Ignatian contemplation

Ignatian contemplation is a method of imaginative prayer developed by Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, and set out in his "Spiritual Exercises" of the sixteenth century. In sharp contrast to the wordless, imageless prayer of the apophatic tradition, it works precisely through the senses and the imagination: the one praying takes a scene from the Gospels, the nativity, a healing, the Last Supper, the crucifixion, and enters it imaginatively, constructing the place in detail, seeing the persons, hearing their words, noticing the smells and textures, and taking a part in the event as though present. This "composition of place" is meant to make the sacred history immediate and personal, so that the pray-er encounters Christ not as a figure in a text but as a living presence to be met.

The aim is not fantasy for its own sake but a deepened relationship and a movement of the heart. Ignatius directs the one praying to notice the interior responses the scene evokes and to draw from them a personal conversation with Christ, ending each period of prayer in direct address as one friend speaks to another.

Ignatian contemplation is one component of the "Spiritual Exercises," a structured programme of prayer, meditation and self-examination designed to be made over roughly thirty days in retreat, or spread over a longer period in daily life, under the guidance of a director. The full course leads the retreatant through the reality of sin, the life of Christ, his passion, and his resurrection, using both discursive meditation and this imaginative contemplation to bring about conversion and a free choice for God.

Woven through the Exercises is Ignatius's distinctive teaching on the discernment of spirits, the art of attending to the interior movements of consolation and desolation that arise in prayer, and learning to tell those that draw one toward God from those that lead away. This attentiveness to inner experience as a guide to decision has made Ignatian spirituality a lasting resource far beyond the Jesuit order, and its imaginative, sense-rich method stands as the great Western counterpart to the visualisation practices found in other contemplative traditions, arrived at independently and framed wholly within the Christian encounter with the Gospel.