Inner Compass - 10th Anniversary Edition: An Invitation to Ignatian Spirituality

“Inner Compass is an extraordinary achievement in spiritual and wisdom literature.” —Joseph A. Tetlow, SJ, author of Choosing Christ in the World

Inner Compass An Invitation to Ignatian Spirituality

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Margaret Silf

Contents

Foreword by Gerard W. Hughes / vii

Preface / ix

New Introduction to the Tenth Anniversary Edition / xv

The Invitation . . . / 3 1. Meet Your Guide: St. Ignatius Loyola / 7 2. Where Am I? How Am I? Who Am I? / 21 3. Finding Our Past in God / 35 4. So What Went Wrong? / 51 5. Letting God Be God / 67 6. Tracking Our Moods / 79 7. Making Our Way in the Dark / 97 8. The Deepest Desire / 109 9. Why Don’t You Answer My Prayers? / 123 10. Recognizing Our Attachments / 141 11. Pathways to Detachment / 155 12. Recognizing the Enemy, Trusting the Friend / 171 13. What Is Freedom? What Is Truth? / 187 14. To See You More Clearly / 205 15. To Love You More Dearly / 225 16. To Follow You More Nearly / 243

Benedictus / 261

Taking Your Ignatian Journey Further . . . / 265

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New Introduction to the Tenth Anniversary Edition

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he request to write a new introduction for this ­second edition of Inner Compass triggered a minor earthquake in my memory. I wrote the text for Landmarks (the original UK title of the book) back in 1997, and I wrote it by accident. Readers perhaps assume that books are the product of a deliberate process of planning and execution, but Inner Compass was not.

I had attended a daylong workshop in Ignatian spirituality led by Gerard Hughes, SJ, of the British Province. I had already been very much formed and influenced by Ignatius and the Jesuits, and, like all the participants that day, I was eager to hear Gerard Hughes’s talk. After the event, a few of those present expressed a desire to follow up on some of the topics that had been raised, and I was asked to help them do this. The result was a series of quiet days in which I shared something of my own “take” on issues such as discernment, desire, and detachment and encouraged people to discover what these things meant for them in their everyday living.

And so, quite accidentally (though in God, perhaps, there are no accidents), the first draft of Landmarks gradually came to be written, to support these quiet days. Titled Inner Compass in North America, it was conceived and grew out of questions rather than certainty, discovery rather than doctrine, the experience of everyday living rather than academic study. It was the fruit of personal experience, reflected upon in the light of the xv

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wisdom of St. Ignatius of Loyola. No one has been more surprised by its warm reception on both sides of the Atlantic than its author.

Since then, the world has turned upside down. We have lived through the devastating impact of 9/11—a day that shifted the human psyche to a place no one had ever imagined it would go. Clerical scandals have rocked the Roman Catholic Church in Europe and America. Deep divisions have opened up worldwide, in all traditions, between the “liberal” and the “conservative” approach to Scripture and to social issues. The Iraq War has divided minds, hearts, and nations and raised questions that will not go away about the moral legitimacy of any violent action to resolve disputes or gain power.

Today we are witnessing an accelerating breakdown of trust in many of our institutions and a dangerous polarization among world faiths. Suddenly “religion” is high on the agenda. People who have never thought about religious matters before are thinking about them now. Everyone has an opinion. And yet we feel more lost and afraid than ever before.

So, it seems, we face insuperable problems in our times.

Einstein once wisely reminded us that we can never solve a problem using the same mind-set that created it. If we are to move beyond the current apparent impasse in our growth and toward the fullness of our humanity, we need a new mind-set. But more than this: we need a new heart. Perhaps never before have we so urgently needed a “compass,” tossed as we are on these high seas of political, moral, social, and spiritual turmoil.

There have been shifts and changes in my life as well since the book was first published. People sometimes comment, with

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kindness and unwarranted generosity, that the book changed their lives. Well, it changed mine too! Something that was initially written by accident actually switched the points on the railroad of my life. I found myself drawn into a much more public place than my off-the-scale-­introvert personality would ever have believed possible. I too was being challenged ever more deeply by the Christian vision, especially as mediated through the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. I have traveled through my own kind of dark night, in both my personal life and my spiritual life. Many of my old “certainties” and assumptions have disappeared, and I have irrevocably departed from my comfort zone. I am learning to live with the questions and uncertainties and, as I do so, to trust that the mystery we call God will continue to hold and shape me, and the universe, and the questions.

In all of this, what, if anything, would I want to add to, or subtract from, the introduction to the first edition of the book?

Essentially, I think, there are two things I would want to add.

The first would be a personal testimony. Through all my own upheavals of recent years, the centrality of the gospel journey into which Ignatius guides us so skillfully has become more and more clearly focused. I have found a clarity at the heart of the matter, and unending space for discovery around the edges. Sometimes we reach a point at which we know that if we go any further, we will either lose our faith or break through to a new dimension of faith that goes beyond creedal believing to authentic personal trust. Like Indiana Jones, we come up to the edge of the abyss, and there is no bridge. Only when we step out with one foot into the yawning chasm of unknowing does the bridge appear.

For me, Ignatian spirituality has been a major component of that

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bridge, and I am immensely grateful for this solid ground, this firm “principle and foundation” in the midst of shifting circumstances both in my life and in the world.

The second addition would be an observation from my meetings with so many ­ twenty-first-­century pilgrims and searchers about the remarkable convergence of their questions and the wisdom of St. Ignatius, in spite of the five centuries and huge cultural differences that separate us from him. The sheer practical power and the spot-on psychology of the Ignatian tools and guidelines provide truly accessible ways forward in addressing so many of the questions that real people in the real world are asking. Questions such as What is my life about? Where is there any solid ground in the heaving landscape of contemporary life? How can I deal wisely with the overwhelming array of choices that confronts me? How can I become a more truly human being?

