Saint Ignatius and His Spiritual Exercises
Introduction
He was born the year before Christopher Columbus discovered America. He was often described as a “soldier saint”, even though he bore arms for a only a few months. He was called a “reformer”, but he rarely spoke about the church’s need to change. He was, however, a natural-born leader of men, a pastor, and one of the most influential men of his time. Ignatius of Loyola was a heroic figure in his own time and is still revered throughout the Catholic Church and by many Protestant traditions.
He was born Inigo Lopez de Loyola in 1491 in the Basque Country of northern Spain. As a boy, he served as a page in the court of a local nobleman, and later distinguished himself as a valiant soldier. He describes himself in his short autobiography as "a man given over to the vanities of the world," particularly concerning his physical appearance. He seems also to have been a ladies' man. At least that is how he fancied himself.
During Inigo's soldiering career, his leg was struck by a cannonball in a battle at Pamplona in 1521. This pivotal incident, which might have been tragic to another person, marked the beginning of a new life for Inigo.
After the battle, he was brought to his elder brother's home, the family's ancestral castle of Loyola, to recuperate. The bone in his leg was set poorly during the battle, and Inigo, "given over to the vanities of the world," wanted the leg to look smart in his courtier's tights. He therefore submitted to a series of gruesome and painful operations. However, the leg never healed properly, and he was left with a lifelong limp.
Confined to his sickbed and being very bored, Inigo asked a relative for some books. All she could offer was pious reading, which he took grudgingly. To his great surprise, he found himself attracted to the lives of the saints and began thinking, If St. Francis or St. Dominic could do such-and-such, maybe I could do great things also. He also noticed that after thinking about doing great deeds for God, he was left with a feeling of peace — what he termed "consolation." On the other hand, after imagining success as a soldier or impressing a particular woman, though he was initially filled with great satisfaction, he would later be left feeling "dry."
Slowly, he recognized that these feelings of dryness and consolation were God's ways of leading him to follow a path of service. He perceived the peaceful feeling as God's way of drawing him closer. These realizations marked the beginning of his understanding of "discernment" in the spiritual life, a way of striving to seek or understanding God's will in one's life.
Inigo decided after his recovery that he would become a pilgrim and tramp to the Holy Land to see what he might do there in God's service. First he made a pilgrimage to a well-known monastery in Montserrat, Spain where he confessed his sins, laid aside his knightly armor, and put on the homespun garb of a pilgrim. From Montserrat, Inigo journeyed to a nearby small town called Manresa, where he lived the life of a poor pilgrim: praying, continually fasting, and begging for alms. He also spent a good deal of his time ministering at the local hospital and practicing self chastisement, a practice during that time to try to share in the suffering of Christ and to atone for sins. He let his hair and nails grow and rarely took a bath. Overtime, he realized that this practice repelled people rather than attracted them, also, it was ruining his health. His renewed commitment to personal hygiene was a step in learning how to join practical wisdom to religious zeal - a trait that he would later elevate to an art form.
During his time in Manresa, his prayer intensified and he experienced great emotional variances in his spiritual life, as he moved from a desolation that was nearly suicidal to a mystical sense of union with God. In the end, his prayer made him more certain that he was being called to follow God more closely. After spending several months in seclusion in Manresa, Inigo continued his journey to Jerusalem.
After a series of mishaps in Jerusalem and elsewhere, he decided that to accomplish anything noteworthy in the church, he would need more education and perhaps even to become a priest. So he recommenced his education, in what was an arduous process that took him to several university cities and, finally, to Paris. Having little knowledge of Latin, he found himself at the age of thirty sitting in class with small boys learning their Latin lessons.
This chapter of Ignatius's life is impressive and touching. It calls to mind the image of the middle-aged man seated at a too-small desk, hunched over his books. The once proud courtier who had hoped to win the attraction of influential men and highborn women nonetheless found the humility necessary to admit that in many ways he was no more advanced than a schoolboy.
