A few years ago, my family changed parishes; we moved from a large diocesan parish to a Jesuit-run church that ministers to the campus community at the University of Michigan. One of the pleasant surprises that came from this change was my introduction to Ignatian contemplation. Occasionally, our priest will skip the normal homily and instead lead the congregation in an act of Ignatian imagination.
Following the model set forth in the Spiritual Exercises, we are asked to listen again to the Gospel reading and to imagine ourselves into the scene. The priest tells us, “Use your senses — what does it sound and smell like there in first century Galilee? What do Jesus and his disciples look like? How do people speak to Jesus, and how does he respond to them? Where are you in this scene? Are you one of the people in the crowd? One of Christ’s followers?” Through this guided meditation we are invited to immerse ourselves in the story, and to allow our imaginations to lead us, so that we come to know Jesus in a new, more immediate way.
I grew up in diocesan parishes, and until a few years ago had never really had much experience with Jesuit spirituality, so this kind of imaginative approach to the Gospels felt new and exciting to me. As I’ve gotten more involved in the Jesuit Media Lab, I came to learn that this way of approaching the Gospels is a common, even foundational, aspect of Ignatian spirituality — the Media Lab even has a whole series called “Imagining the Gospel,” which builds on this practice. As a person whose favorite hobby is reading, I find this way of approaching the Gospels to be a natural fit. I am constantly imagining myself into the stories I read, and find my interior life all the richer for it; so applying this same technique, in a more intentional way, to the Bible makes perfect sense.
But I am also a literary scholar, and so I regularly apply critical frameworks to help interpret and understand the texts that I am studying. There is a difference between reading for pleasure and trying to understand the depths and complexity of a work of literature — and the various forces that helped shape its production. Although it is not my field of expertise, there are, of course, many scholars who have applied these same approaches to understanding the Bible as a text written by specific people in a specific place for a specific purpose. While there are times when I can read a Bible passage and easily enter into the story imaginatively, there are also times when I can’t shut off the more scholarly part of my brain, and I find myself asking critical questions about composition and audience. I then find myself wondering if this critical stance is a flaw, connected to intellectual pride, that I need to overcome.
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In a recent essay in Defector, the literary scholar David Hollingshead argues that “cultural consumers can be grouped into two broad categories: Primary Source People and Secondary Source People. The former are the book lovers, cinephiles, archive perusers and history buffs who grew to love their areas of study because of the specific objects that constitute the field. … Secondary Source People … prioritiz[e] the conversations, contexts and conflicts surrounding the works above and beyond the works themselves.” He goes on to say that academics and producers of literary criticism are, for the most part, Secondary Source People. “For them,” he writes, “the question of a text’s beauty or capacity to immerse is less important than how its ideas expand or contract as we engage with them.”
Hollingshead acknowledges that this primary versus secondary source dichotomy is “crude, filled with exceptions and only helpful up to a point,” but I still find it to be a useful framework for thinking about how I engage with the things I read. As a person who is usually juggling a few novels at once, there is certainly a part of me that identifies as a Primary Source Person; I love getting lost in a good book, and would much rather be reading a novel than engaging in the discourse about it. But I also love teaching (and writing about) stories, and there is very little that brings me the kind of intellectual satisfaction that comes about when a text reveals its myriad meanings as it is being discussed in the classroom, or explicated in a well-written scholarly essay. And I must admit that while there are certain types of books that I enjoy more when I know next to nothing about their background or the ongoing conversations about them, I do tend to have a deeper, richer reading experience when I engage with some level of secondary source context for a given work.
There is something immediate and beautiful in the Ignatian method of using our imagination to put ourselves into the Gospel story and experiencing Christ directly in this way. And there is something equally beautiful and rich about applying a level of scholarship to the Bible narratives, in order to give a level of added depth to this imaginative approach.
While reading Hollingshead’s essay, I found myself thinking about this primary versus secondary source schema as it relates to my own engagement with religious texts, particularly the Bible. Perhaps one reason Ignatian contemplation resonates with me so profoundly is that it is a pure primary source approach — an unmediated immersion in the source text. When I imaginatively inhabit a familiar Gospel narrative, I am not thinking about anything except how it feels to actually be part of the story for a change. It foregrounds emotion and feeling over intellectual engagement, which is (generally speaking) something I can use more of in my life.
