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We might be praying through the story of Jesus meeting a paralyzed man beside the pool in Jerusalem (John 5:1-9). Jesus approaches the man and asks him, "Do you want to be made well?" The man, of course, responds affirmatively. But we may be surprised, imagining ourselves in his place, to find that we are resisting Jesus, holding him at arm's length, uncertain whether we want his healing in our lives. We have allowed the story to unearth something deep within, something which can now become the focus of our prayer.
And that's precisely where Ignatius would have guided people next: into prayer. Each of the Exercises concludes with what Ignatius called a "colloquy," a spiritual conversation. But Ignatius taught people to allow the meditation and conversation to blend together in the context of the imaginative engagement with the Gospel story. To continue the example, we might have pictured ourselves as the lame man lying beside the pool, asked by Jesus if we truly want to be healed. We want to explore our reaction to that invitation more fully with Christ. Ignatius urges us not to break the meditation, to step out of the scene in order to pray. We have pictured ourselves in the presence of Christ: from within that scene, speak with Christ. As you lay beside the Jerusalem pool, talk with Jesus "exactly as one friend speaks to another," as Ignatius expressed it. Allow the conversation to develop as a natural extension of the meditation. And then listen. Be ready to hear Christ's response.
It's precisely at this point that some of us experience an important difficulty: if I'm imagining this scene, and imagining speaking to Christ, am I not simply imagining his response? In other words, I could "hear" Jesus speaking to me, but wouldn't I just be making it up? Isn't this simply self-delusion, pretending that I can put words into Jesus' mouth?
There are those who hold that God speaks to us today in no other way than through the written words of Scripture, and such people will never be able to understand this practice as anything other than a delusional game. But many of us believe that God continues to speak to his people directly and personally—in a way consistent with Scripture certainly, but not only through the book itself. We may have experienced this in a variety of ways: a vague sense that God is "nudging" us to do or say something; a feeling that God is speaking to us through the words of some poem, book, song or conversation; a clearer perception that God is present in some place; even (from time to time) the unmistakable experience of "hearing" the voice of God—although for most of us that last phenomenon is rare indeed. We are, in principle at least, open to the idea that Christ might speak to us. But we want to be able to distinguish clearly between the genuine voice of God and "just imagining." Doesn't an Ignatian colloquy lead us exactly where we don't want to be—into the heart of our imagination?