Society of Jesus
While studying in Paris, Inigo attracted attention as a result of his manner of dressing in the poorest clothes, begging for alms, helping the poor, and assisting other students in prayer. In Paris he also first completed what later become known as The Spiritual Exercises. Inigo also led his new roommate, Francisco Javier, through these exercises. His friend would later become better known as St. Francis Xavier, one of the church's great missionaries. Around this time in Paris, Inigo, for unknown reasons, changed his own name to the familiar Ignatius.
Gradually, Ignatius gathered around him a tight-knit group of six men, who decided they would work together in the service of God.
But doing what? Initially, they decided to go to Jerusalem, as was the practice of many Christians. And, if that was not possible, they would present themselves directly to the pope, who, by virtue of his knowledge of the needs of the universal church, would be better able to discern a direction for the group. Eventually, they decided to form the Company of Jesus for the purpose of "helping souls."
At first, Ignatius had a tough time winning formal acceptance for his Company. For one thing, some in the church hierarchy were disturbed that he was not founding a more traditional religious order, with an emphasis on common prayer and a stricter, even cloistered, community life. But Ignatius' and his men (derisively called "Jesuits" by their critics) wanted to work in the world. Ignatius shrewdly enlisted the help of powerful churchmen to speak on the company's behalf.
From these humble efforts began the Society of Jesus. After settling in Rome and receiving papal approval for his new order, Ignatius began the difficult task of writing the Jesuits' constitutions and mapping out plans for the work of its members. In these efforts, Ignatius proved both ambitious and persistent. At the same time, he was flexible and ready to do whatever might be God's will. He fought for the Society whenever a church official raised another objection about his new order. Yet he used to say that if the pope ever ordered the Jesuits to disband, he would need only fifteen minutes in prayer to compose himself and be on his way.
Despite his remarkably compelling and undeniably inspiring life, St. Ignatius doesn't elicit the kind of widespread affection afforded to saints such as Therese of Lisieux or Francis of Assisi. Descriptions of Ignatius often use such terms as intellectual, serious, austere, mystical—making him, while respected, a rather distant figure.
While all Jesuits revere their founder, more than a few hold "Fr. Ignatius" at arm's length. An elderly Jesuit at Boston College is quoted to have said, regarding the prospect of his judgment in heaven: "I have no problem with Jesus judging me. It's St. Ignatius I'm worried about!"
His Autobiography—which he dictated only after being asked, and then grudgingly—is occasionally moving in its frank descriptions of his mystical experiences but is sometimes awfully dry. Even Ignatius's greatest contribution to Christian spirituality, The Spiritual Exercises, is not a compendium of warm reflections on the love of God. It is instead a series of clear, practical instructions—a how-to manual for retreat directors—that is appreciated more in the doing of the exercises than the reading.
But the two writings into which Ignatius poured his heart and soul — the Spiritual Exercises and the Constitutions of the Society of Jesus — do work, and have worked well for more than 450 years. For Ignatius was nothing if not practical. After discerning God's will for himself, he resolutely set out to do it. He amended his life. Left his military career. Returned to school. Gathered his friends together. Put himself at the disposal of God and the pope. He organized, led, and inspired what he called his "least" Society of Jesus. He wrote their constitutions, opened schools, and sent out missionaries.
Yet at the heart of what can seem like frenetic activity was an intimate relationship with God, which Ignatius often found difficult to put into words. However, his private journals show minuscule notations crowded beside his entries for daily mass that indicate his overwhelming love for God. Ignatius found God everywhere: in the poor, in prayer, in the Mass, in his fellow Jesuits, in his work, and, most touchingly, on a balcony of the Jesuit house in Rome, where he loved to gaze up silently at the stars at night. During these times he would shed tears in wonder and adoration. His emotional responses to the presence of God in his life gives the lie to the stereotype of the cold saint.
Ignatius eventually died in 1556 of a stomach ailment that he had suffered with since his student days in Paris. Ignatius was beatified on July 27, 1609 and canonized on March 12, 1622. His feast day is celebrated on the day he died, July 31.
