It is hard for anyone to acquire a taste for Ignatius. In appearance he bears
no comparison, in any way, to the seductive image of Francis Xavier: a bomb,
a candle that burns brightly and is quickly consumed for God and for people.
Ignatius may seem a figure marked above all by authority. An army general —
an image created uninspiredly, with the help and contribution of Jesuits more
or less entered into glory. The founder of an austere and intelligent
religious order. An administrator, or rather a manager from whom many of
today's managers would have much to learn. A mystic with a language hard to
translate.
I discovered something written by one of the men who lived with Ignatius,
Luís Gonçalves da Câmara, which can overturn many inexact classifications. He
writes his memoirs, noting in his journal a journey to Rome in which, with
great attention, he studies Ignatius, seeking to capture as many details
about him as possible — the way he walks, acts, thinks… He almost comes to
spy on him, not out of morbid curiosity, but out of attentive contemplation
of a man in whom God had worked.
Too long an introduction for a pearl. Here is what da Câmara notes:
"The inner devotion of Our Father shone and was always visible in the deep
peace, calm and modesty of his outward appearance. (…) By nature he had
eyes so cheerful that, as Fr. Laínez told me, when a possessed man in Padua
wanted to identify him, he used this expression: 'a little Spaniard,
slightly lame, with cheerful eyes'. And although this was so, he kept them
lowered all the time, so that they seemed the eyes of a dead man."
It is true that we are on ground foreign to the culture of obligatory "eye
contact". A different kind of respect for the intimacy of the one before you…