Today’s Friday favorite is an old staple of mine. I was first introduced to Margaret Silf’s work when I was in my practicum year in spiritual direction at Tyndale Seminary. I think that I’ve given out (and lost) more than a dozen copies of this book.
Beautiful in its simplicity, Inner Compass takes you on a journey into Ignatian spirituality that, practically speaking, leads you into the depths of your own soul. It’s from Margaret Silf that I learned one of the most helpful explanations of St. Ignatius’s terms: consolation and desolation.
In Inner Compass, Silf writes:
Another way of looking at the effects of our inner movements is through the example of the tide ebbing and flowing onto a beach. If we imagine that the beach represents our true center and home in God, and the destination of our journeying, we can see that the sea is either moving toward the beach (flow tide) or away from it (ebb tide). In the same way, our hearts, our truest centers, are directed either toward or away from God. This represents the general orientation of our lives. Now look at the effect of the winds, which we might compare to the action of what Ignatius calls “the spirits.” Imagine the effect on a swimmer who is moving, in general terms, with the tidal flow, when the wind is blowing against the direction of the tide: If the wind is blowing out to sea, then it will impede the progress of the person swimming witht he flow tide by working in the opposite direction; If the wind is blowing in from offshore, it will accelerate the swimmer’s progress. The opposite effects can be seen in the way these same winds work on a swimmer who is moving out to sea on an ebb tide.
If we translate this into the language of our spiritual journey, we can see that when we are directed toward our home in God, a wind in the opposite direction will cause turbulence and act obstructively. Yet the same wind would be perceived as a benefit to those whose journey is directed away from God. If we now acknowledge that these winds represent the creative and destructive spirits, or movements, working in our hearts, we can begin to understand how a spirit, or an inner movement that speeds and affirms the journey of a pilgrim on his way toward God would appear as a movement of opposition for a person whose life is directed away from God.
Since we can assume that all of us who are joined together in the fellowship of this book, to deepen our life in God, have the same basic orientation toward God and toward our home in him (the “beach”), we can see from this example that the bad spirits are like the wind blowing against us and making us feel that we are up against blocks and obstructions, and experiencing turbulenece and distress, while the good spirits are like the wind blowing from behind us, giving us a sense of support and encouragement and apparently speeding our journey and cooperating with it. (p. 71-72)