20 May marks the five hundredth anniversary of a chance event with large consequences. In 1521 a stray cannonball ricocheting off a castle wall in a minor skirmish broke the leg of a knight defending the castle. The cannonball, a symbol of the knight’s culture, also represented in its errant path the fracture of the ties that bound him to that culture. It had large consequences for him and for the world. The long convalescence of Ignatius Loyola after the siege of Pamplona changed the direction of his life and shaped the church and world that we inherited.
Ignatius himself was a representative of his culture. He had high aspirations, his heart set on life at court, on military prowess, achievement in war, on success in love, on public esteem and on rising fortune. He was a doer and a goer. Being laid up with a busted leg that out of vanity he had had rebroken, with nothing to dream about but jousting and lovemaking, with nothing to read but the lives of Christ and saints, was not part of his plan. He found himself imagining alternately each of these opposing ways of life. And crucially, he began to reflect both on his dreams and on his life, and then to reflect on his reflections.
In this process he found God’s calling to follow Jesus’ way. As he devoted all his energies to following it, he began to open this reflective way of life to others. He lived as a beggar who in the marketplaces engaged people in conversation that led them to reflect on their own lives. These conversations helped shape the Spiritual Exercises, a program of prayer that led people to reflect on the world around them, on what mattered to them in their daily lives, to imagine a better way of living and to find something beyond themselves. Both his way of life and the practice of reflection that he taught were antithetical to the values of the culture of his day. His commitment to reflection and to finding a fuller way of life, however, also drew him back into the complex world from whose culture he had turned, and to a desk job running the Society of Jesus. There was an inherent tension between the commitment to the human world of scholarship, of business, of human and cultural relationships, and his embrace of values contrary to those prevalent