IGNATIAN SPIRITUAL EXERCISES TRAINING (ISET)
2023-BLOCK ONE – SESSION 8
IMAGE OF GOD – FOUNDATIONAL EXPERIENCE OF GOD’S LOVE
Russell: [00:00:00] Welcome, everybody. Good to see you all again on the screen and wherever you are. Can you believe It? We’re already at session eight of our time together. Eight weeks already so you’re very welcome. I’m going to hand over to Brenda and ask her to lead us in a prayer today.
Brenda: So good evening, everybody. As we gather it’s good to be together and perhaps you just want to settle—good morning to those who for whom this [00:01:00] morning—settle into your space and give those who coming in a chance to gather themselves. As normal, if you want to turn off your video, you are welcome to do that. We just turn to God as we give attention to this time.
So, you might want to just be conscious of your body. Notice how you are sitting in the space. Perhaps, you want to shift a bit. Maybe your shoulders are tense, and you would like to loosen them up. Pay attention to your feet touching the floor. Notice not only your feet but notice the pressure from the floor pushing back on your feet.[00:02:00]
Be conscious of how the chair supports your body—the pressure on your thighs and your back. Notice how your neck feels and your head. Draw three deep breaths, drawing in peace, hope, love[00:03:00] and allow yourself to be conscious of God loving you in this moment. Maybe that feels like looking into the face of love or perhaps it is deep stillness or maybe it’s like feeling the sun warm you on a cold winter’s day.
Let your God love you.[00:04:00]
Draw to consciousness what it is you ask of God today; Not for God to do something or sort something out, but an inward gift, an inward grace. Perhaps today you need a measure of God’s peace, or perhaps you’re asking for hope or a felt sense of God’s nearness.
What is the grace you ask of God today?[00:05:00]
Listen, as I read the scripture,
Jesus went on with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi. And on the way he asked his disciples, who do people say that I am? And they answered him, John the Baptist and others, Elijah and still others, one of the prophets.
He asked them, but who do you say that I am?
Peter answered him, you are the Messiah. And sternly, he ordered them not to tell anyone about him.[00:06:00]
I wonder if you can be with Jesus and the disciples on that road, traveling towards the villages in Caesarea Philippi. Maybe you can imagine the colors. And the scenery, buildings—don’t be surprised if it’s not first century Palestine—just allow your imagination to flow. Or perhaps more easily you can hear the sounds of the group as they travel, begin to hear the voices as they engage with Jesus. What do the voices sound like? Maybe they’re serious or perhaps there is some [00:07:00] banter and you hear the sound of Jesus voice as he talks with them.
Or maybe it’s easier for you to imagine what it feels like to be there, almost a kinesthetic imagining. Are you in the crowd? Is someone bumping into you? Can you feel the feeling of the road beneath your feet? I wonder if it’s a hot day or if there’s a cool breeze. I wonder how bright the sun is. Be there as they walk along.
How close [00:08:00] are you to Jesus?
We’re not wanting to watch like on a TV screen. We really want to be with that group and Jesus asks his disciples, who do people say that I am?
Listen as they chat, and they answer him. How does his voice sound as he asks the question, who do people say that I am?[00:09:00] And then he asks them, But who do you say that I am? Who do you say that I am? Let the scene play out in your imagination as you are there with Jesus and his disciples. Who do you say that I am? He asks them.
Watch as Peter [00:10:00] answers. How does Jesus seem as Peter makes his big statement? What does Jesus say next?[00:11:00] What happens next?
Jesus invites you across. You and Jesus find a spot to sit and talk.[00:12:00] Maybe he asks you Who do you say I am? Or perhaps you want to talk with him about Peter’s words. Take some time to have a conversation with Jesus—just the two of you chatting about what has just happened.[00:13:00] [00:14:00] Who do the people say that I am? But who do you say that I am?
When you’re ready, we draw our prayer time to a close. We draw our attention back into the group and to our conversation for the evening.
Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be. world without end. [00:15:00] Amen.
Russell: Thank you very much Brenda, for that. Friends, today we want to look a little bit at the question of image of God and the foundational experience of God’s love.
You’ve been asking in the last couple of weeks questions about the beginning time and people coming into the exercises and these now tonight are two of the things, or today, should I say, are two of the things that we would be looking for as people come in. I’m going to unpack that a little bit tonight.
So, I want to begin by saying these two, the image of God, and the foundational love of God—it’s a bit like being a detective. These are two fundamental [00:16:00] things that we are looking for as we move into the spiritual exercises—that we want to see how this person sees God, the image that they have of God, and also if they can connect with the foundational experience of God’s love.
They’re not the only things, but I will dare to say that they are fundamental, and we will still talk about a couple of things, but these are the two that we want to spend some time looking at today.
I want to begin—Image of God, looking at number two there—the Image of God by reading a little passage from a book that some of you may be familiar with—a book by a Jesuit who at one stage in my life, I was privileged to live with for two years. His name was Gerard Hughes. The God of Surprises is the [00:17:00] title of the book and I just want you to listen to what he writes at the beginning of the book.
God was a family relative, much admired by mom and dad, who described him as a very loving, a great friend of the family, very powerful, and interested in all of us. Eventually, we were taken to visit good old Uncle George. He lives in a formidable mansion. He’s bearded; he’s gruff and threatening. We cannot share our parents’ professed admiration for this jewel in the family.
At the end of the visit, Uncle George turns to address us. Now listen, dear, he begins, looking very severe. I want to see you here once a week. [00:18:00] And if you fail to come, let me just show you what will happen to you. He then leads us down to the mansion’s basement. It is dark. It becomes hotter and hotter as we descend, and we begin to hear unearthly screams.
