Ignatian Spirituality and Interreligious Dialogue: Reading Love's Mystery

By Michael Barnes SJ and Michael Barnes

This is a book about dialogue, specifically about the dialogue between religions. But it is also a book formed in dialogue. I seek to bring together the two sides of my experience as an academic teacher and pastoral worker: on the one hand, the extraordinary world of the religions that is such an important feature of contemporary Western culture; on the other, my spiritual formation and religious practice which has acted as the primary motivation for everything that I do as a Jesuit priest. The book can be read both as a practical correlate to what I have written elsewhere on the theology of religions, and, at a more personal level, as a reflection on my experience ‘on the streets’, as it were. I am guided throughout by the conviction that Christian faith comes truly alive when it is communicated, brought into dialogue with what is ‘other’, different, even strange. God’s own story, what God seeks to reveal of God’s own self through the witness of the Bible, enters into dialogue with the story of one Jesuit who seeks to respond to the mystery of a loving God through the lens of Ignatian spirituality. The twelve linked chapters form a personal introduction, with a degree of autobiography and illustrative anecdote, to an interior dialogue between Christian faith and the challenging context of contemporary religious pluralism. 

Michael Barnes is the author of Religions in Conversation (SPCK 1989) , God East and West (SPCK 1991), Theology and the Dialogue of Religions (CUP 2002), Interreligious Learning: Dialogue, Spirituality and the Christian Imagination (CUP 2012), Waiting on Grace: a Theology of Dialogue (OUP 2020).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Messenger Publications
• Release date: Apr 19, 2021
• ISBN: 9781788123464

Book preview

PREFACE

THIS BOOK consists of twelve interlinked reflections on the dialogue of religions. The main body of the text is based on lectures given at the Sion Centre for Dialogue and Encounter in Bayswater, London, in 2019 on what I then called ‘new approaches to interreligious relations’. Only towards the end of that series did it dawn on me that what underpinned them was not any sort of ‘newness’, but the intuitions and instincts of Ignatian spirituality. As I revised those lectures, reshaping the main themes and adding material from my regular teaching and contributions to conferences and seminars over the years, I sought to make explicit the principles that underpin my experience of interreligious dialogue at a variety of levels – the same principles that form the mission of the Society of Jesus and the lives of those Christians who have been inspired by the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius Loyola.

This is not, therefore, a book about the theology of religions but a record of practice – or, to be more precise, an account of how one Jesuit’s personal experience feeds back into and reinforces the Church’s faith. I write as a theologian and specialist in Asian religions, specifically Theravada Buddhism, the ancient tradition now to be found in Śri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand and Cambodia. As I sought to illustrate and expound the book’s many cross-religious themes, one idea kept coming back. I found myself conscious of a sort of ‘holy restlessness’, a sense of being on a never-ending pilgrimage. It took me back to the Acts of the Apostles where the early Christians became conscious of being guided by the Holy Spirit who always went ahead of them. It also reminded me of how St Ignatius talks about himself as ‘the pilgrim’.

More profoundly, I was struck by how, in the various forms of interreligious relations – people gathered for neighbourly support on behalf of a local area or sharing each other’s spiritual experience in silent prayer and meditation – somehow, and so mysteriously, the Word of God goes on being spoken. That is why the title of this book brings all such activities together as ‘interreligious dialogue’, to remind us that the God of Israel, the God of Jesus of Nazareth, invites us into a life of love and learning. Dialogue is a two-way process that crosses all borders and challenges all our preconceptions about where God is at work. The teacher in me has always found it a privilege to explore the inner life that is generated by Christian faith, the more so when it engages with other religious worlds, raising questions and finding unexpected responses. If there is one principle of Ignatian spirituality that gives life to these pages it is a ‘deep listening’ for the movements of the Spirit of God, wherever they may be felt.

Later in the summer of 2019, when those lectures were finished, I spent a month in India, visiting centres of teaching, prayer and study. It was there that the framework for this book began to form itself. I was reminded of other visits I had made to that extraordinary part of the world, what I had seen and heard that set my academic expertise in a new light. When I joined the Society of Jesus in the heady years after the Second Vatican Council, I had very little idea of what the future held in store, except that it was going to be very different from the minutely calibrated liturgy I had known as a small boy. In my noviciate we were expected to speak Latin. That lasted precisely three weeks; modernity was beginning to invade our ecclesial hideaway. Even the mode of study of philosophy and theology changed dramatically, with less emphasis on dry-as-dust theses from ancient manuals and more attention to the sources of the Church’s life in Scripture, liturgy and – most revolutionary – its relations with ‘the world’.

