31

Desire and discernment

Michael Ivens

respect in which retreats today differ from those of, say, thirty
A years ago - and incidentally approximate more closely to the
world of the Spiritual Exercises is the extent to which the concerns of
-

a contemporary retreatant are likely to include a particular kind of

desire.1

Desire
Desire itself, of course, is of the essence of Christian spirituality.
Central to it is the desire for God himself which is the point of reference
in relation to which more specific desires find their meaning. Where the
latter are concerned, emphases and approach partly correspond to
culture and situation. Thus, in the pre-conciliar spirituality familiar to
an older generation three aspects of desire were especially stressed:
desires of instinct with their need to be brought under the higher desires
of will and reason; desires for ‘favours’ as expressed in prayers of
petition; and desires by which given obligations (the general obli­
gations of the moral life, obligations of one’s ‘state’ etc.) become
personally wanted objects of commitment. Each of these is of
fundamental and perennial importance to Christian spirituality as
such. But this said, spirituality today confronts us additionally with a
feature of desire which the pre-conciliar period played down in practice
if not in principle. As encountered in a retreat-director’s everyday
ministry, it might include, for example, desires to adopt a way of life, or
to change a way of life or to enter upon or terminate a relationship;
desires which, if realized, would make a person a founder, or a
reformer; desires for changes in the Church or in society and for a
personal involvement in bringing these about; desires to adopt a stance
or promote a cause or communicate a message. Such desires either arise
within the retreat itself or form part of the life-material brought to the
retreat for processing.
Such desires are of the sort which interest Ignatius in the Exercises
and which lead to ‘election’-type decisions. A number of distinctive
features characterize them. They fall within the realm of free option and
personal responsibility located by Ignatius between the correlative
limits of the ‘obligatory’ and the ‘forbidden’; hence while people may
32 DESIRE AND DISCERNMENT

differ widely as to where these boundaries lie, we are not here

considering desires of an objectively sinful kind.2 They all involve
response to gospel values and implicate, positively or negatively, the
quality of a person’s service of Christ and his kingdom. They are
important for the kind of personal and creative decisions that they
engender. They are also important as giving rise to a particular
decision-making process - a process in which, in the end, when
everything else has been taken into account, the intuition contained in
the desire itself is the final criterion of choice. But although the desires
are orientated towards decision and action, these latter may be long in
coming, and indeed may never happen in direct or foreseeable ways;
and meantime the desires are important in themselves, penetrating as
they do the character of the person who accepts them, giving direction
to the will and shaping overall outlook.
To anybody familiar with the Spiritual Exercises, the significance of
these features of desire both for the life in the Spirit of an individual,
and as mediations of God’s own ongoing creative action in the Church
and the world, needs no emphasis. However, the characteristic
dynamics of creative desire, so effective when enlisted by the Holy
Spirit, are not in themselves any guarantee of the Spirit. Indeed, even in
our more seemingly innocent creative desires, radical egocentricity,
values inconsistent with the gospel, crippling images of God, and
elements of psychological unfreedom readily find shelter under the
cover of moral neutrality. If, then, creative desire under the influence of
the Holy Spirit has a special potential in relation to the action of God in
the world, its potential when under the influence of other ‘spirits’ is
especially destructive.
In the following pages, without making any claim to comprehen­
siveness, I want to consider some of the practical implications of this
discernment, looking at the subject under three general heads: spiritual
discernment, common defences which impede this discernment, and
ways of dealing - discerningly - with situations brought to light by
discernment itself. The context I envisage is that of any retreat
programme able to accommodate the Ignatian ‘discerning partnership’,
described in the Exercises as a relationship of mutual help in which ‘the
one who gives’ and ‘the one who makes’ together seek the presence and
invitation of the Holy Spirit in the latter’s prayer.3