In the basement there are steel doors and Uncle George opens one. Now look in here, dear, he says. We see a nightmare vision, an array of blazing furnaces with little demons in attendance, who hurl into the blaze those men, women, and children who failed to visit Uncle George, or to act in a way that he approved. And if you don’t visit me, dear, this is where you will most certainly go, says Uncle George. He then takes us upstairs to meet Mom and Dad. [00:19:00]
As we go home, tightly clutching Dad with one hand and Mom with the other, Mom leans over and says to us, And now, don’t you just love Uncle George with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and all your strength? And we, loathing the monster, say, yes, I do, because to say anything else would be to join the queue at the furnace.
At a tender age, religious schizophrenia has set in, and we keep telling Uncle George how much we love him, and how good he is, and that we want to do only what pleases him We observe what we are told are his wishes, and dare not admit, even to ourselves, that we loathe him.[00:20:00]
Intellectually, I may know that God is not like Uncle George, but it is my feelings about God which determine how I approach God. and they do not change as easily as my ideas. Uncle George is not easily exorcised from my emotions and although I may know in my mind that God is not like that, I may still experience a strong disclination to approach him without knowing why and find a thousand reasons for not praying. I’m too busy, I prefer to find God through my work, etc. etc.
What Jerry Hughes does here is he really sets up for us a caricature of a false image of God, a false notion of God. And sometimes people may [00:21:00] hold on to this image of God of a kind of Uncle George figure, but other people may also look at God as a kind of Santa Claus kind of figure, a benevolent figure, who enters our life occasionally to give us presents when we need them. He’s nice to have around when everything is going well, but when disaster strikes, that’s when we find ourselves in a lot of trouble.
Now the Santa Claus figure might be a little bit closer to God than the Uncle George figure, but both of them really bear no relation to the God who scripture reveals to us.
The picture that we have of God or the image that we have of God or that a person holds, determines so much. It determines how we relate to God, how we [00:22:00] pray; it will determine as well, the openness, the honesty that the person has with God. It will determine the way that the person will relate to God. And often people say things like “I know that God loves me,” but when we start to listen a little bit more, their image of God reveals much more than the language that they use. And when we are sort of listening for the person’s image of God, we want to do that in a sensitive way. We don’t want to be invasive, but we want to try and uncover the image of God that the person holds. Listen to the language, because the image they have of God, as I say, is the way that they will relate to God, which will impact on [00:23:00] everything else.
I want to continue to read you just an example that Hughes goes on to give us later on in this book of someone who came to him for a spiritual direction.
He says, Fred, we consider to be a model Christian, he was young and married. In addition to his professional work, he belonged to several voluntary bodies, took an intelligent interest in theology, lived a very simple lifestyle, rarely dining out or going to films or to theater, and he and his wife spent most of their holiday time at conferences. And then he came to me and said he wanted to make an individually guided retreat.
I encouraged him to pray by using his imagination on scenes from the gospel, entering the scene as though it were now happening, and himself [00:24:00] a participant. At the end of each day, he would come to see me and tell me what he’d experienced.
One day, he had been imagining the marriage feast at Cana. He had a vivid imagination and had seen tables heaped with good food set out beneath the blue sky. The guests were dancing, and it was a sense of great merriment. Eventually, I asked him, did you see Jesus? He said, yes. I said, tell me a little bit more. He said, Jesus was sitting upright on a straight-backed chair, clothed in a white robe, holding a staff in his hand, a crown of thorns on his head, looking very disapprovingly at all those who were at the party.[00:25:00]
Notice that example, the model Christian, the one who’s involved in all sorts of voluntary work, is no doubt doing a lot of good things, and yet, when he starts to interrogate a little bit deeper, the image of God that he holds seems to be quite a severe one, that when these people are partying, a party that Jesus himself produced by giving them more wine, he sees Jesus is sitting on the side rather severely looking at everybody rather disapprovingly, not happy with what is going on.
That image of God is so important. And so, what we want to try and do is get a sense of the image of God that the person who’s coming to do the exercises holds. Now, [00:26:00] no human being is going to have a perfect image of God. That’s just simply not going to be the case, because our image of God is formed by our parents.
I remember as a child, we were very often told, things like, if you don’t do X or Y, God’s not going to be very happy with you. Our image of God is formed by teachers. Our image of God is often formed as well by pastors, by what we learn in Sunday schools, by our life experience—by our life experience.
Just yesterday in the Catholic lectionary, we had the story of the blind man in chapter nine of John’s gospel. And the disciples of Jesus say to him, is this man blind because his parents did something wrong. Now, our image of God is formed by the kind of theologies as well that are held around us and so we want to interrogate that image of [00:27:00] God. We want to become aware of that image of God. But as I say, we need to do that sensitively and gently. In the process of the exercises, a lot of people experience that their image of God might be healed to a certain or they come to a more mature or more realistic image of God. But right at the beginning, we want to be aware of the image that the person has or holds of God. I’m hoping that you can see something of the development of your image of God as well in your own journey, and hopefully maybe even if you look back on your own experience of the exercises, you might be able to see too—you might have an awareness of how your image of God shifted or changed.
I guess I can make the advert again. I spoke a couple of weeks back about the book [00:28:00] that Annemarie was involved in writing with Elizabeth Liebert. And they, in that book as well, they have some helpful work, research that’s done on how women’s image of God was transformed through the exercises.
If we want an image of God, perhaps that I find very helpful is to look at the image of God that Jesus holds, just for us as a kind of a way of just checking in. And it seems to me that one of the best places to see the image of God that Jesus holds is in Luke chapter 15. I’m not going to read it to you because you’ll be well familiar with it.
That account that Luke gives us of the son who returns to the father. the prodigal son, or the loving father, or whatever title you want to give that. But to look at the father in that account, because it seems to me that that’s one of the places where very clearly in the scriptures, Jesus exposes [00:29:00] or gives us some insight into the image of God that he holds—this father who welcomes, who will not hear of any of the of the speech that the son has prepared, who puts a ring on his finger and says, even though you have cut yourself off from the family, the ring is the image of you still belong. He puts shoes on his feet, and we know that he then slaughters the fattened calf.
