Lame to Game

What can a lame former knight of the fifteenth century offer to the modern management, group dynamics, spirituality and psychiatry of the twenty-first century? One might wonder, if I was only kidding. It is next to impossible for such a person to have any trace of memory in modern minds, were he not someone who has etched his name in the annals of history. But it would be interesting to note what his contributions to the modern world are, before reckoning him with laurels.

This dreamer, who had far too great ambitions to win the whole world, had formed a band of men, who today number about 18,000, spread around the world, involved in anything that a human mind can imagine, and his successors are even today looked upon as the ‘black pope’; if there is any group of men that the hierarchical Church would lean on at the time of any major crisis, it is these men, ever ready to give even their life to save the Vicar of Christ and the Church militant.

Church militant? He was a knight, and so he could think of the Church and the Society only in military terms; was he not the first Superior General to head the band of men, who called themselves the Society of Jesus? His Spiritual Exercises today is considered a great spiritual classic, and men and women who long to have an experience of God in the midst of all the hussle and bussle take this small book, and get themselves lost in the forest of love and God’s compassion.

If the company that he founded along with nine other companions were to survive five centuries, it is no mean thing. He had a method of forming his men that even management curricula will fall short; men who were not even above average, became firebrand missionaries, teachers, social workers, thinkers, writers, researchers, and inventors. What ignited these men that they are able to surpass all human expectations and calculations? What is the magic behind these men?

Ignatius of Loyola was too short in height in comparison to the six feet men and women; he seemed to have looked quite handsome in his younger days, but that was not the case in his older days; he clothed with rags, and lived such a miserable life in the heart of Rome, bearing all privation happily, but pouring all his efforts in forming his men, giving them council, writing letters to them (already in a matter of about 10 years, he seemed to have written over 3000 letters). His legacy lives on, in the men ready to fight any battle, be it moral, social, religious, economic; name it and they are ready to fight. If one lame had surrendered his sword at the foot of Mother Mary, today 18,000 men are ready to fight, not with swords of steel, but with swords of faith in God and humanity, trust in the age old wisdom of their founder, confidence in the five century old tradition… If one were to claim that Ignatius has not given to the world anything positive, that would be the greatest lie ever!