Yes, indifference is a key Ignatian concept. We are, as he says in his Principle and Foundation (the beginning of the Spiritual Exercises) to be indifferent to all created things, inasmuch as they prevent us from getting closer to God. Not to say that you shouldn’t “care” about, for example, other people, but that you should be free of any “disordered attachments” (like, say, a desire for wealth or power or an excessive regard for your physical health or appearance) that would prevent you from experiencing God’s love. Another way of looking at this is by saying you should be “detached” or, more simply, “free.”

You can find a lot of this in my chapter on Ignatius in “My Life with the Saints” and also in an upcoming book, to be published in March 2010 called “The Jesuit Guide to Almost Everything,” an introduction to Ignatian and Jesuit spirituality for the general reader.

Peace,

Jim Martin, SJ

Our only desire and our one choice should be this:
I want and I choose what better
leads to the deepening of God’s life in me.

I have found that one question to be a touchstone — I hold a decision up against this light, make it, and move on.

(I think that I found that originally by following a link on prayer in the googlingGod section of BH. Thanks for it being there.)

“Man is created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord, and by this means to save his soul.

And the other things on the face of the earth are created for man and that they may help him in prosecuting the end for which he is created.

From this it follows that man is to use them as much as they help him on to his end, and ought to rid himself of them so far as they hinder him as to it.

For this it is necessary to make ourselves indifferent to all created things in all that is allowed to the choice of our free will and is not prohibited to it; so that, on our part, we want not health rather than sickness, riches rather than poverty, honor rather than dishonor, long rather than short life, and so in all the rest; desiring and choosing only what is most conducive for us to the end for which we are created.”

I appreciate Jonathan bringing this issue into the discussion. Of course, this is the spiritual backdrop behind my statement that “many of the decisions we face every day are entirely unimportant.” The anxiety and fear that feed and feed off of indecision take us away from God or are expressions of our distance from God.