That’s the image of God that Jesus holds, and I find it very helpful from time to time to check in myself with that image of God vis a vis the images or the different images of God that are at play in me from time to time, because I think that’s also true that over a period of time, we may see, or even in a difficult time, we may see that there are different images of God that are at play in our lives.
So firstly, the image of God, [00:30:00] I’m listening for the image of God that this person holds, because if I can kind of get a glimpse into that, I have an insight that’s going to be helpful to me as I accompany, as I journey with this person on their journey of the exercises.
The next thing we want to do is we want to also be detectives looking for a foundational experience of God’s love. So, the image that the person holds of God, but also a foundational experience of God’s love. Now, hopefully, in the preparation, in the disposition days, where we’re going to check in with this. This is also foundational for doing the spiritual exercises, but we’re also going to hopefully, in the process of the exercises, deepen this foundational experience.
Any relationship requires [00:31:00] time. If you think about human relationships. Those of you. who have a life partner will know this better than me. The relationship doesn’t just happen. It requires time. It develops over time. It grows over time. Sometimes you take a few steps forward, sometimes you take a step backwards. And our relationship with God can be the same. It requires time. Much feeds into our getting to know God, perceptions, what others say, spending time with God in prayer, reading about God, gathering information. There are wonderful primary sources in the scripture.
If you think of John chapter three, verse 16—For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, or Romans chapter five, God loves us and has poured his love into our hearts. We can go on and on—the first letter of St. John, let us love one another [00:32:00] because love is of God. Going on from there. God is love and all who love, live in God and God lives in them.
So, we have as a source, the scriptures for God’s love, for an understanding of God’s love. Another source might be nature, what we see going on around us. For many people, nature can be an important experience of God’s love, whether that’s in a sunrise or in a sunset, or whether that’s being in the country or being at the ocean or whatever it is.
Another source is our experience, our own experience of being loved by God. So, the Book of God’s Word, the Book of Creation, as they say, and the Book of our human experience. But all of this can also just remain head knowledge, and we know the [00:33:00] longest journey we make is the journey from the head to the heart.
And that’s what we’re getting into here. I don’t really want to know how much theology this person knows, or how often they can quote scripture, or what wonderful things that they can tell me about what they’ve done. What I’m looking for is a felt sense of God that somehow that it hasn’t just lived in the top part of their body, in their head, but there’s a real sense that they have experienced, that they have felt God’s love.
I had an experience not so long ago, a couple of years ago. An elderly priest came to see me. He was seeking out spiritual direction. He was well into his 80th year. He was almost 81. And we met once, we met twice. The second time he came, I can still remember as if it was yesterday. He sat in front of me and he [00:34:00] said, I’ve come to realize something in the last few months, that all my life, I’ve thought about and known about God’s love in my head, but I’m 80 now and I can’t at all put my finger on a time in my life when I had a felt love of God. And I was quite astonished at that because I thought, sure, imagine, being a minister, imagine all your life living and coming to this realization that I don’t know. It’s hard for me to have a felt experience of God’s love. So that foundational experience of God’s love goes well beyond knowing about God, goes well beyond the head. It goes to this felt experience of God’s love. and God’s care. What we’re trying to do is to get into the emotional center.
We’re trying to [00:35:00] find a sense, deeply, emotionally, that there has been an experience of God. Once again, I find it very helpful to keep going back to our human experiences. If you think, once again, if you have a life partner, couples, love is not a theory, it seems to me. It’s not something, that you know about, or that you know that the other person loves you simply in your head. But there’s a deep sense; there’s a feeling in you; you can feel it. You can feel that love of the other person for you and sometimes even we can’t put that into words. We can’t put those experiences into words and people will say that too. I had an experience of God. I’m not sure that I can explain it, or I’m not sure that I can put it into words, and then bingo, we know, we’re into one of those foundational experiences of [00:36:00] the love of God.
Now there are tools to help us to explore at the beginning of the exercises in those preparation days. There are tools to help us to explore the image of God and also the foundational experience of God. One of them is for the person to reflect on their faith history, as we would say, to try and see how God has been active and present in my life—how God has been in all things.
Now we’re looking most especially here again for experiences. So, we invite the person to pay attention to their faith history, to their journey, to their story. And again, we want to honor this. We want to be sensitive. But we’re also listening for clues. We are once again in that detective mode. We’re listening for clues.
When first did they become aware of God in their life? [00:37:00] How was that experience for them when they became aware of God in their life? Get them to describe it in a little more detail. When, where, how, why? Those kinds of questions are the ones we want to ask when we’re looking at the faith history. When did you discover that God loved you, or God loves you? And what was that discovery like for you? What was that experience like for you?
So, we are we’re trying to help the person to look at their life experience, to see how God was active, and perhaps even here and there to pinpoint a certain time or a place where they really felt connected with God and it evoked certain feelings and emotions when they had that connection with God.
A couple of weeks ago, when we spoke about Ignatius [00:38:00] Loyola, I spoke about Ignatius sitting beside the Cardona River, and he has a religious experience, and he’s not able to explain that. He just says, I know that it was of God, and I know that suddenly God was in all things. He can’t give it language, but he had a religious experience there.
I also spoke about Thomas Merton and the religious experience he had on the corners of Fourth and Walnut Street, where he was looking at all these people going about their business, rushing from shops to offices, and he just had a sense of the unity of all humanity. And at that moment, he describes how he had this emotional reaction in this religious experience.
If you want to go back as well to someone like, for example, Francis of Assisi—when he’s on the streets, he sees the beggar and he is moved [00:39:00] emotionally and at that moment, he swaps his clothes, et cetera, et cetera with the beggar. Now, everybody who comes to do this spiritual exercises, I can assure is not swapping clothes with beggars, but we’re looking for that deep felt sense of God’s action and God’s working in the person’s life.