At it’s core, Ignatian spirituality flows from the saint's most famous work, The Spiritual Exercises, which Ignatius wrote and revised over 20 years; it was the fruit of his prayer and his experience in helping others pray. Any understanding of the spirituality of St. Ignatius begins with this short work. What has been called his greatest gift to the church has enabled thousands of men and women—Jesuits, priests, sisters, brothers, laypersons—from almost every Christian denomination to experience a deep intimacy with God. It is no stretch to say that The Spiritual Exercises has transformed lives.
Essentially, The Spiritual Exercises is a manual for retreat directors that maps out a retreat designed to fit into four weeks. During that time retreatants ponder the love of God, pray over the decision to follow Christ, contemplate events from the life of Jesus of Nazareth, and experience God's creative activity in all things. The Exercises are intended to help one know Jesus more intimately, experience a growing freedom, and understand how to make decisions in accord with God's grace.
Though the Exercises are traditionally divided into four "Weeks," in actual practice it usually takes more than seven days to complete each "Week." It is also referred to as the "thirty-day retreat" or, for obvious reasons, the "long retreat."
The Spiritual Exercises begins with Ignatius' famous "Principle and Foundation," which lays out in broad strokes his religious worldview: "Human beings are created to praise, reverence and serve God our Lord, and by this means to save their souls." As such, we should make use of things on earth that enable us to do this, and free ourselves of anything that prevents us from doing so. We should be, to use a favorite Ignatian expression, "indifferent to all created things."
Iindifference, as Ignatius uses it, is a commonly misunderstood concept. It does not mean that we should set aside things (or people) as worthless. Rather, we should not be so attached to any thing or person or state of life that it prevents us from loving God. The Exercises invite us to embrace a radical freedom: "On our part," Ignatius writes, "we want not health rather than sickness, riches rather than poverty, long rather than short life, and so in all the rest; desiring and choosing only that which is most conducive for us to the end for which we are created."
One might ask, "I'm not supposed to prefer health over sickness? That's insane!"
Of course no one wants to be sick. But in Ignatius' worldview, health should not be something clung to so tightly that the fear of illness prevents you from following God. As in "Well, I'm not going to visit my friend in the hospital, because I might get sick." Ignatius would say in that case that you may not be "indifferent" enough; health has become a sort of god, preventing you from doing good. The goal is not choosing sickness for its own sake, but moving toward the freedom of knowing that the highest good is not your own physical well-being. For most of us, this kind of complete freedom will remain a lifetime goal.
But indifference can be a costly grace. Ignatius and the early Jesuits understood this well. In 1539, when a Jesuit whom Ignatius had hoped to send to the Portuguese colony in India fell ill, Ignatius' best friend, Francis Xavier, volunteered. Faced with the decision of keeping his friend at his side or sending him away "for the greater glory of God," Ignatius chose the latter.
It must have been a painful step, one he was able to take only with true indifference. It was this radical kind of freedom that enabled Ignatius to let his friend go, and it was the same freedom that enabled Xavier to become one of the world's greatest Christian missionaries. But the two men, best friends since their university days, would never see each other again. After spreading the message of the gospel in India and Japan, Francis Xavier died off the coast of China in 1552.
Retreatants usually spend a few days praying over the "Principle and Foundation" not just as a way of thinking about indifference but also as a means of meditating on their relationship with God. This stage of the Exercises allows people to experience gratitude by contemplating God's creative activity in their lives. For many, it may mean pondering the beauty of nature, or the blessings they have received from God, or any of the ways in which they've experienced God throughout their lives.
At this point Ignatius introduces a simple but powerful form of prayer called the "examination of conscience," a way of noticing where God is active in your life. It's also called the "examen," or "examination of consciousness”.
There are five steps in the examen. First, you ask God to be with you. Next, you recall the events of the day for which you feel grateful. Your gratitude need not be for anything extraordinary: it can be for a phone call from a friend, an enjoyable meal, a tough job finally completed. Small things are important, too: a sunny day, a refreshing nap, a baby's smile. Offering gratitude helps you to recognize God's presence in these moments.
