When I signed up for the Ignatian Creators Summit, I had not anticipated finding myself, less than an hour after it began, standing in a dew-covered field, taking what I hoped would be an artistic photo of a lamppost (in the foreground) and two award-winning writers (in the background), one staring avidly into the woods and one appearing to take a picture of a pile of rocks. I probably should have planned for something very much like this, though, since this is what attending the summit is all about: putting ourselves in unusual situations with remarkable people and seeing what happens.
Twenty-nine of us gathered in late August at a retreat center in Marriottsville, Md., for the fourth annual Ignatian Creators Summit, a three-day gathering of Catholic “creators”—poets, essayists, bloggers, journalists, filmmakers, photographers, teachers, editors, actors, singers, songwriters and visual artists—organized by the Jesuit Conference of Canada and the United States.
The summit is the brainchild of Mike Jordan Laskey, director of communications for the Jesuit Conference and founder of the Jesuit Media Lab. The mission of the Media Lab is to “gather, form, and unleash” all sorts of artistic creators “whose lives and work have been shaped by encounters with God through Ignatian spirituality.” Most of the work of the initiative is virtual; they offer a variety of online courses, writing workshops and webinars and publish a wide range of creative work—personal essays, poetry, meditations on scripture, interviews, visual art, book and movie reviews, along with podcasts and other audio content.
The summit is an opportunity for people who have been involved in the work of the Media Lab to meet in person and discuss their creative processes, form new connections and share works in progress, and support each other in the often isolating vocation to the creative life. It is a unique blend of professional conference, artistic workshop and spiritual retreat. Our days were structured (but not overly so), with time allotted for lectures on topics related to Ignatian spirituality and the Catholic imagination, creative prompts and activities, small group discussions and designated breaks for personal reflection, along with plenty of time set aside for community building and the movement of the Spirit. This was my second year attending the summit, and both times I left the experience feeling both artistically reinvigorated and spiritually renewed. It was a joy to reconnect with people I had met at the previous summit, like the writer and Catholic worker Renée Darline Roden, Sr. Colleen Gibson, host of the “Beyond the Habit” podcast, and the artist and writer Erin Buckley; and to encounter the work of new-to-me artists like the musician Jessica Gerhardt and the writers Marissa Papula and Rebecca Moon Ruark.
One of the beautiful things about this gathering is that participants are given the opportunity to create in community and then share the fruits of this work with each other. Since no one is worrying about finding the right venue for publication, or appealing to a given audience, we are free to simply embrace the process and the joy of being creative together. It is a credit to Mr. Laskey and the rest of the team from the Jesuit Conference that they are able to instill this sort of comfort and community so quickly.
During the opening activity of the summit I found myself sitting at a table with the poet Philip Metres, which led me to think of the last time I had sat next to Phil in a gathering of Catholic artists. We had been together in Rome in 2023 for a conference on “The Global Aesthetics of the Catholic Imagination.” On that occasion we had the truly memorable experience of a private audience with Pope Francis, who told us: “This…is your task as poets, storytellers, filmmakers and artists: to give life, flesh and verbal expression to all that humanity experiences, feels, dreams and endures, thus creating harmony and beauty.” He challenged our international gathering of Catholic writers to be “the voice of the ‘restlessness’ of the human spirit.… Keep helping us to open wide our imagination so that it can transcend our narrow perspectives and be open to the holy mystery of God.”
Pope Francis’ vision for the Catholic artist is an inspiring one, but it is also daunting. In the years since that conference, I have wrestled with how I should go about trying to meet it. I have found that participating in the work of the Jesuit Media Lab and attending the Ignatian Creators Summit has helped support me in my desire to live out this mission. The essence of the Ignatian imagination is an openness to the “holy mystery of God,” and the work of the lab is defined by a desire to both capture some aspect of this mystery and to share it widely.
As artists with an Ignatian bent, the attendees at the summit were inclined to “find God in all things,” and our opening session invited us to do just this. Steve Givens, a writer, spiritual director and the executive director of the Bridges Foundation in St. Louis, led us in an activity in which we were tasked with taking a photo of God. Mr. Givens set this up by showing us a photo taken by Thomas Merton, which Merton titled “The Sky Hook” and described as “the only known photograph of God.”