This can be in many different places. And so, we have to also be listening carefully and be listening with wide open minds, because this could happen. It could be evoked in someone in their life, in their faith history through a piece of scripture. They may have had a piece of scripture that brought them to a religious experience.
For others, it might be a moment in a church community that brought them to a religious experience—that deep sense that God is here with me. For others, it might be in a film. [00:40:00] For others, it might be a book that they read. For others, an experience in nature. For other people, maybe even a significant person who drew them to God.
So that’s what we’re looking for in the person’s faith history and it’s probably very helpful to get someone to write their faith history. Sometimes people have done that before, but as they start to get ready to move into the exercises to take time. It doesn’t have to be done in one day or two days, but to take time to put down their faith history.
If it’s someone who keeps a journal, for example, encourage them to go back and to look through their journals at their experiences, what has happened to them. Construct your faith history by looking back over what you have [00:41:00] noted before. If it’s a journal, a prayer journal, whatever it is, encourage the person to go back and to look at that as well because in as much as we’re trying to get them to seek out their experience of God, sometimes when people go back, something that they can remember as an experience of God will be there, but they might actually see others as well that they did not at the time Then encourage them to talk about their faith history once they have had a chance to do that.
And once again, what are we doing? We are listening for emotive content. What were the dominant feelings? What are the dominant images that this person has as they talk through their faith history? So, you’ll see the two, in a way, might cross over as well. The two might cross over—[00:42:00] the image of God that they hold and their experience of God.
But sometimes, too, you might find that they may hold a certain image of God, and when they start to dig through their life, their faith history, the image of God might be impacted by that as well. The two are not completely separate, even though we’re talking about them separately. But the experience of God may help them for their image of God to also be sometimes moved a little bit or sometimes deepened depending on what image they have.
I remember somebody who came to see me on a retreat and right at the beginning, I had a real sense that they had a very severe image of God. I had the person for eight days and I thought to myself, what am I going to do with this person who was making sure that they did everything right? They followed every step in whatever method of prayer they were using, because if [00:43:00] they didn’t, God is going to zap them for doing that. And I was a little bit at sea, and I thought to myself, maybe the best thing for me to do is to pull on this and to get them to suspend maybe going into scripture and praying, but let’s take a day or two for them just to look through their faith history.
It was God’s grace or my luck, but when the person started to do this, by the time they came on the second day of doing this, it was very interesting how right at the beginning, they said to me yeah, I’ve done this before. I’m not sure, but okay. I’ll try. Well, they got into that and when they got into that, by the end of that retreat, and I think it was because of them being able to comb through their own faith history, it seemed to me that there was the beginning of a shift in their image of God, because they noticed things. They had found religious experiences that perhaps contradicted that sense or that image of God that they had right in the [00:44:00] beginning. So, the two kind of are not exactly separate, but they do have an impact on each other.
Then what we want to do is, we want to try and revisit and affirm or deepen what has happened—the religious experiences that they’ve had. So, someone does their faith history. There’s an experience that was a real emotive experience of God for them. We want to maybe take them back there. What happens when you go back to that? What happens when you revisit that moment? What does it evoke now when you go back to that experience?
We will be dealing a lot with and talk about consolations and desolations and so forth, but in that kind of language, we want, after they’ve looked at their life and they have been able to, so to speak, [00:45:00] dig out some of these religious experiences. We want to take them back to those religious experiences to see what they evoked, to try and listen again to those experiences. The consolations—we want to take them to those places of consolation.
A helpful image for me as well is the peeling of an onion We are listening all the time here for deeper layers. We are trying to go a little bit deeper. We take off that first layer—those leaves on the top, and then we take off another layer, and then we take off another layer. That’s what we’re trying to do. We’re looking for affirmations in their experiences through looking at their faith history. And we’re trying to get them to engage with those affirmations, those foundational experiences of God’s love.
And hence as [00:46:00] well, I think very important. If you are going to be journeying with someone is to encourage them to write things down and to keep journals, to record these sorts of experiences because so often as well, when one might have something that happens.
I think of it even in my own life. There’s been times when something’s happened, you know, and I haven’t really kept a record of it, and maybe a long time later, I say to myself, I wish I had at that time put something down on paper. It would have been helpful to me now. I have a journal, but I’m not always all that good at keeping things in there. So, to encourage people as well, to write things down and this will be throughout the process of the exercises, and we’ll talk about that a little bit as well as we move through this course together. But the importance of recording these experiences is so that we can go back to them, so that we can dig through them again, and the object of that is to deepen—so that [00:47:00] we can deepen these experiences, and we can revisit them.
I thought I would share an experience of my own. And it’s once again, I think probably an experience that I can’t quite put words to, but many years ago—so, I’m going back 20, maybe 30 years ago when I was a student, when I was studying theology at the seminary and seminaries can be pretty dry places when it comes to the spiritual life. And for a long time, a number of months or whatever, I was asking myself all sorts of questions about this place.
We were studying theology, and we were into all sorts of wonderful doctrinal things, but it all felt very dry to me. I think I probably was in a moment, a time where I was feeling spiritually barren, maybe even verging on a crisis of faith [00:48:00] and I wasn’t quite sure what to do about that.
One afternoon, and I remember this like it was yesterday. One afternoon, I was walking from one place on the campus to another, and I had to pass the chapel. And for some strange reason, I thought, okay, I’m just going to pop into the chapel for a few minutes. I thought to myself you are not in your right mind and why are you going in there of all places? I went into the chapel, and it was a late afternoon, and the chapel had windows right at the top and the sun was coming down at a certain spot in the chapel. I sat in the chapel for a while, and I looked at the sun coming in, and it was pretty still.
Then something happened. There was just a kind of real sense that God was present. This desire that I’d had or the seeking or this thirst in this place, which seemed very dry and very academic, I suddenly just had a sense [00:49:00] that God was present and many times in my life when things have got tough, I’ve gone back to that experience. And even though it’s many, many years ago, I can still smell the wood of the chairs in that chapel. I can still remember the sun coming in and catching on these brown benches and there was a kind of gray blue carpet under these brown benches, but there was a deep sense for me that somehow God is present.