Like all Jesuits I was expected to do studies in a non-theological discipline. I quite enjoyed theology, so I opted for the languages and culture of India – because no one else was doing it, and in the days of the hippy counter-culture ‘other religions’ seemed like an important area to explore. I quickly realised I was not cut out for editing obscure Sanskrit texts. But India became an object of total fascination, not least because it holds such an important place in the life and mission of the early Society of Jesus. When I eventually got there, with the time to soak myself in the rhythms of its religious life, it all seemed strangely familiar – and yet disarmingly different. I knew I could not be a missionary, dedicated forever to life in another culture, but I was also conscious that living on borders, intellectual as much as cultural, was where I was instinctively ‘at home’. Most of my life I have been involved in university teaching, but I have also enjoyed opportunities for the more informal pastoral activity that spins out of parish, chaplaincy and the ever-rewarding task of spiritual accompaniment. While I include a few examples of the academic side of my work in this book, my intention is to show how conversations with people from other faith traditions are constantly nudging at concept and theory, insinuating a different vision of what God may be saying to all of us.

Jesuits are not so much expert in one thing as adept at holding all sorts of things together. St Ignatius’s little text of Spiritual Exercises brims over with spiritual wisdom, and is nothing if not a brilliant guide to the living of the Christian life. But his discretely understated pedagogy of regularity and repetition, constantly returning to the moments that have touched us and – to use his term – brought us ‘relish’, is what enables that sense of a purposeful spiritual journey or pilgrimage to grow.

After a brief introductory comment on my sub-title, ‘Reading Love’s Mystery’, the first chapter takes up the theme of Jesuit mission as illustrated through my encounter with the greatest of Jesuit missionaries, St Francis Xavier. That forms one ‘bookend’ and was written largely in the heart of Catholic India, the sometime Portuguese enclave of Goa. The last chapter, the other ‘bookend’, was written in Pune where I was a guest of the Jesuit community at De Nobili College, named after the extraordinary Roberto de Nobili who, two generations after St Francis Xavier, pioneered a new form of missionary presence to the brahmin elite of Hindu society. Linking those chapters together is another Francis, the Jesuit Pope who makes his own distinctive call to a pastoral and political evangelisation. Between them come what began life as the lectures I gave at Sion, plus some independent lectures, now revised from more halting originals to fit the shape of this book. None of this material has been published before. In terms of theological genre much of what I have written, here and in various more detailed studies, fits under the general title of comparative theology. This is more a style of theology than a school, and its origins are spelled out in the book. It was one of the ‘new approaches’ I examined in the original lectures. Rather like Scriptural Reasoning, with which it is often contrasted, comparative theology takes up themes, symbols and words that ‘resonate’ across religious traditions and which can therefore be read together.

If there is one particular resonance I seek to evoke, it is that of dialogue itself. On the inside front cover is a fifteenth-century fresco of the Annunciation by Fra Angelico; on the inside back a photograph of the great 1986 interreligious gathering in Assisi. Two very different records and two very different encounters, yet together symbolic of all those moments in human lives when difference itself, being faced with the stranger, provokes thought, decision and change.

The Preface normally ends with a list of thanks. With a book like this, essentially a gathering of new experiences, scattered memories and well-thumbed files, it could quickly get out of hand. If I mention only a few of the more immediate names, it is to acknowledge that the debts are endless, some of them deep-lying and beyond words. Among the Jesuit support team, I must single out Joe Munitiz and Tom Shufflebotham for their sage advice, Donal Neary and Paddy Carberry for their excellent editing, and Michael Kirwan and Damian Howard for judicious comments and words of encouragement which they have probably long forgotten. At the Sion Centre I am indebted to Margaret Shepherd and Jonathan Gorsky for inviting me to give those lectures in the first place, and to all those who participated in the sessions so enthusiastically. In India, I must thank all those who made me so welcome and with whom I talked at some length, especially Roy Alex in Trivandrum, my sometime pupil, Xavier Tharamel, in Kalady, Kuruvilla Pandikattu who was such a generous host in Pune, and the Jesuit community in Panaji who were mobilised to introduce me to the sights of Old Goa and to ensure I was brought up to date with the story of the extraordinary Fr Thomas Stephens SJ, the first Englishman in India. More particular debts are owed to many friends: especially Chris Roberts and Nick Weeks who offered insight and reassurance, Rachel Huckstep who commented on drafts of almost everything, and David Lonsdale for his evocative calligraphy. Finally I should mention my dear friend and mentor, Br Daniel Faivre, whose influence shines through on every page. There are, however, so many more who have accompanied me on this pilgrimage. Dialogue involves an endless array of partners, especially those persons of faith who have taught me so much and so many friends, students and colleagues with whom I have been privileged to share the wisdom of St Ignatius.

