From May, 2021 through July, 2022, the Society of Jesus asked us to observe an Ignatian Year, specifically to reflect 500 years later on the compelling episode of conversion that St. Ignatius identifies as the origin of his choice to dedicate his life to God—his “cannonball moment.” Although forced into convalescence by the cannonball injury, like most converts, Ignatius needed this time to reflect on his cannonball moment in order to articulate its meaning for himself and for us. Eventually the moment took narrative shape in his autobiography, organizational shape in the Constitutions, and served as an animating force in the practice that became the Spiritual Exercises.
Even a blindingly certain conversion like St. Paul’s experience on the road to Damascus came to clarity only when the apostle began to shape his experience into testimony and consulted with the prophet Ananias. So, it is during his long period of reflection and attention to various spiritual guides that the cannonball moment emerges for the converted Ignatius, who now recognizes this moment as explaining what all his life had been leading him towards and what would guide him in the future. What once seemed random has direction; what once seemed pointless has purpose. Humility has replaced pride; and where there was fear, there is now love.
St. Ignatius’s story joins a rich and varied tradition of conversion narratives that are familiar to me because of the research I did for my first book which explored “conversions and visions,” in nineteenth and twentieth century African American women’s writing. I took my hermeneutical cue from Zora Neal Hurston, whose own spiritual and anthropological exploration led her to live a life not unlike Ignatius’s in its restless searching for and profound commitment to the power of spirit, however we encounter it and where ever it takes us.
In The Sanctified Church, Hurston describes the difference between a voluntary and an involuntary convert. She uses these terms in specific ways that don’t apply to muscle movement but rather to states of consciousness. As described by visionaries collected in the canon of nineteenth century Black women’s spiritual narratives, an involuntary conversion wasn’t one without discernment. It involved an election, a choice to assume entitlement to the visionary power God offers one, to accept without doubt the call one hears, despite the purveyors of cultural and religious norms who challenged one’s authenticity. In Ignatian language, an involuntary convert can do no other but choose God’s standard. As opposed to the involuntary servitude of slavery, the involuntary choice to submit to God’s call and live God’s vision for one’s life outside of human confinement is as bold a statement as St. Ignatius is credited with making when he encouraged his followers to “go and set the world on fire.”
A voluntary convert is one who recognizes an absence in her life and who consciously seeks out a deeper meaning and connection to her true identity, one free from irrelevant religious and persistently confining cultural norms. She seeks an identity that reaches back to ancestors from a variety of spiritual traditions to give her life purpose and to draw her attention to beauty. Late twentieth century Black women’s writings are potent with characterizations of women who initiate this search in their lives, who hear a call to convert and are compelled to exercise that call in some kind of intentional and generative action. These seekers don’t follow a linear path but move backwards and forwards through their lives to develop what Joseph Brown, SJ, recognizes as the “performative poise,” of a spirit-filled life. St. Ignatius was a voluntary convert who sought out a new path to living in this old tension between consolation and desolation. He did so by adopting the Principle and Foundation of his ancestors and animating it through the Spiritual Exercises, a product of his own imagination and experience. Through disciplined practice and intentional action, voluntary converts reveal to us how we can recognize and sustain our relationship with God.
Among all the many academic perspectives on conversion, across disciplines and time, including out-of-church conversions, de-conversions, and psychosis and drug-induced conversions, William James’s contribution endures for its elegant simplicity: conversion “unifies a divided self.” That’s how I interpreted the phenomena as a scholar and how I experienced it as a seeker being guided through the Spiritual Exercises. My cannonball didn’t land with a thud as an epic moment in a dramatic narrative. Rather, it was a “thing with feathers,” like Emily Dickinson’s vision of hope. It was the poetry of the Spiritual Exercises that converted me, a poetry revealed, as Howard Gray, SJ reminds us, “not in its language but its movement.”
Yet that kind of movement can be approached in language, especially in poetry. Poetry allows us to occupy a betwixt and between consciousness not unlike what a seeker hopes to achieve in contemplation, where emotions, intellect, imagination, senses, and all our faculties come alive in a unique alchemy of experience—a discernment of spirit. William Wordsworth captures this movement in his Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, where he offers a compelling definition of poetry as a devotional response to an encounter with transcendence. Poetry captures “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.”
