Digression: Euphoria is a typical characteristic of a hypo-manic episode. For my present purposes, I will operationally define the euphoria of a hypo-manic episode as uncontained and unregulated euphoria. But I think that Tony is here referring to a somewhat more contained and regulated experience of euphoria. When a person experiences euphoria in a somewhat contained and regulated way, he or she feels animated. As a result, he or she is usually a high-energy person who feels ready to conquer the world, so to speak. End of digression.
Now, when a person who is at emotional dead-ends makes the Spiritual Exercise to attain God's love, he or she may emerge from doing this exercise feeling that God does indeed truly love him or her. As a result, the person who is at emotional dead-ends will go forth feeling loved by God and will as a result be filled with euphoria.
So a question arises: How many Jesuits who were at emotional dead-ends have emerged from their 30-day retreats feeling loved by God and as a result filled with euphoria? How many Jesuits, if any, have not been at emotional dead-ends?
In his perceptive essay "St. Ignatius' Prison-Cage and the Existentialist Situation" in the Jesuit-sponsored journal THEOLOGICAL STUDIES, volume 15, number 1 (March 1954): pages 34-51, the American Jesuit Walter J. Ong (1912-2003) examines and discusses
In THE WAY TO LOVE (pages 16, 25, 48, 50, 68), Tony works with prison imagery in different ways to characterize our human condition before we have advanced to the condition wherein we are free from our emotional dead-ends.
But if Tony himself had somehow managed to move beyond emotional dead-ends, which appears to have been the case, we may wonder exactly how this happened to him. Unfortunately, Bill deMello's otherwise fine biography of Tony does not shed much light on how this happened to Tony, if it did indeed happen to him, as I believe it did.
Your guess is as good as mine as to whether or not Jesuits will appreciate having the above quotation about Jesuits published in Bill deMello's book. Make no mistake about this quotation. Not many people besides Jesuits make 30-day retreats, even though it is possible for non-Jesuits to sign up for such 30-day retreats at Jesuit retreat centers in the
Your guess is as good as mine as to just how effective Tony's experimental group-counseling retreats were in moving the participants toward overcoming their psychological limitations. But it is possible that a certain number of the participants emerged from the experimental retreats at emotional dead-ends, just as they had been when they signed up for the retreat. In this way, a certain number of participants may have been disillusioned about the possible effectiveness of the retreat. Moreover, given the nature of Tony's experimental group-counseling retreats, it also possible that occasionally a participant may have felt deeply humiliated in the retreat -- perhaps deeply humiliated enough to want revenge on Tony for what had happened.
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