What the Rooms of St. Ignatius are Teaching Me.

Brother Pozzo's Fresco at the entrace to the rooms to Ignatius to the left.

Have you ever had the moment, joyfully, when you have felt like its time to get back to something more basic, more rudimentary about who you are to remember where God’s grace has been?

I think that’s me right now.

Now don’t get me wrong, my life is great, and I am grateful for the way things are going, but at the same time I think it may be good to get back from time to time to that space that you can remember God calling you from (spiritually and mentally) to reap greater benefit from it.

Now obviously I am not talking about going back to Westerly, Holy Cross, or the Novitiate. (all three places which I have a very deep love for granted.)What I am talking about it perhaps more like this story.

The rooms of St. Ignatius in Rome are obviously considered by many to be a very holy place. This was the space in which he wrote the constitutions, sent Xavier to the East, and governed the Society in its early years. Over time, in order to honor the holiness of the place pilgrims came and left behind gifts, the Society started decorating more and more until some 20 years ago, after nearly 450 years, the rooms would have been unrecognizable to Ignatius. They were baroque in every sense of the word, golden altars, candles everywhere, even a goofy looking mannequin of Ignatius. (In other words every little bit of bad religious quiche that one could imagine)
The society decided to strip down everything that had been built up over the years to get back to the original spirit of those rooms, to their original aggiornamento. Now the rooms are back to something much simpler, much more recognizable to Ignatius himself probably, and people seem to love them more than before. Stripped down from all of the baroque and back to their original simplicity, where people can commune with the spirit of Christ present because of the holy man who lived there.

So it is with me, and I think with all of us as we walk down the path of life in Christ. Occasionally we need to admit that we have gotten too baroque, to flowery, stuffy, and maybe even a little full of ourselves. Its then we have to go back to that moment when we really first heard the call of Christ to “come follow me” and began to do it. Obviously, as Catholics we have confession, and I have been faithful to that, but moreso sometimes its good to go back and remember what it is that got us here in the first place, to let ourselves become more and more like that Child in order to enter the kingdom more readily. Remembering those first moment of our walk with Christ I think fill us with gratitude, can overwhelm us with joy, and reinforce us wherever we are in our spiritual life. Obviously not to deny how far I have come and how I have grown (no one wants the current general to move back into those few rooms and govern 20,000 men and the world’s largest single religious order from there) but simply to be able to remember, reclaim, and marvel at how God’s grace continues to move in our lives, that’s not such a bad thing. So in these last days of lent, I am stripping away all of my baroque outwards show and pomp and getting back to the bare walls underneath, that bear a far greater story than the decorations which cover them.