El Ignaciano / September 2024

 Praying for Freedom; Racism and Ignatian Spirituality in America
Edited by Laurie Cassidy
Liturgical Press Academic; Collegeville, Minnesota, (2024)
María Teresa Morgan
St John Vianney College Seminary, Miami, FL

The volume under review offers a valuable and original contribution to Ignatian Spirituality. Informative and contextual, it is written from particular and varied frames of references, incorporating the “graced stories” (John English, SJ) of the land where we live; it confronts our complicity in racism and in doing so poses crucial questions about our future as a culture and country as well as our own conversion process through the Spiritual Exercises. “The resistance to indifference” of which Pope Francis speaks is a common thread running throughout the diversity of perspectives. 

Fifteen authors from diverse backgrounds and disciplines –theologians, spiritual directors and leaders in Jesuit ministries- have contributed to the present volume and thus it is beyond the scope of this review to offer a detailed analysis of each chapter. I will give a general overview on each of the three parts and highlight the subject covered by each writer in the hope of enticing the reader to further explore the subjects presented by the various authors. 

Part I, “Presuppositions” considers the relationship between the Spiritual Exercises and the struggle against racism:

 In his scholarly article “Training the Soul; A Black Catholic Journey through the Spiritual Exercises” Andrew Prevot identifies the “soul damage” caused by “social systems of racial control” and recounts his own experience of the Spiritual Exercises as a Black Catholic arguing for harnessing the transformative power of the Exercises in the struggle against racism.

Ken Homan, SJ, in “Digging into Jesuit Slaveholding, Digging into the Exercises” wrestles with the issue of Jesuit slaveholding, identifying the impediments to doing so with honesty and the need for an ongoing examen of the Jesuit participation in the evil of slavery.

Alex Mikulich in “The Composition of Place in Ignatian Spirituality; Repositioning a Historical Ecological Encounter with Jesus in the Context of Modernity/Coloniality” insightfully considers the complex inter-relatedness of the Ignatian Composition of Place with the above mentioned historical trends and interpretations, proposing a “recomposition of place.”

Part II, “The Spiritual Exercises” is the most extensive. Here the authors engage in praying through various experiences of Ignatian spirituality.

 In “Self-Centered to Other-Centered: Ignatian Indifference on Racial Differences” Hung Pham, SJ, seeks to clarify the difference between Ignatian indifference and apathy, incorporating the indifference of which Ignatius speaks into the historical Jesuit missionary discernment of cultural differences. The author argues that Ignatian “graced indifference” leads us to conversion and freedom from our own prejudices. 

Jeannine Hill Fletcher writes on “The Sins of White Supremacy; Institutionalized Racism and a Composition of Place” focusing on praying the First Week of the Exercises through the lens of institutional racism, one that is embedded in the fabric of the land and history that we identify as our home.

 In “The Gift of Tears; White Metanoia at the Foot of the Black Cross” Christopher Pramuk’s prayer flows from his retreat at Mepkin Abbey, a former slave plantation. His via crucis through a Black Cemetery resounds with the cries of the dying Christ echoing the dying pleas of Trayvon Martin, Elijah McClain, Sandra Bland and George Floyd. The construct and pathos of Pramuk’s words moved me deeply. His lyrical prose provides a wrenching meditation that led me to discover a hitherto unknown meaning of the gift of tears, one I had never understood or experienced before.

Maureen H. O’Connell’s “Resting Under the Standard of Christ; The Spiritual Exercises and Discerning White Supremacy” is a call to conversion, a meditation on the Two Standards inviting the reader to an exercise of resting under the Standard of the Cross as opposed to the standard of white supremacy.

Armando Guerrero Estrada and Paulina Delgadillo, in “Recuerda que Jesús También Fue Niño; An Undocumented Reflection on the Spiritual Exercises” offer a meditation on the Gospel passage of the Child Jesus Presentation in the Temple. Both authors are undocumented and write from their position as DACA recipients. Their contribution gives a “theological voice” and a biblical interpretation to immigrant youth living in the U.S. illegally. Their unique insights coming from their experience and immigration status introduce us to a precarious reality unbeknown to many. Words and phrases such as “transitioning into illegality,” “the safe haven of education,” “Holy disobedience” … deeply impacted me.

