The Way is an international journal of contemporary Christian spirituality, published by the Jesuits in Britain. Through writing informed by critical and creative scholarship, it aims to provide a forum in which thoughtful Christians, from different walks of life and different traditions, reflect on God’s continuing action in human experience.
Among particular concerns of The Way are:
The Way therefore needs to draw on resources of two kinds. It must explore the documents of the Ignatian tradition, but not simply for the own sake or in isolation. Rather, it must also follow the invitation that the Spiritual Exercises have always given to anyone who takes them seriously: an invitation to explore how the Spirit is at work in our changing culture and our changing selves.
What we do in ministry is pointing us further forward along the way of ‘the divine service’—not only the service we perform for God but also God’s service to us. Neither in the Spiritual Exercises nor in the Constitutions does Ignatius attempt a direct description of the encounter with God that he seeks to foster, the encounter on which, nevertheless, both his masterpieces centre. This is because of his respect for God’s freedom and for the diversity of times, persons and circumstances. The process is a way of continuous growth, of God carrying forward what God has begun.
The Ignatian tradition of spirituality can be of service to anyone serious in their desire for God. Nevertheless, it is perhaps especially suitable for those whose vocations do not lie within the conventional, for those whose experience of life and of God drives them somehow beyond the boundaries, beyond what is normal. The first Jesuits opted out of patterns of ministry centred on local churches, and sought to serve wherever the need was greatest.
The discernment learnt in the school of the Exercises enables us to act with integrity in worlds for which rule books have not been written, or where those that are available are inadequate. There are close links between the spirituality of the Exercises and the margins of church and society, the places where questions are being asked of inherited tradition, the places where images of the self are being renegotiated.
An Ignatian journal of spirituality is thus interested not just in Ignatius’ teaching on discernment, but also in how this wisdom interacts with the questions raised by life today. The Way is committed to bringing the Ignatian tradition of spirituality, in particular its understandings of discernment and mission, to the new questions being raised for Christians in the twenty-first century. What is the Spirit saying to us through our discoveries in the human and natural sciences, through our enriched experiences of gender and sexuality, through our encounters with other great traditions of faith and culture? How is the divine wisdom preserving us and governing us and carrying us forward as these changes occur? How can we be constantly sensing God’s most holy will, and perfectly fulfilling it in new situations? These are the perennial questions facing the Ignatian family; they are also close to the questions which animate and inspire the contemporary study of spirituality.
This is an edited extract from Philip Endean, ‘The Ignatian Spirituality of The Way’, The Way, 42/1 (January 2003), 7–21.