In Junior High, I played tenor saxophone. The main reason I chose the tenor saxophone (apart from the fact there were too many alto saxophone players already) was saxophones are the instruments of jazz, and I liked jazz. In 7th grade I sat next to another tenor sax player who was in the jazz band, we talked about it, and he showed me some of the music they played and told me he had a solo in the upcoming concert. He played a little something and it looked so easy, but when I tried to imitate him I sounded terrible. He played music and I made weird random sounds. This really discouraged me in pursuing my interest in jazz. It was much harder than I imagined, inexplicably so.
My experience with jazz parallels my experience with faith. I know what it’s supposed to look like and sound like because I have seen other people live it, but when I try to imitate them my experience seems totally different. They’re making the equivalent of spiritual music while I’m making weird random sounds. Nowhere has this been more than the case than with prayer.
Growing up in an evangelically oriented Mennonite tradition, prayer was supposed to be (1) “from the heart” and (2) extemporaneous, unscripted. While I recall sermons, Bible studies, and Sunday school lessons about prayer, what I mostly recall is I wasn’t doing it enough, I was probably doing it wrong, and that it was inexplicably harder than it seemed. Just like jazz.
In my late 20s, I encountered contemplative prayer and it changed my world. The idea of a scripted, guided prayer including lots of silence and being present in the moment to myself and God’s presence was radical. It ultimately led me to pursue spiritual direction training at a Jesuit university; perhaps an unlikely choice for a cradle Mennonite with undergraduate and graduate degrees from different Mennonite institutions, especially given my nearest Mennonite school offers a spiritual direction training program. At first, I was a little concerned that the Catholic tradition of spiritual direction developed by St. Ignatius of Loyola would fit poorly with my Anabaptist faith, but my concern was ill-founded.
Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556) developed his Spiritual Exercises, the core of the Jesuit spiritual tradition, in the early-mid sixteenth century at the exact same time as Anabaptism began emerging. Ignatius, the radical reformers, and early Anabaptists were all steeped in late medieval piety and all drew on similar threads from within that world, but in novel ways. The late medieval world was seen as divided into distinct parts: heaven and hell; good and evil; light and dark; with earth caught in the middle, and for “medieval people the lines between earth, heaven, and hell were not firmly drawn.”1 Angels, demons, and spiritual powers could move freely between these spheres, influencing people and events on Earth. This resulted in a rise of spiritualism, embodied by early Anabaptists like Caspar Schwenkfeld von Ossig (1487-1561) and Hans Denck (~1500-1527). This rising tide of spiritualism emphasized the importance of the inner life and the direct action of the Holy Spirit within the believer but also faced opposition from traditional ecclesiastical quarters, as well as mainline protestant reformers, as it threatened their authority and established power structures within the church. But it wasn’t only Anabaptists who were influenced by spiritualism, Ignatius’ firm belief that “Creator and creature deal with one another directly” without the need for an intermediary drew charges of heresy from some Catholic authorities as well.2
Despite this opposition, “[b]y the sixteenth century, there had been a decisive shift inward in Christian spirituality.”3 For Anabaptists, the two primary stages of spirituality were: 1) seeking the presence of God in repentance from sin and submission to God’s will, and 2) seeking and dwelling in the presence of God which defined the experience of new birth, a conversion of the heart, without which there could be no new life.4 Yet, early Anabaptist spiritual practices were diverse, for example, they “prayed frequently, fervently and often, but with very few exceptions they prayed informally or in their worship services, unlike the monastic tradition with its regulated program of daily prayer.”5 The Bible featured prominently in shaping the inner life of Anabaptists, but not in the conventionally contemplative mode of the time, rather, learning, memorizing, and internalizing scripture were a means to a practical end: living according to the way of Jesus. However, the one central thread running through all early Anabaptist spirituality is the idea of Gelassenheit, yielding to the will of God in all things. Radical reformer Andreas Karlstadt “argued that grace freed the human will to choose or not to choose salvation [in contrast to Martin Luther’s theology of predestination]…the conquering of sin must take place by means of Gelassenheit or the act of ‘yielding’ one’s will and desires to God’s will.”6 Gelassenheit bears a striking resemblance to the Ignatian concept of indifference, which according to Michael Ivens, SJ, “is an affective space within which the movements of the Spirit can be sensed and things seen in relations to the signs of God’s will, an affective silence making possible an unconditional listening.”7 Indifference is ultimately about recognizing and yielding to God all the desires, thoughts, and impediments that prevent us from following the will of God in all aspects of life.