This sentiment also describes my cannonball moment, which came after I had completed the Spiritual Exercises and was extending my practice by including the ritual of reading poetry as an additional form of prayer. The Ignatian techniques of contemplation I was applying naturally aligned with poet Billy Collins’s advice for how to read a poem. A reader should ask “not what a poem means,” but rather “where is it going?” and “how does it get there?” These are questions seekers also ask ourselves during the Spiritual Exercises—”where is God leading me?” and “how do I get there?” Answering these questions is how we come to know the meaning of a poem and the meaning of our lives.
The spontaneous overflow of feelings generated by transcendent beauty that Romantic poets like Wordsworth tried to capture is what I seek in my spiritual practice and what poetry helps evoke for me. But often in my practice, I can only sustain an experience akin to Robert Frost’s description of poetry–as “a momentary stay against confusion,” that doesn’t always lead to a spontaneous overflowing of feelings. Finding and appreciating that “momentary stay,” however, is the beginning of learning how to find “God in all things,” and how we build the motivated capacity to do so as what Flannery O’Connor calls a “habit of being.”
Converts need the ongoing varieties of Ignatian practice to sustain this habit of being, to develop the spiritual elasticity that leads us to notice and to discern the unfolding of spirit–where it is going and how it is taking us there. The way I got there was through Beauty and where I got to was Beauty, too. While reading Richard Wilbur’s poem, “The Beautiful Changes,” a favorite I often return to for consolation, I had my cannonball moment when, beyond the usual delight I took from reading the poem, I relished it. I experienced what Howard Gray, SJ, describes as an “overture from God.”
I came to see that the poem illustrated the invitation to revelation that captured my experience of the Spiritual Exercises over time. The poem gave expression to the dynamics of my ongoing encounters with beauty in the world when I felt the movement of spirit but as yet had not been tutored in the tools of discernment. Learning to recognize and relish beauty was how I began to unite my divided self, how the Spirit was working in me before I knew it. The Beautiful Changes also described my encounter with beauty as embodied in the intimate relationships with guide, self, others, and God, that the Spiritual Exercises encouraged me to develop, showing me where I most needed love to enter my life. And the poem continues to serve as a vision for the confirmation I seek going forward as I continue to know, love, and serve God in the beauty of all things.
As Howard Gray, SJ explains in his brilliant series of lectures on the Spiritual Exercises, what St. Ignatius accomplishes with the Spiritual Exercises is akin to what a poet achieves with a poem. A poet receives reality and transforms it into a vision and then offers it back to readers as a gift and an invitation to relish that poetic vision. In The Beautiful Changes, the transformative effect begins as most pilgrimages do, with a walk. The poem reveals how seekers experience the dynamics of conversion as both a transformation (metanoia) and a reorientation (conversio). Our perspectives are altered in ways that sharpen our powers of perception, deepen our appreciation of beauty, and direct us towards the love that inspires its growth. The poet takes us on an Ignatian walk from attention, to reverence, to devotion, showing us how to free ourselves from distractions or disordered attachments so we can follow our desire to where we find God.
While “wading a fall meadow,” the speaker in The Beautiful Changes experiences alterations in nature that the poet echoes in language by changing not just the action in the setting but also rearranging the parts of speech served by customary words. As a dry grass field becomes a “lake,” that needs to be “waded,” so it happens as his mind is “Lucerned,” the lake not just a body of water but a hydrology. A noun becomes a verb to articulate the miraculous transfiguration. Throughout the poem, “beautiful” and “changes” serve as nouns and adjectives and verbs depending on where they land in the verse. Grammatical and observational disruptions continue to guide the speaker through the natural setting, reversing customary natural hierarchies, as when a mighty forest changes in response to the small chameleon that “tunes its skin to it.”
Rather than disorienting the speaker, the reversals lead them to recognize—to know again–what they had always felt but left unacknowledged. This poetic move is also a theological move that is illustrated in the Spiritual Exercises during the Second Week when seekers walk through the life of Jesus in order to find our place in his story. As with the progression of the stanzas in The Beautiful Changes, it is in moving through the episodes of Jesus’s life that we encounter during the Second Week that we come to recognize how Jesus found beauty by reversing orders. Like the poet, Jesus shows us that the humble will be exalted.
