07/09/2024
But Christians don’t assent to a set of ideas, we follow a person. The risen Christ whom we know through the Spirit is continuous with the human being Jesus of Nazareth who walked this earth; and if we want to know Christ better, we need to start with the witness to the life and death of Jesus that we find in the Gospels.
These are not objective scholarly biographies in the modern sense. They are written with the clear purpose of communicating the important things that will help the reader or hearer come to know Jesus better; they are filtered through the stories of communities who loved, lost and still yearn for Jesus; and their authors are not dispassionate scholars, but people whose lives have been turned upside down by the Spirit. Knowing something about historical-critical approaches to these texts can actually help us see this more clearly and treat them with more respect, but can also enable us tentatively to draw out the core Jesus characteristics.
Therefore serious academic study of the Gospels should not be neglected.
However, there are (thankfully for some!) other ways to approach these texts that appeal to the imaginative rather than the scholarly human faculties.
The best known of these is found in the spiritual exercises of Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556). This is an approach to the Gospel narratives that Ignatius calls Contemplazio, but we would now term discursive meditation.
It requires the person undergoing the exercises (the ‘exercitant’), after prayerful preparation, to recall the story and then to enter it imaginatively. There is a strong emphasis on visualizing the scene as vividly as possible and embracing the emotions it evokes. For example, on contemplating the birth of Christ: To see the people, that is our Lady, and Joseph and the servant girl, and the child Jesus after his birth.
Making myself into a poor and unworthy little servant, I watch them, and contemplate them, and serve them in their needs as if I were present and with all possible submission and reverence; and afterwards I reflect within myself for some profit.
(Spiritual exercises First day, Second contemplation) The exercitant is instructed to draw from this a response in the form of a prayer directed to the Christ she has encountered in the narrative, with the full expectation of consequent transformation in her life.
This practice of imaginative engagement with the Gospels enables a deep processing of Jesus material (not for nothing did Ignatius name his new brotherhood the Compañia de Jesus). It can be pursued outside of the context of a full 30-day Ignatian retreat, and many people find it highly beneficial to incorporate this kind of meditation into their regular devotions.
-The Psychology of Christian Character Formation-
