To say that I had dragged myself to spiritual direction would be an understatement.  It had been several months since I had met with my director.  A successful retreat ministry had led me to double my work schedule, leaving me a total of four hours each day for praying, eating, and sleeping combined.  I had heard of double bags at the supermarket, but now the double bags were under my eyes.

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As I told my director the story of my overwork and my felt distance from God, he listened carefully.  A trained Ignatian spiritual director, he let me tell the whole story before he gave me his advice:  “Ignatius clearly states in Rule 5 of his First Week rules that one should not make any changes when in desolation.  You are clearly in desolation, so you should not make any changes.  Continue working 20 hours a day, and don’t give any more time to your health or your prayer than you’re giving now.”

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You’ll be happy to know that this conversation never actually took place.  But if it had, the director’s advice would have been a colossal misuse of Rule 5.

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Here are the words of Ignatius himself:  In time of desolation never make a change, but be firm and constant in the proposals and determination in which one was the day preceding such desolation, or in the determination in which one was in the preceding consolation.

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Though Ignatius does not use the word spiritual here, it is clear from the context that Rule 5 refers to changing spiritual proposals during spiritual desolation.  It is those decisions which should never be changed.

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Here are some examples to which Rule 5 would apply:

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• A parishioner is invited by her pastor to take on a position of leadership in their parish.  She prayerfully considers the request with her spiritual director and comes to peace with accepting it.  Now, criticism after her first effort has discouraged her, decreased her relish for prayer, and made her think that someone else would be more suited for the job.

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• A man who has recently rediscovered the Sacrament of Reconciliation during a retreat resolves to confess during each of the three calendar months spanned by Lent this year.  After going twice with great spiritual fruit, he falls once again into the very sin that he thought he had beaten months earlier.  Dejected, he thinks, “Maybe I should just skip Confession this month and get myself cleaned up first.”

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• A woman enters formation in a religious community after frequent discussions with a vocation director and her own parish priest.  Now, after having her first argument with another postulant, she is disappointed with her own lack of virtue and considers leaving the convent.

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Each of these examples involves a decision made during consolation, or at least during a time of tranquility.  In each case, subsequent spiritual desolation disposes the person to change their earlier decision.  Ignatius’s counsel is clear in such cases: these are changes that should never be made during desolation.

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By way of contrast, in the fictional example at the beginning of this article, a poorly-made decision (or perhaps the lack of any decision at all!) led to exhaustion through overwork.  Although the desolation had also begun to impact my spiritual life, the proposal to decrease the exhausting activity is dictated simply by the necessities of human nature.

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New circumstances or new information can also sometimes require a new decision.  In my previous assignment as director of a retreat center in Florida, I was faced with the decision of whether to temporarily close the center as Hurricane Ian approached the peninsula.  Two individual retreatants were scheduled to arrive for an eight-day retreat.  After taking the decision to prayer, I chose to leave up to them the decision about whether to go through with the retreat.  Both retreatants were young adults who stood to benefit greatly from the retreat, Hurricane Ian was projected to pass by us at a safe distance in the Gulf, and a married couple had offered the use of their nearby home on higher ground if needed.

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Things went well until about halfway through the retreat, when the hurricane decided to take a sharp right turn and head directly toward us as a category 5 storm.  For the sake of illustration, let us say that the news also plunged me into spiritual desolation—perhaps a dispirited sense that if God really cared about me and the retreatants, he wouldn’t have allowed the hurricane to suddenly change course.  Would it have been wise for me to insist on continuing the retreat because my original decision was made during consolation?

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In this situation, I was faced with a different decision than several days earlier, requiring the consideration of new objective facts.  We ended the retreat and evacuated inland.  (In such cases, it is wise to seek counsel to ensure that one’s own desolation is not driving the decision.)

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By the way, the decision to evacuate was probably the right one, as shown below.  The first photo shows the retreatants’ villa a day before landfall.  The second photo (taken from a kayak) shows the same villa the day afterward!​