Where Gelassenheit underpins a more spontaneous Anabaptist spirituality in a critical but general way, indifference belongs to a robust program of spiritual training Ignatius called the ‘spiritual exercises.’ “The purpose of the Exercises is explained as being a conversion of the heart resulting in a new quality or a new direction of life”— a purpose in line with Anabaptist spiritual practice—the Exercises achieve this result through an intense formalized regime of four consecutive weeks of prayer.8 Each of the four weeks has corresponding themes beginning with a consideration and contemplation of sins; followed by meditations on the life of Christ up to and including Palm Sunday in the second week; the third week is dedicated to the Passion of Christ; the final week is filled with meditations on the Resurrection and Ascension. The highly structured and guided meditations and contemplations of the Exercises are a radical departure from the extemporaneous spirituality of early Anabaptism, and an even more radical departure from later Anabaptist traditions which “continued to insist upon the inner work of the Spirit which produces faith, but in contrast to the early movement, the emphasis fell more on the ethical and communal results of the Spirit’s work.”9
It is precisely the highly structured nature of the Exercises that I have found so incredibly valuable as someone from a tradition that has no equivalent and has eschewed anything like it. Jazz improvisation looks effortless but is in fact very difficult to do well precisely because it requires mastery of more basic forms and a deeply internalized understanding of how music works. The Exercises treat prayer like a skill that can be learned, and if not mastered at least we can become more seasoned and familiar with our interior selves and the ways the Holy Spirit is present with us. In practice, the Exercises are quite flexible, adapted by spiritual directors for each person undertaking them, but their general format and spirit give a consistent shape and direction to the experience. For those (like myself) who do not have four full weeks to dedicate to the Exercises in a retreat, the 19th Annotation to the Exercises provides instructions for undertaking them over a prolonged period of time “in daily life.” I undertook the exercises over the course of nearly two years. One of the principal blessings in my experience was practicing an affective grammar to describe my interior life, recognizing and naming the movements of the Holy Spirit beyond the evocative, yet practically unhelpful descriptions of poets and mystics.
Two major terms within this Ignatian spiritual grammar are consolation and desolation. Ignatius gives robust descriptions of each “interior motion” that makes them easily identifiable. Consolation includes every “increase in hope, faith, and love; and every interior joy which calls and attracts one toward heavenly things and to the salvation of one’s soul by bringing it tranquility and peace in its Creator and Lord.”10 (Ignatius note 316). Desolation is the opposite, it includes all things “that move one toward lack of faith and leave one without hope and without love. One is completely listless, tepid, and unhappy, and feels separated from our Creator and Lord” (Ignatius note 317). Ignatius provides additional guidance for how a person should respond to such experiences, what is helpful or unhelpful, what cautions to keep in mind, and how to integrate spiritually high and low experiences constructively into the broader arc of a person’s faith journey.
