Ignatian Pentecost

Consolation has captured my imagination lately. Dean Brackley in The Call to Discernment writes about how the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises can be used for discernment. I have been experimenting with using consolation and desolation to discern the voice of God leading me.

Simply put, when we are following after God, “It is characteristic of the Holy Spirit to move us to ‘true joy and spiritual delight, taking away all sadness and turmoil induced by the enemy.’ It is characteristic of the enemy to ‘work against this kind of joy and spiritual consolation, introducing false reasons, subtleties, and persistent fallacies’” (135). I have been trying to be more aware of those feelings of joy that are disproportionate with their cause, and follow that consolation as the way God is leading me. Likewise I have paying attention to the feelings of desolation that are disproportionate to cause, trying to track down where that feeling began and address that incursion of the enemy as a departure from what God would lead me. This has been exciting, as I have learned to hear the voice of the Spirit in the sensations of my soul. There are of course dangers in false consolations; I can’t trust my feelings, only my God. So I need much practice in these experiments to learn to tell the difference.

Brackley made an immediate connection to my Pentecostal heritage when he mentioned that the Greek word for this consolation is paraklesis: the very stuff of the Paraklete (one of our favorite names for the Holy Spirit). “The comforter has come!” and it is even by his comfort that we learn to hear his will.