Exploring aspects of Ignatian tradition

Channelling the Inner Fire:Ignatian Spirituality in 15 points by Brendan McManus SJ (Messenger Publications, €4.95/£4.50)

The Ignatian Guide to Forgiveness: Ten steps to healing by Marina Berzins McCoy (Messenger Publications, €12.99)

These are two further publications relating to the celebration around the world this year of the 500th anniversary of his wound at the battle of Pamplona that led eventually to his creation of the Society of Jesus and the insights of Ignatian spirituality.

They explore very different aspect of belief, but will be found of great interest to a wide readership. Both are well worth reading for their different approaches.

Brendan McManus may already be familiar to readers from his earlier books. Formerly a farmer and a computer expert (a startling conjunction) before becoming a Jesuit.

Seed

These previous lives may have taught him the need for planting good seed to achieve a harvest, and to make information clear across a communications system, or indeed across a religious community.

This booklet is a sort of packet of 15 seeds, which though small may a produce a brilliant crop in the end. To introduce his readers to the role that faith and religious belief can play in people’s lives, he lays out these essentials of the Ignation vision in 15 short pages, little more than a long paragraph to a page. But this compression helps to make it all clear, from the first proposition: God is found more easily within than without.

I have always been a great believer in the effectiveness of the short pamphlet: my shelves are still littered with copies of now ancient Catholic Truth Society publications from the last century. This booklet, in its brilliant compression of a creed, recreates their simple but effective manner, though in a rather smarter jacket than was formerly the case.

Religious writers often forget that most people have not been able to devote years and years to study. Life makes demands of them. To open up aspects of spirituality to them there must first be some baby steps. Here are some 15 of them, which will help many of those people on a road which may well end (as it did for Fr McManus) on the experience of the Camino.

Forgiveness

In contrast, Marina McCoy is a professor of history at Boston College. A theme of the book is forgiveness and healing. She quotes another writer that “there is a fence between the forgiveness of hurt and total healing of a hurt.” My mind at this point moved off, I am afraid, to thinking about President Vladimir Putin and forgiveness for his trespasses against others. Many will surely have a difficult moral question. My thought was that hating him will get us nowhere. He is a damaged person, but then so are we all one way or another.

Mr Putin’s life has always been a quest for power, and not a search through experience for knowledge. He is a professional spy who has failed to uncover the real secret heart of things – the hidden truth of things.

But as she tells us, despite all that happens, we can still arrive at a place of forgiveness. Let us hope that we can in the not too distant future.