Ignatius has us pause at this time of the Exercises to consider how we answer the universal human question, "How do I know who I am?"  Our identities are fragile enough and we wonder and we hear various invitations on just how to answer this most important question.  This is a week of consideration and evaluating the strategies of the two main contestants in the battle for our souls' identities.  Ignatius puts the survey in terms of two camps and two battle flags or standards.  There is the Evil One and his minions in one army and there is Jesus peacefully inviting us.

We pray this week to understand how positively attractive the plan of the Evil One is to answer the question about our identity.  First the Evil Spirit will attract us to solve the question by accumulating possessions which we will be able to point to and say, "There!  I must be somebody, because I have all these material trophies." 

So we pray about how attracted we can be by those things which in themselves might be very good.  Do we possess them or do they possess us?  The Rich Young Man was tied up by what he had, because they told him and others who he was.

The next step the Enemy of our human nature tries, after we still can not peacefully answer the question by the amount of our goods, is to attain a position of importance by which we have other people telling us who we are.  Prestige and power are so attractive and the Evil One tempts Jesus and us as well to define ourselves by our titles and honors.  The advance is towards greater and greater dependency on something outside ourselves to create a sense of worth and self.  The third and most fatal trap of the Leader of Destruction is a radical stance of independence from God, a prideful appreciation of ourselves as our own cause and sustainer.  We need not God, but more things and people as testimonies to our undaunted.

Ignatius has us turn then to the camp of Jesus and He Who has heard from His Father exactly Who He is, invites us to listen to that same baptizing and confirming voice telling us that we too are the "beloved" of God.  We have listened to the tempter and his offerings; we spend time considering how attractive is the invitation to so believe who we are that we need not solve the question by having something outside us affirm ourselves.  A spirit of simple openness, which Jesus called "poverty of spirit."  We know what things are, what they are for and where they have come from. 

We hear the freedom from and freedom for expressed when Jesus invites us to not be concerned about being humbled or even humiliated, because our names and identities are given to us by the Creator. 

For Ignatius, freedom from possessions and prestige allow us to walk the walk of the free Jesus whose actions and style we are contemplating this week.  He knew Who He was and simply asks us these days to so accept ourselves as the beloved of God that imitating Him becomes our way of expressing who we are.  We live now, not merely as our independent selves, but Christ lives in and through us.

This week we follow Jesus from His being baptized to our facing our own ways of being attracted by the tricks and trade of the seducer.  We also find our hearts and minds being drawn to the ways and wisdom of Jesus.