If I look at my journey, I kind of noticed how things sort of changed from there; and a lot of the stuff that was swirling around in me, even though it continued to swirl, didn’t seem to be as important or the focus of what was going on after that. That maybe was a religious experience, but just that deep felt sense of the presence of God, and there was a God and there was a God of love, and I was loved by that God happened that afternoon. I think that’s what we’re trying to do is [00:50:00] reconnect with those types of experiences.
So, you’ll notice that I sent a sheet with some questions. There were quite a few questions on that sheet. I think this is pretty important, so I want us just to spend some time with these questions.
The first one is When did you first become aware of God in your life? What was your image of God, or can you see how it may have evolved? Because I’m sure that the image of God that we have when we first become aware of God is not the same image that we hold now.
Do you remember your first experience of God’s love? Where was it? You could do a composition of place. What did you feel? Notice I’m asking the question all the time. What did you feel? I’m trying to get into the heart center, not what did you think?
And often when you say to people, when did you feel God? They’ll talk from the head and so we just have to be aware when someone is talking from the head and when they’re talking from the [00:51:00] emotional side of themselves.
And if I may say as a footnote, I find that generally as a rule, it’s much harder for men to talk from that emotional part than, and especially in my experience has been with a lot of male clergy, it’s very difficult. There’s always a kind of head thing going on and to get them to go into the heart can be quite a challenge at times.
But I’m asking the question, what did you feel? Can you name a few experiences of God’s love and care for you in your journey of life? Consider these. What stands out for you as you call these to mind?
Maybe you can say, is there a pattern? Is there a pattern? And how often do you return to these experiences? And what does that return do for you or do to you? And these are also the kinds of questions that we want to offer to others. But I think it’s important that we [00:52:00] allow ourselves first to dig through this and be able to see this, to feel this in our own lives and in our own journey with the Lord.
So, we’ve got about five minutes to go. I’m five minutes early. I don’t know. Annemarie will give us a timing there. Maybe if we can spend a couple more minutes with these questions so that when we go into the groups, you’re not going to be able to cover all those questions in 20 minutes or 15 minutes or whatever it is, but maybe if there’s just one of them that stands out for you. I think those are important questions to get us in touch with our image of God and also our own experience of God, our own felt experience of God.
Annemarie: Let’s take 20 minutes and come back at 20 past the hour. We’ll shift into that now.[00:53:00] [00:54:00]
[Break]
Russell: So welcome back everybody. We hope that you had a good time in the groups. So once again, we enter now into a time of reflection, questions; maybe an experience that you’d like to share because so often as well, we learn from one another’s experiences when we share those experiences.
I was just saying yesterday that Henry Nouwen speaks about what’s personal is also universal and sometimes we think, oh, no one else has had this experience and then when we start to share, we discover actually I’m not such an oddball or whatever. It’s a universal experience that others have had as well. So, as they say, the screen is open.[00:55:00]
Bob: I guess I would just make one observation And that is that listening to the other’s stories how much God works through an event. Amazing!
Russell: Thanks. Thanks, Bob. And that’s quite important, I think, because if one looks even just at the scriptures, how often God was working through the events in people’s lives. So, to really hold on to those events, those moments when things happen, those experiences. Thank you. Melanie.
Melanie: Yes, thank you. We were [00:56:00] having so much fun in our group that we didn’t actually get to say goodbye to everybody. We were just brought back into the session, but at the very beginning, Shelley shared something about just attachment. And then Tracy at the end was just saying that how this sharing and revisiting and reflecting on reminded her of God’s kids sitting around the table talking about memories of childhood experiences or whatnot; and then was going on to say more about how this connects with attachment.
Now I’m just filling in the blanks here. I’d be curious to hear what Tracy has to say or any of the others, but it seems to me that when I revisit this, when I share with others, when I verbalize it, when I reflect on it, that it deepens my attachment to God and to Jesus, to the Holy Spirit and I’m just wondering if that’s one of the [00:57:00] gifts of this kind of reflection and sharing. Yeah, so I’d be interested in hearing what anyone else has to say from their expertise on attachment.
Russell: Thank you. I think there is definitely something in revisiting those experiences and I try to say that as well, that the revisiting of those experiences is a way of deepening them, and in the exercises as well, Ignatius has us going back sometimes and doing repetitions of prayer. He wants us to revisit. He doesn’t want us to redo, but he wants us to revisit what was significant for us, because there’s something about revisiting those things that takes us, as I use that image of an onion to the next layer that helps us to unpeel to the next layer.
And I also think, the other part of that is this being able to share my experience or my story with someone or with others, because sometimes as well the deepening happens in the things that other people are able to point out to me as they [00:58:00] listen to me. When people are journeying with me and I’m sharing an experience or a moment or whatever it is, and somebody can say something as well that can just help me to maybe get to the beginning of that next layer.
So, there’s those two things—the revisiting, but also the ability to share it with others who may help me as well to go that little bit deeper.
I don’t know if anybody else from the team wants to say anything, feel free just to jump in.
Annemarie: I think there’s something about it just becoming alive again in us as we remember the experience. It re-evokes the experience in us and sometimes if we’ve moved into a place of desolation, if we’re feeling a little bit disconnected from God, just going back and revisiting a key moments of connectedness with God, a key foundational experience can [00:59:00] help us to reconnect somehow with God and with our own journey with God in a way that can be extraordinarily powerful.
I think sometimes just being able to reread our notes of a powerful experience like that in your own handwriting, in your journal, I think, I actually wrote this. I remember that feeling. I remember the place I was in and what it felt like. It just somehow reconnects us with that experience in a profound way and that makes that link with God enlivened in a new way, deepened in a new way, because we’re not the same people either. We’re coming back to that experience from a different place with more life experience as well.
