Fruitful Muse #6

Soft eyes.

(27.12.23)

In his famous spiritual manual,

The Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius Loyola includes several ‘additions’ to his instructions on prayer. The third of these, a small line, easily missed, has grown into a practice of great significance for those drawn into this tradition. In short, Ignatius encourages the person who prays to begin by pausing to consider with the imagination and the intellect, the way that they are being gazed upon or seen by a loving God. One Ignatian writer, Robert Marsh (2004) has described this action of prayer as a practice of : ‘looking at God looking at you’. I enjoy considering the actual words of Ignatius in the traditional language:

Third addition: A step or two before the place where I have to contemplate or meditate, I will put myself standing for the space of an Our Father (the Lord’s prayer), my intellect raised on high, considering how God our Lord is looking at me … and will make a gesture of reverence or humility [75].  

Over the previous two years or so I have been intentionally practising this simple approach to the place and time that I set aside for contemplation (usually in the morning in a quiet, hidden location). Here is what I have noticed: 

  • The act of pausing to consider with my imagination the way that God sees me, somehow protects me from using the contemplative space to rehearse my anxieties or from ruminating on my perceptions of failure

 

  • The act of looking at God – takes me out of the unhelpful negative appraisals of my own psychological mirror

 

  • The Spirit somehow illuminates my attempt to imagine how it is that God sees me at this given moment

 

  • I notice a consistent sense of warmth and delight, a welcome and inclusion, a sense that I can move towards this loving gaze

 

  • As I gaze on the God who is gazing at me – a strange and beautiful peace descends (or does it rise?)

 

  • I feel free to be honest with myself about my strengths and weaknesses, my successes and failures, but without an accompanying feeling of shame or despair, and also without pride or inflation of my own importance

 

  • As I sense the seeing of God, so I see myself more clearly and without the tangles and crazy mirrors

 

  • It’s like a kind of forest bathing, the practice is therapeutic as a result of placing oneself in proximity to a healing source

 I could go on, but what I really want to say is that I’ve reached a conclusion that God only and always looks at me with soft eyes. And as I consider the way that God looks at others and the whole of creation in this way, it makes me become more desiring of sharing in this way of seeing and being. I don’t want to be a hard man. My aspiration is gentleness, to pass on the gift of benevolent and compassionate seeing. This is my desire. And perhaps the revolution that Christ inaugurates and that got the angels, the wise men, Mary and Joseph, Anna and Simeon, so excited and willing to endure hardship just to get a glimpse and to be part of this good news for the whole world, is simply a quiet and hidden awakening of being seen, of sensing the depth and breadth and height of divine affection, and allowing oneself, over many years to becoming subtly converted in the way that we see and feel towards our neighbours.

 

I pray for a softer world, a gentle awakening.

A message from the Author
God’s face lights up when you walk into the room. Really. Can you allow yourself to bask in the warmth of this favour and to believe this truth? You are far more lovable than you think!
Dr Phil Daughtry