Too often we assume human desires are unruly, untrustworthy guides for life. Plato long ago provided the tale of the chariot pulled in different directions by the horses of desire, powerfully neighing for dominance in human hearts. As we shall see, however, Ignatius grounds Jesuit education in desire and thereby challenges us all to reexamine our assumptions about where God can be found. Indeed, desires are keys to our true delights and ground spiritual formation, especially within Jesuit education.
Most of us have heard phrases like “Jesuit education focuses on cura personalis,” or “Jesuit education fosters faith that does justice.” While these phrases express core aspects of Jesuit education, let us explore the following question: How does Jesuit education foster cura personalis and understand the interlocking between faith and justice?
We can answer the question through understanding human desires from the perspective of Ignatian spirituality. Saint Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556) was the man of desires. Shattered as all his desires were by the cannonball moment, it was during his spiritual conversion on his sickbed during leg recuperation that Ignatius learned to recognize and distinguish between authentic and inauthentic desires. He also learned to redirect his desires from worldly ambition to glorifying God in the service of others.
The Spiritual Exercises communicate what he learned so that others too may share the journey of transformation (metanoia) that gifted him new life. In the Exercises, Ignatius structures each prayer period by advising people to pray for the grace to know their deeper desires, to discover their meanings, thereby knowing how to use them to grow in relationship with God and others. Desires, or passions, are more than merely human emotions. From a spiritual and religious perspective, they are signs of God’s grace present and operative in human life. As Edward Kinerk, S.J., observes, “One of the reasons Ignatius took his desires seriously was that he considered them to be graces from God.”1
Graces from God are thus free gifts of inspired desire offered to humans for response. As in all responses to an invitation from another, we must examine how we shall respond gracefully. To respond gracefully requires taking a close look at our desires. If we trust that God can be found here, then deeper awareness and understanding of human desires brings us closer to God and one another. Just as Ignatius learned how to discover his deeper desires and direct them toward the service of others, so too, Jesuit education aims to foster authentic desires and direct them toward the common good in the service of all.
For this reason, we need to understand desire. Fr. Kinerk rightly points out that desire is an enormously complex word. For example, in the spiritual life, we often talk about the desire to be holy; in school, we foster the desire for excellence; and in sports and business, individuals and companies cultivate the desire for competition.2
Desires are accordingly encouraged and manifested differently, depending on context, and they take on degrees of authenticity and inauthenticity. For example, other-centered desire may arise in us and naturally incline us toward helping others; but there are times when desire isolates and creates self-centered actions.
The two types of desire cause two contrary interior movements; the desire to be with others and to help them often generates joy, hope, and love, whereas the desire to isolate often ends in depression, lack of joy, and lack of hope. Ignatius characterizes the former as a spiritual movement toward God and others, and he calls it spiritual consolation. He also contrasts this with a movement toward isolation and away from God and others, which he calls spiritual desolation (SpEx 316 and 317).3
Jesuit education aims to help students to be in touch with their deeper desires, to cultivate them, and to use them in glorifying God in serving others. The first step in doing so is to pay attention to one’s own experience. Being aware of our experiences is the gateway to knowing our deeper desires, for unless we become aware of how a certain experience relates to a certain type of desire, we will be unable to know the difference between conflicting desires. In his article, “The Experience of Ignatius of Loyola: Background to Jesuit ducation,” the late Jesuit, Howard Gray, S.J., argued that Jesuit education should be seen as a lifelong process of discernment and growth based on personal experience, over and against prevailing models of education aimed at information intake and securing jobs.4
Gray bases his argument on Saint Ignatius’s experience as the ground of Jesuit education. We know that Saint Ignatius spent 11 years of formal education in the years following his religious conversion at Loyola and divine illuminations in Manresa. This period of Ignatius’s formal education provided him with a well-grounded knowledge in humanities, philosophy, and theology. Subsequent generations of Jesuits after Ignatius developed the Ratio Studiorum, or the program of study, as a guide for structuring formation for Jesuits and lay students at Jesuit schools based on the educational program then in use at the University of Paris.
The posthumous development of this course of study, integrating Ignatius’s various life experiences, too often directs us to his formal studies so that we fail to appreciate the weight accorded to personal experience in Jesuit education. “Education for Ignatius,” writes Gray, “antedated those 11 years and persisted until his death.”5 If we are engaged directly in Jesuit education, we can misremember the powerful influence personal experience retains in this inspired tradition of formation. Gray encourages us to remember well the formative power of personal experience that we always have with us, before and beyond structures of formal education, hence the elevation of education to a lifelong process of discerning and exploring our passions.
Personal experience thus serves as the point of departure in Jesuit education and the springboard for understanding because it is ever and always with us. The term “experience”, from an Ignatian and Jesuit perspective, encompasses both human experiences and divine experiences that generate deeper levels of affectivity.6 To be affected is to be moved. Even poetry and music are often associated with being moved by another; think of the “Muse” that inspires ancient poets. The terminology of human passions have linguistic roots (for English) in what is happening to us, what we suffer; think of the “passion” of Good Friday.
Our affectivity is similar insofar as “emotions” or “feelings” arise in us (they are happening) and remain tied to desires. To become familiar with how ever deeper levels of affectivity are connected to desire, we need to look closely at what is happening within so that we can better understand the driving forces of our lives. Think of the following: If desire involves responding to gifts of invitation from God hidden in our desires, then perhaps we can respond to those desires with a commitment to change the world for the better.