Trevor: Without wanting to go too far, maybe down a therapeutic route, I think that some awareness of how attachment happened and didn’t happen, I think affects [01:00:00] so deeply the way we relate to God and experience that relationship. I’m with someone at the moment who I think in their own growing up years was overly responsible for the attachment dynamic within their own family set up and feels very responsible now to keep the attachment with God going and so that interplay of some awareness of, you know, how the relationship with significant others played out, I think does have a deep profound bearing upon our present way of relating to God and God relating to us. So, I also value what you bring up there, Melanie around the attachment dimension.[01:01:00]
Russell: Thanks, Trevor. Jaco.
Jaco: Thanks, Russell. Mine is more likely a process question. Do we need to ask into the image of God during the disposition days? And then if we find that it is not as it is supposed to be or it’s somehow skewed to stay there before we go into week one?
Russell: Yes. That’s a good question. And somehow, I knew that question was coming. So, I just want to maybe say two things. The first one is—and this could just be a language thing—I think we need to think through the way that we do the kind of [01:02:00] detective work around the image of God. We’re not going to say to someone okay well, tell me, how do you see God type of thing.
I think we need to do detective work because if you say that to someone, they’ll say, oh yeah, God is a loving God or whatever, but as you saw in that story that I read from Jerry Hughes’ book, how it came out when the person was using their imagination in the prayer, how it maybe comes out when the person is working on their faith history.
So, it’s a subtle detective kind of work that we’re doing. We’re trying to tune ourselves in to looking to looking for that. And indeed, if we discover that, you know, no one’s going to have a perfect image of God. That’s just not going to happen, but if we discover that the person has maybe instead of saying a bad image or whatever, if we discover the person maybe is living with an unhealthy image of God, I think it’s important in those disposition days to spend [01:03:00] time around the question of image of God trying to help the person maybe to revisit that and it might be as well with the aid of some scripture texts or whatever the case is.
If the person has a really unhealthy image of God; so for example, if the person who was talking—and I want to go back to Jerry Hughes—if the person who came to me and said, okay, I want to do the exercises and they describe God as Uncle George with his burning fire ,furnaces, and whatever else he talks about their demons, you’re not going to try and take someone like that into the first week. You’re not going to do that. So what we want to do then is to work with their image of God a little bit and that may take time as well and hence also we say, the exercises take maybe nine months, a year, or maybe a bit longer as well, because we don’t have really a set end and these are the kinds of things that may also cause the journey to, flow a little bit differently. So that detective [01:04:00] work and then maybe taking time to work on that a little bit. You want to come back to me?
Jaco: Yeah, just maybe because I just realized the content of week one is very deep and serious and if you tackle that with Uncle George in mind, it’s a whole wrong outcome that you’re going to get, I think. Yeah. Yeah.
Russell: And so that idea of connecting someone, helping someone maybe with a bit of time with the image of God and connecting them to foundation experiences of love is going to be so critical before one can move into the first week. Otherwise, it’s going to be counter really to what you want it to be.
Jaco: Thanks.
Russell: I don’t know if Trevor, Annemarie, Brenda—you want to add anything?
Trevor: [01:05:00] I think that maybe just the one thought that I have is that when I sense that maybe someone’s image of God is unhealthy, I cannot talk them into a healthy image of God. So, I think the danger for the giver of the exercises is that we become a bit of a teacher or a preacher, trying to reassure them or tell them or talk them into a better image of God.
So, I think we need to do some homework in terms of how can I facilitate for this person during the dispositional days? How can I facilitate some kind of engagement with God whereby God can reveal God’s self in a more loving way to this person? And I think we can be [01:06:00] creative around that in terms maybe of some biblical texts, which we give the person to or invite them to pay attention to the narrative of love in their own life. How have they felt loved over the years and then to maybe connect that with God, loving them. Yeah.
So, I think my main point is, I think just to be aware that I cannot talk someone into a better image of God, but I can maybe be a midwife of them coming in the dispositional days to have a deeper experience of God’s love during these weeks.
Russell: Thanks, Trevor. I think it goes back as well to what we were talking about, Jaco. What Trevor is saying now is also allowing—we’re trying to help them, but we’re [01:07:00] allowing the Creator as well to deal with the creature—that God will reveal God’s self to the person.
Brenda: Maybe it’s also helpful. Oh, sorry.
Russell: Sorry. Sorry, Brenda. Sorry. I didn’t see you.
Brenda: I was just going to chip in there a little bit. It’s also helpful to remember that people don’t always have one image of God. They often are carrying multiple images. And so, they may have healthy images and unhealthy images mingled together and then it’s the thing of feeding or helping them be in the place of feeding the healthy images—praying with those and not trying to get rid of the unhealthy images, but rather just allow space where God can meet them in those healthy places. So, it’s also helpful to remember that.
Russell: Thanks, Brenda. That’s very helpful, because I think that’s very true that we do carry different images of God, and so, Jaco, we could be listening once again for the dominant ones and then we’re trying to [01:08:00] do what Brenda says, work with those healthy ones. Thanks, Brenda.
Tracy: I’m actually coming on the piggyback of Melanie, who had brought up how we ended up in our group, and I didn’t finish a thought, but I just thought I’d share it with you all. It really just reinforces everything you all are saying and that the way our neurology is like wired is that when we reinforce something, we create pathways that get stronger and stronger and so even what Brenda was just saying is when we reinforce these positive images of God, the likelihood that our bodies are going to go back to those images of God gets stronger and stronger and stronger. And so, when you think of like Ignatian practices of like how God looks at me, or like remembering these experiences of loving encounter with God are just reinforcing and strengthening those neural pathways, which then get [01:09:00] triggered over and over again, which then, of course, makes it more likely that we will move towards love than away from love. That was the thought I was going to finish for my group who was wondering.
