On Personal Care in Ignatian Spirituality

by Father David L. Fleming
JESUIT BULLETIN - Fall 2009
Missouri Province

Jesuits used to be the only ones who would talk about their relationship to their superiors in terms of the Latin phrase cura personalis. Cura personalis is translated as “personal care” or “care for the person.” Today we speak of this “care for the person” as an intrinsic part of an Ignatian spirituality, even if Ignatius himself never used the term. Although the phrase is not an Ignatian expression, Jesuits found the concept in the thinking about spiritual governance outlined by Ignatius in the Constitutions of the Society of Jesus. Personal care is a priority for every superior dealing with the men in his community. From the superior general to the provincial to the local superior, care of the person is to mark their way of governing in the Society of Jesus. In the constitutions such care is insisted upon, for example, in the formation of the Jesuit in the novitiate and in studies, in the acceptance and the dismissal of candidates to the Society, and in the interaction we Jesuits would have with students in our schools and the people with whom we worked in pastoral situations.

The phrase is first noted in the Instruction of Father General Ledochowski concerning Jesuit education in the United States, dated August 15, 1934. The Instruction was August 15, 1934. The Instruction was written in Latin and was identified as “for Ours only,” which was the custom of such Jesuit documents in those days. So the words cura personalis became Jesuit Latin lingo more internal to religious life as described the Jesuit Constitutions, even when dealing with our schools, students, and faculties.

We know that Ignatius thought similarly in setting forth the relationship between the retreat director and the retreatant in his book Spiritual Exercises. In the introductory notes Ignatius describes in various ways the interaction of the director and the retreatant. He encapsulates this care in words like giving and receiving, the one who gives and the one who receives. Listening, wanting to be of help, being accommodating, always allowing God to act directly, giving the better interpretation to another’s statements or giving someone the benefit of the doubt, and being compassionate, were all ways of exercising this care within the retreat.

How was Ignatius inspired to emphasize this kind of care of the person? He had experienced this kind of care from God. Just as he constructed the last prayer exercise in the Spiritual Exercises as the contemplation on the way that God loves so that we might be graced to love similarly, so he realized that essential to this way of loving was the care that God employs in relating to each one of us. If we want to love as God loves, then this kind of personal care must be part of our way of interacting with one another.

Ignatius’s experience of God was just that — personal care. From God’s creative act, Ignatius had a sense of God’s taking great care to make himself known to each person through his creation and to enable each person to have the happy choice of responding to this God of loving gifts. From his contemplation on the life of Christ, Ignatius heard again clearly the call that Jesus makes to every man, woman, and child to be with him and to work with him to make the Kingdom more present in our world. Jesus’ call is a personal one — to be heard and recognized in the depths of one’s being.

For Ignatius, it is necessary for us to learn how to listen to God’s way of speaking. I learn to recognize God’s desires in and for me by the deep desires I find within myself. This language — often wordlessly spoken between two lovers’ hearts — is the essence of finding the direction we want our lives to take. For Ignatius, taking the time to discern was all a part of the process of my receiving from God and my giving back to God a loving response of "doing God’s will.

The giving and receiving of human interaction is a mirror of our relationship with God, a giving and receiving. As we focus on Jesus giving himself over during the Third Week of the Spiritual Exercises, the week of Christ’s Passion, we have the prime example of the human reciprocal relation to God. We often don’t think of God as waiting to receive anything. After all, God is God and doesn’t need anything. But God, in his personal care for each one of us and in God’s desire to share eternal life with us, waits to receive our human response of the total gift of self back to God. And so, as Ignatius showed us, God, the giver of all good gifts, waits to receive our gift of love, our expression of  personal care. In every Eucharist, we are invited by Jesus to act out how God and we are in a giving and receiving relationship. In every Eucharist, we are sent forth to respond in a cura personalis way-of-acting in every human relationship.

God also experiences our personal care in the way that we treat one another. What we do for the littlest one we do for God. For Ignatius, then, the second half of the great commandment is to have and express love for our neighbor in personal care. If there is truth in the reputation that Jesuits have had as good confessors and effective teachers and practical preachers, it finds its roots in the Ignatian emphasis on God’s relationship to us as cura personalis.

Today in the study and spread of Ignatian spirituality, a phrase that seemed so internal to Jesuit religious life has given expression to an essential part of the Ignatian way of living our Christian life. We receive now a renewed appreciation of God’s personal care for us, and we are inspired to exercise our own way of loving care of the persons that God puts into our lives.