The considerable duration of the Exercises and their guided nature give plenty of opportunity to contemplate the full range of human experiences prayerfully alongside a spiritual director. I began the first week of the Exercises (contemplating my sin, and sin in the world) on January 5th, 2021. In my journal entries from the morning of Jan 6th, I ruminated on Sin’s power to sweep us up without our knowledge or consent; my reflections from Jan 7th are filled with anguished scrawls about what I witnessed the previous afternoon. My anger is palpable in those pages, but I wrote with an awareness of the strength of my emotions and the framing of the Exercises changed the key of my anger from aimless fury to introspection and confession for my participation in a world where certain people “deserve” to be violent and other people “deserve” to die. Those were strange days to be a Canadian pastoring a congregation in Ohio. How should I, a literal foreigner and member of a peace church respond? It was clear on that day that our individual spirituality does not exist independently of our politics; the way we organize ourselves collectively and distribute power. Despite the highly individual nature of the Spiritual Exercises (and of American culture), and the desire for personal spiritual growth, I was forcefully reminded that our faith is about living the way of Jesus together; a way that rejects all attempts to seize power and control, even (especially) in the name of God. The way of Jesus is the way of the Cross, a self-emptying way that includes our death, not the death of our political enemies. It was also a reminder that so often Mennonites and other Anabaptist traditions have internalized a quiet moral superiority as a people apart, distinct from the rest of the populace when truthfully we are as fully ensnared in the evils that plague our world and desperately need to recognize the seeds of sin and violence allowed to germinate among us.
Throughout that week in January in particular and the further mediations of the first week that followed, a core tenet of Ignatian spirituality became very apparent to me: our prayers are fashioned from the raw material of everything in our daily lives, carried by the momentum of our traditions and communities of faith. Nothing about our emotional responses to the news, our memories of guilt and shame, our hidden thoughts, and the images of ourselves and God we lug around like overstuffed suitcases everywhere we go needs to be held back from God. Confession is not just about acknowledging sin, but recognizing all everything we are and laying it before God. God can speak to us and be present in all of it if we can learn to recognize God’s presence.
Almost two years later in early October 2021 as I was finishing the third week, having spent more than a month contemplating the final hours of Christ’s life I received word that my father, after several months of extremely optimistic results of chemotherapy treatment for his stage 4 cancer, had suddenly been admitted to palliative care. The treatment was no longer effective and no longer an option. As I sat by the bedside of my dying father the months I had spent contemplating the death of Christ began to seem like a grace-filled preparation for this time. It did not spare me my grief or any of the gamut of emotions that surged within me, but I felt more aware of them and prepared to find God in the middle of it all. My heart was fine-tuned to feel grief yet also be present to the peace of Christ which surpasses understanding.
As a Mennonite, the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius fit into a gap within the theology and practice of my tradition. They granted me a spiritual grammar for my interior life and helped me recognize the presence of the Holy Spirit, helping me discern and live the way of Jesus. The Exercises drew together the disparate parts of my existence: my deepest desires, my highest thoughts, and my hidden self, and helped me to honestly yield to God everything that hinders and helps my spiritual growth. My experience with the Spiritual Exercises has taught me if we can learn to be attentive we will find the presence of God is not far away or hard to find, but already near to us, at work within our hearts.
Alvis Pettker is the pastor of Friendship Mennonite Church in Bedford Heights, Ohio. Born and raised in Canada to Paraguayan Mennonite parents, Alvis practically grew up at the local church. While exploring his faith in high school he “rediscovered” the church as if encountering it for the first time, and came to publicly affirm his faith in Jesus as Lord. Alvis is passionate about the Word of God in all its wonderful intricacy; loves to help people encounter God in the often-neglected portions of scripture. He’s studied theology and ministry at the Canadian Mennonite University and Conrad Grebel University College. In his spare time, Alvis enjoys spending time with his wife, Ruth, running, reading, and building Lego.
- Arnold C. Synder, Following in the Footsteps of Christ (Orbis Books, 2004), 25.
- Michael Ivens S.J., Understanding The Spiritual Exercises. (Gracewing, 1998), 15.
- Arnold C. Synder, Anabaptist History and Theology: Revised Student Edition (Pandora Press, 1997), 37.
- Synder, Following in the Footsteps, 64.
- Ibid, 115.
- Synder, Anabaptist History, 51.
- Ivens, Understanding, 31.
- Ibid, 5.
- Synder, Anabaptist History, 402.
- Ganss, S.J., George E., editor. Ignatius of Loyola: The Spiritual Exercises and Selected Works. Paulist Press, 1991.