God Who Prays in Us: Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Diary

Abstract

This article explores Katherine Sonderegger’s thesis that in Christian prayer, not only does the person pray, but God prays. Though such an idea runs contrary to the settled conviction in Christian spirituality that the human person prays to God, this paper enquires into the idea that God also prays in the person with a study of Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Diary. That record of his spiritual experiences suggests that not only did he listen to God’s prayer in him, but that this listening comprised a spiritual itinerary in which he was led into a deeper experience of God’s prayerful laboring in him. Following this itinerary, this article proceeds in three parts. First, a study of Ignatius’s prayer to the mediators reveals that in his petitions, he sought to hear the intercessory prayer of Mary and Jesus. Second, he found himself discovering a new way to name God as he celebrated the mass; that newness resided not in a new vocabulary but in his participation in the prayer of the Son to the Father. Finally, Ignatius experienced the grace of loqüela in which he heard a kind of celestial music whose tone and language moved him to a simple, contemplative admiration of God. More than the story of a mystic with an uncommon ability to listen to God, Ignatius’s journey into greater attention to God’s language within him is the story of grace, God’s life, which is always present, active, and audible in the believer’s prayer.

1. Introduction

Katherine Sonderegger admits that the question she poses in her essay “Does God Pray?” is strange (Sonderegger 2022, pp. 136–48). She understands that it does not make sense to consider God’s prayer when the “settled conviction among Christians” is that “we pray, God does not” (Sonderegger 2022, p. 136). Nevertheless, exploring the possibility that God joins the human person in his or her prayer, Sonderegger goes beyond traditional understandings of prayer that reduce it to a need or a cry for help. Her argument rests upon the passage from Romans 8 where Paul declares that “the Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words” (Rom 8:26). She also points to Jesus, “the man of prayer” who shows “in his own devotions the simplicity, the vulnerability, and the meekness proper prayer exacts” (Sonderegger 2022, p. 145). Recalling for us that Scripture discloses the life of God, she argues that these passages reveal that the Son and the Spirit, these processions from the Trinity, “are divine prayer, source of all creaturely prayer” (Sonderegger 2022, p. 148). God does pray, and as she affirms, “everything about God is blessing, everything” (Sonderegger 2022, p. 148).

For as novel as Sonderegger’s thesis appears, it reminds us that prayer is a relational space in which both the human person and God engage each other in ways that are personal and direct. As Gabino Uríbarri Bilbao plainly states about prayer, “God enters into dialogue through history with persons in history” (Uríbarri Bilbao 2017, p. 49). Such an idea about God’s action in prayer can hardly be considered the domain of one charism in the Christian tradition, but it fits well in the context of Ignatian spirituality, especially as interpreted by William Barry. Barry, perhaps most known in the North American context for his work in spiritual direction, has argued that prayer might best be understood as friendship, and in that intimate relationship “God reaches out and desires intimacy with the person” (Barry 2007, p. 1370). Intrigued by this idea of prayer as friendship in which God is an active pray-er in the relationship, I will examine Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Diary to see in what ways Ignatius listened for God’s prayer in him.1 These personal notes of his, covering a 13-month period, record his discernment regarding an issue connected to the vow of poverty. Praying over whether to accept some, all, or none of the revenue attached to the churches entrusted to the Society of Jesus, he registered what he experienced in his prayer as a way to find God’s will on this issue. These notes, eminently personal and never meant for others to read, immerse us in his interior life; they tell us of the devotion, warmth, tears, and other spiritual and corporal experiences he felt as he prayed and celebrated the mass. They are not about prayer but reveal what he actually felt and thought in prayer. Scholars typically invoke the text to study his discernment process, especially in its correspondence to his more famous text, the Spiritual Exercises. But another reading of his personal notes could be framed along the lines of Sonderegger’s insight into the intimate and familiar ways in which God speaks to the person in prayer. The Diary itself invites such an interpretation because in it Ignatius minutely attended to his experiences to see in what way they came from God and revealed God’s will to him. In short, he was listening to the groans of the Spirit within him.

