Faber Lecture 2007

from the 2nd annual Faber Lecture,
The Stories We Live By - Beholding the World With God
 delivered by Fr Monty Williams SJ (from Toronto, Canada)
 at Holy Spirit Church, Auchenflower, Brisbane,
 on Friday, August 31.

 

Fr Williams said that his basic insight was that we live in imagined worlds - as if they were real.  Ignatius knew that to change the world we first had to change the way the world is imagined.
 
Constructed worlds fall into three categories:  closed myths, broken myths, open myths.

 

A closed myth's claim is to totality, to basic idolatry.  It maintains standards, integrity, values, tradition and offers security and stability.  In effect, it is elitist, the outsider is alien; it benefits a select few; controls media; and violence is the norm.

 

A broken myth sees the limitations of closed myths but is trapped in the narrative of the closed myth.  It claims to be counter-cultural, but defines and maintains itself only in relationship to the culture it professedly rejects; is a smaller and less stable version of the closed myth; uses violence to overthrow the dominant closed myth.

 

An open myth explores the gaps that are inherent in closed and broken myths to achieve the life those myths struggle to control. It uses what is given or at hand to make the next step; is attentive to the possibilities within a given situation; is risk taking; sees the limitations of the closed and broken myth; is committed even to the extend of losing one's life; faces the unknown without trying to control it.  The open myth follows the example and path of the Christ who is attentive always to the Father.

 

The open myth is not constrained by a pragmatic existentialism that says: well, this is what we have; we might as well make the best of it. The open myth, though beset by insecurities and the reversals of fortune, human bias, and cultural chaos, faces the darkness, which is the face of the future, as the context of emerging possibilities based precisely on relationship. Those relationships invite, call, entice, seduce, beckon, and impel us forward.  We are constantly called to be who we truly are by constantly moving beyond who we are now.

 

The questions that emerge from this perspective are: How are the worlds we live in created? and, Why do we at times remain fixed in those worlds refusing to move from them even though they distort our integrity and stifle our creativity?

 

The movement of the open myth is a movement always towards, and in relationship with, the other ... It can be noted not only in individuals, but also in communities, societies, and cultures.

 

I would point out though that the movement from a closed or broken myth to an open myth is not measured temporally but in terms of intimacy with the Divine, which, though it manifests itself in time, transcends time. The creativity of God cannot be contained fully in any one particular time, even though every moment of time - and here I acknowledge Blake again - contains the invitation of God to enter into the realm of the fullness of time. The narrative dynamics - post-modern narratives look at the ways those closed, broken, and open myths manifest themselves in our contemporary world - of the open myth are found in the Incarnation contemplation of the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius of Loyola.

 

Security, order, liberty, community are the rhetorical tropes of contemporary culture. These are not bad things in themselves, but they are bad things by themselves when they replace a relationship with God.

 

The power of God working through the Incarnation contemplation posits stories that disestablish the controlling narratives of security, order, liberty and cult.   Today it is onto these conflicting narratives of disorder that the Trinity of the Incarnation contemplation, gazes.  

 

The tension is between how God imagines us and how we imagine ourselves.   The Incarnation contemplation allows us to re-imagine ourselves as God does.

 

The Trinity decides to confect the Incarnation as an entry into the praxis of ideologies, as a fully human discourse into the closed or broken myths we live out of - no matter if our primary concerns are individual, social, or ecological - to create the real possibilities of an open myth.

 

Mary and Joseph give up the cultic dictates of their religion and culture with its constraints that offer the security and privilege of belonging to tribe, caste, and culture when they accept the presence of God into their lives at an unprecedented level. They entrust their lives to Divine Providence. They live out of an open myth.  

 

And the Christ of Philippians 2: 1-11, the Christ found in the Exercises of St Ignatius, gives up the absoluteness of the Godhead to enter into a particular moment of human history as a vulnerable member of a particular human family established within the dynamics and tensions of a particular culture. It is a time very much like ours.

 

A prayerful entry into the Incarnation contemplation gives us access to the energies narrated in those stories, and it is the exposure and alignment of our histories and energies with those manifest in those stories that effect the Incarnation in our world today.

 

The Incarnation contemplation becomes the paradigm of the whole of the Exercises.

 

I would put forward the suggestion that the work of the First Week of the Exercises is the deconstruction of limiting stories we live out of.

