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Now and then

30 November, 1999

Brian Grogan brings us on a visit to the places and scenes of St Ignatius’s life and asks us to ponder what it would be like for us to revisit the scenes of our own life after we died.

Were Ignatius to return today to his native land, as he did in 1535 when he was forty-four years old, he would have a hard time recognizing the scenes of his childhood. Azpeitia, the town nearest to Loyola, has changed hugely, but if he entered its parish church, he would find the old baptismal font, now restored, and nearby an inscription in Basque, capable of shaking his soul: Here Ignatius of Loyola was baptized.

Wandering through the oldest section of the inner city, which today has been enlarged and surrounded by ugly factories, he would come across a street named St. Ignatius Street. He would walk out of the town in the direction of his home, no longer visible, and find himself in a magnificent basilica with a silver statue of himself above the main altar.

Bewildered and confused, he would fall in line with a crowd of weary tourists on their way to visit one of the ‘musts’ of the tour, the Santa Casa, the Holy House. Suddenly his heart would beat faster, because there they are – the unmistakable walls of his home, the solid rocks, the carved coat of arms, and the brickwork upper storeys. These were built by his grandfather after the king had ordered the demolition of the original towers and fortifications, as a punishment for rebellion.

Two statues would be immensely suggestive: one of a knight standing erect in heavy armour, and the other of some soldiers carrying a wounded man on a litter. A dog is giving the invalid a warm welcome home. Ignatius would remember the dog’s name and what company it was to him during his long, lonely hours of convalescence. The guides would tell the tourists nothing about his family, even though they had been very prominent. Instead, everything would be about himself and his spiritual family of Jesuits.

He would experience another surge of emotion if he went up to the top storey of the house and looked
at the statue of himself as a convalescent with his eyes raised from his book to gaze at a little wooden carving of the Blessed Virgin. This was the room where his adventure had begun. It was in this room that he had been born anew.

It had been a slow, difficult birth into a life that would be directed by a compass not of his own making. The dreams he had nurtured during the long hours spent in the solitude of this room had marked his life, because from that time on he was free, his life had truly become his own, or rather his life no longer belonged to himself but to Another, to the One who would take him where he had never dreamed of going.

On his way to the blacksmith’s house, where he had been nursed as a child, he would stop off at a fine building named the Centre of Spirituality. A friendly Jesuit would explain that people came there to make the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. In the library his heart would beat faster when he gazed on some familiar titles: the Spiritual Exercises, the Autobiography, Constitutions of the Society of Jesus. Elsewhere he would find thick volumes titled the Narrative Sources for the Life of St Ignatius and the Beginnings of the Society of Jesus.

He would turn the pages of his Spiritual Journal, which deal with a single year of his life (1544-45) and which reveal how intense his mystical experiences were. He would see a note stating that the Spiritual Exercises have been edited more than 4,500 times since the first edition in 1548. He might look at the numerous biographies of himself, some sympathetic, others highly critical. He would shake his head in wonder at more than one hundred volumes of the History of the Society of Jesus, twenty-four of them dealing with himself.

We may now leave the preceding fantasy and focus instead on the sources for the present book. Chief among these is Ignatius’s Autobiography, dictated to a Jesuit scribe a few years before Ignatius’s death in 1556, and written at the request of his Jesuit companions. For long they had begged for an account of ‘how the Lord had guided him from the beginning of his conversion’.

It begins abruptly with his wounding at Pamplona in 1521, and ends with his early years in Rome, where he lived from 1538 to 1556. The protagonist in the tale is not himself but God. Ignatius is the anonymous pilgrim, the one who trudges toward the unknown, guided by a fundamental trust in Him who was leading him, without knowing to what nor to where he was being led.

After his death, his companion Nadal gave the Ignatian profile some cosmetic ‘touching up’ and spread his vision of Ignatius throughout the Society of Jesus in Europe. Then in 1572 came the official image, in Pedro Ribadeneira’s Biography of St. Ignatius. This met with criticism, so another version was commissioned. From 1596 onward, the beatification process began. Tribunals met in places linked to Ignatius, and gathered up the precious but fading memories of those who had known him during his life.

In 1609 he was beatified and in 1622 he was canonized along with Francis Xavier, his dearest friend, and Teresa of Avila. The mythification was at last solidified and the results would be spectacular, for this was the age of baroque art, triumphant, splendid, heroic and miraculous. Could anyone standing under the glorious vaults of the Gesu Church in Rome ever recognize the poor pilgrim who walked shoeless and in threadbare clothes over half of Europe?

For Pondering:
If you were to return after death to the scenes of your life, what effect would this have on you? 


This article first appeared in The Messenger (February 2008), a publication of the Irish Jesuits.  

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