The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything Read Free Page A

operations. The surgery would leave him with a lifelong limp.
    While he was convalescing at his family castle, in Loyola, his brother’s wife gave him a book on the life of Jesus and another one on the lives of the saints. These were about the last things Iñigo wanted to read. The budding soldier preferred stirring tales of chivalry, of knights doing gallant deeds to impress noble women. “But in that house none of those he usually read could be found,” he wrote in his Autobiography . (In his autobiography, dictated late in life to one of his Jesuit friends, Ignatius, probably out of modesty, refers to himself as “he” or “the pilgrim.”)
    As he idly leafed through the seemingly dull lives of the saints, something surprising happened. Iñigo began to wonder if he could emulate them. Within him stirred a strange desire—to become like the saints and serve God. He wrote, “What if I should do this which Saint Francis did and this which Saint Dominic did?” In other words, “I could do that!”
    Here was an average man without much prior interest in religious observance assuming he could emulate two of the greatest saints in the Christian tradition.
    Did Ignatius trade ambition in the military life for ambition in the spiritual life? David, my spiritual director in the Jesuit novitiate, put it differently: God used even Ignatius’s overweening pride for the good. For no part of a life cannot be transformed by God’s love. Even the aspects of ourselves that we consider worthless, or sinful, can be made worthwhile and holy. As the proverb has it, God writes straight with crooked lines.
    This began Iñigo’s transformation. Rather than wanting to chalk up heroic military exploits to impress “a certain lady,” as he wrote, he felt an ardent desire to serve God, just as his new heroes, the saints, had done.
    Today in Loyola, the family castle stands a few yards from a colossal church that commemorates the saint’s conversion. Despite additions, the castle itself looks much as it did in the sixteenth century, with its two-meters-thick defensive stone walls on the lower floors and graceful red brickwork on the upper floors, which served as the family’s living quarters.
    On the fourth floor is the bedroom where Ignatius convalesced: a spacious room with whitewashed walls and a ceiling supported by massive wooden beams. A dusty brocaded canopy hangs over the location of Iñigo’s sickbed. Underneath the canopy is a polychrome wooden statue of the bedridden saint holding a book in his left hand and gazing heavenward. Painted in gold on a beam overhead is a legend: Aquí Se Entrego à Dios Iñigo de Loyola . Here Ignatius of Loyola surrendered to God.
    After recuperating, Iñigo considered the insights he had received and, despite his family’s protests, decided to relinquish the soldier’s life and devote himself entirely to God. So in 1522, at the age of thirty-one, he made a pilgrimage to the Benedictine abbey in Montserrat, Spain, where, with a dramatic gesture right out of his beloved books on chivalry, he stripped off “all his garments and gave them to a beggar.” Then he laid his armor and sword before a statue of the Virgin Mary.
    Afterward he spent almost a year living in a small town nearby, called Manresa, and embarked on a series of austere practices: fasting, praying for hours on end, and allowing his hair and fingernails to grow, as a way of surrendering his previous desire for a pleasing appearance. It was a dark period in his life, during which he experienced a great spiritual dryness, worried obsessively about his sins, and was even tempted to commit suicide.
    The difficulty of what he was about to do—trying to live like a saint—tempted him to despair. How could he ever change his life so dramatically? “How will you be able to endure this [new] life for the seventy years you have to live?” a voice within him seemed to say. But he rejected those thoughts as not coming from God. With