Russell: Thanks, Tracy. Yeah, and I think that is important, and once again, there how the science of psychology helps us. I think they call it positive psychology, but how it helps us to know that if we are reinforcing what the positive ones, the healthy ones, that they do start to kind of, what’s the word? They start to grab. They start to grip; they stay with us. So, I think that’s important.
The other thing that I wanted to say, Tracy also linked to when we were using the word remember and where, we’re saying we want to take people back to a moment to remember and maybe just theologically saying, I think we’re not saying, Oh, let’s remember what happened in the past, but we are remembering in such [01:10:00] a way that it’s present for us now ;it’s a reality for us now.
Maybe from the scriptures, when Jesus says, do this in memory of me. It’s not just some historical fact that, okay, that happened, but somehow in our remembering it is making it present again and hence as well, helping someone to enter into that experience again, revisit that experience and so forth.
Maddy: One, Tracy, that was really helpful what you just shared about the neuropathways so just wanted to mention that and I’m really grateful for what you shared, Trevor, with that example of this person feeling responsible to keep connection with God. When I reflected on our group, I grew up in such a broken, dysfunctional, abusive, not [01:11:00] loving home and we often say, our experiences growing up can form our picture of God. I came to faith as an adult, and I feel my image of God was never through people or church. It was one on one with God, and it’s been really easy for me to connect with God. God did not resemble in any way, shape or form what I grew up with, so I find that interesting that there is Grace in that.
However, Trevor’s example does make me want to sit with this longer. Like in what ways do I have an image of God because of my past that I’m not yet aware of. So those are the things that I’m kind of sitting with and it needs way more time than just this morning for me.
Russell: Thanks, Maddy. And thanks [01:12:00] for sharing your personal experience there. And, you know, I think that wondering about image of God really—well, my experiences, my own experiences—I don’t think there’s ever a point in my life where—and from what I understand from other people who have walked the journey—where we say, okay I’ve got it all neatly tied up now because I think it’s changing the whole time and I think that at different times in our lives, God is revealing God’s self to us in different ways, and maybe the best thing I think I can do is just ask for the grace to be open to the ways that God might. So, I’m grateful to God for what I’ve already been given, but I’m also open for whatever the Lord may still want to show me or where the Lord still may want to take me.
You ended up there saying I need much more time than this morning, and I want to say to you, yes, it’s called the rest of your life.
Maddy: I think for me, it’s important to point out that images of God, I think are not [01:13:00] just dependent on our past experiences or our earthly parents. Like clearly my experience is different, and for everyone, it’s always different, but because we often just say that hey, look how you were brought up and look how you translate that.
Well, I live I think in a different story that, yeah, it’s been very accepting and loving, so I just wanted to shine that light as well and I live a lot in my past. I’m a four on the enneagram, so for me to say this is good.
Russell: Thank you. I don’t know—Anne Marie, Trevor, Brenda, do you want to?
Annemarie: It’s also interesting that some of the research that’s been done around developments of image of God seems to suggest that sometimes images of God are formed [01:14:00] around our own experiences of our parents and that sometimes that’s a negative, and sometimes they’re the opposite. They get formed in opposition to that. So, it’s the kind of longed for parent that we didn’t have that becomes the image of God.
So, there may be something to just kind of be aware of around that. But I think also just to highlight the word that Maddie used, grace. I think that God is at work. Grace is operating and God is not limited by anything in our life experience, but there’s stuff that we can’t necessarily explain psychologically in terms of how image of God develops.
Thanks, Annemarie. Shelley.
Shelley: Yeah, I just want to make space for something I have found challenging with directees in the past. Sometimes there’s that [01:15:00] revisiting of those deep experiences of God, like there is the primary role, it seems like, is to strengthen that bonding and attachment. And then I find some directees go to kind of frustration that they can’t recreate that or haven’t. Do you know what I mean? Haven’t had that again—sort of a sense of that was ten years ago. How come I haven’t had an experience like that lately? You know what I mean? And yeah, it’s just all I’m doing is making space to know. It’s a wrestling at times where it seems in the moment to arouse and deepen relationship and then they may come back later and say, I almost like I tried to recreate that. Do you know what I mean? And that’s all I’m saying that I’ve wrestled with that at times with directees, because that’s not my experience. My experience is it is bonding, and I have found for others it has aroused frustration, which is [01:16:00] my opportunity to trust God to work with them. But yeah.
Russell: Thank you, Shelley. That’s very helpful. So, long time ago, I did a retreat and for me, it was a wonderful experience. I did a kind of retreat a year later after that and it just wasn’t the same. I didn’t have that sense of God, and the prayer just didn’t go well. Then I did the retreat again and it was the same story; it didn’t go well, and that sense of frustration of like, why is it; what’s gone wrong? Where have I gone wrong?
I went to the director with that, and I said, it’s not happening like it should be happening and he said what do you mean it should be happening? There’s no shoulds here. You’re coming already with a template of how you think that it should be. And that it’s—that at times, we can’t recreate these experiences. It’s like a gift that is given to us for that moment. And how I learn rather [01:17:00] to cherish that gift than to try and recreate that gift? Because, he said to me as well—I remember this quite clearly—he said, by trying to recreate that particular gift at that time, you may discover that the gift that God wants to give you now you’re not open to, you’re not open to because you have this template in your head as to how it should be.
Anyway, it was very difficult, and it was very frustrating, but there was some wisdom in what I was told, and I can’t say there was a magical experience after that or whatever word you want to use—profound experience. There was something about being able to let go of that and to honor it as a gift, and therefore, just to say, I’m open to whatever else you want to give me, Lord which was a journey for me. It’s not something that just happened like that. So, I understand what you’re saying, because I’ve been there and that’s what I’ve found. helpful. Some of the others may have some other wisdom about that.