In this article, I will explore three of Ignatius’s experiences in prayer that sketch the outlines of God who labors in him—to use one of Ignatius’s basic understandings of God’s interaction with the human person—and whose labor takes the form of prayer. This approach to a mystical text from the 16th century may help us deepen our experience of the Spirit’s intercession in us, an intercession in the life of the Church that is inviting all of us to listen more deeply to the voice of the Spirit, and in so doing become a more synodal church (Pope Francis 2020, p. 86).

2. Intercessory Prayer: Listening to the Prayer of the Mediators

Ignatius began his discernment praying to Mary and Jesus, petitioning them to intercede on his behalf to the Father. Readers familiar with the Spiritual Exercises will not be surprised to see in these prayers the practice of colloquies as he seeks help from them. This prayer was more than a perfunctory supplication for assistance; he spent several days drawing close to them, growing in intimacy and gaining confidence that they would help him. For this reason, his petition to Mary and to Jesus was relational: it is as if he believed that moving deeper into a relationship with them would move him closer to God.2 After five days of praying and noticing the presence of Jesus and Mary, whom he refers to as the “Son” and the “Mother”, he sensed that they had interceded to the Father. He perceived a “sign” (señal) of their presence, and with this sign, he believed that they had prayed for him.3 The confirmation of this was his feeling of having “notable access” to the Father.

With this unhurried period of intercessory prayer to the Mother and the Son, Ignatius implicitly reveals how important this discernment was. The question of receiving or not receiving income for the maintenance of churches was ultimately a question of how to be faithful to his experience of Jesus, whom he knew and loved as the poor and humble one. For this reason, the discernment touched an essential element of his way of following Jesus in the Church. Though many commentators see the vow of obedience as central to the Jesuit vocation or way of proceeding, the vow of poverty held at least an important, if not more important, place in the order’s religious self-understanding. Poverty was, in the words of Philip Endean, “the cardinal Ignatian value… obedience takes over this primacy only later” (Endean 1987, p. 21).

Ignatius’s intercessory prayer also suggests that prayer for him was a populated space in which he sought intimate contact with the divine persons. Similarly, his desire that they intercede for him discloses a fundamental posture of his: humility. He seems to know that he cannot pray or discern on his own or as he would like, and so he seeks their presence and guidance. At the same time, Mary and Jesus were not instruments in his quest to know God’s will. He did not abandon them once he felt that they had interceded for him; rather, he imagined himself in their company—as friends—as he progressed closer to God in his prayer.4 In this way, petitionary prayer was about cultivating a deeper relationship, and in this relationship, what he sought in his prayer was to hear their intercessory prayer to God.

Petitionary prayer, although often thought of as vocal prayers or simple expressions of one’s desires, is relational. For Ignatius, it is the work of two. In other words, a petition for him was more than asking God for what he wanted; it was a moment of mutual giving and receiving; it is about speaking and listening (Arana 2007, p. 342).5 And his listening was a patient listening: it was only on the sixth day of his process that he approached God the Father with his desire to know God’s will. On a theological level, his prayer to the mediators is his asking that his prayer be raised up in the prayer of Mary, the one who contemplated and pondered all things in her heart (Luke 2:19). His prayer to the Son invoked Jesus as the mediator, the one who exists to intercede to the Father on behalf of men and women (1 Tim 2:5). Moreover, his petitionary prayer, made in the solitude of his room and chapel where he prayed and celebrated mass, participated in the Church’s praise and adoration to the Father to know and to do the Father’s will.