Desires and the desire for God

Discernment properly so-called is an exercise of faith. In the case of
desire, it consists essentially in a testing of the immediate desire against
 DESIRE AND DISCERNMENT 33

the most fundamental and authentic of all our desires, those we

experience at the deep level of ourselves where in and through our own
desires the Spirit within us yearns for God. Discernment requires us
therefore to become self-aware at this level and if, within this
awareness, the meeting of our immediate desires and our Spirit-given
desire for God brings harmony, this is indicative of the influence of the
Holy Spirit in our immediate desire. Dissonance, on the other hand,
indicates a ‘spirit’ at variance with the Holy Spirit.
Desire, then, is tested by desire. But this principle has many
implications which must not be overlooked if it is not to be dangerously
exposed to simplistic interpretations. Not every positive feeling that a
person might experience in the quiet spaciousness of a retreat can be
presumed without more ado to be an authentic, truly Spirit-given desire
for God; and the person in search of discernment and his or her director
needs to be aware that such a desire must be marked by certain
characteristics. Authenticity requires that the desire for God be truly the
personal consequence of a real relationship. In some way therefore it
must contain the sense of a heart restless till it finds its rest in God;4 and
it is the more truly authentic the more it is a habitual mental climate
effective all the time and hence constituting a continuous prayer.5
Authentic desire for God, thus understood, is inseparable from other
basic desires. Thus, authentically to desire God is to desire to hear
God’s word in its many mediations: Scripture, the Church, existing
vocational commitments, the principles and values one believes to be
true. It is to desire God’s will - to desire, that is to say, that in
everything the desires of God himself be the norm of one’s freedom.
This in turn implies the desires that make the disposition of
indifference, the inner space for God to make his word heard and his
action felt. And finally, all these desires imply commitment to a
continuous and many-faceted conversion of heart and mind.
The spiritual quality of a particular desire is discerned, then, in
relation to the Spirit-given desire for God and its component dispo­
sitions. While dispositions fall into the gradations of a spectrum in
which cut-off points are hard to define, generally speaking, a person is
capable of discerning the spiritual quality of their desires in proportion
as they are possessed by these dispositions. One implication of this for
the discernment of a particular desire in a retreat is clear - the desire for
God must have primacy over the practical details of discernment
processes. As the retreat goes on, the retreatant’s attention must
certainly come to focus on their particular desire, and matter for prayer
must be such as to help towards the discernment of it. But it is essential
34 DESIRE AND DISCERNMENT

to begin by eliciting the desire for God and entering into the conversion
of heart which is its corollorary.

Blocks to discernment
The discernment of desire is not necessarily complicated. Simply by
allowing their particular desire to come into contact with the true desire
for God which is the norm of all other desires, a self-aware person may
reach a manifestly right discernment - whether positive or negative -
without needing recourse to any further processes. But if ‘simple’
discernment may occur frequently, matters are not always simple, as
becomes clear when different perceptions of a situation emerge within
the discerning partnership.
Every director will be familiar with this experience: a director senses
an acute need for discernment in a desire presented by the retreatant as
raising only questions of implementation or defence; or discernment is
brought to a close by the retreatant at a point which to the director looks
more like foreclosure than completion. I am not implying that
differences such as these indicate that in the end the director’s
perception is more likely to be right. They do, however, raise the
possibility that the retreatant, perhaps quite unconsciously, has taken
refuge behind one or more of a range of defences to which the
discernment of desire is inherently liable. The reason for this liability
can be briefly put. It is of the nature of desire to be defensive, defensive
not only in regard to its object but also against any challenge to the
motivation, perception or values which constitute its personal quality.
When this defensiveness operates in the context of discernment, it can
cause even a person of spiritual quality to feel that discernment is
complete when it is not, or even to be unaware of the need for any
discernment at all.
To discover and confront these defences is part of (not additional to)
the very search for conversion and for an authentic desire for God, for
discernment is concerned with will and commitment, not just with
intellectual comprehension. But since the defences themselves draw on
the inherent psychological dynamics of all human desire, the discerning
partners will do well to gain some sense of the ways in which defences
against discernment exploit these. A brief survey of the more typical of
these may therefore be helpful.