Ignatian spirituality helps us find where God is subtly working in our interiority so that personal commitment to God’s grace is grounded in those places of joy generating our passions for life. Education thus begins in experiencing the deeper level of human passions so that we are acutely aware of the enlivening gift they are for engaging the reality of our world with care-filled delight. The second step in education involves an understanding that requires discernment. If paying attention to the deeper experiences so as to become aware of our authentic desires is the first step in education, discernment between authentic and inauthentic desires comes as the next natural step.
We understand the two different types of desire by the fruits they produce. An authentic desire will often generate a sense of peace, calmness, and joy about oneself, others, and the world, because it is the desire that comes from a deeper self. The deeper self is the one in whom desire is rooted and connected with an identity to be tethered to God’s calling (that is the primary sense of vocation in Ignatian tradition).
An inauthentic desire, on the other hand, is uprooted from the deeper self, triggered by illusory projections of oneself, often influenced by cultural and social expectations. Jesuit education aims to provide students a broad knowledge by reading and examining classic texts in humanities, philosophy, and theology and to correlate them to our contemporary context. In doing so, the students’ personal experience becomes refined, well-articulated, and informed by the wealth of human wisdom.
We journey together through lives and ideas contained in a treasury of human experiences untraveled by us, but which we compare and contrast with how we are living so that perhaps we can count the cost of the decisions before us. The result is that students can distinguish between authentic desires and inauthentic desires and judge how best to follow the former while working on eliminating the latter. The stories and voices our students meet in education become companions on the way, indirectly teaching them how to distinguish between authentic and inauthentic desires.
Finally, all authentic spirituality has one aim: the betterment of others. Rooted in Ignatius’s desire to save souls, which essentially means to accompany others in their life’s struggles and experiences through words of consolation and acts of charity, Jesuit education aims at the service of others. This is its final goal. Human desire finds its fulfillment in action. For education, human desire fulfilled in action is manifested concretely in the mutual sharing of knowledge. Our experiences and desires are discerned and evaluated with an aim toward the betterment of humanity. This other-centered spirituality lies at the foundation of Jesuit education and grounds its understanding of how faith and justice are ever interlocked.
At the Last Supper before he was arrested, trialed, and killed by way of the cross, Jesus washed the disciples’ feet and taught them to do the same for each other ( John 13:12–20). Jesus modeled for the disciples a way of life in service of others whereby the one who serves and the one who is served are treated with equal status. Rather than relating as masters and subjects, they are companions on the journey of life, and their dignity is respected and protected as equals.
Jesuit education is inspired by this understanding of faith in God’s given dignity and the desire to protect, not only one’s own, but primarily that of the others whose dignity has been violated. It is difficult work to figure out one’s own desire, let alone the desires of others. We can be assured, however, that the process of getting in touch with our deepest desires through regular practices can ready us to be attentive to how desires are manifested in those for whom we care.
The fancy-sounding Latin of cura personalis is an ever-present task for us because the types of attentive care required at each moment change subtly, sometimes wildly, even if the end of desire remains unchanging. To hear the cry of the poor, for example, requires attentive listening. Just as God calls to the human heart through churning desires, so too do our fellow companions on the way call to us from within their own roiled lives, longing for responses of mutual care.
We are all made in the image and likeness of this God, calling us to be in loving relationship that responds to the needs of the world. There is thus an interconnectedness between faith and justice that Jesuit education fosters because the primary aim is the service of others as we journey in companionship toward union with God. Together, we can get caught up in the wake of grace, pulling us with divine energy into greater joy.
Let us remember that joy-filled accompaniment of this kind is rooted in and articulated from one’s own experiences of God’s given grace that one continually explores and discovers anew through a lifelong process of learning.
1. Edward Kinerk, S.J., “Eliciting Great Desires: Their Place in the Spirituality of the Society of Jesus,” in Studies in the Spirituality
of Jesuits (November 1984), 6.
2. Edward Kinerk, S.J., “Eliciting Great Desires,” 1–2.
3. The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius, translated by George E. Ganss (Saint Louis: The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1992), 122.
Hereafter, text from the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius will be cited as SpEx followed by a paragraph number.
4. Howard Gray, “The experience of Ignatius Loyola: Background to Jesuit Education,” in The Jesuit Ratio Studiorum, 400th
Anniversary Perspectives, edited by Vincent J. Duminuco, S.J. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), 2.
5. Howard Gray, “The experience of Ignatius Loyola: Background to Jesuit Education,” 2.
6. David Lonsdale, “Discernment of Spirits,” in A Jesuit Education Reader, edited by George W. Traub, S.J. (Chicago: Loyola Press,
2008), 179.
JOSEPH NGUYEN, S.J., is an assistant professor of systematic theology and Christian spirituality in the Theology and Religious Studies Department at the University of San Francisco. He is a Jesuit priest of the U.S. West Province of the Society of Jesus. His research focuses on Christian spirituality with an emphasis on Ignatian spirituality and Buddhist-Christian dialogue. His doctoral dissertation from the Jesuit School of Theology of Santa Clara University focused on the theology of divine union in Maximus the Confessor and Ignatius of Loyola. His recent book, Christian Contemplation: Theological Foundations and Contemporary Practice, explores Christian contemplation from the point of view of Ignatian spirituality.