In terms of the spirituality of his petitionary prayer, attention characterized his disposition, and attention represents a contemporary spiritual topic whose reach is expansive. One might think of the growing practice of and reflection on mindfulness in genres both popular and academic. Similarly, one may also consider the encyclopedic studies of Iain McGilchrist who, drawing from the fields of neuroscience, philosophy, and psychology, has argued that “what we attend to, and how we attend to it, changes it and changes us” (McGilchrist 2019, p. 167).6 In addition, on a sociological and political level, attention—or our lack of it—is a growing cause for concern.7

In Christian spirituality, attention, in the estimation of Mark Burrows, “has long shaped Christianity” (Burrows 2023, p. 280). Though ours is an era where we may find ourselves, borrowing from T.S. Eliot, (Burnt Norton) “distracted from distraction by distraction,” (Eliot 1944, lines 4–5) spiritual reflection in the Christian tradition has always been interested in cultivating the search for God in silence, listening, and attention, and some of that reflection has not been without creative connection to theology. For example, in an epilogue to a series of studies on kenosis, Kevin Hector argues that attention could be one way to “put kenosis into practice” (Hector 2022, p. 310). In short, attention is not something new. The poet Mary Oliver’s intuition that “To pay attention, this is the work of our lives”, not only recovers the basic insights of the Christian spiritual tradition, but it reminds us that attention is work, and in the context of prayer, the work of attention is about listening to the prayer of the Spirit in us (Oliver 2023, p. 264).

The opening entries of Ignatius’s Spiritual Diary reveal the prayer of intercession as an act of attention to a deeper prayer that takes place in the person. This is to suggest that the most basic form of prayer runs much deeper than a simple formulation of wants and needs. It participates in and is lifted up by the movement of the Spirit in the person. Such a perspective on prayer is more than a compelling insight offered by Ignatius the mystic. This is Christian prayer. One need only to look at the “Hail Mary” in which one beseeches Mary that she might “pray for us sinners now and the hour of our death”. Similarly, in praying the “Our Father”, one enters into that which belongs to the very heart of Jesus’s prayer, yet, “not for that reason is it exclusive to him” (Uríbarri Bilbao 2017, p. 149). The Christian prays the “Our Father” as his or her own, and it is—it is a prayer which configures the person into the Son, the one who prayed and prays it to the Father. Christian prayer, in its most elementary or rote forms, “returns us to that prayer which was uttered in the person of Jesus Christ and of which is constantly repeated because God is not without humankind” (Barth 2002, p. 14). Intercession, the simplest form of Christian prayer, participates in the prayer that Jesus and Mary offer to the Father.

3. Listening to God Pray in Him in the Mass

Throughout the Diary, Ignatius continued calling out to God with petitions, and on occasion, he transcribed the words that he uttered to God. He also specified moments in which he was not able to speak the way he wanted; words were, at times, withheld or not available to him. For example, in the first days of his discernment, he wrote that he felt a kind of “withholding” of speech.8 The language that he used indicates a kind of loss of the word; his speech was, as he put it, retained (retener). It could be that at that moment, he was so affectively moved by an experience of God that he was at a loss for words. But more than a loss for words because of powerful emotions, the way he described this experience suggests something different; he found himself held back from using his typical expressions to talk to God.

This withholding of the word does not seem to be a random or haphazard spiritual experience; rather, there seems to be a pattern of language being withheld, followed by language given. For example, in describing his prayer several days later, he reported that as he was heading to mass, “there came to me a short prayer.”9 Unfortunately for us as readers, he did not transcribe in his notes what this “short prayer” was, nor did he indicate why it provoked in him, as he reports, “intense devotion and tears.”10 Nevertheless, the text presents a dynamic of losing and then receiving new language.

This pattern repeats. Two days after receiving this new prayer, he again indicated an experience of an “abundance of tears, devotion, and great sobs”, and the cumulative effect of this intense moment in prayer was that “many times I was not able to speak without losing the ability to speak” (no pudiendo muchas veces tener la habla sin perderla).11 Yet, this loss of language did not seem to have been a kind of void or an emptiness, but rather something fruitful, noting that he received “many spiritual intelligences.”12 Though the content of these “spiritual intelligences” is not specified, something new was coming to him. A hint of this newness might be found in what he said when he described his prayer in “finding much access to the Father in naming him as the mass names him.”13 It seems that naming God felt new to him, and that experience continued. On the following day, he returned to this experience of naming God, writing that “at the first prayer, in naming the eternal Father, etc., there came an felt interior sweetness”.

