On the campus of Regis University in Northwest Denver where I teach, in a meditation garden just west of the St. John Francis Regis Chapel, there stands an enormous bronze crucifix known by the community as the “Black Jesus.” Situated on a hillside against a panoramic view of the Rocky Mountains, surrounded by clusters of gambel oak, maple, and quaking aspen, the crucifix has become a pilgrimage site for many, from students and staff seeking a quiet place for prayer, to faculty bringing their class for discussion around the flagstone table at the foot of the cross. Why? How is it that a sculpture of the crucified Black Jesus, hidden among trees on a Jesuit university campus, has become for many a cherished site of prayer and contemplation?
The answer, I wish to suggest, mirrors the inner logic of The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius, which bears the retreatant on an immersive, affective journey that is not strictly “logical.” Like the exercises, the Black Jesus beckons memory and imagination into places they might not wish to go, linking Christ’s passion directly with the wounds of Black Americans. For white followers of Jesus, the Black crucifix stirs what Johann Baptist Metz calls “dangerous memory,” a reason that remembers, which refuses to forget a cruciform litany of the dead: nameless millions who perished during the Middle Passage and enslavement, Emmett Till and Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice and Breonna Taylor, Trayvon Martin, the Emanuel Nine of Charleston, and ten citizens of Buffalo cut down in a hail of bullets while buying groceries.
Here is the Christ of the “First Week” of The Spiritual Exercises, when, after gazing long and hard at one’s sins, bound up in the brokenness of the world, Ignatius asks the retreatant to “imagine Christ our Lord suspended on the cross before you,” and to ponder three questions: “What have I done for Christ?” “What am I doing for Christ?” and, “What ought I to do for Christ?” (Sp. Ex. no. 53) Jesuit Jon Sobrino, formed as a theologian by the pathos of El Salvador, adds a fourth question to the colloquy: “What am I doing to take the crucified peoples down from the cross?”
Metz describes mourning in biblical terms as “hope in resistance,” a mark of Israel’s intensely covenantal relationship, and often intense wrestling, with God. A capacity to grieve the suffering of others is critical in the movement from personal to social transformation. “I do not theologize about the redemptive significance of Calvary,” professes Jesuit Walter Burghardt, “I link a pierced hand to mine.”
Thus, the Black crucifix links the underbelly of anti-black racism in America with our deepest capacities for empathy, grief, and regret, mediated by the figure of Christ. “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?” the famous Negro spiritual asks. “Yes, I have to confess, I was there. I am there, for Christ is still being crucified in Black and Brown bodies.”
“And what will you do to help take them down from the cross?”
The “Second Week” meditation on the Two Standards, culminating in the election of a major life choice or vocational direction, dares the retreatant to imagine a more active participation in God’s own dream for the world. The “Third Week” asks if one is free enough, for the sake of loving God’s people, to drink from the cup of suffering that Jesus drinks. For the white Christian faced with the question of active solidarity with our Black and Brown neighbors, this is strong but beautiful medicine. Beautiful because it calls the imagination beyond its habitual ken into the building of joyful, beloved community.
Not everyone, to be sure, is willing to identify Christ crucified with Black victims like Emmett Till, Sandra Bland, or Elijah McClain, as the controversy surrounding a pieta-like image of George Floyd displayed at Catholic University of America makes clear. It was Nietzsche, suggests Metz, who inverted Jesus’s beatitude, “Blessed are those who mourn,” to its cynical corollary under the corporate will to power, “Blessed are the forgetful.” The norms of racial hierarchy, now mediated by Project 2025, dictate such willful amnesia, trapping the (white) imagination in a bubble of solipsism, denial, and indifference. “Any man who is capable of being satisfied with himself as he is,” wrote Friedrich Schleiermacher, “will always manage to find a way out of the argument.” The genius of the exercises is their refusal to limit the horizon of human being and flourishing to rational (and rationalizing) arguments; “For, what fills and satisfies the soul consists, not in knowing much, but in our understanding the realities profoundly and in savoring them interiorly” (Sp. Ex. no. 2).
Akin to the power of the spirituals and the blues, African American literature, art, and a venerable tradition of Black theology, the exercises appeal not foremost to the intellect, to humane ideals, ethical principles, or even cherished dogma. By way of heightened imagination and senses, the retreatant is drawn stepwise into the heart—and yes, into shame and confusion, as the path begins with facing one’s complicity in the world’s brokenness. Mirroring the upending logic of Jesus’s teachings—the Good Samaritan, the judgment scene of Matthew 25—the eyes of the heart are drawn into a wider field of kinship “in all things,” that, once seen, cannot be unseen. I can no longer behold the suffering of my neighbor—nor her joys and aspirations—without at once beholding the face of Christ, Emmanuel, the humanity of God with us.
For the Catholic and Ignatian sacramental sensibility, the imagination is not separate from or antithetical to reason but enables us to reason differently by enlarging and reordering our perception of reality, providing a new unity to our understanding and knowledge. If God’s presence and promise truly dwells in all things, it remains for the follower of Christ to discern the seeds of possibility in every human situation, no matter how “god-forsaken” it might appear to be. Imagination, says Pope Francis, is “that place where intelligence, intuition, experience and historical memory come together to create, compose, venture, and risk.” In the Jesuit pope’s affirmation of freedom as an outward movement of the whole person, one can hear St. Ignatius’s famous prayer of the “Fourth Week”: “Take Lord, receive, all my memory, my understanding, my entire will.” (Sp. Ex. 234)
The difficulty, especially in a hyper-privatized, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps culture, hinges on the movement from “me” to “we.” It is not only my own “memory, understanding, and will” that is at stake in the divine-human drama of history. When will we learn to revere and defend the sacred agency of other persons and communities in whose freedom God also dwells, no less than our own? “Who is my neighbor?” the young lawyer asks Jesus. To gaze upon the Black Jesus is dangerous insofar as it threatens to crack open the imagination held captive by racism and in-group bias, blinded by the privileges and “disordered attachments” accruing to white embodiment. As Metz suggests, mourning and a heightened sense of responsibility—what the mystical tradition calls “the gift of tears” (see Sp. Ex. nos. 203, 206, 316)—is a painful first step to reconciliation and solidarity in the public square.
In light of all this, the fact that the Black Jesus meets the viewer’s gaze in an earthen landscape of abundant life is not incidental. Here we meet the wages of social sin in a setting that quietly proclaims, as wind stirs through the aspens, “Behold, death is not the last word.” In the dance of light through shadow, Christ meets our gaze with God’s ever-present love, mercy, and solidarity, the promise of the “Fourth Week.” Even in Colorado winters, one can feel the tendrils of new life waiting to break forth amid frozen barrenness.
We may well ask, as the Jesuits asked at General Congregation 36, why have the Spiritual Exercises not changed us as deeply as we would hope? (Decree 1, no. 18). Recognizing my own hesitation to love more boldly and fearlessly, to critically question my own self-justifying attachments, I can wonder with Ignatius how it is that the angels and saints have “interceded and prayed for me,” and that even “the heavens, the sun, the moon, the stars, and the elements” have conspired with God not to “swallow me up” in eternal isolation and misery. As a chill breeze sweeps down from the foothills, I can pray for the grace to move forward, with “an exclamation of wonder and surging emotion,” knowing that I am forever held and beheld with mercy by the divine Beloved. (Sp. Ex. nos. 59-61). Our weakness, humbly and forthrightly acknowledged before God and one another, can become our greatest strength. His way of love, though rent with sorrow, is beautiful.
