Can the Spiritual Exercises Help Fight Racism?
A Review of
Praying for Freedom: Racism and Ignatian Spirituality in America
Laurie Cassidy, Editor
Paperback: Liturgical Press, 2024
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Reviewed by Maria Henderson
Life-changing. That is what I heard from a few friends who had gone through St. Ignatias’s book The Spiritual Exercises. The way they talked about discernment and desire made me want to make this pilgrimage, too. Indeed, the experience of the nine-month “retreat in daily life” was life-changing, so much so that a few years later I trained to share this gift with others. Going back through my own experience with the Ignatian exercises and digging deeper into this unique exploration of Christian spirituality, I began to understand something of the richness embedded in Ignatius’s manual of meditations and prayers aimed at freeing us from attachments and helping us to discern God’s will. Between my own growing awareness of racial justice issues and the experience of accompanying a person of color through the exercises, I began to sense there were untapped resources in this 500-year-old spiritual classic that might speak uniquely to the longing many of us feel for a more just and equitable society. Praying for Freedom: Racism and Ignatian Spirituality in America explores those resources and reimagines the way that Ignatian exercises can be part of the formation of people who work against racism.
The book takes up the question posed by Jesuit leaders at their last general congregation gathering: Why don’t the exercises change us as deeply as we would hope? The book attempts to answer that question by situating us firmly in the context of America’s history of colonization and enslavement, offering an approach to Ignatian spirituality “which confronts and resists white supremacy,” while also centering the experiences of people of color “in order to more deeply understand the paschal mystery of this land” (5). The result is a collection of essays that invite readers to reflect seriously on the degree to which racism in all its overt and covert manifestations works against our formation into Christ-likeness and to imagine how the dynamics of The Spiritual Exercises, and the way they root us in the message of the Gospel, might form us in new ways. While clearly written by individuals deeply committed to Jesuit institutions and Ignatian practices, and often reflecting the particular circumstances of the Catholic church in America, the volume offers a wide range of insights that would be helpful to anyone with at least a cursory familiarity with The Spiritual Exercises. I found a “holy envy” – to borrow Barbara Brown Taylor’s phrase – rising up in me as I read repeated references to Catholic social teaching and the words of Pope Francis, wishing that the evangelical tradition that has nurtured me had such a theologically grounded commitment to pursuing social justice as part of the Gospel. The specific contours of Jesuit slaveholding and the challenges faced by Black Catholics easily find resonances in the wider American church.
The book begins with Andrew Prevot’s overview of Ignatius’s exercises, based on his experience with them as a Black man, drawing on the insights of Black theology to deepen his understanding of a concept like “indifference,” which Ignatius defines as not putting our own concerns above doing God’s will. Prevot refuses to be indifferent to the plight of poor Black neighborhoods, and finds a model of indifference in the civil rights activists, who were willing to “risk their possessions, social standing, and even health for the sake of doing what God willed” (31). Ken Holman confronts resistance to honest conversations about the Jesuits’ history of slave holding in the context of an archeological dig at the site of one of their plantations. He leans into the first week of the exercises, in which we are urged to look hard at our own history of sin in order to discover God’s mercy. The heart of Ignatian spirituality, and the part that might be most familiar to those who have not delved deeply into Ignatian exercises, is the use of imagination to put ourselves into familiar stories. In an essay on this “composition of place,” Alex Milkulich considers how this imaginative engagement brings together individual history, including one’s particular social and historical setting, with the salvation history being contemplated.
The essays in the longer middle section, which roughly follow the progression of The Spiritual Exercises, press hard into this intersection of setting and prayer. Two of the most powerful essays take up the First Week’s confrontation with sin, and name white supremacy as a “disordered affection.” Jeannine Hill Fletcher translates Ignatius’s instructions to lay out a “court record of my sins” from the purely individual to detailed examination and confession of one’s complicity in white supremacy in thought and deed, encouraging us to ask how the places we have lived were taken from their indigenous inhabitants and how institutions we have been part of have perpetuated unjust structures. Christopher Pramuk takes up the colloquy with Christ on the Cross, “colloquy” being an Ignatian word for an intimate conversation. He counters the amnesia of white supremacy by remembering the details of the deaths of Elijah McClain, Sandra Bland and George Floyd, adding a question to those prescribed at the end of the prayer: “What have I done for Christ? What am I doing for Christ? What shall I do for Christ?” That question is, “What am I doing to take the crucified people down from the cross?” (112) Never hesitating to confront us with the sufferings of Black and Brown people in our midst, the authors in this volume keep drawing us back to the wonder of grace and God’s solidarity with the most broken and distorted parts of human experience. Bringing our whole selves into this kind of prayer, including our emotions and imagination, reveals the exercises as “a powerful school for empathy, nurturing our capacity and willingness (i.e., our freedom) … to place ourselves inside the life-worlds of others”(115).
The Spiritual Exercises have long been used as a locus of discernment, based on Ignatius’s exposition of rules for identifying and responding to interior movements of consolation and desolation. Marilyn Nash takes up this tradition with a critical eye to the value placed on comfort in white culture, asking whether we have confused comfort with consolation. “Those of us who are closest to power by role, identity, or sphere of influence could very well experience consolation (God’s will) much more like a troubling of the waters, a stretching of the heart, invitations to discomfort and sacrifice” (170). There is much in this book that functions as a “troubling of the waters,” reminding us of painful realities and undeniable facts of history, drawing us again and again back to the life and death and resurrection of Jesus, and the costly freedom he brings to his followers.
The trope of “I don’t see color” receives a thoughtful treatment in Patrick Saint-Jean’s essay, “Seeing Bodies.” Drawing on racial theorist Franz Fanon and theological concepts such as the Body of Christ, Saint-Jean says, “Ignatius guides us firmly away from the error of clothing ourselves in the invisibility of a mysticism that is not tangibly embodied” (188). Far from the white gaze that renders people of color invisible, Ignatius invites a way of seeing such that “when we see others, we see both their physical reality and we see the presence of the divine” (190). The answer to racism is an embodied spirituality that recognizes God’s presence both in ourselves and in the racial other.
Scattered among these deeply personal and also rigorously scholarly pieces are a number of testimonies and applications to specific situations. The book ends with a reflection on the legacy of Catholic boarding schools where Native Americans were stripped of their languages and cultural heritage. Maka Black Elk invites the reader into the healing journey with three questions that echo those of the first week’s colloquy: “Ask yourself, do I want to heal, do I believe healing is possible, and am I worthy of healing?” (225). These are good questions for anyone longing to heal America’s racial injustices, for our own liberation from the attachments and fears we carry around race, and for the healing of the wounded body of Christ.

Maria Henderson
Maria L. Henderson is a writer and spiritual director based in Santa Barbara, California. She is trained to lead others through the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises and is currently working on a D.Min. focusing on the spiritual formation of White Christians for the work of pursuing racial justice. She writes at mariahenderson.substack.com
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