Summarizing, it is possible to detect an itinerary that consists of first losing a certain language to address God, followed by the reception of a new prayer or new spiritual thoughts, and then finally a new way to name God. This movement suggests that part of his spiritual journey during this discernment process involved a loss of language familiar to him as well as the advent of a new way to name, speak to, and be with God.

In her study of what she has called a “contemplative theology in via”, Sarah Coakley has argued that contemplation, an experience of “graced vulnerability”, “invites uncomfortable change” (Coakley 2013, pp. 86–87). In an early part of her study, she describes this transformation as a process of “contemplative effacement”. Such effacement for Coakley is the sine qua non “to learn to speak a new language” (Coakley 2013, p. 23). She circles back to this idea in a chapter titled “Reorientations of Classic Trinitarian Thought”, where she argues that true contemplation brings about “an epistemic stripping necessary to right contemplation of the divine,” and in a right contemplation of God, she suggests that one learns how to “name God” (Coakley 2013, pp. 309, 311). According to Coakley, in this condensed summary of her work, one loses in contemplative prayer a way of knowing in order to receive a new way of knowing and naming God.

This epistemological metanoia represents a considerable and often overlooked aspect of the spiritual journey. Scholars of the Spiritual Exercises opine that a kind of epistemic stripping should be thought of as part of Ignatian spirituality. According to Santiago Arzubialde, one of the great commentators on the Spiritual Exercises, the spiritual experience offered in the Exercises is that of “abandoning language for a new language” (Arzubialde 2009, p. 83). Similarly, Patrick Goujon affirmed that the Exercises allow for the creation of a new discourse for the retreatant, a discourse in which each person discovers and enters into a new or different relationship with God (Goujon 2021, p. 24).

The Diary suggests that Ignatius made this journey. His way of knowing God shifted and that shift involved a new relationship with language. The words were likely the same, but they meant something new to him. Moreover, the Diary situates this spiritual process in a place: the Eucharist. To cite just two examples. While at Mass, he reported that with “every word of naming God, ‘Dominus’, etc., I seemed to be penetrated so deeply” (cada palabra de nombrar a Dios, Dominus, etc., me penetraba tanto dentro).14 The second example is even more vivid: one day at the mass “with the most holy Sacrament in my hands there came to me a speech” (al tener el santísimo Sacramento in las manos, viniéndome un hablar).15

These experiences in the celebration of the Eucharist suggest that his experience of naming God in a new way consisted of something more than a new relationship to language. The shift was relational. In the mass, the liturgical prayers said by the priest are prayers said in the Son, through the Spirit, to the Father. Thus, Ignatius was praying, as all priests are when they say the mass, in the Son who is praying all things to the Father. As such, the new naming of God that Ignatius felt might best be understood as his participation in the Son’s prayer to the Father. The new language that he receives is the language of the Son’s prayer to the Father. He was, as it were, inside the prayer of the Son, quite possibly feeling the Son’s love and passion for the Father in naming “God, ‘Dominus’, etc.”

In the Letter to the Hebrews—the New Testament text that elaborates theologically upon Jesus’ priesthood—the author declares that Jesus “is always able to save those who approach God through him, since he lives forever to make intercession for them” (Heb 7:25). Jesus, the high priest who definitively offered himself to God for men and women, continues to intercede for all of humanity. His priesthood is open to all those who approach him with faith, and in faith all can enter into his prayer to the Father. In his priesthood, Ignatius entered into the intercessory prayer of Jesus, who intercedes for all from his exalted place with God.

This was Ignatius’s own realization. In the midst of this discovery of a new speech and new feelings at naming God, he wrote: “It is Jesus who presents or accompanies my prayers.”16 And in one of the few images that he used in his notes, he wrote that he found himself “in Jesus’ shadow.”17 His experience of naming God anew and being penetrated so deeply by the name of God points to his prayer as taking place in the Son. His words were participating in the prayer of the Son, “who lives make intercession” for the person before God.