But this summer, at the Ignatian Creators Summit, I had an experience that helped me realize that I do not need to turn off the intellectual side of my mind to imaginatively inhabit the Gospels. Frequent Jesuit Media Lab contributor Alli Bobzien led us in a new twist on Ignatian contemplation, which led me to see that by bringing secondary sources to bear on the Gospels, we can actually enrich our imaginative experience of them.
During this exercise, we read the Road to Emmaus story (Luke 24:13-35) and were invited to enter into it via the standard practice of Ignatian contemplation. Then Alli provided each of us with a short “research fact,” or brief bit of information gleaned from an expert source about the passage, and then we heard the story again. We were asked to reflect on how this new information helped us to understand the text differently than we had before. Afterward, as we discussed our experiences, it was clear that having these added bits of information helped each of us to hear and experience this very familiar story in a new way.
One “research fact” that sparked a great deal of discussion in the room concerned translation choices. We learned that in the original Greek text, kaiomenē, which is translated simply as “burning” (“Were not our hearts burning within us while he spoke to us on the road…”), is a present passive participle that carries the connotation of an ongoing, gradual warming. This added information about the language helped us to be more aware of the physicality of this experience — that the language choice is not a simple metaphor, but rather a specific choice that captures the disciples’ dawning awareness of who was breaking open the Gospels for them. This fresh insight into the language being used really did help me to think more consciously about the language of the story, which in turn enabled me to imaginatively inhabit it more richly.
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Scholars of the Catholic imagination like to speak about it as a “both/and” worldview — meaning that it seeks to transcend binary oppositions and look for unlikely points of convergence. Alli’s scholarly twist on Ignatian contemplation helped me to bridge the possible gap between the primary and secondary source approaches to the Bible and to see the value in the “both/and” framework instead. There is something immediate and beautiful in the Ignatian method of using our imagination to put ourselves into the Gospel story and experiencing Christ directly in this way. And there is something equally beautiful and rich about applying a level of scholarship to the Bible narratives, in order to give a level of added depth to this imaginative approach.
We live in an age when fewer and fewer people are reading anything at all, and when it is becoming all too easy to outsource one’s thinking and imaginative faculties to a machine. Perhaps, in the not too distant future, the real division will not be between Primary and Secondary Source People, but between people who engage with any sources at all and those who do not. Perhaps we are already there. If so, activities that foster and engage the imagination — like my parish’s practice of leading the congregation in Ignatian contemplation — will become increasingly important.
If we are to imagine this new way forward, we will need to continually employ and hone our imaginations. We will need to read broadly and deeply, and we will need to engage in robust ways with both primary and secondary sources.
Pope Francis, in his letter “On the Role of Literature in Formation,” writes that engaging with literature “teaches us how to look and see, to discern and explore the reality of individuals and situations as a mystery charged with a surplus of meaning that can only be partially understood through categories, explanatory schemes, linear dynamics of causes and effects, means and ends.” (Here, too, we see the Catholic “both/and” worldview at work.) The stories we tell ourselves shape the way we see and understand the world, and we will need to develop robust imaginations to envision a better future.
Because, as Pope Francis also wrote, “the challenge facing the Catholic imagination in our time … is a challenge entrusted to [all artists]: not to ‘explain’ the mystery of Christ, which is ultimately unfathomable, but to enable us to touch him, to feel his closeness, to let us see him as alive and to open our eyes to the beauty of his promises. Because his promises appeal to our imagination: they help us to imagine in a new way our lives, our history and the future of humanity.”
If we are to imagine this new way forward, we will need to continually employ and hone our imaginations. We will need to read broadly and deeply, and we will need to engage in robust ways with both primary and secondary sources. We will need our church to help us become better at being “both/and” people. Fortunately, in the example of St. Ignatius and his Spiritual Exercises, the Catholic Church already has an excellent foundation in place for just this sort of development.