Discernment and the real

The first, basic and essentially negative, consists of shutting the door
on realities sensed as potentially disturbing. In some degree this
 DESIRE AND DISCERNMENT 35

belongs to every defence against discernment, but it is especially

resorted to in situations in which discernment is held off less because a
false note is suspected in the desire itself than because of a fear of being
required to change the desire or to develop it. It is a fact of experience
that desires which appear unexceptionable when we look only at the
desire itself, find themselves challenged to change and grow, even to be
subjected to fresh discernment and decision, when we acknowledge
new or newly emerging realities. Again, examples are not hard to find -
a material situation making a desire difficult or impossible to
implement, overlooked or genuinely forgotten previous commitments;
the unfolding of a vocation; an intervention of authority such as
frustrated Ignatius’ desire to live in the Holy Land.6 The first defence
tactic, then, is basically a defence against risking one’s desire to
elements of disturbance such as these. Yet simply by looking the other
way, it is possible, without reflection or disturbance, to turn a desire
from an initial openness into a dead end.

Attribution of other motives

Other defences consist in positive tactics, indicative of an unwill­
ingness to confront the intentions and values contained in the desire
itself. One such tactic, familiar to any director coming out of an
Exercises background, is to substitute ostensibly ‘higher’ motives,
more acceptable to the person’s ideals, for actual motives unlikely to
survive the scrutiny of discernment. To take an illustration from the
world of the Exercises themselves, an ambitious but not unidealistic
cleric might be bent on securing a well-endowed benefice for the actual
intention of advancing an ecclesiastical career, while covering this
intention with the ostensible intention of using power and wealth in the
service of God. If applied completely unconsciously (as it often is), the
tactic can be so plausible as to lead, for a time at least, to feelings of
consolation of such power that only prayer and reflection over time can
succeed in revealing their ambiguity.7

Belief as defence
Another tactic consists in shifting attention from motive to
principles. Thus both motive and numerous, possibly relevant, external
factors are placed beyond the need for recognition or discernment by
means of a justifying belief or belief system. This is made possible by
the intrinsic relationship that exists between desire and belief, desire
needing the support of belief while belief acquires force and clarity
from the desire it supports. It should be noted that this dynamic is
36 DESIRE AND DISCERNMENT

normal, and indeed essential to a vital life of faith. Here, then, we are
concerned only with its unacknowledged use as the basis of a defence
tactic. As a tactic, a ‘belief’ can take many forms. Often it takes the
form of axioms, sometimes of the ‘I always say’ variety, sometimes
invested with an aura of scientific authority reflecting a loosely
consistent desire-validating personal ‘system’. (How often when
people claim to act or to see reality on the basis of ‘good theology’,
or dismiss another’s actions or vision as coming out of ‘bad theology’,
theology is to be understood in this sense.8) When there might be
grounds to suspect that axioms or belief systems are being used as
defences, some fundamental questions must be asked. ‘Do I really
believe this?’ ‘Have I really tried to think this out?’ ‘How far do I desire
because I believe?’ ‘How far do I believe because I desire?’ It would be
naive to hope for instant or totally limpid answers to such questions, but
if the questions are not even asked, discernment is virtually impossible
because it is not seen to be needed.
Defence beliefs may also take the form of potent but unstated
assumptions, of which two, each appealing to a particular type of
person, call especially for mention. The first is the assumption that the
very experience of a desire is its own validation. Desires correspond to
needs and certain needs - notably needs for freedom, for power, for
self-actualization, for quality of life - are seen as important enough in
themselves to confer unnegotiable status, even the status of a moral
imperative on any but a patently sinful desire springing from such a
need. Prior to discernment desires are regarded, implicitly, as self­
authenticating and in relation to the self-authenticating, discernment
has no relevance. The prevalence of such assumptions today doubtless
represents the flip-side of the positive insights of modem culture into
the whole domain of the subjective. But in themselves they are a
perennial phenomenon, as we are reminded in the Four loves, where
drawing on the words ‘love’s law’ in a line from Milton’s Samson
Agonistes,9 Lewis describes how for people ‘in love’ being in love can
constitute a kind of ‘law’ justifying, even demanding, actions they
would not previously have countenanced. (‘For love’s sake I have
neglected my parents, cheated my partner, failed my friend at his
greatest need.’) It would not be difficult to find other instances of ‘laws’
of this kind. They are never, of course, articulated and precisely in this
lies their power to place particular desires far beyond the reach of the
discernment through which their real personal and corporate impli­
cations might have been discovered.
 DESIRE AND DISCERNMENT 37