Michael Barnes SJ

London

November 2020

INTRODUCTION

Reading Love’s Mystery

ON THE night the Jesuit Pope was elected, I was teaching my course at Heythrop College on the theology of religions. As I finished the first hour and announced a break, one of the students from the back of the room brandished his mobile. ‘White smoke’, he called out. I have to admit that my immediate reaction was to look out the window, fearing Health and Safety regulations were about to be breached. No one expected a result from the conclave to emerge so quickly. After a few minutes, we got back to the business in hand. I finished the lecture, packed my books and made to leave. ‘Don’t you want to know who it is?’ asked the student with the mobile. The class suddenly snapped to attention. The name was called out and a certain frisson hit me. ‘Bergoglio of Buenos Aires?’ I said to myself. ‘But he’s a Jesuit.’ It seemed impossible. Jesuits take a special vow to refuse ecclesiastical preferment, apart from exceptional circumstances; it isn’t our way to be part of the hierarchy. Indeed we take a vow of special obedience to the pope. How can a Jesuit take a vow of obedience to himself?

I rushed home and found three calls on the answer-phone. The media were clamouring for news and information. By that time various of the brethren had answered the call and were appearing on radio and television, passing on what little they knew of this extraordinary Argentinian who had suffered such a bruising experience of Jesuit leadership in the days of the military junta. My turn was to come. A month or so later I took part in a radio programme exploring the likely impact of a Jesuit pope on the Church. It focused mainly on the historic mission of the Society of Jesus and on the Spiritual Exercises of its founder, St Ignatius of Loyola, since these supplied important remote background to the identity of the man now leading the Church. I thought I was managing quite well until the last question was thrown out: ‘And what do you think he’ll be best remembered for?’ Off the top of my head, I replied: ‘He’ll be a good communicator.’ Despite my initial confusion, on that particular point I think I have been proved right.

Speaking and Presence

It’s not that this pope is an eloquent rhetorician, injecting memorable phrases into well-crafted homilies and addresses. This is a man who commands attention because his faith has a moral integrity. When he appeared on the balcony of St Peter’s later that night, I was struck by the stillness of his bearing. He radiated an austere yet gentle inner strength, an impression accentuated by the fact that he was not wearing the traditional ermine-trimmed red mozzetta. This turned out to be more than a gesture towards simplicity of lifestyle. At first I presumed the name he had taken was after St Francis Xavier, the first of St Ignatius’s early companions. Some hours later I understood it was in response to words of encouragement from a fellow Latin American Cardinal sitting next to him in the Sistine Chapel: ‘Do not forget the poor.’

A different Francis was to be his patron, not the restless missionary but the poverello of Assisi who gave everything away in order to follow Christ. This was the Francis who, in the wake of the Fifth Crusade, in a Church obsessed with the Muslim menace, proposed a mission of friendship and peace. In 1219, after the battle of Damietta in which some five thousand Christians had been killed, Francis crossed the lines separating the armies and visited the Sultan al-Malik al-Kamil. An overly romantic interpretation of the episode sees it as a model for interreligious dialogue. The truth is a little different, but no less significant. Francis presented himself as a messenger from God and spoke with no doubts about the truth of his Christian faith; his intention was to convert the Sultan to Christianity. In that he failed, but the Sultan was clearly impressed by the gentleness of his manner and the zeal of his words. They conversed together about faith and peace. And when he returned home, Francis proposed that his friars commit themselves to living peaceably among Muslims, a radical move at a time when it was exceptional for Muslims and Christians to meet anywhere but on the battlefield.

A couple of years later, Francis formulated an early rule for the order in which he distinguishes two ways for his friars to conduct their mission to Muslims. ‘One way is not to engage in arguments or disputes, but to be subject to every human creature for God’s sake (1 Pet. 2.13), and to acknowledge that they are Christians. Another way is to proclaim the word of God when they see that it pleases the Lord.’ That last qualification is significant. To Francis is ascribed that admirable sentiment which should be inscribed above every pulpit: ‘preach always and sometimes use words.’

No doubt, there are many links and quite a few differences between this Francis and his twenty-first-century Jesuit successor. As religious ‘families’, Franciscans and Jesuits follow different charisms, or gifts of the Holy Spirit. But as witnesses to the truth of the Gospel they are very much at one. There’s an important place for the craft of speaking and writing in any work of communication, but it will always be the quality of a person’s inner life and moral integrity that speak most clearly.