 

[The techniques of deconstruction displace the horizons of the narratives we spontaneously live out of.  The individual situation is put within the context of human history and that history is put within the context of a cosmic history in the First Exercise of that First Week. The second exercise with its escalating questions of the value of the "I" and the comparisons to ever broadening contexts re-enforces the deconstructions, as do the re-presentation of one's history.   There is also the dynamic context of prayer - the creative presence of God and the intentionality of that prayer directed to being disposed to, for and by God, which subverts, sublates, or displaces self-interest and the narratives with which this self-interest manifests itself.   Moreover there are the colloquies with Mary, Christ, and the Father and these engagements transform the previous interpellations by which one is defined.   You might note that what is going on here is the transformation of closed and broken myths, not by another myth; that comes in the Second Week of the Exercises.]

 

Rather at the end of the First Week those stories we live by are so deconstructed that aporias are revealed and it is into those openings that the dynamic love of God is poured and this is experienced as a sense of being loved and as a desire to respond to that love.   What is not given at this time is what new story to live by, and this only starts in the Incarnation contemplation.

 

We live only in stories.

 

God's story is that creation is the manifestation of God's love.   The stories of a creation that has separated itself from that love, encounter the story of God in the Word-made-Flesh.   That embodied story enters not only into an individual's broken story, but also through that individual into the broader contexts of the social, cultural, human, and cosmic story.

 

The transformation that begins there does not push us back into Gospel stories, but actually re-presents those dynamics of stories in our present life so that the Incarnation takes place yet again not only in us, but through us into the worlds in which we live.

 

Simply put, when we contemplate the Incarnation, we become Incarnation.

 

[But between the Incarnation contemplation and the end of the First Week is the bridge that mediates the works of the two weeks. This is found in the Kingdom meditation. On a strategic level it is interesting to note how the blockages of our sin perspective - not  only personal but also cultural and social - makes us misread elements of the  Kingdom meditation as forms of oppression and cultural dissonance, - as male and feudal - rather than an invitation to enter into an open myth where God's grace can work. In the Incarnation contemplation myth meets mystery and that mystery is narrated through the work of the Trinity and in the person of the Word-made-Flesh. When the Trinity looks down on creation They see people trapped in closed and broken myths. What is experienced in the First Week of the Exercises is the work of the Incarnation. What is implicit in the first week of the Exercises becomes explicit in the second week of the Exercises. The explicit context of a fallen creation in the first exercises of the First Week broadens into the context of the Trinity embracing that fallen creation in the first exercise of the Second Week.]  

 

The Incarnation contemplation which invites us into the story of God invites us first, into the perspective of God, and through that gift of vision, into the work of God, and through that identification, into working with God in this world as a grateful and humble service to the Father by being another living word of the Father, as is the Christ.

 

It is a work of the liberated imagination which points always beyond itself to what illuminates it.

 

As the Buddhists say: The pointing finger is not the moon. They know that it is the light of the moon that allows the finger to be seen.

 

This presentation is such a finger. Hopefully, for you, it works as a template to understand the Incarnation contemplation as it manifests itself in the world we find ourselves today.

 

I would point out though that the movement from a closed or broken myth to open myth is not measured temporally but in terms of intimacy with the Divine which though it manifests itself in time transcends time.

 

The creativity of God cannot be contained fully in any one particular time, even though every moment of time - and here I acknowledge Blake again - contains the invitation of God to enter into the realm of the fullness of time. The narrative dynamics of the open myth is found in the Incarnation contemplation of the Spiritual Exercises.

 

The contemplation itself begins with the usual preparatory prayer: "I will beg God our Lord for the grace that all my intentions, actions, and operations may be directed purely to the praise and service of His Divine Majesty" (#46).

 

The prayer does not ask us to look at God but at how we relate to the world.

 

The value of the praise and service is Incarnational.  Our energies in the context of the prayer are directed to contributing to the work of the Trinity engaged in creation.  That work is an act of contemplation, and Ignatius has us in the three points he gives replicating the dynamics of contemplation.

 

There are levels of contemplation.  One looks; one 's interest is engaged; one so engaged become involved.

 

That involvement carries one outside the boundaries of one's now opened myth.   That ek-stasis can be experienced at the root of one's being, where the applications of the senses carry us even beyond the sensible to the level of intimacy with the divine.

 

It is at this level that we understand the particular grace we are praying for in this contemplation which acts as a template for the whole of the Exercises and is the root of Ignatian spirituality.

 

We pray for our desire to be united to the Desire who desires us.

 

We pray "for an intimate knowledge of our Lord, who has become man for me, that I may love Him more and follow Him more closely" (#104).

 

Out of that intimacy comes love, and out of that love comes service. It is important to note that the intimacy is the foundation of the love, and not vice versa. That intimacy engages all the levels of being human, and manifests itself in contemplation in action as a creativity that works to transform the worlds in which we live into communities of love.