The third step is a review of the day. Here you try to notice God's presence in the day, seeking an awareness of where you accepted (or did not accept) God's grace. It’s like a movie of the day being replayed. When you recall someone offering you a kind word, you might say to yourself, "Yes, there was God." Conversely, when you recall treating someone with disrespect, you might say, "Yes, there I turned away from God." This leads naturally to the fourth step: asking forgiveness for any sins. The fifth step is asking for the grace to follow God more closely during the following day. Ignatius recommends closing the examen with an Our Father.
Besides these everyday graces, at this point in the Exercises retreatants may also recall moments of particular grace, those times when God's presence is felt especially near.
These "peak" experiences are not simply the province of mystics. Many, if not most, people encounter them—though often they are not recognized as such. Let's say that you are alone on the beach during a beautiful sunset and are overwhelmed by the beauty of creation. Or you are in the midst of an intimate encounter with your spouse and are made aware of a deep connectedness to the Source of all love. In each of these experiences you are encountering God in a profound and personal way—whether you know it or not.
There are a number of descriptions of such experiences in contemporary novels and autobiographies. For instance, in C. S. Lewis’ autobiography, Surprised by Joy, the author recounts a moment when he was standing before a currant bush in a garden and recalled a fond memory from his childhood. Lewis was overcome by a desire "from a depth not of years but of centuries." He writes:
“It is difficult to find words strong enough for the sensation that came over me. ... It was a sensation, of course, of desire, but a desire for what? . . . And before I knew what I desired, the desire itself was gone, the whole glimpse withdrawn, and the world turned commonplace again, or only stirred by a longing for the longing which had just ceased.”
Perhaps you also may have experienced such moments!
After reflecting on such moments, retreatants begin to see their unwillingness to respond to God's goodness—in other words, their sinfulness.
During the First Week, retreatants consider their own sinfulness. Ignatius reminds prayers to always ask for a grace, i.e., what they want in prayer, especially during the Exercises. In the First Week, writes Ignatius, we are to "beg for the grace for a great and intense sorrow for my sins." Over time, retreatants find themselves grateful that even though they have sinned often, they are always loved by God. This gratitude for God's unconditional love usually, and naturally, prompts a desire to respond to it.
To begin the Second Week, Ignatius offers a powerful meditation entitled "The Call of Christ the King." He asks retreatants to imagine serving a charismatic human leader. We are to imagine our hero bidding us to follow him in his lifework and to feel how great that would be.
But after meditating on this, we are asked to consider something more important—"how much more worthy" it would be to follow Jesus Christ. This meditation offers a double invitation: to be with Christ and to work for a world of justice, love, and peace.
Now aware of the desire to follow Christ, the retreatant is invited to contemplate the life of Jesus. And Ignatius starts at the beginning of Christ's life—the very beginning—with a meditation that imagines the Holy Trinity gazing down on the earth and deciding to "send" Christ. In one of the loveliest meditations in the Exercises, we are encouraged to see things as God sees them. We are asked to consider all of humanity and "to see the various persons ... in such variety, in dress as in actions: some white and others black, some at peace and others in war; some weeping and others laughing; some well, others ill; some being born and some dying."
Thus begins the part of the Exercises that is often the most appealing: the meditations on the life of Jesus. In it, we are introduced to a type of prayer that goes by many names: "Ignatian contemplation," "contemplative prayer," or simply "imaginative prayer." It is a form of prayer that uses the imagination as a way of encountering God. The method also enables the retreatant to experience the characteristic grace of the Second Week: the desire to know Jesus more fully.
In an Ignatian contemplation we attempt to place ourselves in a particular scene, often from the Gospels. In the story of the Nativity, for example, Ignatius asks us to imagine ourselves with Mary and Joseph on their way to Bethlehem: "to see, with the sight of the imagination, the road from Nazareth to Bethlehem, considering the length and breadth, and whether the road is level or through valleys and hills; likewise looking at the place or the cave of the Nativity, how large, how small, how low, how high, and how it was prepared."
