In Son of Man, the South African film retelling the story of Jesus, a Xhosa woman runs through a building seeking safety from the mortal danger of militia forces. Devasted and in shock she finally takes refuge by hiding amid a pile of dead bodies. After the soldiers have left, a young Xhosa boy appears, his black body decorated with white feathers. The young boy is God’s messenger and this woman we discover is Mary. In this situation of death and terror, the angel invites Mary to be the mother of the Son of God, and she says, “yes.”
I begin with this annunciation to explore how imagination in prayer may embody Ignatian spirituality as a reparative practice. My comments are addressed to those of us who are white. As we begin this Advent, 2025 in the United States, do we see and believe in the Word being made flesh in Black bodies like this Mary and through angels like this young boy—God’s life emerging amid the dead bodies piling up (being abducted, detained, disappeared, and incarcerated) in history on this land? To reflect upon this question requires probing imagination in Ignatian spirituality as a site of struggle for personal and social transformation.
Imagination functions in Ignatian forms of prayer as a medium of encounter, it is a self-transcending capacity that allows for mutual self-relation between God and the one who prays. Through the intentional practices of imagination in contemplating scripture, imagination becomes the condition of possibility for the Holy Spirit to bring the Word of God to life in creative, unexpected, and lifegiving ways. For many of us involved with Ignatian spirituality my description may be a given. But, this description of imagination in prayer is without the context of embodied historical life in America. We do not come to prayer with our imagination as a disembodied tabula rasa. Our imagination is more of a palimpsest, a flesh and blood text we inherit, which has been written upon, written over, erased, and written upon again. And as M. Jacqui Alexander teaches, the lens of palimpsest makes fluid the realities of time; simultaneously the past is present and reaches into the future. As white people formed by and living in white supremacy our imagination is conditioned by a history, of which we are often ignorant. Living in the United States, we experience an onslaught of images and messages that continually disable imagining Black and Brown bodies as revealing to us the mystery of the Incarnation. How can such Ignatian prayer be reparative (can it be?) when our imagination itself is in need of repair?
Publishing Praying for Freedom: Racism and Ignatian Spirituality in America (2023) was a moment of discovering, and making public, dimensions of a national ongoing conversation. But I fear there is a withdrawal and contraction in this conversation as Jesuit retreat houses across the country are closing and Jesuit institutions of higher education are under multiple political, socio-economic, and financial assaults. This conversation on racism and Ignatian spirituality may be marginalized, reduced to one issue among many that are a luxury “we can’t afford” in the struggle of institutional survival amid the polycrisis that is the United States. Out of this breakdown of what we have relied upon, and in this climate of uncertainty, fear, vulnerability, and division, is God desiring to heal our imagination? For Ignatian spirituality to be reparative we may need to surrender to God’s transforming love in places we cannot yet imagine, for the very powers of our imagination to be transformed.
So how can Ignatian prayer be reparative? First, we need to ask for the grace to acknowledge that our imagination in prayer and how we imagine other people is the same imagination. My statement may appear obvious, but is not in actual practice. Praying with scripture using our imagination is conditioned by our everyday lives and history. Consider how difficult it is to imagine Jesus living and acting as a First Century Jewish man. We do not enter into prayer free of the conditioning imprinted upon us by U.S. history, contemporary online and internet culture, and the patterns of how and where we live. How can the Holy Spirit be free to bring the Word of God to life if our imagination is held hostage to stereotypes of people not like us? If we are continually socialized to see Black and Brown people as dangerous, scary, or threatening, how could we imagine them as the image and likeness of God in prayer? Moreover, how can we see God in their image?
Healing the bifurcation between imagination in prayer and in life has very practical applications. For example, while giving a directed retreat at a Jesuit retreat house a directee shared with me her discomfort. “I love the silence, but being the only Brown person here is uncomfortable. People stare at me like I don’t belong, and I don’t know what I am doing. And there are no images of God that look like me….” This directee’s experience is not unique, and demonstrates this disconnect between imagination in prayer and in how we white people imagine people who do not look like us. To state this more clearly, for us to stare at people of color as if they do not belong at a Jesuit retreat house (or are an exception because white people are the norm) is a behavior coming from the formation of our imagination living in white supremacy, which impacts our experience of God in prayer while we are on retreat. When we act out of these stereotypes that are within our imagination, in the words of James Baldwin, we are trapped in a history we do not understand. Ignatian prayer as reparative is an invitation for us as white people to pray with what arises in our imagination in order to grow in the freedom to experience God in and through all people.
For Ignatian prayer to be reparative requires those of us who are white to ask for the grace to be curious and persevering in investigating the formation of our imagination living in a white supremacist society. David Fleming, S.J., explains that one of the lasting gifts of The Spiritual Exercises is seeing the face of God in our lives. Seeing the face of God in our lives may not only involve freedom from distorted images of God from our own personal histories, but also freedom from the distorted inherited narratives of white supremacy. To investigate the formation of our imagination is to engage in the memories of our country—which are also our memories, and as Patrick Saint-Jean, S.J. wrote, “Memory as Ignatius taught is essential to our spiritual pilgrimage.” This kind of remembering is a door into understanding our personal story in relationship to our shared and intersecting history in the United States.
Having the courage to explore the content of our imagination is a way into understanding the very systems into which we have been socialized. Our imagination bears witness to the fact that racism and white supremacy are not just “out there” but are the very frameworks of how we see one another. Participating in the healing of our imagination through Ignatian spirituality is a way of participating in God’s work of personal and social transformation. I return to the scene of the annunciation: engaging in Ignatian spirituality as reparative is to trust in the passionate desire of God to be among us in ways we cannot yet imagine.
