Angelus News | August 2-9, 2019 | Vol. 4 No. 27

A season’s supply of
spiritual weapons
Got a case of the summer blues? St. Ignatius
of Loyola may have the prescription you need
BY KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ / ANGELUS
LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART
“St. Ignatius of Loyola’s Vision of Christ and God the Father at La Storta,”
by Domenichino Zampieri, circa 1622.
If you are a Christian who goes to Mass most Sundays
but see that you’re not quite living up to everything that
your faith professes, how about asking yourself a couple
of useful questions before the summer is over? “Do I
have a thirst to imitate Christ?” “Does my heart ache to
live without anything contrary to Christ in my life?”
If your answers are “yes” — even just a little — St. Ignatius
of Loyola might just be the saint for you. In fact, he may
just be the saint for our times.
“Prayer is simply getting in touch with God’s thirst for us
and our longing for him,” writes Father Gregory Cleveland,
OMV, in his new book, “Awakening Love: An Ignatian
Retreat with the Song of Songs” (Pauline Books & Media,
$20). In other words, prayer makes what can sometimes
seem impossible in our busy, noisy world, feel a lot more
doable. It’s not reliant on us — it’s God’s work.
Bruno Lanteri, the late 18th- and early 19th-century
founder of Cleveland’s religious community, the Oblates of
the Virgin Mary, once wrote: “In order to facilitate prayer,
to know what it is to pray, what is really necessary is neither
strength, nor study, but only a word, a sigh, a desire ever so
light, a desire in its birth, a desire that we feel has not yet
developed in the heart; this same disposition of the heart to
pray has already passed into the heart of God.”
The existence of the Oblates of the Virgin Mary has a
lot to do with Ignatius, founder of the Jesuits, who we
celebrate on the last day of every July. At the heart of the
Oblates’ charism is spiritual direction and the spiritual exercises
Ignatius composed from his own prayer experience.
In his book, Cleveland credits Ignatius’ “Spiritual Exercises”
as a school of prayer through which we prepare ourselves
to receive the divine gift of prayer, the kiss of God.
“Saint Ignatius offers many forms of prayer exercises as
ways to dispose ourselves to receive God’s grace. As we ponder
these exercises, a combination of prayer and Scriptures,
we use the powers of our soul — the memory, intellect,
will, and imagination. God works through our faculties to
reveal himself to us in prayer.”
The temptation that threatens this work, Cleveland writes,
24 • ANGELUS • August 2-9, 2019