Ignatius Tells His Story

He is called Ignatius of Loyola (pronounced ig-nay-shus) and he tells his own story:
"I had enlisted in the army of the Duke of Navarre, to help him defend his province from the attack of the French. I fought hard in the battle of Pamplona and nearly lost my life.
"They pulled me out of the battle alive, but my leg was badly broken up. The field-surgeon told me how he would have to work on the bones to put it back together. I watched them work. He was no expert -- I could tell that; and when they brought me back to Loyola the doctors there broke my leg a second time, in order to set it properly. [This was in the year 1512 -- with no anesthetics!] I had made up my mind not to yell at all; during the whole operation I sent the pain into my clenched fists.
"When they had finished, there was an ugly piece of bone still sticking out from my leg. I was ashamed of it and told the doctors to take it off. So, more sawing on bones. After these 'operations' I was taken to my home. We lived in a castle, no doubt, but the family had become poor. There was little of anything in the house. All I could do was to lie in bed and wait for the bones to knit. Feeling very bored, I asked the family for some novels and love-stories to while away the time, but they could not afford those. Books were rare anyway, and expensive, there in the countryside. I had to make do with two books we had in the castle, both of them 'holy books'. One was a life of Jesus and the other was a collection of lives of saints.
"My life had been spent recklessly till the war. Parties, revelry, gossip, out on the town: these had been my favorite occupations. And so the books were not much to my taste, but what else to do?
"When the holiness became too much for me, I tried daydreaming." [Well, what would you do, with no radio, no television or computer?] "I just lay there on the bed and went into a reverie about the various lady-loves of my youth.
After a week or two of this I discovered a strange thing: when I lingered over the memories of my reckless days, I would feel quite happy for a little while and then my mind would go into a negative reaction. I would feel more depressed than I had before. But when I took up the holy books, even though I might be bored at first, they left in my mind a much longer lasting upliftment and happy feeling. I began to take a serious interest in the lives of Saint Francis and Saint Dominic.
'Could I ever do those things?' I wondered; 'sleep on the ground, go for days without food, pray and meditate for hours and serve the poor and sick?'
Those lives began to inspire me with their heroism, solitary contentment and selfless goodwill. I wondered if I, too, might become a 'soldier of Christ' and fight in some moral battle, maybe found an order of dedicated monks...

"It took many months to recover enough even to walk. As soon as I began I found that the wounded leg was going to be shorter than the other, and I would walk with a limp from then on. I walked through the halls of the castle and would have to lie down again. When at last I could leave the castle, I set out with no very clear goal in mind. Having no horse, I saddled up the mule and went on mule-back. It kept me low to the ground and was easy to mount and dismount, which I often had to do. I had read somewhere about one who had let his mule make all the choices on which road to take. It was something like surrendering one's will to God, I suppose; anyway, I too decided to let this happen and at the first fork in the road, let up on the reins and watched the animal take the road which led to Montserrat."

Here we must take up the story from Ignatius. Very likely, he might not want to tell us how, arriving at Montserrat, he had become inwardly a changed man. Visiting the local shrine to the Virgin Mary, he gave his fine clothes to a poor man, put on the coarse robe of a monk, took up a staff to steady his gait, and set out for the nearby town of Manresa. Manresa was the whole story of his life, he used to say: there he felt distinctly the presence of God in his heart, and gave up to Him his future and his all. Ignatius went into "retreat" and becoming very sorry for the wasted years of his life, began to punish himself. Later, getting hold of the book Imitation of Christ, he read it every day and understood that to be a spiritual pilgrim one must deal gently with oneself. [This book was a favorite with Swami Vivekananda as well.]
Ignatius went on to become the founder of an important movement within the Catholic Church and the author of a famous book, Spiritual Exercises.