Ignatius of Loyola
Turned the end of the day into fifteen minutes of looking honestly at where your attention went.
- Lived
- 1491 – 1556
- Feast
- July 31
- Tradition
- Western
- Veneration
- Canonized 1622; venerated in the Catholic Church as founder of the Society of Jesus
- Patron of
- The Society of Jesus, soldiers, spiritual retreats
A cannonball broke Ignatius’s leg at Pamplona in 1521, and the long convalescence is the only reason anyone knows his name. Stuck in bed with nothing to read but a life of Christ and a book of saints, he started noticing something ordinary: daydreams of knightly glory left him flat afterwards, while thinking about a different kind of life left him steady. Same pleasure in the moment, different residue. He decided the residue was the data.
Out of that he built the examen — a short review, done twice a day, in which you walk back through the hours and ask where you were awake and where you were not, what pulled you and what drained you. Modern Jesuits give it fifteen minutes; no incense required.
He made it the one thing his order could not skip. Drop everything else, he told them, and keep this. It is the least mystical practice on this list and possibly the most useful: attention paid to your own attention.
- Died: Camere di San Ignazio
79 · churches recorded in Wikidata — the map is as complete as that record, which leans European