 

The grace we pray for here replicates what occurs in the First week, where we are the world the Trinity contemplates and transforms.   The grace we pray for manifests itself in the Second Week when we discover how we are to love as the Trinity loves as we learn - with an intimately personal knowledge - how to be present to the world as the Trinity is present to the world in union with the Trinity.

 

In the Third Week we find ourselves so committed to the presence that we move beyond the purely human dimensions of the open myth into the narrative of the Trinity.

 

We note that in death Christ's "body" remained separated from the soul, but always united to the divinity. His soul, likewise united to the divinity, descended into hell.   There he sets free the souls of the just (#219).   Even in death, the work of the Trinity continues.

 

In the Fourth Week, the resurrected humanity of Christ continues that work, finally sending us the deeply personal love He and the Father share, so that we, filled with the Spirit, "created in the likeness and image of the Divine Majesty", labour in the world as "God works and labours for me in all creatures upon the face of the earth" (# 236).   That is from the Contemplatio Ad Amorem which concludes the Exercises.

 

The Incarnation contemplation initiates us, quite self-consciously into that ever-deepening journey into love, so that we become one with the Beloved. Not only do we share the Beloved's life and mission, but, in doing so, we become the continuing manifestation of the Word-Made-Flesh in the world today.

 

Just as the first exercise of the First Week has us imagine from our fallen perspective, a fallen creation, cosmic, human, and individual, the first exercise of the Second Week allows us to see that creation from the liberated perspective of an opened myth and so we can contemplate the Trinity contemplating that fallen creation of the first week.

 

This parallel structure continues in the second exercises of both weeks.

 

In the first week, we consider our personal sinfulness; in the second week we are invited "to make myself a poor, little, unworthy slave" (# 114).

 

The nature of Ignatian love is humble service.

 

It is evangelical witness in action.

 

And in the Incarnation contemplation we are shown models of that incarnate activity in the work of Gabriel - whose name means "the power of God" - and in Mary who in humble service allows her personal story to be re-written by God.

 

In Mary's emptying herself of her self-will to allow the work of the Trinity to be done, we have the imaging of the Second Person of the Trinity emptying himself - as is stated in Philippians 2: 1-11 - in the service of the redemptive work of the Trinity.   He is to be "born in extreme poverty and ... after many labours, after hunger, thirst, heat, and cold, after insults and outrages, He might die on the cross." (#116).

 

Our own position is to be invited to place ourselves in that same stance of humility.  

 

The second exercise asks us, in the circumstances of the Nativity, to "make myself a poor little unworthy slave" and from that perspective, place ourselves in the scene "as though present" and in that place to "look ... contemplate ... serve ... with all possible homage and reverence" (# 114).

 

The humility that is solicited from us is to live out of an opened myth.   That opened myth sees us understanding ourselves as not having our identity in ourselves - which is narcissism, and the prime sin of pride that opposes the relationships of the kingdom of God. 

 

Instead it sees us as effecting our truest sense of self in relationship to God.  It realises that we are creatures and still being formed, and that we are subject to change as relationships change, or our understanding of those relationships change. 

 

The Incarnation occurs within a set of relationships and it is helpful to contemplate how the Incarnation manifests itself within the context of the closed, the broken and the opened myth.

 

The census of Caesar Augustus (Luke 2:1) - the counting of the people of the world, and an abomination to devout Jewish sensibility - becomes the moment for the fullness of time.   Galatians 4:4 tells us "When the time had fully come, God sent forth His Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law."

 

Incarnation enters broken and closed myths and allows us to see in those broken and closed myths the possibilities of redemption. Broken and closed myths, and even opened myths, do not see the possibilities of redemption. It is a gift.  As Blake points out "Jesus breaking thro' the Central Zones of Death &Hell/ Opens Eternity in Time &Space; Triumphant in Mercy" (Jerusalem 75:21-22).

 

In the explicit myths we discover ourselves in is always the implicit myth that is the narrative of the Trinity.

 

As we contemplate the Incarnation, we allow that implicit myth of God's mercy to be expressed in the explicit myths of our lives.

 

When that happens, the work of the Trinity contemplating us contemplating it continues.   It offers us the grace "to follow and imitate more closely our Lord, who has just become man for me" ( # 109).

 

We note the word "just."

 

That Incarnation has not occurred in some distant past in some foreign land. It occurs when we contemplate the Incarnation, as we do now. It occurs here and now.

 

And what the Incarnation contemplation offers us is a re-imagined world:

and the ongoing constructions, de-constructions, and re-constructions of our lives are found not in any system but in an lived intimacy with the Christ out of which flows love and from that love a service of God in the world.  That service, fragile, broken, is an ark.  It carries the human project.

 

 

photograph:  courtesy of Steve Cunningham, a member of the Faber Centre of Ignation Spirituality team