My own meditation, “Mephibosheth and Me; An Interpretive Ignatian Prayer of Memory and Imagination” engages in what Dr Laurie Cassidy, the editor. identifies as “historical soteriology.” The memories and prayer appearing in these pages are woven from my experience as a Pedro Pan child. I am most grateful to have been given the opportunity to tell our story, the story of fourteen thousand unaccompanied children, to an audience I suspect is not familiar with the event.

 In an especially practical chapter, Marilyn I. Nash in “Ignatian Discernment in a Diverse Ecosystem” underlines the importance of discernment in considering historical context in our decision-making. 

In “Seeing Bodies; Using the Separate Lenses Frank Fanon and Ignatius of Loyola for Healing” Patrick Saint-Jean, SJ, reflects on “color-blind racism” exploring embodiment with raw insight and underlying the centrality of our body in prayer and spirituality. “Body matters,” he insists; it is the means by which we are seen. Patrick Saint-Jean’s affirmations reminded me of Tertullian’s words “the flesh is the hinge of salvation.”  It also made present one of my favorite verses of the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, cited by the author: “ … for Christ plays in ten thousand places/ Lovely in limbs and lovely in eyes not his/ To the Father through the features of men’s faces.” Patrick Saint-Jean reminds us that we believe in an incarnate God made visible in the flesh in Jesus Christ. The lesson that most startled me is that in discounting our bodylines we allow others to write whatever they want upon our flesh.    

Part III: The third and concluding section of the book calls for a contemplation of  “God’s Laboring and Loving in the World” so that guided by Ignatius words that “Love ought to manifest itself more in deeds than by words” we may be doers of the word of love.

Matthew J. Cressler’s “The Making and Unmaking of White Ignatian Formation” is based on his many years of making Ignatian weekend retreats. Reflecting on his gratitude for his formation in the Jesuit tradition he questions the silence surrounding “the sin of racism” during those retreats he so often made. Together with the chapter on Jesuit slaveholding this is the most challenging article, asking whether one can engage with the Exercises in a society rampant with racism without being invited to challenge that racism. The question he poses throughout is that of the question posed by the General Congregation 36: “Why don’t the Spiritual Exercises change us as much as we would like”?

Justin White’s contribution, “The God of Us All; Praying with Black Spirituality” is based on the Jesuit Antiracism Sodality (JARS) inaugural retreat which took place in June of 2021. His chapter offers a painful witness on how he went to the retreat planning to speak about his ministry, but his first unscripted words were “I am here for healing” reflecting his own “unacknowledged desolation” as a Black Man.

 Elise Gower in “The God of Us All; Examen Reflection” is a lyrical meditation, one that invites to be read slowly and prayerfully, savoring its poetry, lingering in the merging of its images.

The volume closes with Maka Black Elk’s “Truth, Healing and the Journey Through Indigenous Catholic Boarding School History.” The author, an alumni of one such boarding schools, is now the Executive Director for Truth and Healing at Red Cloud Indian School in Pine Ridge, SD.  The project seeks to recover that painful history and to heal the wounds resulting from the practices of the Catholic Boarding Schools imposed upon the Indigenous people of the U.S. and Canada. Maka Black Elk rightly claims that the historical Catholic Church and the Catholic faith we profess are not always in agreement.  Citing the Canadian theologian Brett Salkeld the author points out that the Indigenous Catholic Boarding School system stood in contradiction to two central Catholic tenets: the sacredness of the family and the Catholicity (universality) of our faith.   

Conclusion

During his 2013 visit to Lampedusa Pope Francis lamented that we have become immune to the suffering of others.  Praying for Freedom; Racism in America, challenges our apathy by awakening us to the persistent history of racism in the United Sates. The volume achieves this through a cultural appropriation of Ignatian spirituality developing major themes of this tradition such as the need for a continued examen, the essential disposition of being open to God, the composition of place and praying our experiences in a biblical context. In presenting our personal and collective narratives we, the authors, have gathered the stories of this diverse land in the assurance of God’s all-inclusive love.