pathways, SEPTEMBER 2007
International visitor Fr Monty Williams SJ delivered the second Faber lecture on the topic, The Stories We Live By - Beholding the World With God, at Holy Spirit Church, Auchenflower, on Friday, August 31.
"For those who also attended the launch lecture at ACU Banyo in 2006, it gave them a splendid follow-on to Dr Richard Leonard's talk on Finding God in the Dark: The Spiritual Exercises and the Cinema," Fr Gleeson said.
"It is hoped that we can continue to explore in the annual Faber Lectures the theme of the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius Loyola through the lens of contemporary culture."
Delivery of the Faber Lecture was one of the first events on the itinerary of a two-month Australian tour by Fr Williams who is Professor of Spiritual Theology at Regis College, Toronto.
A much published author on literature and spiritual direction, he is known for his innovative exploration of Ignatian spirituality and its value in helping people understand contemporary culture. He is co-author of Finding God in the Dark: Taking the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius to the Movies.
According to Fr Williams
(pictured left, on retreat at Ormiston), people live out of their experience.
"That experience is more than the histories we make of it. That experience makes us, and in our attempt to understand ourselves we create histories which both reflect our experience and turn our eyes away from it.
"Ignatius was aware of this, and the First Week of his Exercises is a process of deconstructing those appropriated histories to situate us in the larger story of God's constant and abiding love that is the continuing Incarnation.
"We can never step outside of story, and this presentation is an attempt to look at the stories we live by and the experiences that help to form them.
"For this I draw on different religious traditions, literature, contemporary cultural theory, psychology, and the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius," he said.
"This presentation is also a story. It is a story that emerges from the experiences that have shaped my life.
"From Buddhism I take the notion of impermanence, basically that no story covers all of reality; from Romanticism, an exploration of the nature of consciousness; from the spiritual direction that is part of my Jesuit mission, an awareness of the stories people live by as spiritual mythologies.
"It is these stories that I am privileged to hear which show me the truth of William Blake's (1750 - 1820) profound awareness that the imagination creates the real or, as Wallace Stevens would assert in his later poems, that the imagined is the real.
"Out of that insight, I was able to explore contemporary cultural theory and analysis and to realize the importance of narrative in questions of subjectivity. Narrative determines what we see. As Blake says, 'We see through our eyes, not with our eyes.'
"We see through vision and vision creates perception. Perception is already interpretation.
"Ignatius in his Exercises is interested in how reality is created, interpreted, transformed. Ignatius was interested in conversion, not in some crude sense, but in providing means by which people could come to a spiritual freedom through a lived intimacy with God. His Spiritual Exercises provide a text, and a narrative, to enter into that intimacy.
"This presentation weaves these different areas on interest together ... "
Throughout his presentation of the Faber Lecture, Fr Williams used film clips from Children of Men to illustrate various points.
Much of the presentation was centred on the Incarnation contemplation of the Spiritual Exercises: "The Incarnation contemplation initiates us, quite self-consciously into that ever-deepening journey into love, so that we become one with the Beloved, and not only share the Beloved's life and mission, but, in doing so, become the continuing manifestation of the Word-Made-Flesh in the world today."
He concluded: "What the Incarnation contemplation offers us is a re-imagined world:
instead of security, we are offered a living relationship with God;
rather than a leader, we are given the Spirit - that relationship between Father and Son;
instead of the ghettos based on race, religion, class, or nation, we are offered the companionship of those who share that spirit - regardless of race, religion, class, or nation;
instead of the soft illusions of liberty, we are offered the hard road to freedom where no-one is free until all are free;
and the ongoing constructions, de-constructions, and re-constructions of our lives are found not in any system but in an lived intimacy with the Christ out of which flows love and from that love a service of God in the world. That service, fragile, broken, is an ark. It carries the human project."
Throughout his Australian visit, Fr Williams - Monty - will lead several eight-day retreats and give day workshops:
The Stories We Live By and
Narrative Strategies in the Exercises in Sydney and Melbourne. (His Brisbane visit will be finished by the time this article is posted.) Bookings are essential. For details, visit the
Centres of Ignatian Spirituality website.
photographs: courtesy of Steve Cunningham, a member of the Faber Centre of Ignation Spirituality team
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