4. To Be Within Listening Distance

In Ignatius’s spirituality, there is continuation and movement. In other words, the spiritual experience is not comprised of isolated moments, but rather motions which are relational in nature and which continue to develop and deepen. This is to suggest that Ignatius’s listening to God is not just an interesting part of his prayer, but it is a spiritual itinerary not unlike that experienced in friendship; it was a movement that was deepening. It began with his listening to the prayer of the intercessors, and it deepened in his prayer in the mass where he discovered that Jesus presented his prayers to the Father. And this movement continued: for a period of two weeks, Ignatius reported a remarkable grace whose content has both fascinated and eluded readers of his text—loqüela. This grace had an internal and external resonance, and it was often, in his words, “admirable”.

The word “loqüela” comes from Latin, which denotes one’s speech or accent. It is possible to imagine that Ignatius would have come across the word in the Vulgate. For example, in the Gospel of Matthew, Peter is recognized as a Galilean for his accent or “loqüela” (26:73). Another possible source for the word could be Kempis’s Imitation of Christ. In the third section of what is considered the most famous book from the Modern Devotion tradition, and one that early companions of Ignatius indicated that he cherished deeply, Kempis identified God’s speech as the source of consolation. Book III, a book on consolation, impresses upon the reader that the “inward speech of Christ to a faithful soul” causes true spiritual consolation.18 Thus, though loqüela represents a sublime mystical gift, sources for it were at hand for Ignatius, helping him place himself in his prayer, in the words of the Welsh poet R.S. Thomas, “within listening distance” of God’s speech.19

His notes about this grace furnish some idea as to what he was hearing or sensing. For example, on the first day that he recorded it, he made the distinction between an external and an internal loqüela, identifying the internal loqüela that he felt on that day as more divinely given.20 This is a point he circled back to: “in the internal and external loqüela, all moving me to divine love and to the grace of the loqüela so divinely given.”21 And if the reader was interested in finding out what it felt like for Ignatius, he mentioned that both loqüelae brought him great relish or enjoyment (gusto).

Over the next two weeks, he will, as is his custom, briefly note how he experienced this grace. On one day, he repeated the great relish or enjoyment he derived from it, and he gave a brief description of it: “With so much enjoyment of the internal loqüela in assimilating or recalling the loqüela or celestial music.”22 More than a speech or a voice, it appears to have been much more tonal, musical, even mellifluous. Curiously, he described the feeling of that music not in reference to the sense of hearing but to the sense of taste (gusto). In some ways, Ignatius received this gift much like the prophet Ezekiel received God’s word. In what is perhaps one of the more famous images from that prophetic book, God calls out to the prophet: “Son of man, eat what is offered to you; eat this scroll, and go, speak to the house of Israel” (Ezek 3:1). The prophet eats the word, and he exclaims: “I ate it, and it was as sweet as honey in my mouth” (Ezek 3:3).

In a more detailed description of his prayer in this section that commentators have called a “loqüela cycle”, Ignatius wondered if he was enjoying the sound of the loqüela too much. With his extreme, even scrupulous attention to what he felt in prayer, he noticed that his tears diminished during his experience of loqüela, and this alerted him to the fact that something was awry in his reception of it. Reflecting more on this, he concluded that he delighted too much in the “tone” or the “sound” of it without paying attention to the “meaning of the words”. He concluded his notes for that day, stating his desire to continue to learn how to receive the gift: “hoping for greater erudition for the future.”23

