1491, who exemplifies the personal heroism romanticized at the end of the feudal age. As a young man, Iñigo thought he would become one of the great heroes he loved to read about in the literature of his day: fighting for the just cause and winning the struggle for his beloved. Chivalric and charming, he was both brave in battle (as the Autobiography tells) and courtly in his approach to women. Indeed, even after he was critically wounded in the battle of Pamplona and began his path of conversion, the change was largely superficial. Laying his arms at the foot of the Black Madonna of Montserrat and standing vigil there, he changed the object of his affection, but not his understanding. Though he now saw himself doing great things for God instead of the Emperor, and serving Mary instead of a noble lady, Iñigo de Loyola still believed that to be someone great he must first become the medieval idea of an individual hero—replacing Lancelot or Amadis of Gaul, with St. Dominic or St. Francis. However, God saw that what was needed for Iñigo was not to achieve the personal glory idealized in his heroes, but for him to surrender his ideals and become fully himself. Rather than doing great things for God, Iñigo needed to allow God to do great things through him. Though he seeks to be honest in the Autobiography, Ignatius is often betrayed in this desire by subsequent generations of followers, who want to make him, instead of Christ, the center of his story. Thus, when they tell the story of Montserrat, many in the “cult of Ignatius” miss the gentle humor which undercuts the nobility of this lonesome knight, or fail to mention the episode with which the story ends. As Ignatius tells it, the Pilgrim, who had traded his clothes for those of a pauper, travels a short distance from Montserrat when he is overtaken by a man who asks him about the trade, since the poor man, appearing in the fine clothes, had been arrested shortly after Iñigo’s departure. So it is that Iñigo, seeking to pursue his own sense of noble poverty and imitate the great saints of whom he had read, becomes a source of punishment rather than grace. He has not yet surrendered to God, not yet turned to the Jesus who loves him, but remains caught in his ideas of God—ideas that have more to do with him than with God.
Throughout the rest of the text, the Pilgrim slowly learns what true conversion entails, and comes to recognize that God’s love for him precedes and overwhelms any love he can earn for himself. God loves him because God loves him, not because he deserves that love; and all Iñigo’s efforts to deserve it or control it, to comprehend it or direct it—all the attempts to make God go where he thinks God should go—end in unhappiness and despair. Whether in Manresa, where Iñigo considers suicide because he cannot live the life of Dominic or Francis; or in the Holy Land, where his desire to work among the infidels is thwarted by the authorities who don’t need another religious zealot in their midst, Ignatius portrays his younger self as learning by experience the hard lessons of humility and the deep grace of surrender. Even in the foundational moment of La Storta, where, in a small roadside chapel on his way to Rome, Ignatius is blessed by a vision of the Trinity, God demonstrates to Ignatius that grace will be different than he imagines. For though he had been praying to Mary for years to “Place me with your Son,” it is not Mary, but the Father who comes to him, placing the Pilgrim in the presence of Jesus as he carries his cross and tells Ignatius, “I want you to be in my Company.” This small but significant transition, reminds Ignatius that not even his best desires determine God’s actions; rather, it is always about God’s will, given to him in love and communion. “Like a master with a schoolboy,” as he says of his experience at Manresa, Ignatius is led by God into moments that seem at times like failure or a revelation of his own smallness, but are filled with the grace by which he becomes Christ’s Companion, united in the joy of surrender.
Though the stories of Manresa and La Storta are wonderful examples of God’s action in the life of Ignatius, one very small story, rarely recalled from the Autobiography, has become a favorite of mine in recent years—in part because it lacks the grandness of the others. It is told late in the text, when Ignatius is on his way to Bologna in preparation for ordination. He leaves Genoa and begins climbing along a mountain path when he somehow manages to get lost. Walking on, he finds the road growing more and more narrow, and he becomes nervous looking down the steep cliff towards a raging river. As it grows dark, the little path virtually disappears, and Ignatius, in terror, ends up crawling along the mountainside, the roar of the water rising from below. Somehow, though, he makes it through, and comes to the outskirts of Bologna after what the Autobiography calls, “the greatest of all physical efforts he ever made” (91). At this moment of heroic victory, he makes ready to enter the city; but as he is crossing a small wooden bridge, he slips and falls into the muddy, muck-filled waters—giving, as he says, “a good laugh” to all around.
Terrified, muddy, and wet are hardly the images of the great saint that we expect; yet of all the stories in the Autobiography, I think I like this one best because it speaks to my experience of being both a human being and a Christian. We live in an age filled with terrors and muck, with narcissism and unwarranted cruelty. And there are days we will be terrified or humiliated, when we will be made objects of derision for the path we follow. But, as Ignatius came to know, God is still God, and the love of God—even when it seems hidden—is at work in us for the salvation of the world.
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