The second case of an unstated principle is associated particularly

with people who attach value to discernment and to following the
Spirit. It concerns, precisely, the use of an image of the Holy Spirit to
block off a crucial dimension of discernment which consists in
openness to the Spirit in others. This openness must - emphatically - be
critical and itself discerning; but there is a prophetic network through
which we are enabled to communicate to one another in the Spirit by
our very differences, and to put oneself completely outside this is to be
defended against discernment itself. And the implicit premiss that
makes such defence possible is that, exceptions apart, there is a
‘typical’ way of experiencing the Spirit, and that this is one’s own.
The tendency to identify the desires of the Spirit with one’s own kind
of desire is probably universal. Cautious people are inclined to see
caution as the hallmark of sound discernment; risk-takers expect good
discernment to lead to risk-taking. The tendency is most in evidence,
however, in people who experience desires that, at least in an
immediate sense, might be termed ‘prophetic’: people with a different
vision and different passions from those of ordinary men and women,
who both stimulate and disturb, and whose motivations the unpersua­
ded tend to regard with suspicion. Discerning the Spirit, sensing
perhaps the play of different spirits, in prophetic desire is too complex a
subject to be discussed here, but one point must be made. Since the
prophet is always the outsider, and since his or her vision and insights
are not on a par with the sincerely held vision and insights of anyone, it
is perhaps the prophet’s inherent temptation to opt too much for
outsidership, to wish to be only a giver not a receiver in the Spirit’s
network, to assume that in relation to themselves others have much to
gain but little to give. Yet in defending their prophetic identity in this
way, prophets easily come to defend themselves against a dimension of
discernment which consists in allowing one’s own interpretation of the
way of the Spirit to be expanded, nuanced, even corrected, by listening
to the Spirit in others.

Qualities of desire
The immediate effect of subjecting a situation to defence-free
discernment is to enable us to perceive things more as they are and less
as our defences cause them to appear. In the context of discernment, ‘as
they are’ means ‘as they are in relation to the Spirit’, where and how the
Holy Spirit is in them, where and how there are spirits in them contrary
to the Holy Spirit. When the matter is desire, four important quality-
situations can emerge from the discernment process; the antithetical
38 DESIRE AND DISCERNMENT

qualities of authenticity and inauthenticity, a quality of unclarity, and a

quality consisting of a mixture of the authentic and inauthentic. Each
needs a response which itself entails further discernment.

Authenticity
A truly authentic desire is a desire consonant with the fundamental
Spirit-given desire for God, and as indicated earlier, the discernment
process can bring a sense of this consonance such that a person
completely present both to their immediate desire and to the desire for
God experiences a deep awareness of harmony marred by no discordant
note. Such an experience corresponds to the truth that an authentic love
(or desire) for God does not destroy other loves (or desires) but
integrates them into itself. The experience can take various forms. It
can arise instantaneously with the first occurrence of the desire itself. It
can emerge from the testing of one desire against another. Emotionally,
it can be strongly felt or low-key. It will always, however, have
something about it of the synthesis classically described by Ignatius in
the Jesuit Constitutions as ‘loving God in his creatures and his creatures
in God’; and in the Exercises in terms of a consolation in which the
integrated love of creatures is a defining characteristic of the experience
of the love of God.10
Such consolation is not a lasting state of affairs, but the memory of it
has unique reliability as a source of assurance, and as a touchstone by
which to measure subsequent developments in the desire itself. It is
therefore to be lingered on, remembered and trusted - especially where
an authentic Spirit-given desire is not instinctively the easiest to live
with or to implement.