From Francis to Francis

This book begins, not with St Francis of Assisi, but with the first Jesuit Francis, St Francis Xavier; it ends by returning to Pope Francis and his programme for a Church engaged with the conflicts and tensions that dominate a suffering world. If this pope has caught the public imagination, it is not because he has a radical message for change but because he speaks from the heart with a voice to which people from all religious backgrounds and none can respond.The first chapter and the last are intended to complement each other: two Jesuit Francises talking to each other across the centuries. Much has changed between one Francis and the other. What remains constant is the source of their spiritual energy, the practice and forms of prayer that come from the life and writing of St Ignatius Loyola.

Ignatian spirituality, as it is often called today, is as much a school of prayer as it is an ascetical tool for the promotion of the mission of the Church. Ignatius was an extraordinary reader of the human soul, concerned with how we are forever struggling to order and reconcile desires and longings of all kinds. My subtitle, Reading Love’s Mystery, is intended as a metaphor for the contemplation of God’s loving kindness in all its many manifestations, whether discerned in liturgy and sacraments or in the more fraught activity of interreligious dialogue. Like all Jesuits, and all who share in the Ignatian approach to Christian living, St Francis Xavier and Pope Francis are companions of Jesus – not just communicators of the truth revealed in Christ but also observers of the work the Spirit of Christ is already doing in the world. Reading in this sense means careful attention not just to the words recorded in Scripture but to the signs and traces inscribed in another text – the text that is the world of everyday experience, the beautiful yet painful world of human love that in some mysterious way reflects the abundance of the love that is God.

Towards the end of the Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius says that God ‘labours in all created things’ on the face of the earth. If that sounds at first like a bit of vapid pantheism – God identified with the ‘All’ – nothing could be further from the truth. What Ignatius encourages throughout the course of the four ‘weeks’ that it takes to pray one’s way through the Exercises is a growing sensitivity to the God revealed in inner movements of the embodied heart as much as in the convictions of faith.

That sensitivity builds discernment, understood not as a set of rules for decision-making but, in Ignatian terms, as a virtuous quality learned in companionship with Christ that enables one to live with and find a way through the complexities of human living. As anyone who has spent time trying to understand the curious phenomenon that is ‘religion’ knows, not everything that touches the soul is of God. When Ignatius distinguishes two polarities of the spiritual life – consolation and desolation – he is doing more than pointing us in the direction of the one and telling us to avoid the other. ‘Real life’ is never that straightforward, especially when we are surrounded by many different accounts of what is true and good, from the traditional wisdom of the so-called ‘World Religions’ to the myriad ‘isms’ of secular modernity. If I put ‘religion’ in scare quotes, it is not to deny the existence and significance for everyday living of a plurality of ‘religions’. On the contrary, it is to warn against the ease with which the many forms of life, cultures and philosophies that are to be discerned on the face of the earth are reduced to some neat ‘common essence’.

God in All Things

The ‘Ignatian approach’ to interreligious dialogue which I am proposing in this book begins somewhere else, with the practical wisdom of a genuine mystic of the everyday.Whatever name people give to the Holy Mystery that surrounds human beings, from the strong theism of Catholic Christianity to the critical agnosticism of early Buddhism, no arbitrary separation can be made between natural and supernatural, ‘this-worldly’ and ‘other-worldly’ or immanent and transcendent. Whatever terms we use to feel our way forward, whatever distinctions we make, the one is implicated in the other. The task – never that straightforward, whether for theologians and philosophers, on the one hand, or devout practitioners, on the other – is to make the right connections.

In what follows I do not, therefore, sketch out an ‘Ignatian programme’ for interreligious dialogue. There can be no such thing. I offer no more than a record of experience, held together by the central conviction of Ignatian spirituality that God is to be found ‘in all things’. Once that truth becomes rooted in the heart, as a foundational principle that grants entry into the many religious and cultural boundaries that criss-cross our fascinating yet tortured world, everything begins to speak of the possibility of grace. That is not to deny that we live in the middle of many desolating examples of mendacity, corruption and horrendous violence, nor is it to make a naive wager on the power of peace-making, reconciliation and acts of heroic generosity to win some cosmic battle between the forces of good and evil. Ignatius and Francis – and their Franciscan counterpart before them – were guided by a vision not of eschatological vindication but, more simply, of a world renewed in all its living and loving by the challenging yet ever-consoling words of Jesus, that the ‘Kingdom is very near’.