It is a landscape photo, evenly divided between a blue and white sky and green pastures, with a distant tree line and the Kentucky hills marking the border between land and sky. The top half of the image is dominated by a steel hook that descends into the composition, hanging off a rope or cable. We cannot see what the hook is connected to; it is curled up toward the sky, holding nothing. Merton did not explain why he thought of it as “the only known photograph of God,” and the evocativeness of the description is part of the point—or at least it was part of our creative exercise, since we were charged with going out into the grounds and taking our own “only known photograph of God.” The fact that it was an impossible task—even if we felt we captured some aspect of God’s essence, our pictures could not, by definition, be the “only” ones, since Merton had already gotten there first—was freeing. We could not actually accomplish what we set out to do, so we were free to fail in whatever ways felt most productive.
As I wandered the grounds of the retreat center, looking for an image that would capture God’s presence in the world, I once again found myself thinking about Pope Francis’ address, where he told us: “You are eyes that see and dream. Not only see, but also dream.… A Latin American writer once said that we have two eyes: one of flesh and the other of glass. With the eye of flesh, we see what is in front of us; with the eye of glass, we see our dreams.” We had been sent out to look for something that would serve as an image of God; this kind of looking called for both the eye of flesh and the eye of glass. We moved off into the grounds, senses heightened, on the lookout for signs and wonders. I snapped the photo of the lamppost, thinking maybe I could do something with the idea of illumination, but quickly moved on to other subjects.
One challenge of the activity was that we were asked not only to be alert to the beauty and wonder of God’s presence, but to frame it. This is one of the great challenges for any Catholic artist: How do we convey the truth we behold? If we make the effort to be constantly alert and aware and are supremely fortunate, we might sense God’s presence for ourselves, but can we use our artistic gifts to capture it in a form that allows others also to see what we are seeing?
Few of us there were photographers. None of us had fancy cameras. We worked with the tools we had. There was a sense of delight to be found not only in walking around looking for the right framing to capture the mystery, beauty and wonder that we beheld all around us, but also in watching our fellow creators at work. Some wandered widely, snapping many photos, others honed in on one place and spent a long time shooting it from multiple angles, trying to capture something specific that they saw there. Others didn’t even venture outside, which hadn’t occurred to me as an option.
After a half hour or so we gathered in small groups to share our photos, and once again more than half the joy of the experience was in hearing people describe their processes. In some cases, the image itself was a reflection of the beauty (or strangeness) of God (flowers, butterflies, light on the water; one image of a lit candle left in a sink in an otherwise dark room has stuck with me in ways I can’t fully articulate). And there were other photos that worked metaphorically, where the image worked to say something about God’s ways (like the image of a cracked bench titled “Persistent Waiting,” or the small tree surrounded by chickenwire fencing, titled “The Tender Have Need of Our Protection”). Of course no single image was “the only known image of God,” but as is often the case, the collective slideshow of all the images together did seem to capture something of God’s nature—both the immanence and the transcendence. God is other, but God is also present and all around us, if we have eyes to see.
As Catholic artists we need a refined way of seeing. We need to employ both Pope Francis’ “eye of flesh” and his “eye of glass”—alert to what is present in front of us alongside the hidden reality of mystery that also permeates our world. In my own life, the Ignatian Creators Summit has helped me to refine this double vision.
In the end, I did not use the photo of the lamppost as my only known photograph of God. As is often the case in the creative life, there were a number of false starts and promising ideas that did not ultimately lead anywhere. I ended up sharing a photo of the labyrinth on the grounds with power lines running over it; it was both beautiful in and of itself and also represented (for me, at least) the creative and spiritual process. The path might be laid out for us, but in order to actually get to our destination, we need to take all the steps. We need to put in the effort. And all along the journey there will be moments where we think we are close, but this is only an illusion—it will take us many more steps, and probably a few loops of the path that lead us back away from the center, before we finally arrive. And this is OK, because even if we are walking on our own, we are not really alone on the journey.
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