Inauthenticity
At the other pole there is the desire which has no place in the life of a
converted person, either because its object is perceived to be
objectively contrary to the will of God, or because the affective
power of the desire clearly stems from a disordered or ‘inauthentic’
root. A major part of a director’s role is to support and accompany
people in the relinquishment of such desires. In doing this, the director
must realize that inauthentic desire is changed in the end by positive
desire, the desire for a newly emerging positive object, and ultimately
by a strengthening desire for God and service of God. But he or she
needs to remember, too, that the fact of being inauthentic does not mean
that a desire is not intensely felt or without a profound hold on the
 DESIRE AND DISCERNMENT 39

emotions and will; and that the relinquishment of it may therefore take
time, and in its own way entail the process of grieving.

Unclarity
Between the desire which is manifestly of the Spirit and the desire
which is manifestly not, there are desires which leave the sincere and
defence-free discerning person uncertain of the real quality within an
immediately impressive swirl of emotion. In the Exercises such
emotion is described, in the fourteenth annotation, as possibly arising
from immaturity, even personal instability, and in any case as being of a
kind that overrides judgement, and creates too disturbed a psychic
climate for subtle self-awareness.11 In this situation, the most that
discernment can do for the moment is to register ambiguity, and a
director might well remember the advice of this annotation with regard
to action - that the director should not counsel it and the exercitant be
careful not to rush into it. Applying and extending this advice to desire
itself, in certain situations a director will do well to deflect the retreatant
from dubious foreclosure or possibly misplaced confidence, and
encourage patience, continuing discernment and every other aid to
self-knowledge and realistic judgement.

Mixed desires and growth through integration

To be distinguished from all these situations - and perhaps the most
commonly encountered - is what can be described as the ‘mixed’
situation of ordinary Christian life, in which a person’s prayer,
behaviour and overall attitude leave no doubt of the central influence of
the Spirit, while at the same time their desire is marred by elements
visibly not of the Spirit. This is the situation behind de Tourville’s
observation that ‘all who seek God with great depth of desire are more
or less entangled in their own aspirations’.12 Response to this mixed
situation, though finally depending on unique personal factors, must
always take account of the dynamic of an authentic desire for God
towards the integration of other loves into itself.
This integration is not only an essential feature of a totally purified
and mature desire. It is also the principle of growth and co-operation
with the Spirit in situations where our other loves, our other desires, are
mixed in with much that is false and inauthentic. In a letter to Teresa
Rejadell, Ignatius explains this in a distinction between soul and body
which may not be quite our own way of putting things but where the
meaning is clear. Rejadell must not be troubled by unwilled ‘disgusting,
demeaning, provocative or dispiriting thoughts’ since
40 DESIRE AND DISCERNMENT

Our Lord wants my soul to conform herself to his Divine Majesty, and
once the soul has conformed herself she can set the body in motion,
whether it wants it or not in conformity with his divine will.13

What is inauthentic in the desires of a centrally God-directed person

should be seen as so many non-integrated factors needing to be taken
up into the inherent integrative processes of God’s love.
This demands on the part of the person a response which avoids two
falsehoods: the cynicism that devalues the best in us on the grounds that
imperfection debases it, and the complacency that disregards the need
for growth and its necessary asceticism. On the importance of rating
highly the desires that come from the Spirit Ignatius, writing again to
Teresa Rejadell, is eloquent:

After recounting some weaknesses and fears, you say you are a poor
religious and that, ‘It seems to me that I want to serve Christ our Lord’.
You do not even dare to say ‘I want to serve Christ our Lord’ or that
‘the Lord gives me desires of serving him’. Instead, you say, ‘It “seems
to me” that I want to’. If you look properly, you will see that these
desires of serving Christ our Lord are not from you, but given by the
Lord and then you will say: ‘The Lord gives me increased desires of
serving him, the Lord himself’.14