Isn’t there more to life than just surviving?

Finally, when I wrote Inner Compass, I had never been to America. That particular gap in my education has now, happily, been remedied! My rather black-and-white European preconceptions about North America have been heavily challenged by the live encounter. I have discovered, for example, that religion carries a very different weight in North America than in Europe, that the level of theological awareness among many laypeople is extraordinarily high, and that Americans and Canadians neither sound nor think alike. And I have learned a fair bit of “alternative English,” as well as how real coffee should taste.

It is truly said that travel broadens the mind and shrinks the globe. Some folks across the pond have become cherished friends and wise professional mentors. I am especially indebted to my colleagues and friends at Loyola Press; America magazine; the

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Bethany Spirituality Center, in Highland Mills, New York; the Mercy Prayer Center, in Rochester, New York; the FCJ Centre, in Calgary; and also to Joe Tetlow, SJ, John Veltri, SJ, and Jan-Erik Guerth, of BlueBridge, for both their work and their personal encouragement.

All these and many others have helped me in the search for my own inner compass and guided me in how to use it. Today, more than ever, I realize that I can’t take a single step without it.

It isn’t something that any book can give or any friend or mentor can supply. It is a gift of grace, an invitation to internalize something of the mind and heart of Christ in our struggles to live true to God’s dream within and beyond us. All that a book can do is point out some of the landmarks along the way and invite readers to discover their own unique path into the fullness of life.

My hope and prayer is that we may all move daily closer to that destiny, guided and empowered by the spirit of Jesus of Nazareth and assisted by the insights of his good friend Iñigo.

Margaret Silf September 2007

Inner Compass

Where am I? How am I? Who am I?

The Invitation . . .

i

I am

s made out in your name.

But who are you?

Who is this person who feels drawn to explore the spiritual treasures that lie within you?

Yes, within you . . .

Not in some closet in the sky or the bishop’s office.

Not in some divine database, to which only the elect hold the password.

But in you.

Jesus said it himself: “The Kingdom is very close to you. It is in your heart.”

Six centuries before Jesus a Greek philosopher who rejoiced in the name Empedocles said something else that might interest you.

“God,” he said, “is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.”

Now, there’s a thought to ponder.

Because that “center” is in every human heart—­recognised or not.

That “center” is in you. It is the very essence and heart of who you are.

It is WHO YOU ARE.

The Invitation

And the circumference is “nowhere” because God has no edges, no boundaries, no limits.

If only it were so easy! If only that “WHO-­center” were obvi-­ ous and accessible, and if only we could steer our course by it, knowing truly that God is in all things and all choices, seeking to draw the more life-­giving outcome from all we do.

But that innermost circle is wrapped up in other layers that are not always so clearly of God. A bit like the parcels we some-­ times make up for each other, with a small but precious gift wrapped up in layers and layers of wrapping paper and string.

The outermost layer of wrapping is what we might call the “WHERE” of ourselves and our living—those things we can’t change, or not very easily: our family and culture, our state of health and level of education, our strengths and our weaknesses, our history. It’s in this layer that we spend most of our time—out here on the edge of ourselves. And unlike God, we do have an edge—­sometimes a rather sharp one—and we do have limits.

But if we can move inwards a bit, we get to a rather deeper layer, that we might call the “HOW” of our living. Here we have choices. We may not be able to change our circumstances but we have a choice about how we respond to them. We may have no choice about who we get as family or work colleagues, but we can choose how we will relate to them. And, as we shall see when we set out to navigate by the inner compass of our WHO, where God abides, every choice makes a difference.

And so we arrive deep in the WHO center. Not everyone has the courage to go there. There is glory, sure, but there is also shame in that center. To be truly there, before God, we will be invited to take off our protective masks and allow ourselves to be known—and loved—just as we truly are. That encounter with

The Invitation

the living God may challenge us way beyond our comfort zone.

But it will be the most important adventure of all, because it is what we are all about.

Your WHO-­center is the place where God is growing God’s unique Dream in you.

The invitation is to discover that Dream, and to live it.

$14.95 U.S.

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nyone seeking to deepen his or her relationship with God will greatly benefit from Inner Compass, Margaret Silf ’s dynamic presentation of the profound insights of St. Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises. While reflective, the work exudes a congenial, practical outlook and a thoroughly modern sensibility. As Silf points out, the book “grew out of questions rather than certainty, discovery rather than doctrine, the experience of everyday living rather than academic study.”

This tenth-anniversary edition of the acclaimed Inner Compass features a new introduction and personal invitation to the reader, plus a significantly expanded resource section. Devoted followers of Ignatian spirituality and spiritual seekers alike will find that wherever life has led them, Inner Compass offers renewed direction and purpose and helps them recognize the will of God within their own hearts.

ISBN-13: 978-0-8294-2645-8 ISBN-10: 0-8294-2645-0

10 th Anniversary Edition

Margaret Silf travels widely in her work as a retreat director and speaker on Ignatian spirituality. Her books include Close to the Heart: A Practical Approach to Personal Prayer (Loyola Press), The Gift of Prayer and Wise Choices (Bluebridge), and Roots and Wings (Eerdmans).

Inner Compass

Whatever path you’re on, God is there to guide you . . .

“Inner Compass is an extraordinary achievement in spiritual and wisdom literature.”

—Joseph A. Tetlow, SJ, author of Choosing Christ in the World

Inner Compass An Invitation to Ignatian Spirituality

L

Margaret Silf