Originally published at Ignatian Spirituality
In the Spiritual Exercises, St. Ignatius encourages us to pray on the mysteries of the life of Christ. One such meditation encourages us to envision the Nativity scene in detail. We might imagine the scene of birth itself, for example, Jesus being swaddled in his blankets, or what the manger looks like.
But before we even get to that scene, Ignatius asks us to contemplate imaginatively how Joseph and Mary travelled. Ignatius says that Mary goes forth on an ass, with Joseph, a maid, and an ox, to Bethlehem. (Spiritual Exercises 111) In Luke’s Gospel (2:1–5) there is no mention of an ass, a maid, or an ox. But Ignatius’s cultural assumptions inform how he imagines the scene and how he writes about it in the Exercises. Indeed, the whole point of praying with the Gospel scenes—as opposed to, say, doing historical scholarship on them—is to make them our own. More precisely, we are inviting God into the scene to allow the Holy Spirit to make it our own. As we pray and loosen control over the scene and let it happen, God works with the realities of our lives as well as sacred Scripture to bring us closer.
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