Franciscan Spirituality Center
920 Market Street
La Crosse, WI 54601
608-791-5295

Steve Spilde: Welcome. Today I’m excited to introduce our guest, Karen Skalitzky. She teaches in our Spiritual Direction Preparation Program. She comes to each group and presents Ignatian Spirituality, talking about Saint Ignatius and the spirituality that he offered the church. Welcome, Karen.

Karen Skalitzky: Thank you.

Steve: So, tell us, who was Ignatius, and why was he important for people of the year 2020?

Karen: Ignatius, as you know, was a Saint in the Catholic Church. He’s most widely known as the founder of the Jesuits, which is a religious order that went all around the world. I think what makes him particularly relevant in 2020 – and particularly compelling to me, personally – has everything to do with the theology of what he taught about God. And what he taught is that God is present here in our lives, active [and] moving, and that we can attune our hearts to the movement of God in our lives. He taught that in the 1400s, and it’s still relevant in 2020, especially given our current cluster of crises that keep happening. It can sometimes be hard to find God in the midst of all of that, but he taught that God is here present in every moment moving in our lives. He taught that our spiritual journey and on our faith walks that you never actually arrive anywhere. There isn’t a destination that you’re trying to aspire to. There isn’t some point in this walk where you say, ‘I have that all figured out and I’ve got it and I’m good.’ He taught that what there is, is just a constant invitation to go deeper in our relationship with God. I find that to be the most compelling piece of his theology.

Steve: Introduce us a bit to Ignatius, because he had an amazing personal story. Tell us who he was and the parts of the story you find very interesting.

Karen: I love his story because it’s like anyone else’s story. It’s just full of all these twists and turns. What he taught about God was actually born out of his lived experience, which is also what he taught. He taught that you could trust your lived experience of God, and he was very inclusive of everyone else’s lived experience of God. I think he is one of 11 kids born in the northern part of Spain. He is from a fairly noble family. He goes to become a page in the King’s Court at like 11 or 12, which had to be pretty exciting. His first big twist and turn came when the king died and he essentially lost his job. He was laid off, and he had to refigure out what he was going to do. He ends up going to defend the border between France and Spain. And he, at this famous battle which name has completely escaped me, is in a fortress defending Spain, and he’s surrounded by the French and he refuses to give up. Some people think that was really bold and wise, and some people think strategically it was completely the wrong move altogether [because] there was no way they were going to win. Either way, a cannon shoots into the fortress and it shatters his leg, and he goes home in defeat. They have to surrender, and he is carried home on a stretcher, humiliated, in pain, and suffering. Again, another general … turn in his life in terms of how he’s going to recover and what’s going to happen then. He spends time recuperating and he’s pretty bored. The story goes there are only two books in the house because he has to read something, and of course there is one about Jesus and one about the saints. He starts reading and gets compelled into it. He spends all this time daydreaming, which just seems like something all of us do whether we want to admit it or not. He spends all this time daydreaming, and he just starts to pay attention to the movement of that and he has one of his romantic notions of how he wants to win this woman’s hand back and he’s worried because his one leg hasn’t healed properly so he has them break it again and they had to reset it so he could look … appropriate to win this woman’s heart back.

Then he has these other daydreams about serving God and just going in a completely different direction. He starts to pay attention to the energy of them over time and what makes you feel good and the is short-lived, and what comes back and what gives you life. He makes a radical choice and he tells his family that he’s going to go off and become a priest, and he follows the daydreams that keep coming back to him that give him energy and give him life, and he takes on the life of a beggar in service of God and he’s ministering to people who are ill at time, much like now without insurance or coverage or access to healthcare. He’s present to them, and in that time of his life he experiences sort of high highs and low lows. He experiences time where he feels really great union with God, and he experiences time where God feels really far away. He begins to write those experiences down, and a lot of his teaching is rooted in the idea that God is present in both places, that God is present in the high highs and the low lows, and each have value, and that they’re redemptive and God uses that to transform us. He went on to write down his experiences of God, and he started talking to other people and incorporating their experiences of God and the iterated and iterated and iterated, and they eventually became the spiritual Exercises of Ignatius, which many people pray. It’s a 30-day retreat or a weeklong retreat – there are two different ways that you can do it – and I think he would have loved that. He loved iteration. He loved the idea that there isn’t one singular way to know God, and there isn’t one singular way to be in a relationship with God. What there is is this invitation to go deeper.

He takes a few more twists and turns. He tries to get to the Holy Land to see the Holy Fathers, and they basically kind of kick him out and say, “Who are you? You’re not schooled. You don’t have a degree? What are you teaching about?” I think that something like at the age of 40 he decides to go back and become a priest. He has to learn Latin, and he goes and sits a grammar school with other boys to learn Latin because that’s the only place he can learn that. He becomes a priest and he eventually starts the Jesuits, which goes all around the world. The unique think about the Jesuits was that their mission was to serve people, and to go to be the church with the people, and to be present to everyone. It was a very sort of … Sometimes we think of things as “high church” and “low church.” He would have been kind of a low church kind of guy. I think the piece that I always found really compelling is that in his letters and in his writing he always referred to himself as a pilgrim. He too was on a journey going deeper in his relationship with God every day.

Steve: When did you discover Ignatius in your life? What was going on in your life at the time you discovered Ignatius?

Karen: I would love to say that I have a great story about that, but I really don’t. And I think sometimes that’s the way it happens. You’re off thinking you’re going to do this one great thing, and then a door opens somewhere else. I did the exercises because I was curious about them. I did them through a church group and it met every week for probably about two years. I loved the group, and I loved all the sharing. I didn’t actually care for the exercises all that much. I didn’t find Ignatius’ writing to be particularly compelling. He has a regalness about him, and having been a knight he used a lot of more military-based terms in terms of talking about God, and it just didn’t … Some of the more masculine forms of God really didn’t speak to me. Then, only as things can happen, I had a background working in schools and I coached teachers at underperforming schools and I coached principals, and I used to present in schools all the time. There is no harder audience than a group of teachers who don’t want to be in a professional development and who look at you like, “What are you going to tell us now to go do?” So I learned. I learned how to earn credibility. I was at that time in my life have a mentor say, “You really should start speaking about God.” I thought to myself, “That’s absurd. Why would I talk about God?” It was sort of about as antithetical to me as I could possibly think, and it made me uncomfortable. It made my hands sweat. I tried a few out, and they kind of went OK. I got asked to speak at a retreat house and kick off the Ignatian exercises. It was a daylong event, and they said, “By the way, the person who did it in the past was this Jesuit, and here are all of his notes.” I have never been more intimidated. I’m not even sure I feel comfortable talking about God, and now I’m going to teach Ignatius on the heels of a Jesuit? Are you crazy? I pored through every book. I read every everything that I could, and what I found was that his theology, what he taught about God, really resonated with me. It really spoke to me, and it was really easy to take my lived experience and use that as a way to teach Ignatius and build a bridge for everyone else to tap their experience with God.

Steve: So there was a period where you weren’t comfortable talking about God, and now you are. How did you start out? Tell me the beginning.

Karen: I grew up in this very devout Catholic household into my adulthood. I had an experience in my mid-30s that was really life-changing, and up until that point I actually thought I no longer believed in a God who punished. I didn’t believe that you had to say the right prayers to get the right thing to happen. Up until that event, I honestly thought that about myself. Then the event happened, and I felt really forsaken and I felt like, “What had I done wrong, and why was I being punished by God?”