Three Ways to Make Decisions.

Ignatius clearly gave the... method of consolations and desolations priority over reasoning...

However, soon after his death his interpreters began to react against the so-called alumbrados, or enlightened ones, mainly in Spain, a loosely-defined movement whose participants fancied themselves enlightened by the Holy Spirit. They appealed to immediate experience of God independently of church institutions.

In reaction, early interpreters of Ignatius emphasized the dangers of private revelations. The reaction not only stressed the safeguards of obedience to church authority (as Ignatius himself had), but also the preeminence of reason in discernment.

In this way, contrary to Ignatius's teaching, the rational method for the time of tranquility came to be considered a safer and more secure path than the second-time method based on affective movements. The preference for the way of reason over the way of affect became enshrined in the Jesuits' Official Directory of 1599, which thereafter guided the presentation of the Ignatian Exercises. (Brackley, 151)

In this chapter, Brackley lays out Ignatius' "three ways to make decisions." These "ways" or "times" amount roughly to times of certainty, times of great emotion, and times of careful reasoning. (This is a little oversimplified, but it will do for our purposes - do read Brackley's chapter if you'd like more detail!)

What might surprise us is that Ignatius considered the second time, the time of great emotion - or more precisely the time of consolation / desolation - to be an acceptable time of making decisions.

Let's be clear: Ignatius is also quick to counsel against rash and careless decisions. By allowing emotions to come into the picture, he is not endorsing "hotheaded" decision-making.

Neither, however, is he endorsing decision-making through icily pristine reasoning. Rather, he suggests that sometimes our emotions do mean something important. God is present in our emotions, too, and paying attention to them can help us notice what is life-giving and what is life-draining. I imagine this is true for both individuals and communities of faith.

Some part of me thinks this may not be so surprising for us in 2010. My sense is that in the last several generations we have begun a move beyond the Enlightenment, beyond the idea that reason is our road to personal and social perfection. Reason's child, technology, continues to re-make our world over and over, often with wondrous, life-serving results in the fields of health and communication. But we've also realized, in part from a series of tragic world events, that we need more than what reason can achieve to fully satisfy our lives.

It's no wonder, then, that our theology - which once left emotion out of the picture as soundly as any science lab - has begun to recover a sense of the holiness of what we feel. Sifting through our emotions can be a minefield, to be sure, but pretending that God isn't at all present in them is just as dangerous a game.

What do you think? Does God sometimes work through our emotions? And if so, what does it mean about how we should attend to those emotions?