The word itself and his description of it as music, tone, sound, and also as language suggest that he is hearing something of God in his prayer. Perhaps, as Santiago Thió de Pol has commented, loqüela is something along the lines of what Paul wrote to the Christians at Corinth: “And I know that this man, whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, but God knows, was caught up to paradise and heard inexpressible things, things that no one is permitted to tell” (2 Cor 12:3) (Following Thió de Pol 2024, p. 200). Caught up to paradise in the mass, Ignatius seems to have heard “inexpressible things”, delighting and savoring in them. Quite possibly too, the insight of John of the Cross gives an idea as to what Ignatius was experiencing. In The Spiritual Canticle, the narrator speaks of “silent music/sounding solitude/the supper that refreshes, and deepens love.” (John of the Cross 2017, p. 473). The Eucharistic banquet was for John of the Cross, as it was for Ignatius, an experience of listening to love and being moved into love. Elaborating on this stanza in his commentary on the poem, John wrote that “when these spiritual faculties are alone and empty of all natural forms and apprehensions, they can receive in a most sonorous way the spiritual sound of the excellence of God, in himself and in his creatures” (John of the Cross 2017, p. 536). It could be that with loqüela Ignatius was filled with the sound of God’s “excellence” as he celebrated the mass, and he responded by contemplating God with deep admiration. And most importantly, he was moved to love God.

Though the exact content of loqüela is not easy to locate, the grace of loqüela suggests that his attention to God deepened over the time period covered in the Diary. In this way, the Diary does more than affirm Katherine Sonderegger’s thesis about God joining the human person in prayer; it reveals that listening to God who prays in us can become a journey into the mystery of God, where inexpressible sounds and words fill a person who beholds God’s glory. And if that glory is “admirable” as Ignatius repeatedly describes it, it is because love is involved.

For as sublime as the grace of loqüela appears, this celestial music should be thought of as relational. In his fascinating study of the brain’s hemispheres and their differing functions, Iain McGilchrist explores the fundamental place of music in human evolution and the evolution of language acquisition. Though we tend to think of music as something peripheral, McGilchrist proposes the thesis that “music consists entirely of relations”; in his estimation, it is all about “betweenness” (McGilchrist 2019, p. 103). In other words, music represents a deeper expression of intimacy and relationality—it pulls us into the sphere of the other. Attuned to it, we become attuned and in harmony with the other. With such an understanding of music as that which is at the base of our relationality, the grace of loqüela points to the simplicity, intimacy and betweenness that God and he are enjoying. Returning to the formulation of John of the Cross, there are no forms or apprehensions that get in the way of his listening and savoring God’s mellifluous presence.

5. Conclusions

The sudden emergence and disappearance of loqüela in the pages of Ignatius’s Diary has confounded readers. One wonders how this grace appeared so suddenly and why it disappeared, if it did disappear, equally abruptly. Perhaps Ignatius turned his attention to other graces. Or quite possibly, the celestial tones became fainter as he moved out of that deep harmony. But a likely hypothesis is that these celestial tones and the words that accompanied them continued because God continues. Grace does not come and go; it is not “on” and then “off”. The offer of an ever-deepening friendship with God is there; it is we who move in and out of attunement with God in our lives. As Javier Melloni pointed out, the grace of loqüela in the Diary underlines “the inseparable link between God’s gift and the disposition of the human person” (Melloni 2001, p. 65). Ignatius was disposed during those weeks to a more immediate, simpler presence with God. The story then of his listening to God’s prayer in his prayer is the story of grace: his listening and attention to God was a process of becoming more in harmony with a God who was always praying in him.

Ignatius’s Diary reminds us that the Spirit does intercede for us with inexpressible groans, and the human person—homo capax Dei—is able to sense them. In our context, the Church has helped us to recognize that those groans are inviting us to listen more deeply to those with whom we live, minister, and work. Communal discernment, spiritual conversation, and synodal decision-making processes comprise the ways we believe God is inviting us to be Church. All of these communal acts depend upon listening. Following Ignatius’s journey in the Diary, this journey of listening to each other, if guided by the Spirit, will take us into something greater than that of landing upon the right decision. It will be greater than feeling consolation at having arrived at consensus. Listening will bring us into the life of the Son who lives to pray for us. It will immerse us into deeper love and intimacy with God, the one who prays in us, and whose groans for friendship with us take the simplest, most sonorous forms.