The Spirit-given desire must be fostered, and this requires believing

in it. But the second response is also vital, to work with the Spirit, even
quite systematically, in integrating the elements of disorder into the
desire for God.
For an example of Ignatius’ own application of this principle (and of
his approach to creative desires as working out and becoming
integrated in and through action) we can recall the insistence of the
Jesuit Constitutions on ‘right intention’ as something ‘all should strive
for not only in regard to their state of life, but also in all particular
details’.15 That the Jesuit has a core vocational desire from the Holy
Spirit is, for Ignatius, beyond question. This desire they may indeed
have experienced with the lucidity of a first or second time of election.
But as life goes on the desire needs constantly to be re-affirmed, and at
the same time purified (by conversion and integration) of elements that
undermine its effectiveness and erode its quality. Nor should the cost of
this be played down for if integration is the natural thrust of love, the
inauthentic has its own redoubtable powers of resistance. Becoming
totally conformed to God, body and spirit, Ignatius writes to Rejadell, is
 DESIRE AND DISCERNMENT 41

‘where our great battle lies’.16 Making the same point, the last words of
the section of the Exercises on Election, which are also the note on
which the Second Week ends, lay down that in matters of the Spirit all
headway is conditional on the willingness to be taken deeply into the
paschal paradox.17

Desires and the impossible

In an article on the discernment of desires as they present themselves
in retreat, a word must be said finally on situations which tend to
produce distress and frustration in equal measure: the situation where
desires of apparently unimpeachable quality prove in practice difficult
or impossible to put into effect. A not uncommon case would be that of
a person refused admission to a religious institute or ordination in spite
of a quality of desire tested by the times of election in the Exercises;
many other examples will come to mind. Perhaps the first point to make
in connection with such situations is that they are dealt with by further
processes of discernment and not by rules of thumb. Only discernment
can distinguish, for instance, whether to hold firm in a desire against all
odds, or to bow before adverse facts. Only through discernment can we
distinguish between the positive, fruitful and love-suffused pain never
quite absent from any authentic desire, and the fruitless frustration by
which we destroy ourselves and others. Without, however, reducing
matters to a code, one can sketch out briefly some of the principles,
general attitudes and practical responses which enable people under the
leading of the Spirit to find a way forward in situations of apparent
impasse.
One response is explained by principles mentioned earlier in this
article: it consists in changing the object of desire or allowing it to be
changed, without any alteration of the quality of the desire itself except
that of maturing. It is precisely through such developments that God
involves our desires in God’s own ongoing processes. Ignatius’ pristine
desire to live as a pilgrim in the Holy Land would have died as an
effective force had he not accepted first to be moved from the Holy
Land and eventually to be persuaded by Pope Paul HI that the wider
world was a ‘true and good Jerusalem’, and thus to have his self-image
as ‘pilgrim’ expanded into parameters utterly beyond the limits of his
original desire.
But the questions posed by seemingly impossible desires cannot
always be resolved in this way. In many cases, living with immediately
unattainable desires may require an expansion of the meaning of desire,
and of the ways our desires relate to others and to the future. For
42 DESIRE AND DISCERNMENT