This, of course, is where the Gospel begins, with the invitation of the one who invites all who would listen to ‘come and see’, to be touched by Love’s Mystery in intimately personal terms. Reading is normally understood as engaging with a text, a book, a newspaper article, a tiny message of endearment on a mobile phone. But it can be expanded to include any act of interpretation, any external encounter with whatever or whoever is ‘other’ that seeks for inner understanding. Reading entails more than attending to marks on page and screen; it demands careful attention to whatever raises a question for the mind and intrigues the soul. Whatever gives a humane flesh-and-blood reality to a community of faith – sacred pages and wise sayings, geography and architecture, images and artefacts, spontaneous conversations and moments of inter-personal contact – can be read in the sense that they lend themselves to interpretation.

If there is one advantage of living and working on the borders between religious traditions, it is the immediacy of moments of insight and understanding. While years of study bring a learning that is gradual and incremental, the learning that takes place on the streets, in other places of worship or in fruitful conversation of all kinds is often powerful and even overwhelming. Fellow Jesuits and fellow Ignatians from all religious traditions form part of the deep structure of what follows. But their contributions cannot be easily separated from those of the many people of faith who have taught me that an arbitrary limit cannot be put on the extent of God’s compassionate love for human beings. Ignatius taught his companions to read the world of their experience as a great dramatic scene in which God in Christ was involved, bringing creation-and-redemption to a fulness, a great movement of faith, hope and love in which the whole of humanity is caught up. In this sense Love’s Mystery has no bounds. To say that God is at work in all things means precisely that.

CHAPTER ONE

With Ignatius to India

OLD GOA lies on the banks of the Mandovi river, some eight miles up the estuary from the modern state capital of Panaji. Much has changed since the day, 6 May 1542, when the first and greatest of Jesuit missionaries, Francis Xavier, arrived after a voyage from Lisbon, which had taken thirteen months to complete. Today the river is bordered by vast advertising hoardings, choked by dozens of fishing boats and cruised by creepy casino-vessels aimed at the tourist trade – a far-cry from the trading centre first established by Afonso de Albuquerque in 1510.

The Portuguese have long gone, their enclave swallowed up by the State of India since 1961. But many churches in classical Renaissance style survive, not least the Jesuit Basilica of Bom Jesus – the ‘good’ or infant Jesus – where Xavier’s body is enshrined in a finely wrought tomb. There is a charming naivety about many of the artefacts decorating these churches. The ever-proliferating angels look more like dumb cartoon characters than unearthly divine presences. For all its generous proportions, the Bom Jesus is more understated, as if to draw attention to the magnificent baroque reredos that stands above the main altar. St Ignatius Loyola, his arms raised, looks up in ecstasy to what appears like a sunburst exploding from the three Greek letters IHS, a traditional shorthand for the name of Jesus.

Whatever else the Society of Jesus may stand for, without the name of Jesus it would lose the heart of its charism. Officially recognised in 1540, it was expected that the new and untried religious community would call themselves Ignatians, along the lines of earlier orders – Benedictines, Franciscans, Dominicans. Ignatius insisted, however, that the true founder was Jesus; he alone was to be the inspiration that would animate his companions. That did not go down well in some ecclesiastical quarters, but Ignatius was a determined man and he got his way.

Basilica of the Bom Jesus, Goa

The Spiritual Exercises, which were forged out of the intensity of his own mystical experience, are intended as an introduction to the Christian life. They teach people how to pray, and how, in praying with the story of Jesus, to enter into the life-giving mystery of the Trinitarian God. Just as Ignatius found his deepest motivation in the experience of being placed by the Father in companionship with the Son, so everyone who prays their way through the carefully constructed dynamic pattern of the Exercises finds a similar sense of following in the footsteps of Christ, with that name of Jesus indelibly stamped on their hearts.

Different Experiences

I got to know that extraordinary little book when I spent some months in India completing what Jesuits call tertianship, the third year of probation that comes at the end of a long period of training, study and ministry. Nearly two decades earlier, during the first two years of formation, I had experienced the Spiritual Exercises as a novice. At that time we never read the text, never even saw it. For thirty long days we were subjected to what would now be called a ‘preached retreat’. Each meditation was introduced by a conference from the Novice Master before our hapless little band was sent off, for what seemed an interminable length of time, to ponder on the import of some distinctly abstract theology. This version of the Spiritual Exercises was not calculated to inspire a generation of restless young men more interested in the revolution of the Second Vatican Council than the dusty pedantry of sixteenth-century Spanish asceticism.

By the time I went through that thirty-day experience again, the manner of delivery, not to mention the way the text was interpreted, had changed dramatically. We still had conferences, but we were guided mainly by one-to-one individual meetings with the director, a charming and wise old bird with a great deal of experience of teaching and leadership in his beloved homeland. I had been practising yoga for some years, and it seemed entirely natural to relax into a mode of contemplative prayer that seemed appropriate to two