The Root of Loving
Using meditation to train our loves.
Ignatius of Loyola was a soldier in the early sixteenth century. … But Ignatius’ fighting ended abruptly when the enemy shot a cannonball that passed between his legs, shattering one and damaging the other.
Ignatius was forced to lie in bed for recuperation. He had in the home where he stayed nothing to read but a book on the life of Jesus and a book on the history of the saints. The bedridden soldier found himself spending time imagining the stories in the books he read. He pictured Christ interacting with his disciples, traveling from city to city, healing and preaching. He heard the confessions of the saints, boldly proclaiming Christ as they were ridiculed or martyred for their faith. Ignatius began to imagine himself undertaking gospel exploits for the kingdom for Christ. He imagined himself preaching; he heard Christ calling him to follow. He saw Christ dying on the cross for him.
By the time he had healed, Ignatius of Loyola was a changed man.[1]
The story of Ignatius of Loyola, who went on to found the Jesuits (you can fault his theology, but not his zeal), is a perfect illustration of the aspect of meditation called the root of loving.
The root of loving is about helping ourselves desire what we’re learning. Not just pondering it or even living by it, but seeing its goodness and beauty in such a way that we thirst for it.
That may sound odd, because we tend to think of love as something outside of our control. But this is pop-Romantic nonsense, and virtually all cultures through human history have known that we can (and should!) train our loves.
The apostle Paul knows it:
For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age, waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works. (Titus 2:11-14, emphasis added)
Paul is confident that God’s grace both saves us and trains us; and it not only trains our actions, so that we become like kids who dutifully choke down a plate of broccoli, but it trains our affections, so that we reject worldly passions and become zealous for a life that pleases him. In other words, it’s possible both to live a different life through the grace of God and to want it as well.
Meditation changed Ignatius from loving the earthly glory of a soldier to loving the heavenly glory of God. While laid up, without “doing anything” externally, God used the root of loving to transform his soul.
The imagination
Our next few pieces will focus on tools and practices for the root of loving. The first, which we can see in Ignatius’ story, is the imagination.
Like “love,” “imagination” has some modern barnacles to scrape off. You may hear it and think “fantasy,” as in “ideas disconnected from reality.” Or you may think it’s something that artists and poets have, but not everyday people. But “imagination is simply the power of the mind to form a mental image; that is, to think in pictures or other sensory representations.”[2] If you can visualize your next vacation or remember the sight, smell, or taste of your last meal, you are using your imagination.
For instance, when David wrote,
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He makes me lie down in green pastures.
He leads me beside still waters.
He restores my soul.
He leads me in paths of righteousness for his name's sake. (Psalm 23:1-3)
he was using his imagination to render truth in color rather than just sketching it in black. He could have just written:
The Lord is my guide and protector. He gives me rest and nourishment. He leads me in ways I should go.
The truth-content would have been the same. But “The Lord is my shepherd” is immortal, while you’ve already forgotten my paraphrase. When we imagine green pastures, still waters, and a shepherd leading a sheep, we love and long for God’s pastoral care.
How do we use our imaginations to help us love what we study?
Make it real
The first way is simply using the imagination to visualize what we read. Ignatius painted mental pictures of Jesus’s life and of the lives of the saints, rendering them in his mind. This wasn’t just a boredom buster: it changed his heart.
We are shaped by what we see, for good and ill. The images that fill our minds also nudge our affections; our desires can be changed, suddenly or subtly, by the pictures in our heads (as anyone who’s ever seen a child with a toy catalog can attest). “Monkey see, monkey do” may be true, but “Monkey see, monkey want” certainly is.
Painting the stories we read with our imagination can help them become more real and more compelling to us.
If you want to put this into practice, take a story from the Gospels that you love and render it as fully as you can with your imagination. Try re-creating …
The environment. How do you imagine the location looking, sounding, and smelling?
The characters. Visualize their clothes, their expressions, their voices.
The actions. What do they do? How do they look, and how do they sound?
Even the non-narrative portions of the Bible are filled with imaginative language, from the prophets (“Let justice roll down like waters”) to the epistles (“You have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God”). If a passage of Scripture invites imagining, paint a picture or “film” a scene of it in your mind.
Make it personal
Ignatius also used his imagination to visualize himself living the Christian life: “[he] began to imagine himself undertaking gospel exploits for the kingdom for Christ. He imagined himself preaching; he heard Christ calling him to follow. He saw Christ dying on the cross for him.”
He used his imagination to put himself into the story of Jesus and the Church, inspiring himself to incarnate the stories he read.
The apostle Paul commends a similar practice when he writes,
Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.
Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. (Colossians 3:2-5)
Paul tells the Colossians to fix their minds on certain truths – using vivid, imagination-provoking images – as motivations for putting to death their inner temptations to sin. The clear implication is that using my imagination to picture my life hidden with Christ in God, safe in the throne room of heaven, and secured for eternal glory, will make it easier to starve those things in my soul that don’t belong there. And it’s not just about imagining those realities as true; it’s imagining them as true for me.
In practice, this might look like:
Imagining myself as different characters in a narrative to help me feel the goodness of God’s grace, the terror of God’s judgment, or other emotions appropriate to the story.
Putting myself into the visual images of biblical poetry: imagining myself being shepherded by God, or imagining my life being hidden with Christ in God, and then imagining how that might make me live differently.
Taking a belief, like God’s sovereignty, or a moral quality like humility and imagining, “What if this were really, radically true in my life? How would I be different?”
[1] From Evan Howard, Praying the Scriptures.
[2] Gene Veith and Matthew Ristuccia, Imagination Redeemed, 13.