example, there are dream desires which transcend present obstacles by

dwelling on possibilities which only imagination and personal vision
make real (if not quite clear-edged) and are worth working and taking
risks for. And again, there are the desires which energize us to work for
goals we are realistic enough to recognize will only come about, if ever,
in a future beyond our own and with benefit only to another generation
than ours.
These kinds of desire a believer entertains and works for in the light
of faith sustained by convictions regarding God’s own desires for his
creatures. But there are desires with more specific faith meaning, the
desires which we believe, in faith, are effective for others simply by
being elicited and dwelt on in the Spirit. Such are the desires by which
Ignatius urges the General and superiors to support their companions,18
and by which Jesuit scholastics can already benefit a world from which
study for the moment removes them.19 An early Greek father describes
such desiring in its cosmic reach, writing of people united with God as
‘praying ceaselessly for the world, dissolving into tears because of the
ardent love they nourish for human kind’. That is an effective way of
desiring creatively.
With varying explicitness all the above desires imply community;
but fully to appreciate the social dimension of desire we need to realize
that we desire not only for others, but with others; desiring not only on
our own account but as members of desiring bodies - the Church, a
community united by an ideal, all those in the world at any given time
who hunger and thirst for justice. If in any meaningful sense bodies
such as these can be described as being stirred by desire, future-
orientated, yearning for change or new opportunities, it can only be
through the desires of individuals within them. A group can desire only
through its members, as the remnant of Israel could live in expectancy
only through people like the ‘upright and devout man’ Simeon, whose
desiring helped to make possible the desiring of his people, a desiring
of which he himself would experience the fulfilment only in a brief
moment of advanced old age.
It must be added that considerations which give meaning to desire
beyond that of immediate fulfilment must never weaken commitment
to present possible achievements in the service of the kingdom. But an
understanding of desire which does not also include the wider reach of
faith meaning, will always lack the fullness of hope and the
transcendence of egocentricity without which no desire can be truly
described as being ‘of the Spirit’.
 DESIRE AND DISCERNMENT 43

Michael Ivens is a member of the British Province of the Society of Jesus,

now resident at St Beuno’s Spirituality Centre in North Wales. Writer and
retreat director, he was for some years an editor of The Way journals. His most
recent publication is a commentary on the Spiritual Exercises, Understanding
the Spiritual Exercises (Leominster: Gracewing, 1998). He is currently
engaged on a dictionary of the Exercises in which the text is considered
through the most important of the words used by St Ignatius.

NOTES

1 Desire in spirituality is a vast subject and this article adopts a practical approach to one particular
aspect of it. For wider coverage, the reader’s attention is drawn to Edward Kinerk, ‘Eliciting great
desires’ in Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits vol xvi, no 5 (November 1984); Philip Sheldrake,
Befriending our desires (Darton, Longman and Todd, London, 1994); Tom McGrath, ‘The place of
desires in the Spiritual Exercises’, The Way Supplement (Spring 1993).
2 Exx 23.
3 Exx 22.
4 St Augustine, Confessions 1,1.
5 For St Augustine the desire for God is the interpretative key to the ‘pray constantly’ of
1 Thess 5:17, ‘Do we constantly pray on our knees, prostrate our bodies or raise our hands in order
to pray constantly? If that is what prayer means to us, we cannot do it constantly. But there is an
interior prayer that goes on constantly and that is desire. If you wish not to interrupt your prayer,
never cease to desire. Your ceaseless desire will be your ceaseless prayer.’ Augustine, On the
Psalms.
6 ‘Reminiscences’ n 46. Saint Ignatius of Loyola: personal writings (Penguin, 1996), p 34.
7 Exx 332.
8 Desires are also, of course, profoundly affected, both adversely as well as positively, by
whatever theology a person has learnt or grown up with, but this is not what I mean here.
9 ‘These reasons in love’s law have passed for good.’ Cf C. S. Lewis, The four loves (Fontana
Books, 1963), pp 103-104.
10 The Constitutions of the Society of Jesus, ed George Gauss (St Louis, 1970), p 288, Exx 316.
The concept of a consolation in which everything we love is loved in God its Creator is discussed
in my Understanding the Spiritual Exercises (Gracewing, 1998), p 215.
11 Exx 14.
12 Henri de Tourville, Letters ofdirection (Mowbray’s Popular Christian Paperbacks, 1984), p 58.
13 Letter to Teresa Rejadell, 11 September 1536, Saint Ignatius of Loyola: personal writings,
p 137.
14 Letter to Teresa Rejadell, 18 June 1536, Saint Ignatius of Loyola: personal writings, p 131.
15 Constitutions 288.
16 Letter, 11 September 1536, Personal writings, p 137.
17 Exx 189.
18 Constitutions 790, 424.
19 Letter to Coimbra, 7 May 1547, Personal writings, p 180.
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