The cannonball moment that triggers the speaker’s new way of experiencing reality extends this reversal. It is when the speaker ceases to put themselves first, no longer the main character in this unfolding episode but a humble witness to the beauty before them, alluded to as “the slightest shade of you.” Some unconditional love recollected in the tranquility of the walk transforms how the speaker experiences the world and recognizes its beauty. That “you” that “hold roses always in a way that says/They are not only yours,” is what “shades” everything. That “you” expands unconditionally, triggered by the memory of the love now visible everywhere. The speaker has found God in all things. The resulting unexpected changes are beautiful because beauty has changed the speaker who, newly awakened to their relationship to the world, is now the convert who notices Creation in its particularity, with a sense of possession rather than ownership, the same way God notices us. In the language of Martin Buber, the speaker’s relationship to the world moves from I-It to I-Thou. Wilbur concludes with lines that reaffirm the Christian truth that in losing is the finding. I regularly recite this final stanza from “The Beautiful Changes,” in my practice of Ignatian repetitive prayer:
…the beautiful changes
In such kind ways,
Wishing ever to sunder
Things and things’ selves for a second finding, to lose
For a moment all that it touches back to wonder.
That cannonball moment, when I was “touched back to wonder,” came because of the intentional effort of an involuntary convert who had long labored to unify her divided self. It also came because her Ignatian culture continued to tutor her in the discernment of spirit. What matters most, however, is that it came to me as grace, as an overture from God that I wasn’t expecting and didn’t plan for, yet one that continues to orient me towards the beautiful and how it can change me.
In between these moments where powerful feelings are reflected in tranquility, I continue to lean in to the rhythm and movement of the Spiritual Exercises in its rich and enduring culture. That culture sustains me and helps me, as Ignatius advised, to “stop where you find fruit.” We stop, however, not only to contemplate but to act. To become “a contemplative in action,” means recognizing that the “stays” against confusion that practice and poetry provide are “momentary.” We mostly live and find God in what poet Stanley Kunitz describes as “the layers,” of our “many lives.” Although we may be supported by some “principle of being,” that “abides” and from which we “struggle not to stray,” layers build up over time as our tribes scatter and disappear and we wonder: “How shall the heart be reconciled to its feast of losses?”
Amidst their “wreckage,” the answer Kunitz’s speaker offers in The Layers, comes from a transcendent “nimbus-clouded voice,” that directs them to “live in the layers, not on the litter.” This is Ignatian wisdom in verse. We can seek the consolation of living into our messy lives as a blessing or wallow in the desolation of avoiding it all as litter. We may not always understand or apply Ignatian wisdom. We may, like Kunitz’s speaker, “lack the art to decipher.” Still, this wisdom guides us on our pilgrimage towards recognizing life in a new way and helps us to unify our divided selves. As God knows, and as the poet concludes, “I am not done with my changes.”
Kimberly Rae Connor is a Professor of Ethics in the School of Management at the University of San Francisco. She is also Lane Center’s Faculty Chair for Mission Integration. She is a student in the Pierre Favre program in Ignatian Spiritual Direction at El Retiro Jesuit Retreat Center.
To read “The Beautiful Changes” and “The Layers” in their entirety, please follow these links:
www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43055/the-beautiful-changes
www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/54897/the-layers
Partial list of works referenced:
Brown, Joseph A., SJ. To Stand on the Rock: Meditations on Black Catholic Identity. Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock, 2011.
Buber, Martin. I and Thou. Originally published 1923 in German Ich und Du. English translation by Walter Kaufman. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970, 1996.
Connor, Kimberly Rae. Conversions and Visions in the Writings of African American Women. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1993.
Gray, Howard, SJ. Dynamics of The Spiritual Exercises. president.georgetown.edu/initiatives/spiritual-exercises/
Hurston, Zora Neale. The Sanctified Church. Boston: Da Capo Press, 1998.
James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience: a study in human nature: being the Gifford lectures on natural religion delivered at Edinburgh in 1901-1902. New York : Modern Library, 2002.
Wordsworth, William. “Preface,” in Lyrical Ballads: 1798 and 1802 (Oxford World’s Classics) by William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