As we journey with Mary and Joseph, we might ask other questions, beyond those suggested by Ignatius. What do Mary and Joseph look like? What clothes are they wearing? We use the other senses imaginatively as well. What do I hear? (Crunching gravel under the donkey's feet ... a bird crying in the distance.) What do I smell? (The food we have brought. . . the fresh wind off the grassy fields.)
It may also help to envision being a particular person. Perhaps you are a friend of Joseph, come along to help the couple. In that case, you might think about what you feel. Is your clothing rough or soft? Do you feel the warmth of the sun? Are you fatigued? Through these small details you recreate a Gospel passage in order to more completely enter into it to know Jesus more fully.
During the Third Week, Ignatius invites us into each painful stage of the passion and death of Jesus — from the Last Supper to his burial. The grace that one requests during the Third Week is: to have compassion for and to suffer with Jesus. And as we place ourselves in these scenes, we begin to see Christ's suffering as a sign of his love, as well as the inevitability of hardships for those who follow Christ.
At this stage, retreatants are often drawn to meditate on Christ's self-sacrificing love for humanity and to recall times of suffering in their own lives. Often they also find themselves invited to "die to" different parts of themselves that prevent them from following Christ more fully.
Seeking this grace means moving toward an important kind of indifference — the freedom to set aside aspects of your life that prevent you from following Christ: the freedom of "dying to self." For instance, it could focus on pride: my desire to be popular, admired, and even desired. Those feelings, while not bad in themselves, can often prevent us from following Jesus wholeheartedly. It's easy to see how an overriding concern for "popularity," for example, would be an obstacle to preaching the gospel in situations where doing so would challenge the status quo. Jesus was frequently "unpopular," and so was his message. Following Jesus may mean accepting the ridicule, the contempt, and sometimes the persecution that comes with preaching his message.
The Spiritual Exercises, then, invite us to cross the threshold of self-interest and become united with Christ in his mission — even to the point of accepting hardships and personal suffering. Experience with the Exercises was one thing that enabled dozens of Jesuit martyrs to understand the call to follow Christ in this radical way.
Fourth Week
When the Fourth Week is reached, one is usually surprised to discover that the last stage of the Spiritual Exercises are relatively short. Ignatius recommends only one meditation on the Resurrection. And the grace that one asks for is easy to request: “to rejoice and be glad intensely.”
Once again in the Exercises, this grace usually leads to a desire to respond. After spending thirty days meditating on God's love, being with Jesus in his ministry, witnessing the Passion, and experiencing the Resurrection, one wants to respond. By now the retreatant recognizes God's loving action everywhere. So the Exercises draw to a close with a meditation on how God's love works in our life and, finally, a prayer offering ourselves to God, positioning us to live out the fruits of the retreat.
Conclusion
St. Ignatius of Loyola intended the Exercises not simply for Jesuits, but for all Christians—no matter what their state of life. For Ignatius believed that God desires to be in a relationship with every person. Out of this belief flowed his broad-minded and life-affirming spirituality.
Theologians often describe Ignatian spirituality as "incarnational." In other words, it recognizes the transcendence of God, while being grounded in the real-life experiences of people living out their daily lives.
It is a spirituality that reminds us that God speaks to us through prayer—but also through our emotions, our minds, and our bodies. God can communicate through sexual intimacy, romantic love, and friendship. God can be found in Scripture and in the sacraments. God can show his love through your sister, your coworker, your spouse, your next-door neighbor, a teacher, a priest, a stranger, or a homeless person. Finding God in all things. And all people.
The path of St. Ignatius means searching for signs of God's presence in the stuff of the everyday. And it means committing yourself to regular prayer in order to contemplate these signs. For without the discipline of prayer we tend to overlook and forget those moments of God's presence. We are to balance, therefore, a life of activity and of prayer. The goal of Ignatian spirituality can be summed up in another succinct expression: desiring to become a "contemplative in action," a person who maintains a contemplative stance in an active life.