Bob: It seems to me that one [01:18:00] of the things that’s hard for us is to not make things normative and trying to make God normative instead of He’s always free. It’s sort of like to me, the definition of sovereignty is that God is omniscient, God is omnipotent, and God is absolutely free.
So, every time I may want to have something repeated, I forget that God is free and He’s free to do His will. I’m the receiver, not the causer, the receiver.
Russell: Thanks, Bob and I think in that freedom of God is an invitation to my own freedom as well, to receive whatever it is that the Lord wants to offer. Yeah. Trevor, you wanted to say something.
Trevor: I just wanted to respond to Shelley very briefly. [01:19:00] I think that, and maybe with that frustration coming to the surface, that could also be the beginnings of honest conversation in the dispositional days as people then begin to bring that frustration in the present moment to God and that opening them up—the frustration becoming a doorway to a fresh way of knowing God’s love for them.
Russell: Thanks, Trevor. I have my eye on the time so Doreen we come to you and then to Beth.
Doreen: Just two quick things. One, it’s been helpful for me to remember that Ignatius took four years to get one of his good friends ready, I think. Was that Peter barb or something for the exercises.
Russell: Frances Xavier.
Doreen: Oh okay, that’s who it was? Kind of trust in the slow work of God for [01:20:00] that, and the other is what Tracy was saying about neuropathways, I think, it’s like from Kurt Thompson’s work, like Anatomy of the Soul, it’s helpful for me, and for directees to be reminded that we’re not switching back and forth quickly from who we are to who we were to who we are now. We’ve got these thick neuropathways now. We’ve been transformed. We’re new creations. So, directees worry. Oh, I’m gonna be that person again. Well, they’re not. They never will be. They’re not that person.
Russell: There was something I wanted to say, Doreen while you were with your second point. I’m sorry. It’s out of my head. I can’t remember what I was going to say. Sorry. Did you want to respond to anything?
Annemarie: No, that’s fine.
Russell: Beth
Beth: As I ask this question, I [01:21:00] I think about the answer is already somewhat prayer and discernment, but if you have any tools that might help with it. Occasionally, I’ve been with someone—and I’m generalizing here—who is in their head, and they have a hard time expressing words from more of an emotional kind of standpoint, like they’re still using, yes, I know God loves me. Yes. Yes. I can see that. Yes. There’s a lot of words of saying this, and my desire is not to make them have an emotional, but it feels like they’re just more in their head and it’s from what they should know versus talking about their experiences or their feelings. And even when you ask that, it’s just more general. Yes, I feel that way.
So, my question is—never wanting to push somebody to say something that’s not what they feel, but also trying to deepen it. Are there any good questions? Any [01:22:00] suggestions that might be helpful?
Russell: I’m going to rely on the others in the team as well to come in with what they think, but I think one of the things is, trying to go back to, experiences and the question of how did you feel? I think one can try to do that, and especially profound experiences.
Sometimes it helps as well to get people to connect with maybe things that have happened in terms of relationships with others, where there’s been some sort of feeling. Sometimes it can be poetry that helps someone to connect in a more emotional way. Sometimes as well I have found—there was a fellow who came on a retreat. It was a guy who found it very difficult to talk about feelings and when he started to do things like write or to draw or to color. He used [01:23:00] colored cokies to draw various things. It was interesting to me how he could talk a little bit more from a feeling point of view about the picture and what was going on in the picture rather than simply just from his head. So, those other creative ways can also help. I hate to admit this, but not so long ago, I went on a retreat that was being led by somebody else, and they told us on the Saturday morning, we’re going to work with clay. And I thought, Oh, gee, why do we have to do this? I’m not into this clay kind of stuff and it was actually quite fascinating to me because the whole morning was taken up modeling something and talking about it. It was almost, if I think back, how it actually did get me a little bit more out of my head and into my heart talking about what was going on there. So sometimes that kind of thing can help someone to do that. Don’t know if any of the others want to add anything?[01:24:00]
Brenda: I can add some as well. So sometimes it’s actually naming it for people, depending on the rapport that you’ve created with the person or how the relationship is. But sometimes it’s helpful just to go, you know, there’s a lot of head stuff. I wonder how, and I just talk about that so that sometimes is helpful.
I have at least one directee or one exercitant who comes to mind where they don’t talk about the feeling stuff. And sometimes I think, Oh, I wonder if it’s there. And then every now and then there’s just a flash. And so, I actually have to be content that I’m not really always aware of what’s going on in terms of feelings, but there is something there and so I have to be content to let God deal with that person.
Sometimes I try a name and then the other thing that has been helpful in the past is to actually use life examples.[01:25:00] –inviting people to talk about how they feel about their children, and they connect and then wonder how God might feel about them, if it’s a good family.
So, some of those, you know, who’s the best friend, it’s an Anthony DeMello meditation. Imagine the person who loves you most in the world, and if God loves you at least as much as that person, what does that feel like is also one that I’ve used to help people.
Russell: Thanks, Brenda.
Trevor: And I think sometimes maybe, if there really is a real struggle to have a sense or to feel good and maybe just to turn it into a simple grace. God, will you please give me a deeply felt sense of your personal love for me? So that from a very early stage in the exercise journey, a grace and asking for what we most desire becomes a [01:26:00] natural part of the journey.
Russell: Thanks, Trevor. I think we’re just about on time. So, I’m going to hand over to you, Annemarie.
Annemarie: Let’s just take a moment to end with some prayers. I invite you to sit comfortably and to become aware of the God that you have experienced. The God that you have come to know in a heart way is present to you now,[01:27:00] and in the awareness of that presence of God with you, just hold whatever is the gift or the grace for you in this time—whatever it is that you are most grateful for.[01:28:00]
And we end our time this evening as we pray:
May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, The love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with us all evermore. Amen.
Take care everyone. Have a good, blessed week and we’ll see you next week. [01:29:00] Take care.
Russell, if you wanted to bring some show and tell pottery next week, love to see it.
No criticism, just encouraging words, of course. Bye.