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The Spiritual Exercises as a Tool for Conversion
Conversion starts by moving from sin to virtue, but it is much more than that. The First Week of the Exercises seeks basic conversion and provides reflection on the meaning of personal and social sinfulness and the help of God’s merciful grace to overcome same. The Second and Third Weeks elevate the mind and the vision so that the first conversion may move toward a deeper conversion, namely, a new perspective and understanding about God, humanity, and self. Bernard J. F. Lonergan says: A Conversion is a restructuring of consciousness which transforms the subject and his/her world.@ The restructuring of consciousness is to see everything anew from the perspective of the Gospel, something which can be very challenging to the ideologies and philosophies of the secular world. The secular philosophy may say, “Destroy your enemies”, but the Gospel says “Love your enemies.” This means understanding those opposed to us in a totally different way from the way enemies are usually thought of, e.g. Scripture speaks about those who close their minds to conversion: 'You shall indeed hear but not understand you shall indeed look but never see. 15 Gross is the heart of this people, they will hardly hear with their ears, they have closed their eyes, lest they see with their eyes and hear with their ears and understand with their heart and be converted. Matt. 13:14 There are many obstacles to conversion. Persons with an obtuse spirit place many obstacles to real conversion. A person with an obtuse spirit would not be able to see other human beings as God sees them: the cultural milieu and religious prejudices would determine how they would be perceived and judged: Gentiles were unclean, foreigners were unwelcome, lepers were to be shunned, and those who suffer must be guilty of some horrible secret sin. Jesus gets close to such people and sees them as children of God, vulnerable and lovable, worthy of his attention, worthy of the sacrifice of his very life. The Spiritual Exercise of the Second Week, by which we contemplate the Life of Jesus and his teachings, enable us to acquire that perspective not just intellectually, but more importantly, down in our guts, so that we can never again be swayed by false political, economic, or religious ideologies. The Spiritual Exercises of the Third Week show us how dangerous a new perspective can be to us and, for example, to a prophetic church which dares speak out against abuses and injustices and structural sins as Jesus did. Yet these Exercises call for courage to follow after Christ Crucified. One dynamic of the Spiritual Exercises is to help the individual and the community of believers acquires a new self-definition. Bernard Lonergan talks about community being the achievement of common meaning. The Experience of the Lord Jesus and the understanding of the disciples about that experience was certainly the common meaning which first welded them together. But it was not enough. Communities change as their meanings change, is the reality which illustrates what happens in Chapter 10 of Acts. There are new experiences which demand new attentiveness both to the experiences of others and to their own experiences in order to come to new understanding and a radically new self definition. The issue of identity is a serious one. Ben F. Meyer in The Early Christians: Their World Mission and Self-Discovery, says the following: ....a pivotal moment in the history of early Christianity -- the launching of the world mission...was a bold and fateful act; bold in the sovereign proclamation that "there is no longer 'Jew' and 'Greek'" (Gal. 3:28), fateful in that this abruptly declared abolition of old identities ultimately mean an end to toleration within Israel of the offending -- the traitorous -- sect. The world mission was therefore much more than an act of expansion. It set the stage for what in effect be the migration of Christianity from one world to another. It thus not only entailed an effort to bring the gospel into the Greek field of vision, but also generated a change in Christianity itself from its first self -understanding as a vanguard of Israel to its second self -understanding as humanity reborn of the last Adam -- a new mankind. (p. 13) This second type of conversion goes beyond moving from sin to virtue. It is moving from human-limited perspective to God-expansive perspective, and it means acquiring a new self-definition in the form that St. Paul writes about in Romans 12:
Romans 12:9-21 (NAB)
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