In my first assignment as a priest, I was blessed to be in a parish with three other Oblates of the Virgin Mary. The presence of four priests afforded us the opportunity to do pastoral work that normally would have been delegated to others. One such ministry was the prayer services at the local funeral home on the evening before funeral Masses. Near the end of such services, I would offer to stay to meet privately with anyone who wanted to confess or just to talk. On average, three people would take me up on the offer. During our dialogue, they would often say something like, “I’ve been away from the Church for 20 years, but when I saw Harry in the casket, I realized that it would be me soon, and that I can’t keep living the way I’m living.”
Although I didn’t realize it at the time, it seems now that I was in the presence of living examples of Rule 1 from St. Ignatius’ First Week Rules for the Discernment of Spirits. In this rule, Ignatius describes how the good spirit works in people who are far from God. In his usual succinct but not always immediately clear manner, Ignatius says that the good spirit resorts to “stinging and biting their consciences through the synderesis of reason.”
“Synderesis” isn’t a word that is likely to come up at a cocktail party, but we are blessed to have a marvelous explanation of it from Pope Benedict XVI. He described synderesis as our inborn ability to remember the most basic things about what is good and evil. Try though we might, we can never completely erase this original memory from our minds.
Even Hollywood seems to recognize this. Consider Matt Damon’s portrayal of Jason Bourne in the first three Bourne movies. Brainwashed into being a trained assassin who will kill without mercy, he finds himself unable to pull the trigger on a dictator because the dictator’s children are in the room. This “failure” begins to shake off his brainwashed identity, and we follow Bourne as he gradually remembers who he really is, a Catholic named David Webb who was deceived into joining the training program. As another example, even the consummately hateable J.R. Ewing from Dallas, who would stop at nothing to get whatever he wanted, could not help showing occasional signs of remorse.
According to Ignatius, the Holy Spirit can use this original memory of good and evil to sting us when He has nothing else left to work with. He did not touch those visitors to the funeral home with the Scriptures or through any spiritual reflection of mine. He stung them through the corpse: “This will be you soon. Are you really happy with what you have become?”
Synderesis means that no one is beyond hope. From that original memory of the good and the true, the good spirit can inspire the beginning of a new journey. And as the person turns and makes their way towards God, Ignatius offers 13 more rules that will help him on the way!
This post was first published on the Ignatian Disernment Institute and is reprinted here with permission.
Image: Unsplash
