When St. Ignatius tells us (in the Principle and Foundation) to live “indifferent to all created things” it might sound like an insult to our passionately loving Creator, who made the sun and the moon and all the peoples, for his great love endures forever (Ps.136:5).   We are correct to rejoice in the earth and cosmos we belong in.

Anyhow, “indifference” is the way too many people actually live. It has been humankind’s indifference to “all created things” that has let us do what we have done to the earth – and what is being done to the poor, the children, and the refugee. When Pope Francis writes about “globalization of indifference,” he is pointing out how that indifference is sinful. 

But this globalized indifference is nothing like what Ignatius was writing about. In Ignatian spirituality, which is a disciplined asceticism of love, we’d better call it “passionate indifference.”

Then what is passionate indifference? It is doing next the good things I love to do, time and again – but when love for God or for someone in my life requires it, I am free to peaceably not do what I love to do—but to do something else.

“Passionate indifference” names a deeply loving freedom—the freedom to do what I love to do,  and the freedom to do otherwise when a greater love moves me to do otherwise. And all along, real Ignatian indifference teaches us how to live rooted in the greatest love under the sun–for God our Lord.  The things that grow in that love are sometimes big and need time and prayer.  The other things are habitual, daily to-do’s that require no great decisions.

Passionate indifference means that I am ready to change either or both of these when the love of God and neighbor and self—any of the three-might require it. 

Is that ambiguous?  Well, so is human freedom and that’s what it means to be attached to the better, or at least, the next good, finding God in all things, which is where God is, everywhere and all the time.