Inflammate omnia

Math Man is at a Zoom meeting tonight and I’m enjoying the post-kitchen-cleaning quiet in front of the fire with a sleeping cat nosing her way onto my keyboard. The cat is purring, the fire crackling and there is the faint hum of the dishwasher in the background, a testament to industriousness now rewarded. The tendrils of silence that are wrapping around me are bringing back memories of the 30 days I spent making St. Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises. Could it be thirteen years already?

I learned to make a fire on that long retreat, from an Irish priest. There was an enormous fireplace, but as it was bitterly cold in Gloucester that January, the cold air pouring down the chimney tended to extinguish fires before they got going. The trick was to set everything up so that with a single match it went up with a great “whooosh!” The rush of hot air reverses the flow in the chimney, the fire will now burn merrily along. 

This is also a metaphor for the Exercises. Ignatius sets everything up, with the hope that with the touch of the Holy Spirit, it — you— will all go up in flames come the fourth week. Ite, inflammate omnia, Ignatius often signed the letters missioning his Jesuit brothers. “Go and set it all aflame.”